Once the $300 Dells don't exist and those customers either move up market or go elsewhere, the perception of Microsoft as the Walmart brand will end.
But that is the problem, isn't it? Its quite obvious looking at the figures that given the choice of an Apple priced Windows or going elsewhere they will just go elsewhere and thus MSFT slits their own throats for customers that won't buy their products. It would be like raising the price of a coke to a million dollars, sure if you get one taker you'll make a huge profit but more likely you'll be stuck with a warehouse full of cokes that won't sell.
The person spending $1k+ on a PC isn't gonna buy Windows, they are gonna buy Apple. Not only does Apple have the upscale branding but it retains a high resale, that Windows device won't be worth squat 2 years from now. Then there is the fact that there are probably 3000+ that buy a PC at $400-$550 for every one person buying $1K units and the math is clear, MSFT is gonna torpedo the company trying to raise prices when in reality folks will just go elsewhere.
Mark my words if they don't change in 5 years MSFT will be but a rotting husk, Google will put out $200 ChromeOS laptops with an offline mode and that will be that, the high end will go to Apple, the low end to Google, and like RIM all MSFT will be left with is legacy business installs that will be looking at exit strategies. They can want to be a Macy's brand all they want, its just not gonna happen.
Exactly KingMotley, you reach a level VERY quickly where you go "what is the point?" and even those of us who don't have monsters as big as yours (lucky bastard) find we reach a point where the upgrade treadmill makes no sense.
I mean lets take my use case and treat it like I would a customer: what do I want to do? I want to play games, edit and transcode A/V, and do basic tasks like chat and surf. Is there ANY advantage to be gained for swapping this Phenom X6 for lets say your chip? Well I'm sure it would shave a couple minutes off here and there, but the jobs I'm doing rarely pegs what I have so short of timing everything with a stopwatch would be so little difference that as a user I certainly wouldn't "feel" the change like I did when I went from a 300MHz to a 1.8GHz in less than 4 years, so what is the point in buying or building a new one?
Heck I even handed down my Phenom II quad to my youngest and he plays the latest MMOs with more cycles to spare than he knows what to do with. The chips, even the cheap chips like this $100 X6 are sooooo powerful that a good 90% of us simply won't max it out. Then you have 8GB of RAM, plenty of HDD space, what is the point of switching?
So the only upgrades I'm doing in the coming year is upgrade the 4850 for a 6850 and I'm probably gonna swap out my 20 inch LCD monitor for a 32 inch LCD TV, I've had several customers do that and it makes a great monitor but I don't NEED either, I just want it. And that says it all right there, there just isn't any need to upgrade anymore, only want, and most people aren't geeks so they'll only upgrade when they need and they won't be needing upgrades for quite awhile. To use a/. car analogy it would be like everyone using a top fuel funny car to go to get milk and the makers of the funny car trying to sell us a new one "now with dual jet engines!".
Uhhh...kinda sad when the Windows guy understands licenses better than the FOSS zealots. First of all you CANNOT STEAL from BSD, the code is still there for all to use as they see fit, instead of sticking a gun to your head and forcing you to "share", second Apple has given back a hell of a lot more than they have taken out, such as CUPS and Webkit, again just as BSD intended.
Its actually quite simple, you want to lock something up in BSD land? Its not a problem but YOU are gonna be responsible for the fork you have just created, whereas if you CHOOSE to share your changes they can be incorporated into the mainline. Personally I find this to be much better that slitting the throat of the entire ecosystem because of the "blessed three" which is the only way to make money in Linux land. I of course am speaking of support, selling hardware, or the tin cup, which is why you don't see AAA games under FOSS or even a desktop that can compete with OSX, because too many niches aren't covered by the blessed three so you get half baked and poorly supported because there isn't any way to make money in all these areas not covered by the blessed three.
But am I the only one that finds it ironic as hell that when a FOSSie rails against BSD they sound almost exactly like the *.A.A copyright trolls? Its all about stealing and "protecting the rights",hell you could take any FOSSie railing against BSD and simply change a few words and you'd have a classic MPAA/RIAA rant, almost no effort required to switch between the two.
Actually there is an even better way to handle it, just do what that woman who adopted 2 crack babies did when she found out the mother was carrying a third and still doing crack: Offer a one time cash payment if the person will have their tubes tied or get a vasectomy in the case of guys.
Since the ones most likely to breed are the uneducated which tend to be impulsive offering a one time cash payment of say $3K-$4K each would be a bargain when you figure how many unwanted children could be prevented using this method. Hell even the religious shouldn't have any problems as this is tying the tubes before conception, not aborting afterward.
Yes I have, in fact I keep an AMD Sempron from 04 as a nettop in the shop. it doesn't change the fact that Netburst was a piss poor design, it was made to go through power like shit through a goose and long as the clocks kept climbing. This had 2 major consequences, 1.- it used more and more power, until it finally got too much for even Intel around the Prescott era and they started to scale back, and 2.- Having those crazy long pipes that allowed you to get such high clocks made its IPC really terrible, in fact the first compiler rigging by Intel was NOT targeted at AMD but their own Pentium 3 because the benches were showing a 1GHz P3 stomping a 1.5GHz netburst.
Now I only mentioned ARM because it was a Linux article and if all you are doing is web surfing a basic dual core ARM will handle that alright, but if it were me? Throw out the guts and get an AMD Bobcat board which will get you more IPC processed and dual cores with full HD acceleration while using just 18w on max load and less than 10w when it comes to most tasks. When you look at how much power a P4 goes through compared to a bobcat it really is a no brainer, depending on where you live you could make up the cost of the board and RAM in less than 8 months of lowered cooling and power suckage and after that it'd be gravy.
And how much swapping was it doing? How much of it was CLI? You missed my point that if the Steam hardware surveys say their customers have 4GB of RAM on average slowing the client down to shave a few MB off, even 40 or 50MB off, not only would make no sense but would make things worse not better for the user.
Do you TRY to act this retarded, or is it a natural state? I point out several reasons why its a dumb idea, your response? "You're a dirty shill, that's what you are!"...shill for who EXACTLY, oh retarded one? Can't be MSFT since I've already posted its a trainwreck Apple wannabe, so what imaginary conspiracy is making you stop taking your meds THIS week Alex?
Hell it isn't even that tiny, both TinyXP and Tiny7 use less RAM running the full desktop. Sad that the pirate editions run better than the retail, but that has been true of software for quite a few years now.
Of course all this ignores the bigger picture which is that any machine so old that its maxed out with less than 512MB of RAM will end up sucking down more power than it worth therefor won't be worth keeping. Lets face it a good 90% of the old junkers you find are P4s, they cranked out so many millions of the P4s that you practically trip over the things and the P4 was such a power hog its simply not worth keeping. You can buy an ARM stick with Linux on it for less than $40 or if you absolutely HAVE to have X86 support you can get an Atom or Bobcat board for around $100 that gives you several times the speed and uses less power under load than a P4 will use doing nothing.
I was one of the biggest advocates for saving systems from the dump but in very few cases such as old laptops, the AMD single cores and Via CPUs does it make sense and in every other case the power sucked by the system makes it not worth having. Lets face it nobody gave a shit about power usage for a good chunk of the decade.
I was talking about the price of the OS, nobody would consider PCs of even 15 years ago to be Walmart priced, but windows damned well was.
Up until Win 7 it was widely reported that MSFT sold Windows for less than $30 a pop to the OEMs, with Vista and 7 they raised their prices but still you have WinHome for around $50 and basic was around $30, that is Walmart pricing.
And the simple fact is it don't matter what they want anymore, its ALL about public perception and to the public Windows is the OS of those $300 Dell special at Walmart and Best Buy so there is no way in hell people are gonna start treating them like a premium brand like Apple, never gonna happen. that is why i said when WinPhone came out the best thing they could have done was spun off mobile, call it Metro OS or whatever, and allowed it to get away from the public's perception of Windows.
So sorry if i didn't make it clear, talking about the OS and people's perception of it NOT the hardware.
The desktop is NOT dead, it is NOT going away, you like many in the press are just looking at raw data without the facts BEHIND the data. As someone that has been working PC sales and repair let me explain what is REALLY going on.
You see the reason the desktop sold in the numbers that it did from 95-07 was NOT normal , it was because Intel and AMD were in the middle of the MHz war and that barely 2 year old computer would literally struggle to run the latest programs. The reason for that is that writing for a faster single core CPU? Very VERY easy. So naturally all the programs and games simply took advantage of all that extra MHz and it wasn't more than a year that it would start to struggle to run the latest stuff.
Now I want you to look what I was selling as my "low end" build FIVE years ago, okay? AMD Phenom X3 or X4, 4GB of RAM, and a 300-500GB HDD. Before anybody says "You weren't selling that five years ago" remember the first gen Phenoms had the TLB bug which allowed me to score them a lot cheaper, so once I bought one and put it through its paces and found you had better odds of hitting the lotto than hitting the TLB bug I snatched them up like a fat kid snatching candy. Now YOU tell me friend...what does you average user do that is gonna stress that system enough they think "Boy I need to buy a new system" huh? hell I have a customer that was running the latest Solidworks making complex as hell 3D robot models using a Phenom I X3 and a $30 HD4650 GPU and he could whip that model around and zoom in and out all day, no stutters.
Just look at me, I was the guy that ALWAYS had to build himself a new system every year and a half like clockwork so I could play games, now what am I using? An AMD hexacore that was released more than 2 years ago, with 8GB of RAM, 3TB of HDD space, and an HD4850 I'm about to retire for an HD6850...why would I need to build a new one? Neither my OS or my games are using up all my RAM, I have everything just whip along on that 6 core even with it running stock clocks, and even that HD4850 isn't having any trouble with the latest games, I'm switching because of the heat. My netbook is nearly 3 years old but still handles like the day it was made, has a dual core AMD with a powerful enough GPU that just for shits and giggles fired up several games like L4D and Torchlight II and they ran just fine so...why would I need a new one again?
The reason PC sales are down is NOT because people are "switching to cellphones and tablets" its because less than 2 years after AMD and Intel switched from the MHz wars to the core wars they frankly began building machines waaaay overpowered compared to what the user actually does. That is why the smart ones are branching into other things as well as just selling boxes, in my case its HTPCs and security systems. Its not because people don't want or don't use computers, although Win 8 certainly isn't good for the market which is why I don't carry it, its because people are happy with what they have and see no reason to blow money on a system that won't feel any faster than what they had.
Dude don't believe the bullshit. Was MSFT under gates seriously douchey? Yes they were but all they did was kick programs that were already falling down the stairs so they'd fall a little faster.
I actually had both WP and Netscape, in fact until NS 4 I was a DIE HARD NS user. Here let me give you my impression of NS 4: "Alright! I got it installed and am ready to surf the world baby! I'll just go to my favorite site../crash/...huh. Well maybe the site was iffy, I'll just pick one I've surfed a million times with NS 3 and.../NS 4 causes a hard system lock, forcing a reboot/..son of a bitch. Well now that I have my PC up I'll just choose a simple site to../NS 4 causes BSOD/...&%$^$&$!!!! And with WP it was run one instance, pray to God it didn't crash, get halfway through something only to have it crap itself because it was just a DOS program with a DOS for Windows wrapper and when you went to do something like change your volume you had a 50/50 chance of when you switch backed the program would hard lock or crash, and when it did it would nearly always corrupt whatever you were working on.
So I'm sorry you can't blame MSFT for NS 4, nor can you blame them for WP just being a DOS program until nearly 2000. Certainly they weren't being helpful or giving them early access to Windows builds but I can tell you that frankly NS 4 ran like dogshit under DOS as well and WP was a little better in that regard but it was still waaay behind the times. As another pointed out the NS team wouldn't open source NS because they were ashamed of the old code base. I can tell you that I actually had to go and download IE 4 to get it and when I did and was able to surf for a whole hour before it crashed? Well it was like manna from heaven compared to NS 4 which I swear I never did get to read a single article all the way through before it would fuck up somehow.
Not to mention that clean room or not it would STILL be in court for most of the decade, thus making sure that Google missed their shot. My plan is MUCH better and frankly could be in stores by the end of next year as it really wouldn't take much at all to give Chrome OS a true "offline mode" and buy Crossover and triple the Crossover team and just bake that into Chrome OS.
Right now this very minute Crossover already runs a good portion of the programs folks want, MS Office, World Of Warcraft, so you combine that with a true offline Chrome OS and I'd say you'd have a winner. Hell look at the Chrome OS netbook Acer has been selling, dual core Celeron, 4GB of RAM and a 320GB HDD for only $200? I'd say the only reason that thing isn't backordered until doomsday is because you can't run your Windows programs on it and its useless without a net connection. fix those two problems and I bet those would be flying off the shelves!
This is the first time since the 80s where anybody has had a real shot at taking a good chunk of the market away from Windows and if Ballmer goes through with his retarded "Windows Blue" plan frankly there will be a HELL of a lot of windows user looking for an out. I mean what Windows user is gonna want yearly updates, everything tied to an appstore, and the hardware coming from some overpriced MSFT store? Hell if they wanted that they would already own a Macbook. The ONLY things holding people back are their need to run whatever Windows program they consider a "must have" and the ignorant way Chrome OS won't do shit offline. Fix those 2 problems? i could easily see Google controlling 30% of the market in less than 2 years. Hell Chrome OS now looks like Windows more than Windows does, it really wouldn't be hard to switch.
I give you a WHOOSH for missing the point but I'm too tired, BTW the answer is AT&T Hobbit. But the point you missed was the economy of scale meant that BeOS was doomed, their systems would be slower and more expensive than everybody else's systems. There is a REASON why when asked about his big regrets one of the first things Jobs said was "picking the PPC" because they were 1.-Too hot, 2.-Too power hungry, and most importantly 3.-Too expensive for what you got.
They COULD have had their own X86 clone made and sold that along with licenses to their OS and frankly they could have had a REAL shot, because BeOS was doing in 92 what Windows wasn't doing until 98, with beOS you could run multimedia and multitask which until Win98 you could give that shit up on windows as it was too buggy and crash prone, especially when running resource heavy programs. Instead by first picking a dead end, followed by two expensive niche CPUs by the time they realized the economy of scale on Intel was such that they would be leapfrogging anything else out there it was too late,they had given the market to MSFT.
And as I said I can see Google easily doing the exact same thing, MSFT under Ballmer is a trainwreck, they ignore their customers, they put out overpriced products that nobody wants (go look at the sales figures for Win 8 and Surface, its been as well appreciated as a wet fart in an elevator) and most importantly if they do follow the "Windows Blue" strategy they will be sending a clear signal to their current customers that "We don't want your business, we want to be Apple instead" which will leave the market rip for a takeover. Google has a good rep, they have the money to build pretty much anything they want, because they make their bread in search they can sell their products cheap or even give them away, and frankly it would be trivial to just buy something like Crossover and build it into Chrome OS along with an offline mode. That way they could say "See? All your games and programs work here too PLUS we aren't trying to be Apple, we'll give you what you want" and after all the fucking over MSFT has given the OEMs i could see many of them jumping on board VERY quickly just to get away from the Windows Blue trainwreck. After all what OEM is gonna want to do business with a company actively try to put them out of business?
The time is right and if Google were to do what i just listed? I'd be happy to start wiping some of these Windows boxes and put Chrome OS on instead. And this is coming from someone who has been selling Windows since 3.xx, but like many others I don't like the way the company is heading and would be happy for another choice as long as that choice was solid and ready for the masses.
I have an even better question....what EXACTLY is the point of Ubuntu on tablets? Well other than "We can't figure out how to make money off of FOSS so this is yet another thing to throw at the wall and see if it sticks" like Ubuntu Netbook edition and Ubuntu TV.
I mean I could understand it if the only choices out there was iOS and WinRT, but from what I've seen when it comes to the numbers of units moved Android is seriously kicking some tail...am I wrong? I mean its open, it has a Linux kernel, and it already has an SDK that lets anybody write apps for the thing or I assume compile FOSS programs over, so what is the point?
But frankly after the way they made it clear they really didn't care what the users thought of the amazon deal, which in and of itself was stupid because Amazon has a piss poor adult content filter and makes it clear in their terms of use that its for those 18 and up, not the kind of thing you want to build into an OS that supposed to be for the whole family, I have to wonder if Shuttleworth and Canonical really give a shit about their current users at all. I mean its pretty obvious that they aren't making enough bread to keep the lights on and Shuttleworth has already said he's not gonna put in another dime, so I have to wonder if this isn't one last shot at the big time before they either just switch to being server only or just pack it in.
Because lets face it Unity went over about as well as someone taking a dump on the picnic table and if they make it even more of a cell phone/tablet OS I really can't see any of the users they have left not saying 'fuck this mess" and going over to Mint that I do have to give credit to for asking users what they wanted and listening to feedback. Things must be REALLY bad over at Canonical because going all in on tablets when its already so damned crowded seems to me to be practically suicidal, and I really can't see the current users wanting their laptops and desktops to behave like cellphones.
You kinda had it then missed the mark. Its not popular because not only does it not look good it rarely enhances the story and instead what you get is "Dr Tongue's 3D House Of Pancakes". Man I wish Candy were alive, he'd have had a field day with this.
But the dirty little secret that they are ignoring or downplaying, which is also why the 3D TVs aren't selling worth a shit, is a LARGE section of the population gets blinding headaches from the crap! I have 4 customers that have bought 3D TVs so far, how many actually use the 3D? NONE, none of them show 3D content on their 3D TV, why? Because at least one person in their family gets a blinding headache from watching 3D which ruins the entire point of having a home theater, the family gathering around and enjoying it together.
In my little shop I get people from all walks of life and all ages and when Avatar and all the 3D hype started i start asking folks about what they thought of it and I found the headaches are a BIG problem, in fact I hadn't met anybody yet who didn't complain about it giving at least one person in their family a sick headache. In my own family while I can watch it okay, although I do feel kinda fatigued afterward, both of my parents and my oldest simply can't watch anything 3D, more than an hour and they are walking out the theater with a blinding skull thumper.
So you have a product that 1.-Costs more, 2.-Rarely enhances the story, 3.-Often is only used for cheap effects, 4.-Gives a large portion of the population a negative experience when using it, and they wonder why its bombing? Maybe when they come up with holograms or at least 3D without glasses then i could see it maybe taking off, but this current tech sucks just as bad as the tech used back in the 50s, it just sucks in a different way. I know myself and several friends have gone out to see a movie and ended up changing our minds because we couldn't find a theater showing it in 2D and from the sounds of it more folks are doing the same, its not worth the bullshit.
The blue ones which turned out to be deep fried ass, luckily I got my money back. I haven't tried the blacks yet, last i checked the price was kinda high on those, a little too high for my customers. The greens are good but they can be hard to find and I heard WD is phasing those out for the blue/black/red schema and I haven't had a chance to try the red yet but if you are building DVRs the reds are designed for DVR, security cams, and other industrial uses so you might want to check them out.
But just FYI but avoid anything Seagate over 640GB right now, talking to my fellow shop owners they are having Seagate 1TB and 1.5TB die on them left and right, just like Nvidia with bumpgate from the looks of it if you get a Seagate over 640GB it WILL fail, the only question is how long. I had one customer that refused to listen to me because he was building his own media tank/NAS setup and "found a deal" on new 1.5TB Seagate which gave him something like 10TB when he was finished. I tried to warn him but he didn't listen and now he is having to re-rip his entire blue ray collection because every damned one of those 1.5TB drives bought the farm in less than 6 months, taking most of his collection with them.
so if I run across some 2TB blacks at a price i can use I'll be sure to check 'em out, but if you don't want to spend time filling out RMAs you better avoid Seagate like an STD until they fix the problem. i thought I would die laughing as it took nearly 2 months for Tiger to finally find a price low enough to get people to take a chance on the Seagate 1TB, for first it was $80 on BF, nope, then $70 the week after, nope, then it was $60 after a $10 MIR, nope, finally the week before Xmas they said "fuck it" and sold them for $53 with no rebate and FINALLY sold out of the things,but I wouldn't be surprised if Seagate gets more than half of them back as RMAs and the only reason they won't get more is I knew several people that refused to RMA a drive because they didn't have a way to remove their data.
Actually ironically Google is simply doing what MSFT did in the past, which was taking a market from morons. How did MS Office become dominant? Because Wordperfect was run by morons who thought that even though Windows was the dominant platform they could just sit on ass and repackage their DOS version and made a buggy POS that bombed. Same thing happened with IE and Netscape, Netscape put out the disaster that was NS 4 and gave MSFT a market by default, same again with Windows VS BeOS, which chose first a lame AT&T CPU that bombed, then the Motorola chip that was already fading before finally getting the sense too late to make an X86 version.
Now MSFT is being run by an absolute moron named Steve "What is Apple doing?" Ballmer who is about to make a move that will make the Osbourne effect or HP buying Palm look like minor boo boos. For those that don't know what I'm talking about look up "Windows Blue" where Ballmer laid out his "game plan" for MSFT past Win 8. in it he says Windows will get YEARLY releases (just like Apple) Microsoft will take over the production of hardware (just like Apple) stop selling to the low end (see a pattern here?) and tie every single thing to an appstore (Can Apple sue for plagiarism?) while making their own phones (ditto) laptops (uh huh) and desktops (Ray Charles could see through this plan) at high markups like they are doing with the surface, which they had to slash orders for in half because nobody is gonna pay $800 for a Windows device that won't run Windows programs.
So if the board doesn't stop smoking weed and wake the fuck up but quick I predict in 5 years we are gonna see the low end and a HELL of a lot of the businesses move to Google, after all Android has tons of apps and Google has already said they are gonna combine ChromeOS and Android so it really wouldn't be hard for Google to simply bake in something like Crossover to support some legacy Windows programs, Apple will keep the high end, although frankly i think their stock is gonna take a serious tumble when everyone sees that Cook can't pull new markets out of his ass like Jobs did, and MSFT will be relegated to legacy installs and a bunch of MSFT stores that will look like ghost towns.
In the end it won't be because Google made this truly amazing thing, although I give them credit in that they are putting in the work, nope its because Steve Ballmer drank too much eggnog and got it in his head you can take a Pinto, slap a coat of paint on it along with a $100,000 price tag, and it will magically compete with a Porsche. MSFT is a Walmart brand but because Ballmer cares more about what Wall Street thinks than in making good products he is just gonna copy every damned thing Apple is doing and think that people will buy windows...why? Because they like the WinFlag? He butchered the UI, his appstore is a joke, and just ask Intel about how well those crazy high Ultrabooks sold, they got warehouses full of the things.
At the end of the day Windows 8 just doesn't work, the new office will probably end up all metro and ribbon and it won't work, so frankly all Google has to do is make something that works and that lets you do things easily and they can take the Walmart shoppers and the small businesses simply by virtue of MSFT thinking they can take Apple's customers, how retarded. want a perfect example of Ballmer thinking? He said when he canceled Windows Home Server "Oh we have all those features in windows SBS now so we aren't leaving the market as people will just switch to SBS". Hmmm...Windows Home Server..$40, Windows SBS? $400!!! But that is Ballmer in a nutshell, he thinks he can take a brand that has sold at Walmart prices for damned near 30 years and just jack the living fuck out of the price and people will go "Ohh Windows is a hip brand now so we'll pay!" yeah the reason that Google is gaining is because Ballmer and his marketing drones go over about as well as a shit brown Zune.
Tried it, Mint FAILED, the wireless and the sound were completely trashed by the end. It was a bog standard dell inspiron BTW.
In the end you simply can't change one simple fact: Linux is like the shifting sand, everything from the kernel up is in a constant state of flux so drivers and subsystems get shat on all the time. Look at what DE, sound subsystem, and what kernel Mint was using in Jan 07 and what they are using now, we are probably looking at a good dozen plus revs in between jan 07 and today. How many kernels did Vista go through? Sound subsystems? DEs?
But you go right ahead and try it, because I already have tried it with Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora (I knew that one was hopeless but I had a FOSSie that insisted I use it because he thought anything by RH was God), Sabayon, PCLOS, and Mandriva. Not a SINGLE ONE, not one, came out the other end with 100% working software and drivers, not one.
And I don't know what you are smoking but you haven't need any CLI for setup or install of Windows since Windows 9x, in fact Win 7 will even download and install all the drivers through WU for you during install if you like. Meanwhile here is a list of all the major showstoppers currently in Linux, please not the date at the top of the page. Also not the blue words which are links to the proof by Linux sites such as Phrononix, not some random guy's blogs. These are respectable Linux sites pointing out serious issues with drivers and software yet if you check out the original list from 3 years ago you'll see that not only is more than half of the issues from 3 years ago STILL there, but they have simply added new bugs and new issues on top of the old.
I'm sorry but there is a REASON why Linux can't break out past 1%, that is because it simply fails at such trivial tasks like updates so badly due to its fragmented nature of design.
You SERIOUSLY don't see the problem? Let me make this clear, THREE out of the FOUR freedoms CAN NOT EXIST on a closed appstore platform. Can you see the code? Sure. Can you modify? NO because it won't accept modded programs. can you share? NO because it won't load without jailbreaking and voiding your warranty. can you share your changes? NO because of the previous reasons given.
And if you think walled appstores are gonna go away I have a game of 3 card monty you have got to play, I'm sure you'll find the lady! Who is the biggest company on the planet? APPLE. What gives them all that money? LOCKED DOWN HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE. If you theory was correct then Apple would have warehouses full of devices they can't sell, instead they have lines around the block for each new release.
Done right an appstore is frankly superior, the publishers like it because it cuts way down on piracy, the consumer likes it because its simple and easy one stop shopping, the key is pricing and ease of use. take the one appstore i use, Steam. Could I pirate those games? yeah, but why would I? Then I'd have to give up MP, find cracks for each new patch, hope that I could find cracked versions of the DLC, or I can just buy the program through Steam and ALL the updates are taken care of, NO hunting for cracks or DLC, its all just "click button to buy" and its done. do I give a rat's ass that Steam means I can't give my games away or resell? Nope because resale value is virtually nil anymore and if I want to give somebody a game I can just check the box that says "give as a gift" and then they can have their own copy and I won't lose mine.
But if you want to see the future, which frankly for the next 5 years at least is gonna blow donkey balls, look up "Windows Blue" and see for yourself. its the secret Ballmer memo that shows what he is gonna do to the PC platform and all the FOSSies and FOSS users are about to get a train pulled on their ass. basically Ballmer is gonna turn Windows into Apple, its gonna be a locked down platform with Microsoft hardware running Microsoft software so you won't have to worry about the "Windows tax" because your OS isn't gonna be able to run on it anyway. Linux is gonna be relegated to the server room and the ultra expensive workstation market, even the CPU and the RAM is gonna be soldered to the board so the days of DIY are gonna be over, its back to the 1980s with proprietary everything and black boxes as far as the eye can see?
Am I happy about this? Not a chance in hell, but sadly Ballmer is right, the vast majority have NO problem with total black box computing which is why Apple is the biggest company on the planet. You can't even try to bring up antitrust because MSFT is now the underdog which means you'd also have to go after Apple and that just isn't gonna happen, they are too well liked by the public.
But back to VLC, as you can see the four freedoms can NOT be respected in an appstore model like Win 8 and especially WinRT and I'm sure that guys smart enough to make a complex video decoder like VLC know this, they just got free money for a program that will NEVER see the light of day. Look up the talks between the VLC team and the contributor that blocked the Apple appstore version, he pointed out in detail with every clause pointed out in detail why you simply can't put a community project like VLC on a locked down appstore, all it takes is a single contributor to disagree and refuse to sign away his rights and that's it, you HAVE to keep it GPL. This is also why Torvalds can't move from GPL V2 as there have been thousands over the years that have had work integrated into the kernel and since Torvalds didn't have the "or better" clause and didn't think to have a waiver signing rights over to his team he can never change it without doing a clean room rebuild of all the code he'd have to have removed.
Mark my words Odin the rise of the appstore is gonna be the deathnell for the GPL community project, either the projects will be started with a more permissive license like
I don't care where in the west you are free speech should be considered one of the most basic of human rights and if you don't have it? Well then frankly you simply don't have a free society, end of story. The way those in the EU persecute those that dare speak out about the Koran would make me label those societies as non free regimes, which is why we should ALL stand up when anyone in the west tries to stifle free speech.
Never forget the words of the Great John F. Kennedy "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." and at the core of everything is free speech, if you don't have it then frankly everything else really isn't worth anything.
Are you looking at how much actual RAM it is using? Or how much RAM is allocated by Windows? Because i have noticed that since Vista MSFT has switched the way they count RAM usage. Now personally I'm all for it, XP was completely retarded when it came to RAM and would begin hitting swap when 2/3rds of the RAM wasn't even being used but a side effect of the new way of doing things is the way RAM usage is reported in Windows usually itsn't how much RAM its actually using but how much Windows has allocated which can be two very different things. Windows watches over time how much RAM a program uses and since Steam is used as a game launcher if you have been playing games it will cache some of the DLLs for the most recent game and they get counted along with Steam. Use something like Process Explorer and you'll get a clearer picture of how much Steam is actually using. For example using Task Manager Windows reports that Steam is using 261Mb of RAM yet when I fire up Process Explorer what I find out is its actually using only 143Mb, the rest is Windows caching.
Now whether I think Steam uses too much memory for what it does? No I do not and here is why: In Steam you not only have a browser (the store) you also have an updating service, a chat client, and a file syncing service. When you realize it is doing all of that at the same time? I really don't think that the 261MB (actual usage 143MB) is too much to ask for. Personally I'd prefer programs to use my RAM and not make me wait for disk load, hell I have 8GB of RAM so why not use it to make thing work faster? I mean when you can buy 2GB of RAM for less than $20 and often see 4GB sticks of DDR 3 for less than $30, why not use some of that RAM to make things faster for the user? I mean sure you should try to be conservative when you are in a RAM starved environment but Steam's own hardware surveys show their average user has 4GB of RAM so being conservative on RAM at the cost of speed and snappy response? not worth it.
One final thing, it looks like Valve wasn't the only one that got bit this Xmas as Netflix was down too over a large part of the USA, Canada, and Latin America, the cause? Part of Amazon's cloud services went down and Netflix was using them so there ya go.
You are being funny but frankly I'd bet that wasn't far from the truth. They have been having some CRAZY cheap sales this Xmas, many gamers I'm sure got steam bux for Xmas, so everybody and their dog who don't have to work this Xmas all tried loading up at the same time and overloaded the system. Considering they had both the Mass Effect and the Borderlands franchises on sale crazy cheap as well as the THQ collection? again not surprised.
I honestly don't see what the big deal was, sure I'd be unhappy if it wouldn't have worked at all but me and my two boys were able to play our games in offline mode just fine and it was up again fairly quickly (which I thought was frankly amazing considering how much traffic they are getting and the blizzard across the midwest leaving that many more gamers with nothing to do but play) so as far as I'm concerned no harm no foul. Lets face it, every service out there can be overloaded under the right conditions, remember when Amazon went down a couple of years back during one of their big sales? Google has had outages, Microsoft has had outages, Dillard's, all that shows me is you can never plan for every possible problem and sometimes shit happens.
Does anybody know whether it sync'ed your achievements back up after you got back on? I used the time to go back and play some of the games i got during the big summer sale I hadn't gotten around to and none of them had achievements but I can imagine if I had been kicking ass and getting lots of achievements i would have been pissed if they didn't count because of a glitch.
And is it just me, or is the sale this year just not as good? Don't get me wrong, still some good deals to be had, but the sale last year just felt...I don't know, "bigger" somehow. the flash sales seemed to be faster, the game giveaway contest was fun and made me try for achievements I probably wouldn't have to get another shot at the prize bag (I didn't win shit but my youngest won so damned many games he was giving them away to family and friends by the end) and the whole thing seemed just much more festive and fun. Is it just me? Me and the boys each got a couple of games but most of it was just...meh. Maybe the contest made it more exciting, who knows.
I'm afraid the blacks are whack, have been for a couple of revs now. The greens are good but naturally they have been phasing those out so good luck finding any, and of course as I said Seagate over 640GB is just shit, absolute garbage and I'd be afraid to put anything I cared about on it.
And sadly drive quality IS through the floor, I've got a box of 80-200GB drives sitting in the shop to be tested and I bet a good 90% of them, even running for who knows how long in what kind of conditions, will be good whereas in the past 3 years or so the quality has really taken a nosedive, i frankly haven't see this many bad drives coming through my door since The Maxtor Mess of 02.
Here is my personal order of from best to worst, just based on what I've seen at the shop, Samsung EcoGreen > Samsung Spinpoint/ Hitachi Deskstar (tie), WD Green > WD Black > Seagate under 640GB. > Seagate over 640GB. The Seagates over 640GB and WD Black 1TB and 2TB have gotten so piss poor in QA that frankly I would and actually have bought refurb Samsung and Hitachi over new, yes they are THAT bad. And while the Greens are fine WD seems to be having the exact same problem Seagate is having when it comes to their large capacity Black drives, for some reason neither company can build 7200RPM drives 1TB or larger worth a fuck ATM, the failure rates is just insane.
But then we are right back at square one and needing a "new Spinrite" which we sadly don't have.
Frankly i don't give a shit if Steve Gibson was waving chicken bones when it came to the data recovery crap, it did ONE job very very VERY well that I have yet to find a tool to replace it with and the job was thus: You could slap a half a dozen drives into a box, slap in Spinrite, push a SINGLE BUTTON to have it check ALL the drives fully automated, and at the end of it just by pressing the down arrow i could look at a VERY easy to read at a glance layout of the drive. Red meant bad sector, blue meant good.
With a tool THAT simple and painless frankly it made testing a box of 40 odd sized drives a pleasure, no other tool i have ever found will do that one job, not one. if you are a programmer or know one this would be a niche you could make damned good money in, there are plenty of guys like me that would be happy to hand you $20-$40 for a disc that did what I just described. as it is I still use Spinrite on the under 500GB drives just because its so damned much easier to have a big old open sided ATX box with a SATA controller and a couple of extra SATA and IDE slots sitting in the corner where I can just slap a half a dozen drives in the cages at a time and have them all be tested while I'm working on other things.
Nice to see somebody else is sensible. I mean I trust the ForecastFox guys, so why shouldn't I get a little checkbox that says "trust extensions by this publisher" and let that be that?
There are plenty of times, especially with older customers, that having any thing pop up at them is gonna freak them right the fuck out, they are gonna think they are getting hacked or they broke something so why not give the option to guys like me that are actually building the system to say "I trust these extensions, always allow these" while leaving the rest off? Seems like such a logical thing to me, give the choice to the USER, not to the browser or the extension writer.
Of course I've been a champion of user centric design for years, sadly they don't listen to common sense anymore, its all "my way or the highway" crap instead of just giving the user choice. And in the end isn't that what this should be about, giving the user choice and control? I think a little "always trust this publisher" would solve it nicely, nobody has to use it if they don't want to and at the same time guys like me wouldn't be doing a click dance every time my extensions needed updating. sounds like a win/win to me.
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Once the $300 Dells don't exist and those customers either move up market or go elsewhere, the perception of Microsoft as the Walmart brand will end.
But that is the problem, isn't it? Its quite obvious looking at the figures that given the choice of an Apple priced Windows or going elsewhere they will just go elsewhere and thus MSFT slits their own throats for customers that won't buy their products. It would be like raising the price of a coke to a million dollars, sure if you get one taker you'll make a huge profit but more likely you'll be stuck with a warehouse full of cokes that won't sell.
The person spending $1k+ on a PC isn't gonna buy Windows, they are gonna buy Apple. Not only does Apple have the upscale branding but it retains a high resale, that Windows device won't be worth squat 2 years from now. Then there is the fact that there are probably 3000+ that buy a PC at $400-$550 for every one person buying $1K units and the math is clear, MSFT is gonna torpedo the company trying to raise prices when in reality folks will just go elsewhere.
Mark my words if they don't change in 5 years MSFT will be but a rotting husk, Google will put out $200 ChromeOS laptops with an offline mode and that will be that, the high end will go to Apple, the low end to Google, and like RIM all MSFT will be left with is legacy business installs that will be looking at exit strategies. They can want to be a Macy's brand all they want, its just not gonna happen.
Exactly KingMotley, you reach a level VERY quickly where you go "what is the point?" and even those of us who don't have monsters as big as yours (lucky bastard) find we reach a point where the upgrade treadmill makes no sense.
I mean lets take my use case and treat it like I would a customer: what do I want to do? I want to play games, edit and transcode A/V, and do basic tasks like chat and surf. Is there ANY advantage to be gained for swapping this Phenom X6 for lets say your chip? Well I'm sure it would shave a couple minutes off here and there, but the jobs I'm doing rarely pegs what I have so short of timing everything with a stopwatch would be so little difference that as a user I certainly wouldn't "feel" the change like I did when I went from a 300MHz to a 1.8GHz in less than 4 years, so what is the point in buying or building a new one?
Heck I even handed down my Phenom II quad to my youngest and he plays the latest MMOs with more cycles to spare than he knows what to do with. The chips, even the cheap chips like this $100 X6 are sooooo powerful that a good 90% of us simply won't max it out. Then you have 8GB of RAM, plenty of HDD space, what is the point of switching?
So the only upgrades I'm doing in the coming year is upgrade the 4850 for a 6850 and I'm probably gonna swap out my 20 inch LCD monitor for a 32 inch LCD TV, I've had several customers do that and it makes a great monitor but I don't NEED either, I just want it. And that says it all right there, there just isn't any need to upgrade anymore, only want, and most people aren't geeks so they'll only upgrade when they need and they won't be needing upgrades for quite awhile. To use a /. car analogy it would be like everyone using a top fuel funny car to go to get milk and the makers of the funny car trying to sell us a new one "now with dual jet engines!".
Uhhh...kinda sad when the Windows guy understands licenses better than the FOSS zealots. First of all you CANNOT STEAL from BSD, the code is still there for all to use as they see fit, instead of sticking a gun to your head and forcing you to "share", second Apple has given back a hell of a lot more than they have taken out, such as CUPS and Webkit, again just as BSD intended.
Its actually quite simple, you want to lock something up in BSD land? Its not a problem but YOU are gonna be responsible for the fork you have just created, whereas if you CHOOSE to share your changes they can be incorporated into the mainline. Personally I find this to be much better that slitting the throat of the entire ecosystem because of the "blessed three" which is the only way to make money in Linux land. I of course am speaking of support, selling hardware, or the tin cup, which is why you don't see AAA games under FOSS or even a desktop that can compete with OSX, because too many niches aren't covered by the blessed three so you get half baked and poorly supported because there isn't any way to make money in all these areas not covered by the blessed three.
But am I the only one that finds it ironic as hell that when a FOSSie rails against BSD they sound almost exactly like the *.A.A copyright trolls? Its all about stealing and "protecting the rights",hell you could take any FOSSie railing against BSD and simply change a few words and you'd have a classic MPAA/RIAA rant, almost no effort required to switch between the two.
Actually there is an even better way to handle it, just do what that woman who adopted 2 crack babies did when she found out the mother was carrying a third and still doing crack: Offer a one time cash payment if the person will have their tubes tied or get a vasectomy in the case of guys.
Since the ones most likely to breed are the uneducated which tend to be impulsive offering a one time cash payment of say $3K-$4K each would be a bargain when you figure how many unwanted children could be prevented using this method. Hell even the religious shouldn't have any problems as this is tying the tubes before conception, not aborting afterward.
Yes I have, in fact I keep an AMD Sempron from 04 as a nettop in the shop. it doesn't change the fact that Netburst was a piss poor design, it was made to go through power like shit through a goose and long as the clocks kept climbing. This had 2 major consequences, 1.- it used more and more power, until it finally got too much for even Intel around the Prescott era and they started to scale back, and 2.- Having those crazy long pipes that allowed you to get such high clocks made its IPC really terrible, in fact the first compiler rigging by Intel was NOT targeted at AMD but their own Pentium 3 because the benches were showing a 1GHz P3 stomping a 1.5GHz netburst.
Now I only mentioned ARM because it was a Linux article and if all you are doing is web surfing a basic dual core ARM will handle that alright, but if it were me? Throw out the guts and get an AMD Bobcat board which will get you more IPC processed and dual cores with full HD acceleration while using just 18w on max load and less than 10w when it comes to most tasks. When you look at how much power a P4 goes through compared to a bobcat it really is a no brainer, depending on where you live you could make up the cost of the board and RAM in less than 8 months of lowered cooling and power suckage and after that it'd be gravy.
And how much swapping was it doing? How much of it was CLI? You missed my point that if the Steam hardware surveys say their customers have 4GB of RAM on average slowing the client down to shave a few MB off, even 40 or 50MB off, not only would make no sense but would make things worse not better for the user.
Do you TRY to act this retarded, or is it a natural state? I point out several reasons why its a dumb idea, your response? "You're a dirty shill, that's what you are!"...shill for who EXACTLY, oh retarded one? Can't be MSFT since I've already posted its a trainwreck Apple wannabe, so what imaginary conspiracy is making you stop taking your meds THIS week Alex?
Hell it isn't even that tiny, both TinyXP and Tiny7 use less RAM running the full desktop. Sad that the pirate editions run better than the retail, but that has been true of software for quite a few years now.
Of course all this ignores the bigger picture which is that any machine so old that its maxed out with less than 512MB of RAM will end up sucking down more power than it worth therefor won't be worth keeping. Lets face it a good 90% of the old junkers you find are P4s, they cranked out so many millions of the P4s that you practically trip over the things and the P4 was such a power hog its simply not worth keeping. You can buy an ARM stick with Linux on it for less than $40 or if you absolutely HAVE to have X86 support you can get an Atom or Bobcat board for around $100 that gives you several times the speed and uses less power under load than a P4 will use doing nothing.
I was one of the biggest advocates for saving systems from the dump but in very few cases such as old laptops, the AMD single cores and Via CPUs does it make sense and in every other case the power sucked by the system makes it not worth having. Lets face it nobody gave a shit about power usage for a good chunk of the decade.
I was talking about the price of the OS, nobody would consider PCs of even 15 years ago to be Walmart priced, but windows damned well was.
Up until Win 7 it was widely reported that MSFT sold Windows for less than $30 a pop to the OEMs, with Vista and 7 they raised their prices but still you have WinHome for around $50 and basic was around $30, that is Walmart pricing.
And the simple fact is it don't matter what they want anymore, its ALL about public perception and to the public Windows is the OS of those $300 Dell special at Walmart and Best Buy so there is no way in hell people are gonna start treating them like a premium brand like Apple, never gonna happen. that is why i said when WinPhone came out the best thing they could have done was spun off mobile, call it Metro OS or whatever, and allowed it to get away from the public's perception of Windows.
So sorry if i didn't make it clear, talking about the OS and people's perception of it NOT the hardware.
The desktop is NOT dead, it is NOT going away, you like many in the press are just looking at raw data without the facts BEHIND the data. As someone that has been working PC sales and repair let me explain what is REALLY going on.
You see the reason the desktop sold in the numbers that it did from 95-07 was NOT normal , it was because Intel and AMD were in the middle of the MHz war and that barely 2 year old computer would literally struggle to run the latest programs. The reason for that is that writing for a faster single core CPU? Very VERY easy. So naturally all the programs and games simply took advantage of all that extra MHz and it wasn't more than a year that it would start to struggle to run the latest stuff.
Now I want you to look what I was selling as my "low end" build FIVE years ago, okay? AMD Phenom X3 or X4, 4GB of RAM, and a 300-500GB HDD. Before anybody says "You weren't selling that five years ago" remember the first gen Phenoms had the TLB bug which allowed me to score them a lot cheaper, so once I bought one and put it through its paces and found you had better odds of hitting the lotto than hitting the TLB bug I snatched them up like a fat kid snatching candy. Now YOU tell me friend...what does you average user do that is gonna stress that system enough they think "Boy I need to buy a new system" huh? hell I have a customer that was running the latest Solidworks making complex as hell 3D robot models using a Phenom I X3 and a $30 HD4650 GPU and he could whip that model around and zoom in and out all day, no stutters.
Just look at me, I was the guy that ALWAYS had to build himself a new system every year and a half like clockwork so I could play games, now what am I using? An AMD hexacore that was released more than 2 years ago, with 8GB of RAM, 3TB of HDD space, and an HD4850 I'm about to retire for an HD6850...why would I need to build a new one? Neither my OS or my games are using up all my RAM, I have everything just whip along on that 6 core even with it running stock clocks, and even that HD4850 isn't having any trouble with the latest games, I'm switching because of the heat. My netbook is nearly 3 years old but still handles like the day it was made, has a dual core AMD with a powerful enough GPU that just for shits and giggles fired up several games like L4D and Torchlight II and they ran just fine so...why would I need a new one again?
The reason PC sales are down is NOT because people are "switching to cellphones and tablets" its because less than 2 years after AMD and Intel switched from the MHz wars to the core wars they frankly began building machines waaaay overpowered compared to what the user actually does. That is why the smart ones are branching into other things as well as just selling boxes, in my case its HTPCs and security systems. Its not because people don't want or don't use computers, although Win 8 certainly isn't good for the market which is why I don't carry it, its because people are happy with what they have and see no reason to blow money on a system that won't feel any faster than what they had.
Dude don't believe the bullshit. Was MSFT under gates seriously douchey? Yes they were but all they did was kick programs that were already falling down the stairs so they'd fall a little faster.
I actually had both WP and Netscape, in fact until NS 4 I was a DIE HARD NS user. Here let me give you my impression of NS 4: "Alright! I got it installed and am ready to surf the world baby! I'll just go to my favorite site../crash/...huh. Well maybe the site was iffy, I'll just pick one I've surfed a million times with NS 3 and.../NS 4 causes a hard system lock, forcing a reboot/..son of a bitch. Well now that I have my PC up I'll just choose a simple site to../NS 4 causes BSOD/...&%$^$&$!!!! And with WP it was run one instance, pray to God it didn't crash, get halfway through something only to have it crap itself because it was just a DOS program with a DOS for Windows wrapper and when you went to do something like change your volume you had a 50/50 chance of when you switch backed the program would hard lock or crash, and when it did it would nearly always corrupt whatever you were working on.
So I'm sorry you can't blame MSFT for NS 4, nor can you blame them for WP just being a DOS program until nearly 2000. Certainly they weren't being helpful or giving them early access to Windows builds but I can tell you that frankly NS 4 ran like dogshit under DOS as well and WP was a little better in that regard but it was still waaay behind the times. As another pointed out the NS team wouldn't open source NS because they were ashamed of the old code base. I can tell you that I actually had to go and download IE 4 to get it and when I did and was able to surf for a whole hour before it crashed? Well it was like manna from heaven compared to NS 4 which I swear I never did get to read a single article all the way through before it would fuck up somehow.
Not to mention that clean room or not it would STILL be in court for most of the decade, thus making sure that Google missed their shot. My plan is MUCH better and frankly could be in stores by the end of next year as it really wouldn't take much at all to give Chrome OS a true "offline mode" and buy Crossover and triple the Crossover team and just bake that into Chrome OS.
Right now this very minute Crossover already runs a good portion of the programs folks want, MS Office, World Of Warcraft, so you combine that with a true offline Chrome OS and I'd say you'd have a winner. Hell look at the Chrome OS netbook Acer has been selling, dual core Celeron, 4GB of RAM and a 320GB HDD for only $200? I'd say the only reason that thing isn't backordered until doomsday is because you can't run your Windows programs on it and its useless without a net connection. fix those two problems and I bet those would be flying off the shelves!
This is the first time since the 80s where anybody has had a real shot at taking a good chunk of the market away from Windows and if Ballmer goes through with his retarded "Windows Blue" plan frankly there will be a HELL of a lot of windows user looking for an out. I mean what Windows user is gonna want yearly updates, everything tied to an appstore, and the hardware coming from some overpriced MSFT store? Hell if they wanted that they would already own a Macbook. The ONLY things holding people back are their need to run whatever Windows program they consider a "must have" and the ignorant way Chrome OS won't do shit offline. Fix those 2 problems? i could easily see Google controlling 30% of the market in less than 2 years. Hell Chrome OS now looks like Windows more than Windows does, it really wouldn't be hard to switch.
I give you a WHOOSH for missing the point but I'm too tired, BTW the answer is AT&T Hobbit. But the point you missed was the economy of scale meant that BeOS was doomed, their systems would be slower and more expensive than everybody else's systems. There is a REASON why when asked about his big regrets one of the first things Jobs said was "picking the PPC" because they were 1.-Too hot, 2.-Too power hungry, and most importantly 3.-Too expensive for what you got.
They COULD have had their own X86 clone made and sold that along with licenses to their OS and frankly they could have had a REAL shot, because BeOS was doing in 92 what Windows wasn't doing until 98, with beOS you could run multimedia and multitask which until Win98 you could give that shit up on windows as it was too buggy and crash prone, especially when running resource heavy programs. Instead by first picking a dead end, followed by two expensive niche CPUs by the time they realized the economy of scale on Intel was such that they would be leapfrogging anything else out there it was too late,they had given the market to MSFT.
And as I said I can see Google easily doing the exact same thing, MSFT under Ballmer is a trainwreck, they ignore their customers, they put out overpriced products that nobody wants (go look at the sales figures for Win 8 and Surface, its been as well appreciated as a wet fart in an elevator) and most importantly if they do follow the "Windows Blue" strategy they will be sending a clear signal to their current customers that "We don't want your business, we want to be Apple instead" which will leave the market rip for a takeover. Google has a good rep, they have the money to build pretty much anything they want, because they make their bread in search they can sell their products cheap or even give them away, and frankly it would be trivial to just buy something like Crossover and build it into Chrome OS along with an offline mode. That way they could say "See? All your games and programs work here too PLUS we aren't trying to be Apple, we'll give you what you want" and after all the fucking over MSFT has given the OEMs i could see many of them jumping on board VERY quickly just to get away from the Windows Blue trainwreck. After all what OEM is gonna want to do business with a company actively try to put them out of business?
The time is right and if Google were to do what i just listed? I'd be happy to start wiping some of these Windows boxes and put Chrome OS on instead. And this is coming from someone who has been selling Windows since 3.xx, but like many others I don't like the way the company is heading and would be happy for another choice as long as that choice was solid and ready for the masses.
I have an even better question....what EXACTLY is the point of Ubuntu on tablets? Well other than "We can't figure out how to make money off of FOSS so this is yet another thing to throw at the wall and see if it sticks" like Ubuntu Netbook edition and Ubuntu TV.
I mean I could understand it if the only choices out there was iOS and WinRT, but from what I've seen when it comes to the numbers of units moved Android is seriously kicking some tail...am I wrong? I mean its open, it has a Linux kernel, and it already has an SDK that lets anybody write apps for the thing or I assume compile FOSS programs over, so what is the point?
But frankly after the way they made it clear they really didn't care what the users thought of the amazon deal, which in and of itself was stupid because Amazon has a piss poor adult content filter and makes it clear in their terms of use that its for those 18 and up, not the kind of thing you want to build into an OS that supposed to be for the whole family, I have to wonder if Shuttleworth and Canonical really give a shit about their current users at all. I mean its pretty obvious that they aren't making enough bread to keep the lights on and Shuttleworth has already said he's not gonna put in another dime, so I have to wonder if this isn't one last shot at the big time before they either just switch to being server only or just pack it in.
Because lets face it Unity went over about as well as someone taking a dump on the picnic table and if they make it even more of a cell phone/tablet OS I really can't see any of the users they have left not saying 'fuck this mess" and going over to Mint that I do have to give credit to for asking users what they wanted and listening to feedback. Things must be REALLY bad over at Canonical because going all in on tablets when its already so damned crowded seems to me to be practically suicidal, and I really can't see the current users wanting their laptops and desktops to behave like cellphones.
You kinda had it then missed the mark. Its not popular because not only does it not look good it rarely enhances the story and instead what you get is "Dr Tongue's 3D House Of Pancakes". Man I wish Candy were alive, he'd have had a field day with this.
But the dirty little secret that they are ignoring or downplaying, which is also why the 3D TVs aren't selling worth a shit, is a LARGE section of the population gets blinding headaches from the crap! I have 4 customers that have bought 3D TVs so far, how many actually use the 3D? NONE, none of them show 3D content on their 3D TV, why? Because at least one person in their family gets a blinding headache from watching 3D which ruins the entire point of having a home theater, the family gathering around and enjoying it together.
In my little shop I get people from all walks of life and all ages and when Avatar and all the 3D hype started i start asking folks about what they thought of it and I found the headaches are a BIG problem, in fact I hadn't met anybody yet who didn't complain about it giving at least one person in their family a sick headache. In my own family while I can watch it okay, although I do feel kinda fatigued afterward, both of my parents and my oldest simply can't watch anything 3D, more than an hour and they are walking out the theater with a blinding skull thumper.
So you have a product that 1.-Costs more, 2.-Rarely enhances the story, 3.-Often is only used for cheap effects, 4.-Gives a large portion of the population a negative experience when using it, and they wonder why its bombing? Maybe when they come up with holograms or at least 3D without glasses then i could see it maybe taking off, but this current tech sucks just as bad as the tech used back in the 50s, it just sucks in a different way. I know myself and several friends have gone out to see a movie and ended up changing our minds because we couldn't find a theater showing it in 2D and from the sounds of it more folks are doing the same, its not worth the bullshit.
The blue ones which turned out to be deep fried ass, luckily I got my money back. I haven't tried the blacks yet, last i checked the price was kinda high on those, a little too high for my customers. The greens are good but they can be hard to find and I heard WD is phasing those out for the blue/black/red schema and I haven't had a chance to try the red yet but if you are building DVRs the reds are designed for DVR, security cams, and other industrial uses so you might want to check them out.
But just FYI but avoid anything Seagate over 640GB right now, talking to my fellow shop owners they are having Seagate 1TB and 1.5TB die on them left and right, just like Nvidia with bumpgate from the looks of it if you get a Seagate over 640GB it WILL fail, the only question is how long. I had one customer that refused to listen to me because he was building his own media tank/NAS setup and "found a deal" on new 1.5TB Seagate which gave him something like 10TB when he was finished. I tried to warn him but he didn't listen and now he is having to re-rip his entire blue ray collection because every damned one of those 1.5TB drives bought the farm in less than 6 months, taking most of his collection with them.
so if I run across some 2TB blacks at a price i can use I'll be sure to check 'em out, but if you don't want to spend time filling out RMAs you better avoid Seagate like an STD until they fix the problem. i thought I would die laughing as it took nearly 2 months for Tiger to finally find a price low enough to get people to take a chance on the Seagate 1TB, for first it was $80 on BF, nope, then $70 the week after, nope, then it was $60 after a $10 MIR, nope, finally the week before Xmas they said "fuck it" and sold them for $53 with no rebate and FINALLY sold out of the things,but I wouldn't be surprised if Seagate gets more than half of them back as RMAs and the only reason they won't get more is I knew several people that refused to RMA a drive because they didn't have a way to remove their data.
Actually ironically Google is simply doing what MSFT did in the past, which was taking a market from morons. How did MS Office become dominant? Because Wordperfect was run by morons who thought that even though Windows was the dominant platform they could just sit on ass and repackage their DOS version and made a buggy POS that bombed. Same thing happened with IE and Netscape, Netscape put out the disaster that was NS 4 and gave MSFT a market by default, same again with Windows VS BeOS, which chose first a lame AT&T CPU that bombed, then the Motorola chip that was already fading before finally getting the sense too late to make an X86 version.
Now MSFT is being run by an absolute moron named Steve "What is Apple doing?" Ballmer who is about to make a move that will make the Osbourne effect or HP buying Palm look like minor boo boos. For those that don't know what I'm talking about look up "Windows Blue" where Ballmer laid out his "game plan" for MSFT past Win 8. in it he says Windows will get YEARLY releases (just like Apple) Microsoft will take over the production of hardware (just like Apple) stop selling to the low end (see a pattern here?) and tie every single thing to an appstore (Can Apple sue for plagiarism?) while making their own phones (ditto) laptops (uh huh) and desktops (Ray Charles could see through this plan) at high markups like they are doing with the surface, which they had to slash orders for in half because nobody is gonna pay $800 for a Windows device that won't run Windows programs.
So if the board doesn't stop smoking weed and wake the fuck up but quick I predict in 5 years we are gonna see the low end and a HELL of a lot of the businesses move to Google, after all Android has tons of apps and Google has already said they are gonna combine ChromeOS and Android so it really wouldn't be hard for Google to simply bake in something like Crossover to support some legacy Windows programs, Apple will keep the high end, although frankly i think their stock is gonna take a serious tumble when everyone sees that Cook can't pull new markets out of his ass like Jobs did, and MSFT will be relegated to legacy installs and a bunch of MSFT stores that will look like ghost towns.
In the end it won't be because Google made this truly amazing thing, although I give them credit in that they are putting in the work, nope its because Steve Ballmer drank too much eggnog and got it in his head you can take a Pinto, slap a coat of paint on it along with a $100,000 price tag, and it will magically compete with a Porsche. MSFT is a Walmart brand but because Ballmer cares more about what Wall Street thinks than in making good products he is just gonna copy every damned thing Apple is doing and think that people will buy windows...why? Because they like the WinFlag? He butchered the UI, his appstore is a joke, and just ask Intel about how well those crazy high Ultrabooks sold, they got warehouses full of the things.
At the end of the day Windows 8 just doesn't work, the new office will probably end up all metro and ribbon and it won't work, so frankly all Google has to do is make something that works and that lets you do things easily and they can take the Walmart shoppers and the small businesses simply by virtue of MSFT thinking they can take Apple's customers, how retarded. want a perfect example of Ballmer thinking? He said when he canceled Windows Home Server "Oh we have all those features in windows SBS now so we aren't leaving the market as people will just switch to SBS". Hmmm...Windows Home Server..$40, Windows SBS? $400!!! But that is Ballmer in a nutshell, he thinks he can take a brand that has sold at Walmart prices for damned near 30 years and just jack the living fuck out of the price and people will go "Ohh Windows is a hip brand now so we'll pay!" yeah the reason that Google is gaining is because Ballmer and his marketing drones go over about as well as a shit brown Zune.
Tried it, Mint FAILED, the wireless and the sound were completely trashed by the end. It was a bog standard dell inspiron BTW.
In the end you simply can't change one simple fact: Linux is like the shifting sand, everything from the kernel up is in a constant state of flux so drivers and subsystems get shat on all the time. Look at what DE, sound subsystem, and what kernel Mint was using in Jan 07 and what they are using now, we are probably looking at a good dozen plus revs in between jan 07 and today. How many kernels did Vista go through? Sound subsystems? DEs?
But you go right ahead and try it, because I already have tried it with Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora (I knew that one was hopeless but I had a FOSSie that insisted I use it because he thought anything by RH was God), Sabayon, PCLOS, and Mandriva. Not a SINGLE ONE, not one, came out the other end with 100% working software and drivers, not one.
And I don't know what you are smoking but you haven't need any CLI for setup or install of Windows since Windows 9x, in fact Win 7 will even download and install all the drivers through WU for you during install if you like. Meanwhile here is a list of all the major showstoppers currently in Linux, please not the date at the top of the page. Also not the blue words which are links to the proof by Linux sites such as Phrononix, not some random guy's blogs. These are respectable Linux sites pointing out serious issues with drivers and software yet if you check out the original list from 3 years ago you'll see that not only is more than half of the issues from 3 years ago STILL there, but they have simply added new bugs and new issues on top of the old.
I'm sorry but there is a REASON why Linux can't break out past 1%, that is because it simply fails at such trivial tasks like updates so badly due to its fragmented nature of design.
You SERIOUSLY don't see the problem? Let me make this clear, THREE out of the FOUR freedoms CAN NOT EXIST on a closed appstore platform. Can you see the code? Sure. Can you modify? NO because it won't accept modded programs. can you share? NO because it won't load without jailbreaking and voiding your warranty. can you share your changes? NO because of the previous reasons given.
And if you think walled appstores are gonna go away I have a game of 3 card monty you have got to play, I'm sure you'll find the lady! Who is the biggest company on the planet? APPLE. What gives them all that money? LOCKED DOWN HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE. If you theory was correct then Apple would have warehouses full of devices they can't sell, instead they have lines around the block for each new release.
Done right an appstore is frankly superior, the publishers like it because it cuts way down on piracy, the consumer likes it because its simple and easy one stop shopping, the key is pricing and ease of use. take the one appstore i use, Steam. Could I pirate those games? yeah, but why would I? Then I'd have to give up MP, find cracks for each new patch, hope that I could find cracked versions of the DLC, or I can just buy the program through Steam and ALL the updates are taken care of, NO hunting for cracks or DLC, its all just "click button to buy" and its done. do I give a rat's ass that Steam means I can't give my games away or resell? Nope because resale value is virtually nil anymore and if I want to give somebody a game I can just check the box that says "give as a gift" and then they can have their own copy and I won't lose mine.
But if you want to see the future, which frankly for the next 5 years at least is gonna blow donkey balls, look up "Windows Blue" and see for yourself. its the secret Ballmer memo that shows what he is gonna do to the PC platform and all the FOSSies and FOSS users are about to get a train pulled on their ass. basically Ballmer is gonna turn Windows into Apple, its gonna be a locked down platform with Microsoft hardware running Microsoft software so you won't have to worry about the "Windows tax" because your OS isn't gonna be able to run on it anyway. Linux is gonna be relegated to the server room and the ultra expensive workstation market, even the CPU and the RAM is gonna be soldered to the board so the days of DIY are gonna be over, its back to the 1980s with proprietary everything and black boxes as far as the eye can see?
Am I happy about this? Not a chance in hell, but sadly Ballmer is right, the vast majority have NO problem with total black box computing which is why Apple is the biggest company on the planet. You can't even try to bring up antitrust because MSFT is now the underdog which means you'd also have to go after Apple and that just isn't gonna happen, they are too well liked by the public.
But back to VLC, as you can see the four freedoms can NOT be respected in an appstore model like Win 8 and especially WinRT and I'm sure that guys smart enough to make a complex video decoder like VLC know this, they just got free money for a program that will NEVER see the light of day. Look up the talks between the VLC team and the contributor that blocked the Apple appstore version, he pointed out in detail with every clause pointed out in detail why you simply can't put a community project like VLC on a locked down appstore, all it takes is a single contributor to disagree and refuse to sign away his rights and that's it, you HAVE to keep it GPL. This is also why Torvalds can't move from GPL V2 as there have been thousands over the years that have had work integrated into the kernel and since Torvalds didn't have the "or better" clause and didn't think to have a waiver signing rights over to his team he can never change it without doing a clean room rebuild of all the code he'd have to have removed.
Mark my words Odin the rise of the appstore is gonna be the deathnell for the GPL community project, either the projects will be started with a more permissive license like
I don't care where in the west you are free speech should be considered one of the most basic of human rights and if you don't have it? Well then frankly you simply don't have a free society, end of story. The way those in the EU persecute those that dare speak out about the Koran would make me label those societies as non free regimes, which is why we should ALL stand up when anyone in the west tries to stifle free speech.
Never forget the words of the Great John F. Kennedy "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." and at the core of everything is free speech, if you don't have it then frankly everything else really isn't worth anything.
Are you looking at how much actual RAM it is using? Or how much RAM is allocated by Windows? Because i have noticed that since Vista MSFT has switched the way they count RAM usage. Now personally I'm all for it, XP was completely retarded when it came to RAM and would begin hitting swap when 2/3rds of the RAM wasn't even being used but a side effect of the new way of doing things is the way RAM usage is reported in Windows usually itsn't how much RAM its actually using but how much Windows has allocated which can be two very different things. Windows watches over time how much RAM a program uses and since Steam is used as a game launcher if you have been playing games it will cache some of the DLLs for the most recent game and they get counted along with Steam. Use something like Process Explorer and you'll get a clearer picture of how much Steam is actually using. For example using Task Manager Windows reports that Steam is using 261Mb of RAM yet when I fire up Process Explorer what I find out is its actually using only 143Mb, the rest is Windows caching.
Now whether I think Steam uses too much memory for what it does? No I do not and here is why: In Steam you not only have a browser (the store) you also have an updating service, a chat client, and a file syncing service. When you realize it is doing all of that at the same time? I really don't think that the 261MB (actual usage 143MB) is too much to ask for. Personally I'd prefer programs to use my RAM and not make me wait for disk load, hell I have 8GB of RAM so why not use it to make thing work faster? I mean when you can buy 2GB of RAM for less than $20 and often see 4GB sticks of DDR 3 for less than $30, why not use some of that RAM to make things faster for the user? I mean sure you should try to be conservative when you are in a RAM starved environment but Steam's own hardware surveys show their average user has 4GB of RAM so being conservative on RAM at the cost of speed and snappy response? not worth it.
One final thing, it looks like Valve wasn't the only one that got bit this Xmas as Netflix was down too over a large part of the USA, Canada, and Latin America, the cause? Part of Amazon's cloud services went down and Netflix was using them so there ya go.
You are being funny but frankly I'd bet that wasn't far from the truth. They have been having some CRAZY cheap sales this Xmas, many gamers I'm sure got steam bux for Xmas, so everybody and their dog who don't have to work this Xmas all tried loading up at the same time and overloaded the system. Considering they had both the Mass Effect and the Borderlands franchises on sale crazy cheap as well as the THQ collection? again not surprised.
I honestly don't see what the big deal was, sure I'd be unhappy if it wouldn't have worked at all but me and my two boys were able to play our games in offline mode just fine and it was up again fairly quickly (which I thought was frankly amazing considering how much traffic they are getting and the blizzard across the midwest leaving that many more gamers with nothing to do but play) so as far as I'm concerned no harm no foul. Lets face it, every service out there can be overloaded under the right conditions, remember when Amazon went down a couple of years back during one of their big sales? Google has had outages, Microsoft has had outages, Dillard's, all that shows me is you can never plan for every possible problem and sometimes shit happens.
Does anybody know whether it sync'ed your achievements back up after you got back on? I used the time to go back and play some of the games i got during the big summer sale I hadn't gotten around to and none of them had achievements but I can imagine if I had been kicking ass and getting lots of achievements i would have been pissed if they didn't count because of a glitch.
And is it just me, or is the sale this year just not as good? Don't get me wrong, still some good deals to be had, but the sale last year just felt...I don't know, "bigger" somehow. the flash sales seemed to be faster, the game giveaway contest was fun and made me try for achievements I probably wouldn't have to get another shot at the prize bag (I didn't win shit but my youngest won so damned many games he was giving them away to family and friends by the end) and the whole thing seemed just much more festive and fun. Is it just me? Me and the boys each got a couple of games but most of it was just...meh. Maybe the contest made it more exciting, who knows.
I'm afraid the blacks are whack, have been for a couple of revs now. The greens are good but naturally they have been phasing those out so good luck finding any, and of course as I said Seagate over 640GB is just shit, absolute garbage and I'd be afraid to put anything I cared about on it.
And sadly drive quality IS through the floor, I've got a box of 80-200GB drives sitting in the shop to be tested and I bet a good 90% of them, even running for who knows how long in what kind of conditions, will be good whereas in the past 3 years or so the quality has really taken a nosedive, i frankly haven't see this many bad drives coming through my door since The Maxtor Mess of 02.
Here is my personal order of from best to worst, just based on what I've seen at the shop, Samsung EcoGreen > Samsung Spinpoint/ Hitachi Deskstar (tie), WD Green > WD Black > Seagate under 640GB. > Seagate over 640GB. The Seagates over 640GB and WD Black 1TB and 2TB have gotten so piss poor in QA that frankly I would and actually have bought refurb Samsung and Hitachi over new, yes they are THAT bad. And while the Greens are fine WD seems to be having the exact same problem Seagate is having when it comes to their large capacity Black drives, for some reason neither company can build 7200RPM drives 1TB or larger worth a fuck ATM, the failure rates is just insane.
But then we are right back at square one and needing a "new Spinrite" which we sadly don't have.
Frankly i don't give a shit if Steve Gibson was waving chicken bones when it came to the data recovery crap, it did ONE job very very VERY well that I have yet to find a tool to replace it with and the job was thus: You could slap a half a dozen drives into a box, slap in Spinrite, push a SINGLE BUTTON to have it check ALL the drives fully automated, and at the end of it just by pressing the down arrow i could look at a VERY easy to read at a glance layout of the drive. Red meant bad sector, blue meant good.
With a tool THAT simple and painless frankly it made testing a box of 40 odd sized drives a pleasure, no other tool i have ever found will do that one job, not one. if you are a programmer or know one this would be a niche you could make damned good money in, there are plenty of guys like me that would be happy to hand you $20-$40 for a disc that did what I just described. as it is I still use Spinrite on the under 500GB drives just because its so damned much easier to have a big old open sided ATX box with a SATA controller and a couple of extra SATA and IDE slots sitting in the corner where I can just slap a half a dozen drives in the cages at a time and have them all be tested while I'm working on other things.
Nice to see somebody else is sensible. I mean I trust the ForecastFox guys, so why shouldn't I get a little checkbox that says "trust extensions by this publisher" and let that be that?
There are plenty of times, especially with older customers, that having any thing pop up at them is gonna freak them right the fuck out, they are gonna think they are getting hacked or they broke something so why not give the option to guys like me that are actually building the system to say "I trust these extensions, always allow these" while leaving the rest off? Seems like such a logical thing to me, give the choice to the USER, not to the browser or the extension writer.
Of course I've been a champion of user centric design for years, sadly they don't listen to common sense anymore, its all "my way or the highway" crap instead of just giving the user choice. And in the end isn't that what this should be about, giving the user choice and control? I think a little "always trust this publisher" would solve it nicely, nobody has to use it if they don't want to and at the same time guys like me wouldn't be doing a click dance every time my extensions needed updating. sounds like a win/win to me.