Anything using any math is a LOT faster on 64bit than on 32bit. I switched to 64bit back in 05 when XP X64 came out (one of MSFT's best OSes, right up there with Win2K and Win 7 in my list of top notch OSes) and even though I didn't have 4Gb at the time you could really tell a difference, I was gaining on average 10%-15% thanks to having the larger registers.
As far as killing 32bit? If MSFT wasn't currently run by retards they would have made ALL versions of Win 7 come with XP Mode VMs and could have killed off 32bit right there, but since everyone hates Win 8 and it looks like we'll sadly get at least one more release under Ballmer before his fat stupid ass gets fired my guess is we'll see a Win 9 "OMG we want to be Apple so bad it hurts, LOVE ME!!" release with 32bit support, because if its one thing we can count on from Steve Ballmer is half assed software.
That's nice, an OS used by less than 2% of the entire planet has some tool that reports what SMART is telling it, no different that a billion freeware programs for Windows. Just FYI but I can think of about a dozen freeware programs that will do the same damned thing in Windows, INCLUDING the email, so its not exactly like you got anything to brag about Ms AC.
Now I'm gonna spell out what the REAL problem is, which any guy who has spent time in the trenches will tell you and that is SMART SUCKS ASS and for several years has more about covering bad batches for the HDD OEMs than it has been for actually telling you something is going bad. I have had drives in the shop that sounded like an angle grinder bouncing on pavement where SMART said "Nope, nothing wrong here la la la"" while the thing just ground and sputtered, its the most fucking pointless diagnostic tool there is.
What we NEED is a replacement for Spinrite, something that bypasses the lying SMART and just runs a pass of zeroes and ones on the drive and reports a simple pass/fail on the read/writes. Spinrite was fucking brilliant for this, it would give you a layout of the entire drive with red for sectors that failed to report the correct data back and blue for clean so it took just a second to glance at the readout to spot a drive that was buggy out of the box, but nobody has updated the tool in years so its useless now since it can't do SATA 6 or drives above 500Gb.
So how about it FOSS devs, here is the requirements: Bypass SMART, does a single R/W cycle, reports results. That's ALL it has to do anjd so far nobody has stepped up to the plate. damned near every shop I knew including mine had bought a copy of Spinrite so there is good money to be made there if you are willing to put in the work, its a niche but its a niche with money, builders, repair shops and gamers would all love to hand you money for this tool, so get on it and report back when its done, okay?
The problem is the best damned tool ever made for testing drives hasn't been updating in years and now won't work on drives bigger than 500Gb, I am of course talking about Spinrite. With Spinrite on lvl 2 you just bypass the firmware and write patterns of zeroes and ones and then read back what it reports, if its spitting errors right off the bat then you know to send it back. Problem is Gibson hasn't updated the thing since 06 so it can't handle drives bigger than 500Gb which makes it all but useless today.
So if anybody has found something that works similar to spinrite but works on large drives I too would like to know, I get drives coming in from all over the place at the shop with ZERO history here at the shop so I don't know if they've been barely used or thoroughly abused and having a tool I can run on them would be a big help.
Pale Moon is also quite good and has a 64bit version although they compile their for newer CPUs (Athlon64, P4 and above) but if you are running 64bits you probably aren't using an ancient CPU anyway.
But the FF numbers have been dropping and its from nothing but shit like this, being arrogant and not listening to their customers. After all that is EXACTLY what they are, for without them Google wouldn't pay Mozilla for the search rights and the whole company goes down the drain so its time they started actively listening to their customers instead of pissing them off.
This is one thing we have so much better than we did when FF first came out, it no more "use this or get stuck with IE" nonsense, no more having the entire web coded for IE quirks, now we have this great bounty of choice so if any company refuses to listen to us we can just go somewhere else without having to jump through hoops or deal with a crippled web experience. Just off the top of my head I can name Chrome, Chromium and Comodo Dragon in the Chromium based camp, FF, Pale Moon, Waterfox,Kemelon and Comodo IceDragon in the gecko builds, then you got the more "one offs" like Safari and Opera, that's ten browsers that will ALL render the web just fine, so if the numbers for FireFox go down they have nobody to blame but themselves. maybe next time instead of just pulling a boneheaded stunt how about actually asking your customers first, huh?
Want some advice? hunt the net for some Samsung EcoGreen drives, I don't care if you have to take refurb but of course new would be better and BUY THEM. I have put those drives in some truly hellish places, we're talking construction trailers and warehouse floors where the dirt and the grime makes everything just gross but they take insane amounts of abuse and keep on coming. I was so impressed i yanked the drives on my personal systems and replaced them with EcoGreens across the board, even the boot drives are 1TB Ecogreen. And I have to say that after running some benches that the 32Mb cache on these drives actually give them better throughput than the 500Gb Seagates they replaced while running a good 30 degrees F cooler. If you can't find the EcoGreen the Hitachi pre-buyout are also quite good, but those 1TB and 2TB EcoGreens were frankly built like tanks.
And you do NOT want to use an SSD for data storage, you REALLY don't, the reason? I have found the controllers can fail at ANY time with ZERO warning and when it does unless you have the skills to desolder the boards and rebuild the data from the chips its gone forever, poof! Hell I don't even know of any data recovery services that will attempt it with a dead SSD controller, its pretty much considered a lost cause.
I'll treat you just like you were my customer and just give you the straight dope just as I would them. if you came into my shop with this problem? I'd tell you a combination of BD and a Samsung EcoGreen for long term storage. At $1 for each 25GB disc Blu Rays actually make a pretty economical storage solution right now and as long as you keep them out of heat and sunlight it looks like they'll last as long as burned DVDs, which is on average at least 5-10 years. When you combine this with a nice 1TB or 2TB EcoGreen you'll have your data safe, if one fails you have the other, and frankly its economical at the same time as an external case is less than $15 and you can find an Ecogreen online for less than $100.
Well you have to look at the history of shootings in schools Crosshair, the guys doing the shooting? NOT the type to have really thought this shit through nor to have the exp to know how to defeat the Taser. I mean look at Lanza, Klebold and Harris, etc, these clowns were not hardened criminals nor had they spent enough time in the system to learn the tricks required to defeat the Taser.
Now one could argue that they would try to learn how to defeat it, but reading something on the net and actually experiencing it are two totally different things. And remember this is supposed to be in addition to the armed security and panic button, not a replacement of. So all they really have to do if the teacher is uncomfortable with firearms is to buy enough time for security to get there from where they are in the building and I think the Taser (although giving them the mace as well would be a smart move) would accomplish that task pretty well i think.
They can waste their mod points all they want but when you can't even use a tool for the job its intended to do then I'm sorry but your software just isn't suitable for purpose. And don't even get me started on running more than one at a time, you'd think OO.o/LO was designed for DOS the way it shits all over itself if you try to run Writer and another tool like Calc or Base at the same time.
But spend ANY real time in base and you'll find out its complete and total garbage, you try doing what is the most obvious and bog standard uses for a DB, like adding keys and making relationships and the whole thing will just shit all over itself and die hard, often taking its DB with it. Frankly anybody that needs Access or Excel wouldn't spend 5 minutes in either base or Calc before reaching for their CC to buy MS Office just to get away from the mess, its THAT bad. Frankly neither Base nor Calc should have been allowed into the release, its not even alpha quality.
Uhhh...95%+ of the systems released in the last 5+ years? In case you didn't get the memo there is really only a handful of ODMs making parts on motherboards anymore, not that you'd know it by Linux, thanks to the "ZOMFG you have firmware 3.72343 and I want firmware 3.72346!" fiddly and picky as fuck nature of the driver situation. Pick ANY board on Newegg or Tiger, any one you want, and I'll take NOTHING but the Win 7, hell even the Vista install DVD and afterward it will have 100% working drivers without a single forum anything.
Now if you WANT the little extra crap, like Realtek HD Audio manager or AMD CCC? Then you'll have to OMG actually put the disc that came with the system in the drive but none of that is actually REQUIRED, again exact opposite on Linux because everything is tied to kernel which is just retarded.
Hell the teachers that don't want to carry a gun could STILL make their school safer, simply give them police issue tasers! I have a couple of cops that are customers and I can tell you that I don't care how stoned or crazy a guy is one shot with a standard issue police taser will put his ass on the ground. If every teacher had one of these along with the training on how to use it when that nut kicked in the door he could have been laid flat out and carried away.
If you haven't seen it yet Crosshair here is a video on the stock market I think you'll enjoy as he points to many of the same issues you have only he takes it farther, he believes there is gonna be a massive crash and I have to agree.
Since the early 80s the laws have been SOOOO far tilted to favor the interests of the Street it has allowed a massive bubble to be blown (430% GDP, compared to 125% GDP before the great 29 crash) and it has created a truly toxic market, where companies can burn the buildings down and get a stock bounce for a quick dump and get away because "Hey their costs have gone down, no paying rent on those buildings anymore". At the end of the day you have too many people in the market chasing after too few stocks so its no longer about the VALUE or even the long term survivability of the company, like with flipping houses in the real estate market its just about what you can flip that worthless piece of paper for. like a giant game of hot potato each tries to flip the stock a little higher and a little higher until the last sucker gets left holding the bag. Meanwhile the CEO who burnt the company cashes out and goes to the next corp he can burn, sadly we have seen it over and over AND OVER.
as for AMD they could have been great, now we will be lucky if they survive, all because the CEO did a pump and dump on the entire engineering division. The engineers wanted to do like Intel did with Core, go back to the simpler K8 designs and build from there, instead the CEO gave everybody a pink slip and had the computers lay out the chips...that is how you got the steaming mess that is Bulldozer.
In my school as with the guy who posted above those that tried to be "better than the pack" were punished and humiliated. In fact i was actually thrown out of math class because i could work the problems faster than the teacher therefor I HAD to be cheating, it couldn't be that I was good at math, nope I had to be a cheater.
The ONLY reason I wasn't completely kicked out of school was the teacher in the next classroom was the one who was my home tutor when i was recovering from a bike wreck and knew I was good at math so she marched down to the principal's office when she saw me about to be kicked out and demanded that the principal give me and the math teacher a test. He wrote the same question twice on the board and while the math teacher stood there doing all his stupid steps I just wrote the answer and sat down. When the principal saw this he could see it was nothing but the math teacher being an asshole because there he was STILL claiming I had to have cheated! Even the principal was like "How? Did he read my mind, know which problem I was gonna randomly write on the board? How could he cheat just standing at the board with nothing but a piece of chalk?" so since they only had one math teacher I got an A for not doing math that year, i sat in detention reading Asimov and Clarke.
So do NOT try to say "its up to the student" because in many schools they will go out of their way to beat you down if you try. You are "different" you are "other" you will NOT be tolerated, because all must be the same. As I said I got straight As in HS even though I never set foot inside a classroom, because the coach ended up giving me a spare classroom and had me teaching to the jocks so they could pass the eligibility tests. They simply didn't know what to do with a smart kid, there were NO magnet schools in my area, we couldn't afford private, and with the exception of a few wonderful teachers most of the teachers there openly disliked anybody who didn't "fit the mold" and you ended up in a hostile situation.
You got lucky friend, try making one of the bog standard DBs that SMBs use every day in Base and then get back to me. I tried making a copy of what I consider to be about the most bog standard DB you'll ever see is, the contact and customer info DB and the thing crashed more than it ran and corrupted the DB no less than 4 times before i gave up on it and consigned LO to be strictly for my home users, where little Billy is making a book report or grandpa is making a shopping list.
Because if you think LO Writer is painful you ain't seen nothing until your try Base and Calc, the OO.o/LO teams give writer the most love so if you think writer is bad then you haven't messed with the others, they are MUCH worse. In fact I'm seriously thinking about dropping LO altogether even for my home users and just pointing them at Google Docs, there they can do what tasks they have without messing with the horrible mess that is LO. Don't get me wrong, I don't blame the LO guys as Sun basically let OO.o rot for several years so I figure its gonna take them a couple of years just to clean out the cruft and make it modern and modular, but that don't help my users now and right now LO just doesn't cut the mustard, which is why you saw governments like Germany going back to MS Office, because its really not in the same league as even MS Office 2K.
Exactly. Hell look at how Linux as an "OS" is managed, you got fifty billion little fiefdoms, NONE of which are ruled by one grouped or even really has to talk to one another on a regular basis, and then all these "little programs written by little groups with their own agendas" get slapped together and called an OS.
Now this works just great on a SERVER for several reasons. 1.- Removing the GUI and sound subsystems cuts out a LOT of complexity and overhead, 2.- You can "mix and match" to build a system that is right for the jobs your company is doing, 3.- MSFT prices itself very stupidly in that market, with Windows SBS costing $400 a pop, so 4.- Even after hiring an admin at 6 figures you are still gonna be ahead in a large org by the money you save not dealing with the mess that is Windows Server licensing.
But on the desktop this is exactly reversed, you HAVE to have a well built GUI and sound subsystem and frankly X-Server is a crashy mess, and Pulse is a bad joke, the users WILL NOT put up with CLI fiddling and "open up Bash and type" like a server admin would, and finally the cost for most users is practically zero because with trialware the OEMs end up getting windows Home and Basic for free, maybe even make a few bucks which they can use to lower the price.
So I'm sorry but Linux just isn't in the same league as OSX and Windows when it comes to ease of use, user friendliness, stability..its just not even in the same ballpark. I would argue that "free as in freedom" all volunteer doing your own thing nature that so many in the Linux community prizes so highly also insures that it never ever will be up to the task of standing in the same arena with OSX and Windows, because you just can't have the level of QA and QC with everybody doing their own thing. The X-Server guys don't listen to the DE guys who don't listen to the Pulse guys and so on so all it takes is ONE of these groups to change a pointer in the right spot and the whole thing falls down like a house of cards. Go look up the rant Thom that runs OSNews had when he tried to watch a video while chatting and the whole system crashed, its THAT kind of shit, probably caused by the video player team expecting something to be A when the X-Server team changed it to B, that gives Linux a bad rep.
I have said before and I'll say again not a single distro can pass the "Hairyfeet challenge" yet, not one. We take one of the user friendly distros like Ubuntu or PCLOS and install it side by side with Vista, along with a range of average software. We make sure ALL the drivers are working, then we update both to current. The vista machines WILL have 100% working drivers and software, the Linux system? Will be a mess. heck in just the last 5 years we've seen the devs gut both the DEs and the audio and wireless subsystems so good luck getting those systems to update without making a mess.
Until one can pass the Hairyfeet Challenge with flying colors, where every driver and every program still runs without a single forum hunt? Then I'm sorry but your product simply isn't in the same league, end of story.
Via is a corpse, all they make is a few embedded products and its damned near impossible to get your hands on the Nano because they make so few of them. As for AMD...wanna know what REALLY happened at AMD? One of the engineers off on a far flung section of the net spilled the beans about what was REALLY going on at the company and before Bulldozer even came out laid out all the failures AMD was gonna have, you can read it for yourself right here. Basically they ended up with a CEO and board that didn't give a rat's ass about the long term, ONLY the short term, and gutted the whole fucking company. The guys that built Bobcat? GONE. The guys that built Athlon64? GONE. Phenom? GONE. They burnt their own fucking company for a short term bounce which they used to cash out their bonuses and walk away from the wreckage, another sadly typical western trick when it comes to making a quick buck and bailing, see Western Electric or Circuit City.
In the end the west is doomed by its minefield of laws crippling innovation. I'm all for those that come up with tech making money off it but it needs to be RAND and instead we have tollbooths set up all over the technology highway so that nobody can do shit. I gave up on a product I was working on because I was told flat footed I would NEVER be able to build it in the west and hire Americans, that the cost of dealing with all the vultures and trolls would make it a 100% certainty that I would be crushed like a bug, but I could take the product to China and have them cranking out by next quarter. Its fucking disgusting, that is what it is, lawyers have made copyrights and patents so fucking toxic in this country only the most mega of the megacorps can afford to build any damned thing and even then they'll be looking at a couple of years worth of court cases for each new product. Lets face it, the west had its time in the sun but its over, the leeches at the top done pissed in the chili and ruined it for everybody.
But the whole craziness following CN makes no damned logical sense! We are supposed to be geeks and look at things logically so lets do that.
1.-The woman whose guns the dirtbag son stole was 100% allowed to own guns and had passed EVERY background check, so tougher laws would do nothing as she was clean as a whistle, not so much as a speeding ticket from what I've seen of the case. 2.- The most important thing which is CRIMINALS DON'T CARE ABOUT LAWS which is why they are called criminals and not Easter Bunnies. Think you need a gun to rack up a big body count? Look at the crater in OKC, that was diesel and fertilizer, the recipe is all over the net and the ingredients can be bought or stolen anywhere, any small town in this country has enough of both to build a bomb several times larger than would be needed to turn a school into a crater and it could be carried in an SUV no problem. 3.- If you want to make it harder to own guns one should look and see if it has worked elsewhere on your continent and in this case Mexico gives us the perfect example as it is practically impossible for a law abiding citizen to own a gun. Do you see THEIR criminals throwing rocks at each other? NO! Because they are criminals and don't care if you add a gun charge when they are racking up their crimes! 4.- Finally to me the "smoking gun", the undeniable proof that all those who argue for gun bans are completely full of shit, I am of course speaking of Castle Rock v. Gonzales. In that case the woman did EVERYTHING those that are for banning guns tell you to do, she filed a restraining order against the scumbag and when he started to kick down her door she called the police. They showed up FOUR HOURS LATER and the SCOTUS ruled that is 100% okay because the cops aren't here to protect you they are here to protect the interests of the state, PERIOD. Thanks to Castle Rock the cops don't even have to show up AT ALL to stop a crime, or even show up on the same day, because the SCOTUS said its NOT THEIR JOB to protect you its YOUR JOB to protect you.
What SHOULD be done to prevent cases like this? Its so simple if it were a snake it would have bit you as we say in the south, armed security should be placed in all schools. Considering how many kid snatching pervos and dope dealers we have this is frankly common sense and should have been done after Columbine, instead we get everything from guns to VIDEO GAMES, swear to God some are bringing video games into it yet again, instead of using common sense. If there would have been an armed security guard at each entrance he would have had to blast his way through the first guard, if the first guard didn't kill him first,giving the second guard time to call back up and take the guy on. Odds are unless this nutball was Rambo you'd have had one security guard dead or wounded and the shooter toast instead of a room filled with dead kids.
All the stuff that is on a good 90%+ of PCs. You can tell it custom paths if you want it to check software it doesn't normally check but all the stuff most people have that isn't done by Windows Update, your Java and Flash, your third party browsers (although Dragon autoupdates so you don't need the Hippo for that) and most of the mundane everyday software like VLC or messenger, I'd say a good 90% of my customers FileHippo covers all the software they install and use.
BTW you want to save even more time you can use Ninite to not only do first installs but to also update the systems. just tell 'em to check the boxes on the stuff they use and hit run, that's it. No toolbars or other crap, no getting a bunch of dumb questions asked, its a fully automated install and that page covers most of the software your average user is running, from iTunes to.NET.
But if you honestly can't see what is gonna happen then you are blind, its X86 all over again. What happened to cause the race to the bottom? They were ALL running the same OS so nobody gave a shit about brand, it all came down to price. next thing you know each company is trying to undercut the other guy and the bottom plunged right out of the market. Know how much Dell or HP makes on their entry level systems now? $8, that's it, just $8 lousy bucks.
Look up the reports from the Hong Kong expo and see for yourself, they were playing with several nice tablets and cell phones, all 1GHz dual cores, that were $50 each in lots of a thousand. Because anybody can make an Android phone or tablet the bottom is gonna fall right out of that market and just as the race to the bottom killed a good 80% of the original X86 OEMs so too will this race to the bottom wipe a bunch of guys out.
Or you just go to China that don't give a fuck or play these little reindeer games to get your stuff built and let 'em sue a phony shellcorp you set up to take all the losses as a tax dodge.
Don't learn from history yadda yadda the reason the west took off during the industrial revolaution is we didn't care about the old world patents and copyrights, this let our inventors stand on the shoulders of giants and build better tech. Now the USA is completely crippled by the blood sucking lawyers so its all gonna end up in Asia where they will learn by standing on the shoulders of giants to make even better tech. Hell look at the Loongson dragon CPU, here you have a MIPS CPU that has hardware accelerated X86 emulation through Bochs so you can have the long battery life of MIPS and get to have your X86 apps at nearly 85% native speed!
But not only can you NOT build that in America, hell you can't even import that into America but Intel owns X86 and won't license under FRAND so that is that.This is why Asia will be the next to rule the roost, they can come up with truly novel ideas without getting cockblocked or sued into the next life by the blood sucking lawyers. Its a damned shame but what do you expect when a country is ass deep in lawyers and all the politicians are lawyers but a lawyer's paradise?
Not to mention those of us with high IQ scores often did poorly in school because WE WERE FUCKING BORED!!!! Oh God was I bored to fricking tears! Everything was so damned dumbed down it was pathetic,there wasn't any in depth anything at my school because it was a "football school" so the whole place was built around what your average jock could pass (which wasn't much) so I spent I don't know how many hours in Junior HS in trouble because i would just start doing my own thing (like reprogramming their computers to be rude, that was fun) and the only reason I wasn't kicked out or dropped out of HS is because a coach ended up giving me my own class to teach jocks enough to pass the tests, which gave me time to read my science fiction and mess with computers and do other things that didn't want to make me run screaming from the sheer mind numbing BOREDOM!
Well all I can tell ya is what I've seen in the shop and what I've learned from fellow shop owners and the consensus is that Seagate over 500Gb = Shit. Its a combination of really cheap shitty ARM controllers that overheat and fuck up combined with really piss poor firmware but frankly I've dealt with so damned many dead Seagate 1TB and up drives that I honestly would be afraid to use 'em. in fact I'd trust a refurb Samsung or Hitachi over a Seagate new, yes they are THAT bad. We are talking click death in weeks, sometimes in days, and once it goes it just trashes the data, the firmware just totally fucks up the drive geometry so good luck recovering squat.
So I'll tell ya like I tell my customers, there is a REASON why you are seeing Seagate 1TB drives for as little as $50 on sale while the WD drives are starting at $100, its because so many have lost their data thanks to the Seagates shitting on themselves that the companies just can't move 'em. Go look at the feedback for ANY Seagate drive above 500Gb, especially their 7200RPM 1TB and 2TB drives and you'll see page after page of "It borked after a month, I lost everything. won't buy again" because they really are just trash. Before the Maxtor buyout Seagate and WD were both decent, not superb but decent, now as I said I'd take a refurb from anybody else before a new seagate, they just aren't trustworthy.
Hell I just had to walk a guy online through building a clean box because his less than 3 month old Seagate 1.5TB took a shit and the only copies of his family photo album went with it, if that don't tell you what kind of junk they are I don't know what will.
Oh Please! What did you want him to do? jump into the bloodbath that is Android and get slaughtered? Look at the numbers, Samsung and HTC are the only ones making squat in that market, the rest are bleeding to death and its obvious its gonna be a race to the bottom when it comes to Android, hell you have Walmart offering $50 Android smartphones with their prepaid plans so there is just no money there.
Basically they should have brought in somebody to clean house 5 years earlier, by the time the board got off their fat asses and brought in Elop it was already too late. The ONLY place they still had significant share was in dumbphones, which see the Walmart smartphone above to see why that market is as dead as 8-tracks, they had not one, not two, but THREE different in house OSes and NONE of them were up to competing with Android 2 and iPhone 3, which was what was out at the time. you had Symbian which looked like Palm garnet, nobody is gonna want a Win 3.x looking OS on their smartphone so that would require a rebuild from the ground up, you had MeeGo which even the MeeGo team admitted was a good year and a half from being ready and which had MAJOR bugs in the networking and memory management, to the point it would bleed memory over time and crash so no good there, and you had the Java based one that was a piggie and also leaked memory like a sieve.
So where did you want him to go? Android was a deathtrap with a spiraling race to the bottom, they didn't have the cash to massively overpay like HP did for WebOS, MeeGo was broken and needed a year and a half they didn't have and even then there was zero guarantee they could fix the serious bugs, and Apple sure as hell wasn't gonna license iOS, so where did you want them to go? Pass the money back to the shareholders and close the doors? Throw out everything and start from scratch and try to compete with the hundreds of millions the other guys were spending in R&D an their OSes?
I'm sorry but there simply was NO good call when it came to Nokia, like RIM they sat on ass too damned long and by the time they realized they were in bad shape they had already lost the war. Just as with RIM the board at Nokia simply cashed the checks instead of seeing which way the wind was blowing and they left the company with no real strategy and a bunch of half baked broken products. Like it or not the WinPhone was the ONLY OS they could get where the R&D was done, the marketing was paid for, and they could concentrate on the only strength they had left which was making good hardware. We can see now that it didn't work but back then there really wasn't any other choice, it was this or just ride the dumbphones until they went under, they simply didn't have a product that could compete.
Then frankly it would be abandoned anyway as both Google and MSFT pull the plugs on any service that gets less than X number of users and if the fans can't build momentum its gonna go tits up anyway. at least this way the fans could see how hard they need to promote their particular fav service, hell a lot of the services Google pulled the plug on in the last 2 years I'd never heard of yet had many fans. if these fans could have had a counter to see that the software was in serious trouble it would have lit a fire under their ass and guys like me might have heard of and actually used those services. Remember that nothing beats word of mouth when it comes to promotion.
Oh and as far as your sig I would only add that FDR was a traitor as well and like Booth history has made the opposite call, he held a gun to the head of SCOTUS until he got his frankly fascist centralized control of much of the private sector (the stitch in time that saved nine) and despite both the American people demanding not to go to war and his advisers telling him that kissing Stalin's ass was gonna doom millions to a life under Stalin's iron boot he ignored everyone and did everything in his power to cause a war, not because he believed it was right but because he had neocon dreams of empire. You should read Hoover's book which is available free online as it is simply shocking how little respect FDR had for the constitution, the people, or the rule of law. Hoover quotes FDR as saying "I know that if I tighten the noose around Japan tight enough they will have no choice but to fight, my only fear is that Hitler won't take the bait" and even his own VP was shocked at the fawning and ass kissing FDR did when it came to Stalin, all because he had dreams of an American empire to rival the Brits.
He SHOULD have went down as one of the if not the absolute worst president in the history of this country but instead the history books fawn all over him while ignoring what he actually did.
Didn't read the whole post hmmm? I said once they have EARNED your trust then and ONLY then can you do as another poster said and give them 30 or 90 days for payment, but going into ANY business relationship they should first prove they are worth trusting. I don't care if its Bob's TV shack or supermegacorp if you go in there automatically thinking that because its a big corp they will treat you professionally you WILL end up getting fucked.
Again go look up how many companies have gone under because of Walmart stringing them along, Walmart is one of the biggest corps on the planet yet will fuck a vendor any chance they get. Just 2 off the top of my head are Huffy bikes and Vlassic pickles, Huffy IIRC ended up getting bought out at firesale prices by Walmart when they got strung along on payment and Vlassic again IIRC got bought out by a big conglomerate when Walmart not only strung them along but kept fucking them on prices, often selling their product below cost in markets they wanted to capture thus making Vlassic pickles all but worthless to any vendor OTHER than Walmart.
So am I saying that all multinationals are bad and will fuck you? Nope what I'm saying is until they have PROVEN they are worthy of that trust you simply can't trust them simply because they are a large company. Look at how dewy eyed the poster wrote about getting to work with such a big company, if a big corp finds a small company they can dupe and fuck they will, simple as that. As I said if you say "welcome" they'll say "mat" and walk all over you if you aren't careful, business is cutthroat and some businesses, be they large or small, will fuck their own mothers for extra profits, that is just how the game is played friend.
If you go to Phoronix and look up the FOSS drivers they are IIRC up to the 6xxx chips as far as support and there is of course also the Catalyst drivers so there ya go. As I said at just $230 for the whole shebang with a price that low he can always try it and if he doesn't like the AMD GPU he can sell it on CL and grab an Nvidia, he'll still have 6 cores of processing power, a nice board, 8GB of RAM and a burner all wrapped up in a nice case so at the end of the day he's still ahead of the curve.
But you are right about the SDK running in a VM so it honestly doesn't matter which OS you use and one of the nice things about AMD is all the chips have VT support unlike Intel which you really have to watch because they "pre-cripple" a bunch of chips to try to force people to higher tiers.
I can tell you I have built several systems with the Hexa here at the shop and I was impressed enough both me and my oldest boy are running AMD hexacores, what makes them so great is turbocore basically gives you two CPUs in one. When you are doing lightly threaded loads like many games and programs are it'll automatically turbo the chip so you have a nice fast triple core and when you have a heavily threaded load it gives you 6 cores to spread out the load. The nice thing is you have to do nothing, its completely automatic and hands off so you don't need to think about the load as it'll give you the best choice without you doing squat.
So if you want a crazy powerful system Billy just keep an eye on the sales, I've seen the Hexa bundles going for as low as $199 and having that many cores really does help when it comes to heavy multitasking. And as I said at prices THAT low? Even if he don't care for the AMD GPU he has saved enough he can simply buy an Nvidia GPU and still get a great system for dirt cheap.
No it is YOU who are mistaken and here is why: 1.- Intel owns HDCP so they can allow as little or as much as they want of the code for it in their FOSS drivers, AMD doesn't have that luxury as they only license it, 2.- again Intel has their chips built in a MUCH more modular fashion, if you'll look up the design pics of the Intel chips and the AMD chips frankly even with the naked eye its quite easy to see the various components so bypassing HDCP while still having access to the entire GPU is almost trivial for Intel, practically impossible for AMD, and 3.- While Intel baked their HDCP support into a module off in the corner of the chip since AMD has lower IPS than Intel they baked theirs straight into the GPU to let the more powerful GPU do much of the heavy lifting, while this helps them to lower power and cost there is a trade off and that trade off is a section of the GPU which they have no right to hand the code for which then has to be worked around.
At the end of the day this is still a perfect test of the FOSS community, one which I think they will fail because no matter what you think of the Intel GPUs you have to admit Nvidia has been VERY unfriendly when it comes to opening their code to the point Torvalds gave them the finger in a recent video. AMD went above and beyond what was asked of them, even going so far as to hire several developers to work on the FOSS drivers. So if at the end of the day if the "community" goes "LOL use Nvidia" which so far I've seen every indication that they will then this will be a clear indicator that doing as the FOSS community asks is simply a waste of time, its just not worth the effort. If you truly want companies to do as you ask and open their code then you have to show them that you in turn will buy from companies that support your beliefs but at the end of the day I think the numbers will show that the FOSS community is a bunch of hypocrites and will buy proprietary hardware like Nvidia over their supposed beliefs which makes opening the code stupid and pointless. After all "if AMD didn't gain shit from opening their code why should I?" will be the question many OEMs will ask and the answer is you shouldn't, as obviously the FOSS community will buy proprietary and take what they are given without incurring the extra costs associated with opening the codebase.
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Anything using any math is a LOT faster on 64bit than on 32bit. I switched to 64bit back in 05 when XP X64 came out (one of MSFT's best OSes, right up there with Win2K and Win 7 in my list of top notch OSes) and even though I didn't have 4Gb at the time you could really tell a difference, I was gaining on average 10%-15% thanks to having the larger registers.
As far as killing 32bit? If MSFT wasn't currently run by retards they would have made ALL versions of Win 7 come with XP Mode VMs and could have killed off 32bit right there, but since everyone hates Win 8 and it looks like we'll sadly get at least one more release under Ballmer before his fat stupid ass gets fired my guess is we'll see a Win 9 "OMG we want to be Apple so bad it hurts, LOVE ME!!" release with 32bit support, because if its one thing we can count on from Steve Ballmer is half assed software.
That's nice, an OS used by less than 2% of the entire planet has some tool that reports what SMART is telling it, no different that a billion freeware programs for Windows. Just FYI but I can think of about a dozen freeware programs that will do the same damned thing in Windows, INCLUDING the email, so its not exactly like you got anything to brag about Ms AC.
Now I'm gonna spell out what the REAL problem is, which any guy who has spent time in the trenches will tell you and that is SMART SUCKS ASS and for several years has more about covering bad batches for the HDD OEMs than it has been for actually telling you something is going bad. I have had drives in the shop that sounded like an angle grinder bouncing on pavement where SMART said "Nope, nothing wrong here la la la"" while the thing just ground and sputtered, its the most fucking pointless diagnostic tool there is.
What we NEED is a replacement for Spinrite, something that bypasses the lying SMART and just runs a pass of zeroes and ones on the drive and reports a simple pass/fail on the read/writes. Spinrite was fucking brilliant for this, it would give you a layout of the entire drive with red for sectors that failed to report the correct data back and blue for clean so it took just a second to glance at the readout to spot a drive that was buggy out of the box, but nobody has updated the tool in years so its useless now since it can't do SATA 6 or drives above 500Gb.
So how about it FOSS devs, here is the requirements: Bypass SMART, does a single R/W cycle, reports results. That's ALL it has to do anjd so far nobody has stepped up to the plate. damned near every shop I knew including mine had bought a copy of Spinrite so there is good money to be made there if you are willing to put in the work, its a niche but its a niche with money, builders, repair shops and gamers would all love to hand you money for this tool, so get on it and report back when its done, okay?
The problem is the best damned tool ever made for testing drives hasn't been updating in years and now won't work on drives bigger than 500Gb, I am of course talking about Spinrite. With Spinrite on lvl 2 you just bypass the firmware and write patterns of zeroes and ones and then read back what it reports, if its spitting errors right off the bat then you know to send it back. Problem is Gibson hasn't updated the thing since 06 so it can't handle drives bigger than 500Gb which makes it all but useless today.
So if anybody has found something that works similar to spinrite but works on large drives I too would like to know, I get drives coming in from all over the place at the shop with ZERO history here at the shop so I don't know if they've been barely used or thoroughly abused and having a tool I can run on them would be a big help.
Pale Moon is also quite good and has a 64bit version although they compile their for newer CPUs (Athlon64, P4 and above) but if you are running 64bits you probably aren't using an ancient CPU anyway.
But the FF numbers have been dropping and its from nothing but shit like this, being arrogant and not listening to their customers. After all that is EXACTLY what they are, for without them Google wouldn't pay Mozilla for the search rights and the whole company goes down the drain so its time they started actively listening to their customers instead of pissing them off.
This is one thing we have so much better than we did when FF first came out, it no more "use this or get stuck with IE" nonsense, no more having the entire web coded for IE quirks, now we have this great bounty of choice so if any company refuses to listen to us we can just go somewhere else without having to jump through hoops or deal with a crippled web experience. Just off the top of my head I can name Chrome, Chromium and Comodo Dragon in the Chromium based camp, FF, Pale Moon, Waterfox,Kemelon and Comodo IceDragon in the gecko builds, then you got the more "one offs" like Safari and Opera, that's ten browsers that will ALL render the web just fine, so if the numbers for FireFox go down they have nobody to blame but themselves. maybe next time instead of just pulling a boneheaded stunt how about actually asking your customers first, huh?
Want some advice? hunt the net for some Samsung EcoGreen drives, I don't care if you have to take refurb but of course new would be better and BUY THEM. I have put those drives in some truly hellish places, we're talking construction trailers and warehouse floors where the dirt and the grime makes everything just gross but they take insane amounts of abuse and keep on coming. I was so impressed i yanked the drives on my personal systems and replaced them with EcoGreens across the board, even the boot drives are 1TB Ecogreen. And I have to say that after running some benches that the 32Mb cache on these drives actually give them better throughput than the 500Gb Seagates they replaced while running a good 30 degrees F cooler. If you can't find the EcoGreen the Hitachi pre-buyout are also quite good, but those 1TB and 2TB EcoGreens were frankly built like tanks.
And you do NOT want to use an SSD for data storage, you REALLY don't, the reason? I have found the controllers can fail at ANY time with ZERO warning and when it does unless you have the skills to desolder the boards and rebuild the data from the chips its gone forever, poof! Hell I don't even know of any data recovery services that will attempt it with a dead SSD controller, its pretty much considered a lost cause.
I'll treat you just like you were my customer and just give you the straight dope just as I would them. if you came into my shop with this problem? I'd tell you a combination of BD and a Samsung EcoGreen for long term storage. At $1 for each 25GB disc Blu Rays actually make a pretty economical storage solution right now and as long as you keep them out of heat and sunlight it looks like they'll last as long as burned DVDs, which is on average at least 5-10 years. When you combine this with a nice 1TB or 2TB EcoGreen you'll have your data safe, if one fails you have the other, and frankly its economical at the same time as an external case is less than $15 and you can find an Ecogreen online for less than $100.
Well you have to look at the history of shootings in schools Crosshair, the guys doing the shooting? NOT the type to have really thought this shit through nor to have the exp to know how to defeat the Taser. I mean look at Lanza, Klebold and Harris, etc, these clowns were not hardened criminals nor had they spent enough time in the system to learn the tricks required to defeat the Taser.
Now one could argue that they would try to learn how to defeat it, but reading something on the net and actually experiencing it are two totally different things. And remember this is supposed to be in addition to the armed security and panic button, not a replacement of. So all they really have to do if the teacher is uncomfortable with firearms is to buy enough time for security to get there from where they are in the building and I think the Taser (although giving them the mace as well would be a smart move) would accomplish that task pretty well i think.
They can waste their mod points all they want but when you can't even use a tool for the job its intended to do then I'm sorry but your software just isn't suitable for purpose. And don't even get me started on running more than one at a time, you'd think OO.o/LO was designed for DOS the way it shits all over itself if you try to run Writer and another tool like Calc or Base at the same time.
But spend ANY real time in base and you'll find out its complete and total garbage, you try doing what is the most obvious and bog standard uses for a DB, like adding keys and making relationships and the whole thing will just shit all over itself and die hard, often taking its DB with it. Frankly anybody that needs Access or Excel wouldn't spend 5 minutes in either base or Calc before reaching for their CC to buy MS Office just to get away from the mess, its THAT bad. Frankly neither Base nor Calc should have been allowed into the release, its not even alpha quality.
Uhhh...95%+ of the systems released in the last 5+ years? In case you didn't get the memo there is really only a handful of ODMs making parts on motherboards anymore, not that you'd know it by Linux, thanks to the "ZOMFG you have firmware 3.72343 and I want firmware 3.72346!" fiddly and picky as fuck nature of the driver situation. Pick ANY board on Newegg or Tiger, any one you want, and I'll take NOTHING but the Win 7, hell even the Vista install DVD and afterward it will have 100% working drivers without a single forum anything.
Now if you WANT the little extra crap, like Realtek HD Audio manager or AMD CCC? Then you'll have to OMG actually put the disc that came with the system in the drive but none of that is actually REQUIRED, again exact opposite on Linux because everything is tied to kernel which is just retarded.
Hell the teachers that don't want to carry a gun could STILL make their school safer, simply give them police issue tasers! I have a couple of cops that are customers and I can tell you that I don't care how stoned or crazy a guy is one shot with a standard issue police taser will put his ass on the ground. If every teacher had one of these along with the training on how to use it when that nut kicked in the door he could have been laid flat out and carried away.
If you haven't seen it yet Crosshair here is a video on the stock market I think you'll enjoy as he points to many of the same issues you have only he takes it farther, he believes there is gonna be a massive crash and I have to agree.
Since the early 80s the laws have been SOOOO far tilted to favor the interests of the Street it has allowed a massive bubble to be blown (430% GDP, compared to 125% GDP before the great 29 crash) and it has created a truly toxic market, where companies can burn the buildings down and get a stock bounce for a quick dump and get away because "Hey their costs have gone down, no paying rent on those buildings anymore". At the end of the day you have too many people in the market chasing after too few stocks so its no longer about the VALUE or even the long term survivability of the company, like with flipping houses in the real estate market its just about what you can flip that worthless piece of paper for. like a giant game of hot potato each tries to flip the stock a little higher and a little higher until the last sucker gets left holding the bag. Meanwhile the CEO who burnt the company cashes out and goes to the next corp he can burn, sadly we have seen it over and over AND OVER.
as for AMD they could have been great, now we will be lucky if they survive, all because the CEO did a pump and dump on the entire engineering division. The engineers wanted to do like Intel did with Core, go back to the simpler K8 designs and build from there, instead the CEO gave everybody a pink slip and had the computers lay out the chips...that is how you got the steaming mess that is Bulldozer.
In my school as with the guy who posted above those that tried to be "better than the pack" were punished and humiliated. In fact i was actually thrown out of math class because i could work the problems faster than the teacher therefor I HAD to be cheating, it couldn't be that I was good at math, nope I had to be a cheater.
The ONLY reason I wasn't completely kicked out of school was the teacher in the next classroom was the one who was my home tutor when i was recovering from a bike wreck and knew I was good at math so she marched down to the principal's office when she saw me about to be kicked out and demanded that the principal give me and the math teacher a test. He wrote the same question twice on the board and while the math teacher stood there doing all his stupid steps I just wrote the answer and sat down. When the principal saw this he could see it was nothing but the math teacher being an asshole because there he was STILL claiming I had to have cheated! Even the principal was like "How? Did he read my mind, know which problem I was gonna randomly write on the board? How could he cheat just standing at the board with nothing but a piece of chalk?" so since they only had one math teacher I got an A for not doing math that year, i sat in detention reading Asimov and Clarke.
So do NOT try to say "its up to the student" because in many schools they will go out of their way to beat you down if you try. You are "different" you are "other" you will NOT be tolerated, because all must be the same. As I said I got straight As in HS even though I never set foot inside a classroom, because the coach ended up giving me a spare classroom and had me teaching to the jocks so they could pass the eligibility tests. They simply didn't know what to do with a smart kid, there were NO magnet schools in my area, we couldn't afford private, and with the exception of a few wonderful teachers most of the teachers there openly disliked anybody who didn't "fit the mold" and you ended up in a hostile situation.
You got lucky friend, try making one of the bog standard DBs that SMBs use every day in Base and then get back to me. I tried making a copy of what I consider to be about the most bog standard DB you'll ever see is, the contact and customer info DB and the thing crashed more than it ran and corrupted the DB no less than 4 times before i gave up on it and consigned LO to be strictly for my home users, where little Billy is making a book report or grandpa is making a shopping list.
Because if you think LO Writer is painful you ain't seen nothing until your try Base and Calc, the OO.o/LO teams give writer the most love so if you think writer is bad then you haven't messed with the others, they are MUCH worse. In fact I'm seriously thinking about dropping LO altogether even for my home users and just pointing them at Google Docs, there they can do what tasks they have without messing with the horrible mess that is LO. Don't get me wrong, I don't blame the LO guys as Sun basically let OO.o rot for several years so I figure its gonna take them a couple of years just to clean out the cruft and make it modern and modular, but that don't help my users now and right now LO just doesn't cut the mustard, which is why you saw governments like Germany going back to MS Office, because its really not in the same league as even MS Office 2K.
Exactly. Hell look at how Linux as an "OS" is managed, you got fifty billion little fiefdoms, NONE of which are ruled by one grouped or even really has to talk to one another on a regular basis, and then all these "little programs written by little groups with their own agendas" get slapped together and called an OS.
Now this works just great on a SERVER for several reasons. 1.- Removing the GUI and sound subsystems cuts out a LOT of complexity and overhead, 2.- You can "mix and match" to build a system that is right for the jobs your company is doing, 3.- MSFT prices itself very stupidly in that market, with Windows SBS costing $400 a pop, so 4.- Even after hiring an admin at 6 figures you are still gonna be ahead in a large org by the money you save not dealing with the mess that is Windows Server licensing.
But on the desktop this is exactly reversed, you HAVE to have a well built GUI and sound subsystem and frankly X-Server is a crashy mess, and Pulse is a bad joke, the users WILL NOT put up with CLI fiddling and "open up Bash and type" like a server admin would, and finally the cost for most users is practically zero because with trialware the OEMs end up getting windows Home and Basic for free, maybe even make a few bucks which they can use to lower the price.
So I'm sorry but Linux just isn't in the same league as OSX and Windows when it comes to ease of use, user friendliness, stability..its just not even in the same ballpark. I would argue that "free as in freedom" all volunteer doing your own thing nature that so many in the Linux community prizes so highly also insures that it never ever will be up to the task of standing in the same arena with OSX and Windows, because you just can't have the level of QA and QC with everybody doing their own thing. The X-Server guys don't listen to the DE guys who don't listen to the Pulse guys and so on so all it takes is ONE of these groups to change a pointer in the right spot and the whole thing falls down like a house of cards. Go look up the rant Thom that runs OSNews had when he tried to watch a video while chatting and the whole system crashed, its THAT kind of shit, probably caused by the video player team expecting something to be A when the X-Server team changed it to B, that gives Linux a bad rep.
I have said before and I'll say again not a single distro can pass the "Hairyfeet challenge" yet, not one. We take one of the user friendly distros like Ubuntu or PCLOS and install it side by side with Vista, along with a range of average software. We make sure ALL the drivers are working, then we update both to current. The vista machines WILL have 100% working drivers and software, the Linux system? Will be a mess. heck in just the last 5 years we've seen the devs gut both the DEs and the audio and wireless subsystems so good luck getting those systems to update without making a mess.
Until one can pass the Hairyfeet Challenge with flying colors, where every driver and every program still runs without a single forum hunt? Then I'm sorry but your product simply isn't in the same league, end of story.
Via is a corpse, all they make is a few embedded products and its damned near impossible to get your hands on the Nano because they make so few of them. As for AMD...wanna know what REALLY happened at AMD? One of the engineers off on a far flung section of the net spilled the beans about what was REALLY going on at the company and before Bulldozer even came out laid out all the failures AMD was gonna have, you can read it for yourself right here. Basically they ended up with a CEO and board that didn't give a rat's ass about the long term, ONLY the short term, and gutted the whole fucking company. The guys that built Bobcat? GONE. The guys that built Athlon64? GONE. Phenom? GONE. They burnt their own fucking company for a short term bounce which they used to cash out their bonuses and walk away from the wreckage, another sadly typical western trick when it comes to making a quick buck and bailing, see Western Electric or Circuit City.
In the end the west is doomed by its minefield of laws crippling innovation. I'm all for those that come up with tech making money off it but it needs to be RAND and instead we have tollbooths set up all over the technology highway so that nobody can do shit. I gave up on a product I was working on because I was told flat footed I would NEVER be able to build it in the west and hire Americans, that the cost of dealing with all the vultures and trolls would make it a 100% certainty that I would be crushed like a bug, but I could take the product to China and have them cranking out by next quarter. Its fucking disgusting, that is what it is, lawyers have made copyrights and patents so fucking toxic in this country only the most mega of the megacorps can afford to build any damned thing and even then they'll be looking at a couple of years worth of court cases for each new product. Lets face it, the west had its time in the sun but its over, the leeches at the top done pissed in the chili and ruined it for everybody.
But the whole craziness following CN makes no damned logical sense! We are supposed to be geeks and look at things logically so lets do that.
1.-The woman whose guns the dirtbag son stole was 100% allowed to own guns and had passed EVERY background check, so tougher laws would do nothing as she was clean as a whistle, not so much as a speeding ticket from what I've seen of the case. 2.- The most important thing which is CRIMINALS DON'T CARE ABOUT LAWS which is why they are called criminals and not Easter Bunnies. Think you need a gun to rack up a big body count? Look at the crater in OKC, that was diesel and fertilizer, the recipe is all over the net and the ingredients can be bought or stolen anywhere, any small town in this country has enough of both to build a bomb several times larger than would be needed to turn a school into a crater and it could be carried in an SUV no problem. 3.- If you want to make it harder to own guns one should look and see if it has worked elsewhere on your continent and in this case Mexico gives us the perfect example as it is practically impossible for a law abiding citizen to own a gun. Do you see THEIR criminals throwing rocks at each other? NO! Because they are criminals and don't care if you add a gun charge when they are racking up their crimes! 4.- Finally to me the "smoking gun", the undeniable proof that all those who argue for gun bans are completely full of shit, I am of course speaking of Castle Rock v. Gonzales. In that case the woman did EVERYTHING those that are for banning guns tell you to do, she filed a restraining order against the scumbag and when he started to kick down her door she called the police. They showed up FOUR HOURS LATER and the SCOTUS ruled that is 100% okay because the cops aren't here to protect you they are here to protect the interests of the state, PERIOD. Thanks to Castle Rock the cops don't even have to show up AT ALL to stop a crime, or even show up on the same day, because the SCOTUS said its NOT THEIR JOB to protect you its YOUR JOB to protect you.
What SHOULD be done to prevent cases like this? Its so simple if it were a snake it would have bit you as we say in the south, armed security should be placed in all schools. Considering how many kid snatching pervos and dope dealers we have this is frankly common sense and should have been done after Columbine, instead we get everything from guns to VIDEO GAMES, swear to God some are bringing video games into it yet again, instead of using common sense. If there would have been an armed security guard at each entrance he would have had to blast his way through the first guard, if the first guard didn't kill him first,giving the second guard time to call back up and take the guy on. Odds are unless this nutball was Rambo you'd have had one security guard dead or wounded and the shooter toast instead of a room filled with dead kids.
All the stuff that is on a good 90%+ of PCs. You can tell it custom paths if you want it to check software it doesn't normally check but all the stuff most people have that isn't done by Windows Update, your Java and Flash, your third party browsers (although Dragon autoupdates so you don't need the Hippo for that) and most of the mundane everyday software like VLC or messenger, I'd say a good 90% of my customers FileHippo covers all the software they install and use.
BTW you want to save even more time you can use Ninite to not only do first installs but to also update the systems. just tell 'em to check the boxes on the stuff they use and hit run, that's it. No toolbars or other crap, no getting a bunch of dumb questions asked, its a fully automated install and that page covers most of the software your average user is running, from iTunes to .NET.
But if you honestly can't see what is gonna happen then you are blind, its X86 all over again. What happened to cause the race to the bottom? They were ALL running the same OS so nobody gave a shit about brand, it all came down to price. next thing you know each company is trying to undercut the other guy and the bottom plunged right out of the market. Know how much Dell or HP makes on their entry level systems now? $8, that's it, just $8 lousy bucks.
Look up the reports from the Hong Kong expo and see for yourself, they were playing with several nice tablets and cell phones, all 1GHz dual cores, that were $50 each in lots of a thousand. Because anybody can make an Android phone or tablet the bottom is gonna fall right out of that market and just as the race to the bottom killed a good 80% of the original X86 OEMs so too will this race to the bottom wipe a bunch of guys out.
Or you just go to China that don't give a fuck or play these little reindeer games to get your stuff built and let 'em sue a phony shellcorp you set up to take all the losses as a tax dodge.
Don't learn from history yadda yadda the reason the west took off during the industrial revolaution is we didn't care about the old world patents and copyrights, this let our inventors stand on the shoulders of giants and build better tech. Now the USA is completely crippled by the blood sucking lawyers so its all gonna end up in Asia where they will learn by standing on the shoulders of giants to make even better tech. Hell look at the Loongson dragon CPU, here you have a MIPS CPU that has hardware accelerated X86 emulation through Bochs so you can have the long battery life of MIPS and get to have your X86 apps at nearly 85% native speed!
But not only can you NOT build that in America, hell you can't even import that into America but Intel owns X86 and won't license under FRAND so that is that.This is why Asia will be the next to rule the roost, they can come up with truly novel ideas without getting cockblocked or sued into the next life by the blood sucking lawyers. Its a damned shame but what do you expect when a country is ass deep in lawyers and all the politicians are lawyers but a lawyer's paradise?
Not to mention those of us with high IQ scores often did poorly in school because WE WERE FUCKING BORED!!!! Oh God was I bored to fricking tears! Everything was so damned dumbed down it was pathetic,there wasn't any in depth anything at my school because it was a "football school" so the whole place was built around what your average jock could pass (which wasn't much) so I spent I don't know how many hours in Junior HS in trouble because i would just start doing my own thing (like reprogramming their computers to be rude, that was fun) and the only reason I wasn't kicked out or dropped out of HS is because a coach ended up giving me my own class to teach jocks enough to pass the tests, which gave me time to read my science fiction and mess with computers and do other things that didn't want to make me run screaming from the sheer mind numbing BOREDOM!
Well all I can tell ya is what I've seen in the shop and what I've learned from fellow shop owners and the consensus is that Seagate over 500Gb = Shit. Its a combination of really cheap shitty ARM controllers that overheat and fuck up combined with really piss poor firmware but frankly I've dealt with so damned many dead Seagate 1TB and up drives that I honestly would be afraid to use 'em. in fact I'd trust a refurb Samsung or Hitachi over a Seagate new, yes they are THAT bad. We are talking click death in weeks, sometimes in days, and once it goes it just trashes the data, the firmware just totally fucks up the drive geometry so good luck recovering squat.
So I'll tell ya like I tell my customers, there is a REASON why you are seeing Seagate 1TB drives for as little as $50 on sale while the WD drives are starting at $100, its because so many have lost their data thanks to the Seagates shitting on themselves that the companies just can't move 'em. Go look at the feedback for ANY Seagate drive above 500Gb, especially their 7200RPM 1TB and 2TB drives and you'll see page after page of "It borked after a month, I lost everything. won't buy again" because they really are just trash. Before the Maxtor buyout Seagate and WD were both decent, not superb but decent, now as I said I'd take a refurb from anybody else before a new seagate, they just aren't trustworthy.
Hell I just had to walk a guy online through building a clean box because his less than 3 month old Seagate 1.5TB took a shit and the only copies of his family photo album went with it, if that don't tell you what kind of junk they are I don't know what will.
Oh Please! What did you want him to do? jump into the bloodbath that is Android and get slaughtered? Look at the numbers, Samsung and HTC are the only ones making squat in that market, the rest are bleeding to death and its obvious its gonna be a race to the bottom when it comes to Android, hell you have Walmart offering $50 Android smartphones with their prepaid plans so there is just no money there.
Basically they should have brought in somebody to clean house 5 years earlier, by the time the board got off their fat asses and brought in Elop it was already too late. The ONLY place they still had significant share was in dumbphones, which see the Walmart smartphone above to see why that market is as dead as 8-tracks, they had not one, not two, but THREE different in house OSes and NONE of them were up to competing with Android 2 and iPhone 3, which was what was out at the time. you had Symbian which looked like Palm garnet, nobody is gonna want a Win 3.x looking OS on their smartphone so that would require a rebuild from the ground up, you had MeeGo which even the MeeGo team admitted was a good year and a half from being ready and which had MAJOR bugs in the networking and memory management, to the point it would bleed memory over time and crash so no good there, and you had the Java based one that was a piggie and also leaked memory like a sieve.
So where did you want him to go? Android was a deathtrap with a spiraling race to the bottom, they didn't have the cash to massively overpay like HP did for WebOS, MeeGo was broken and needed a year and a half they didn't have and even then there was zero guarantee they could fix the serious bugs, and Apple sure as hell wasn't gonna license iOS, so where did you want them to go? Pass the money back to the shareholders and close the doors? Throw out everything and start from scratch and try to compete with the hundreds of millions the other guys were spending in R&D an their OSes?
I'm sorry but there simply was NO good call when it came to Nokia, like RIM they sat on ass too damned long and by the time they realized they were in bad shape they had already lost the war. Just as with RIM the board at Nokia simply cashed the checks instead of seeing which way the wind was blowing and they left the company with no real strategy and a bunch of half baked broken products. Like it or not the WinPhone was the ONLY OS they could get where the R&D was done, the marketing was paid for, and they could concentrate on the only strength they had left which was making good hardware. We can see now that it didn't work but back then there really wasn't any other choice, it was this or just ride the dumbphones until they went under, they simply didn't have a product that could compete.
Then frankly it would be abandoned anyway as both Google and MSFT pull the plugs on any service that gets less than X number of users and if the fans can't build momentum its gonna go tits up anyway. at least this way the fans could see how hard they need to promote their particular fav service, hell a lot of the services Google pulled the plug on in the last 2 years I'd never heard of yet had many fans. if these fans could have had a counter to see that the software was in serious trouble it would have lit a fire under their ass and guys like me might have heard of and actually used those services. Remember that nothing beats word of mouth when it comes to promotion.
Oh and as far as your sig I would only add that FDR was a traitor as well and like Booth history has made the opposite call, he held a gun to the head of SCOTUS until he got his frankly fascist centralized control of much of the private sector (the stitch in time that saved nine) and despite both the American people demanding not to go to war and his advisers telling him that kissing Stalin's ass was gonna doom millions to a life under Stalin's iron boot he ignored everyone and did everything in his power to cause a war, not because he believed it was right but because he had neocon dreams of empire. You should read Hoover's book which is available free online as it is simply shocking how little respect FDR had for the constitution, the people, or the rule of law. Hoover quotes FDR as saying "I know that if I tighten the noose around Japan tight enough they will have no choice but to fight, my only fear is that Hitler won't take the bait" and even his own VP was shocked at the fawning and ass kissing FDR did when it came to Stalin, all because he had dreams of an American empire to rival the Brits.
He SHOULD have went down as one of the if not the absolute worst president in the history of this country but instead the history books fawn all over him while ignoring what he actually did.
Didn't read the whole post hmmm? I said once they have EARNED your trust then and ONLY then can you do as another poster said and give them 30 or 90 days for payment, but going into ANY business relationship they should first prove they are worth trusting. I don't care if its Bob's TV shack or supermegacorp if you go in there automatically thinking that because its a big corp they will treat you professionally you WILL end up getting fucked.
Again go look up how many companies have gone under because of Walmart stringing them along, Walmart is one of the biggest corps on the planet yet will fuck a vendor any chance they get. Just 2 off the top of my head are Huffy bikes and Vlassic pickles, Huffy IIRC ended up getting bought out at firesale prices by Walmart when they got strung along on payment and Vlassic again IIRC got bought out by a big conglomerate when Walmart not only strung them along but kept fucking them on prices, often selling their product below cost in markets they wanted to capture thus making Vlassic pickles all but worthless to any vendor OTHER than Walmart.
So am I saying that all multinationals are bad and will fuck you? Nope what I'm saying is until they have PROVEN they are worthy of that trust you simply can't trust them simply because they are a large company. Look at how dewy eyed the poster wrote about getting to work with such a big company, if a big corp finds a small company they can dupe and fuck they will, simple as that. As I said if you say "welcome" they'll say "mat" and walk all over you if you aren't careful, business is cutthroat and some businesses, be they large or small, will fuck their own mothers for extra profits, that is just how the game is played friend.
If you go to Phoronix and look up the FOSS drivers they are IIRC up to the 6xxx chips as far as support and there is of course also the Catalyst drivers so there ya go. As I said at just $230 for the whole shebang with a price that low he can always try it and if he doesn't like the AMD GPU he can sell it on CL and grab an Nvidia, he'll still have 6 cores of processing power, a nice board, 8GB of RAM and a burner all wrapped up in a nice case so at the end of the day he's still ahead of the curve.
But you are right about the SDK running in a VM so it honestly doesn't matter which OS you use and one of the nice things about AMD is all the chips have VT support unlike Intel which you really have to watch because they "pre-cripple" a bunch of chips to try to force people to higher tiers.
I can tell you I have built several systems with the Hexa here at the shop and I was impressed enough both me and my oldest boy are running AMD hexacores, what makes them so great is turbocore basically gives you two CPUs in one. When you are doing lightly threaded loads like many games and programs are it'll automatically turbo the chip so you have a nice fast triple core and when you have a heavily threaded load it gives you 6 cores to spread out the load. The nice thing is you have to do nothing, its completely automatic and hands off so you don't need to think about the load as it'll give you the best choice without you doing squat.
So if you want a crazy powerful system Billy just keep an eye on the sales, I've seen the Hexa bundles going for as low as $199 and having that many cores really does help when it comes to heavy multitasking. And as I said at prices THAT low? Even if he don't care for the AMD GPU he has saved enough he can simply buy an Nvidia GPU and still get a great system for dirt cheap.
No it is YOU who are mistaken and here is why: 1.- Intel owns HDCP so they can allow as little or as much as they want of the code for it in their FOSS drivers, AMD doesn't have that luxury as they only license it, 2.- again Intel has their chips built in a MUCH more modular fashion, if you'll look up the design pics of the Intel chips and the AMD chips frankly even with the naked eye its quite easy to see the various components so bypassing HDCP while still having access to the entire GPU is almost trivial for Intel, practically impossible for AMD, and 3.- While Intel baked their HDCP support into a module off in the corner of the chip since AMD has lower IPS than Intel they baked theirs straight into the GPU to let the more powerful GPU do much of the heavy lifting, while this helps them to lower power and cost there is a trade off and that trade off is a section of the GPU which they have no right to hand the code for which then has to be worked around.
At the end of the day this is still a perfect test of the FOSS community, one which I think they will fail because no matter what you think of the Intel GPUs you have to admit Nvidia has been VERY unfriendly when it comes to opening their code to the point Torvalds gave them the finger in a recent video. AMD went above and beyond what was asked of them, even going so far as to hire several developers to work on the FOSS drivers. So if at the end of the day if the "community" goes "LOL use Nvidia" which so far I've seen every indication that they will then this will be a clear indicator that doing as the FOSS community asks is simply a waste of time, its just not worth the effort. If you truly want companies to do as you ask and open their code then you have to show them that you in turn will buy from companies that support your beliefs but at the end of the day I think the numbers will show that the FOSS community is a bunch of hypocrites and will buy proprietary hardware like Nvidia over their supposed beliefs which makes opening the code stupid and pointless. After all "if AMD didn't gain shit from opening their code why should I?" will be the question many OEMs will ask and the answer is you shouldn't, as obviously the FOSS community will buy proprietary and take what they are given without incurring the extra costs associated with opening the codebase.