The problem is like in X86 there isn't any real competition and I'd say its worse than in X86 because at least AMD, which I've been building exclusively for the past 5+ years, the performance is "good enough" for the vast majority of users including the gamers but in the HDD arena the competition is making such piss poor products that I'd be afraid to buy them.
You see pre-flood we had 4 players in the game, Hitachi, Samsung, Seagate, and WD, but now there is only WD and Seagate and ever since the Maxtor buyout Seagate quality has really gone down the shitter so there isn't really any choice but WD. Pre-flood I was buying Samsung EcoGreens at $35 a TB but since the buyouts I've found anything that Seagate makes over 500Gb to be Russian roulette with your data while the WDs have a MUCH lower failure rate, at least from what I've seen in the shop.
So I'd say what they are doing certainly isn't illegal, although why they allowed Seagate and WD to buy out the competition to make it a duopoly I'll never know, but since Seagate seems unable to fix the serious failure rate of their over 500Gb drives you have WD charging 40%+ over what Seagate is charging and they'll get it as nobody wants to risk losing their data. Just go look at any of the BF and Xmas sales and you'll see what I mean, the Seagates are selling for $60-$70 for 1Tb, $70-$80 for a TB and a half, while WD is selling for $100 a Tb, $150 for a 2TB and they can't seem to keep them in stock whereas the Seagates have been on sale for weeks and they appear to have plenty of stock left.
Its not the market itself keeping the prices high, its the fact you really only have one supplier worth buying. Like I said you can take an AMD quad or Hexa and even the gamers will be happy with the performance but NOBODY is happy when they buy that cheapo Seagate 1.5TB and it craps itself in 3 months and takes their data with it. WD knows this so they keep their prices high, knowing that all it takes is getting burned by Seagate for a time or two for the customers to see its better to spend the money than lose their stuff. This is just a perfect example of "you get what you pay for" where someone who makes a better product charges more than the guy making cheap shit and this is why the prices remain high on the WD side of the aisle, they know their competition just can't seem to make a good product ATM.
What inflated? I've seen 2Tb for $99, 1Tb for $70 and the prices continue to fall. and when it comes to SSDs you have to watch for the hot/crazy scale which as a retailer who has gamer customers into the double digits when it comes to SSDs because of all the failures i can tell you is a BIG problem.
In fact with the prices falling the way they are I'd say the ONLY problem we have is Seagate. Instead of Seagate raising up Maxtor it appears that Maxtor brought down Seagate, with Seagate drives being sold cheaper and cheaper due to the high failure rates. During the BF and Xmas sales so far I've seen WD charge 40%+ markups not because that price is a fair market value but because like Intel WD knows that their "competition" can't really compete on anything but price so they feel no need to lower their prices.
Now I don't know if this is true or not, just what I heard, but here is the scuttlebutt I was told when it comes to Seagate: When Seagate bought Maxtor they got the cheap ARM controllers from Maxtor and that when combined with piss poor firmware is making the Seagates die left and right. From what I was told the ARM chips get too hot and when they do the firmware starts fucking up, it fails to "see" where the end sectors of the drive are and tries to go past end of the drive and bye bye drive. I know that the failure rate on anything Seagate above 500GB from what I've seen in the shop is just pathetic, I've had to RMA enough of them i won't even touch a Seagate larger than 500GB ATM. Since most people don't care about the drive itself but the data this is a serious problem, I even had to walk a guy through building a clean box so he could swap the platters on a less than 3 month old Seagate in the hopes of getting his pictures back.
But I'll tell you like I tell my customers that SSDs are ONLY useful for certain use cases, like any tool you have to make sure that you have the right tool for the job. If its a laptop or netbook AND you have limited non cloud based data or are religious about backups? Then SSDs make sense there, less power usage and no moving parts make it a good fit especially if you pull the drive and slap it in an external and use it to hold backups of the OS and important data. If its gonna be used on a desktop as an OS drive AND all your data as well as backups of the OS are gonna be kept on a HDD? Then it makes sense, the increased speed is worth the risk. if its gonna be a mission critical system or you are working on data you can't constantly backup and would hurt if you lost? Then there it is NOT a good fit, the high failure rate makes the risk too great for any advantages.
Now as far as HDDs go from the shop here is what I've found, again YMMV but in order from best to least I've found the best to be pre-buyout Samsung and Hitachi drives, especially the EcoGreen on the samsung as their excellent firmware and well thought out use of the 32Mb cache makes them test nearly as fast and sometimes faster than a 7200RPM drive while putting out MUCH less heat and taking insane abuse, we're talking construction trailers and warehouses where the systems get seriously nasty with dirt and grime, followed by the WD drives and finally Seagate which over 500Gb I wouldn't trust with anything I cared about.
So if you want to go SSDs just remember the hot/crazy scale and backup often, and avoid the OCZ drives like an STD because from what I've seen they are just garbage. Like Seagate this is reflected in the prices, with the better quality Intel and Samsung drives carrying a much higher per GB price than the OCZ because the OCZs fail like crazy. Why they can't put a simple ARM chip that would take over if the main controller dies and simply allow the drive to be used as read only so you could get your data off I don't know, but from what I've seen here in the shop over 90% of SSDs fail not because the cells fail, but because the controller dies. Until they fix this serious problem I'd be leery of trusting my data to an SSD.
For those that aren't aware there is a REASON why AMD can't get "fully behind the Open Source Drivers" and that is because there is a section of each chip they can't legally allow access to, the HDMI HDCP decoders. Since they have integrated that into the GPU there is simply no way for them to open that up, the code isn't theirs to give. Intel has their HDMI HDCP more separate than AMD does because their chips are all about the CPU and the GPU is simply supposed to be "good enough" for basic video watching and the like. Since AMD has been more about the GPU everything is tightly coupled around that GPU so they just can't give you 100% access, not without ending up blacklisted and unable to play any content that uses HDCP.
But this should be a perfect test of the FOSS community, to see if they are worth supporting or not. AMD has done EXACTLY what you asked, and opened every bit of code that was theirs to give, so if their sales don't go up because the community goes "LOL use Nvidia proprietary drivers" then the hardware manufacturers will see how pointless it is to support FOSS, as AMD will have done all that work and not gotten any more sales as a result. At the end of the day if you don't support the companies that do as you ask then frankly nobody is gonna bother, after all it costs money to have a lawyer sign off on opening tons of code and docs and if they see no ROI for doing so why bother?
If you want to game on a laptop the Liano quad laptops are pretty nice, its not gonna play Crysis cranked out but for most games its fine. Just remember to put the fastest memory it'll take as those APUs are more affected by fast memory then a CPU since both GPU and CPU are accessing the memory. But its really hard to even find a discrete in a laptop anymore since the APUs came out, hardly anybody puts a discrete when the APU is "good enough" for most folks.
Exactly, just look at how many companies have been crushed like a bug by Walmart. A local ice cream vendor got all starry eyed at getting their product in Walmart, the result? after 90 years in business they had to sell the company, Walmart fucked them so bad with late payments they literally couldn't keep the lights on. huffy bikes, Vlassic pickles, all got crushed like bug by Walmart and then later bought out at firesale prices by Walmart itself or one of its friends when they couldn't pay their bills because Walmart stretched out their payments long past due and left them hanging.
This is why you don't EVER do shit on credit. If they want your services then they can damned well pay for them up front and if they won't? that right there should tell you ALL you need to know. I have NEVER seen a case where a company refused to pay up front for the work where the one doing the work didn't end up getting fucked, hell one of my best customers was a graphics designer and engineer that just sold everything he owned to move out west because the very large local college strung him along for damned near a year on payment for a big job and he ended up going under. I've said it before and I'll say it again, you say "welcome" and they'll say "mat" and walk right over you.
In a business relationship they have to EARN your trust and the SECOND, the very second, that company was sold you should have treated it like a brand new company and demanded cash on the barrelhead until they proved they could pay their bills on time. if they don't like it? Well then they are just looking for someone to fuck anyway, let 'em hit the bricks.
Hell it damned near happened to me, I got offered a job to outfit this large business with computers, they said they had heard how I had built several lines for local businesses based on their workloads and they were quite happy with the results so they wanted the same deal but made it clear "all our financial transactions are taken care of on a twice yearly basis" and I told them I don't work like that and walked away. Sure enough one of my rivals took the job, I ended up getting a ton of equipment at auction dirt cheap when he went under because that "twice yearly" turned into 2 and a half years and he was left hanging for around 25k worth of computer builds and laptops.
Here ya go, 6 core AMD for $230 after MIR all you got to do is add the hard drive. the HD4350 that comes with it is far enough behind the curve that they should have the bugs worked out and if you don't like it? At this price you can just sell the card and slap an Nvidia in there no problem. I have one of the X6 CPUs and I can tell ya they are great,turbocore makes short work of jobs that only need a couple of fast cores and with 6 cores to share the load you can multitask all day long with no problem. it comes with 8gb of RAM and a DVD burner, just pick whatever SSD or HDD suits your fancy and bob's your uncle.
At this price you can afford to take a chance and it shouldn't be hard to sell the graphics card if it doesn't do to suit you.
Sadly this is true, but there IS a reason for that: for some reason people seem to turn off their fucking brains when it comes to things like Twitter, email, FB, and say shit that frankly they really wouldn't have ever said face to face with other people.
I mean how many times have we seen a company investigated and they trot out the emails and you're like "WTF dude? you are just talking about what could very easily be illegal or at the least several damaging shit, and you are just throwing it in an email and hoping somebody don't hit reply all?". And that effect seems to be amplified when it comes to anything social, if they stay on it more than a couple of hours their guards get let down like they've been doing shooters and the next thing you know they are just blabbing away about shit that should never leave the inside of the company.
So there is a VERY good reason to not want your employees within a hundred miles of anything social because once that shit goes viral the cat is out of the bag and its like something in that damned social crap just turns people's brains off.
And you don't even have the balls to make an account so why should anybody listen to you? Oh and here is How to write a Linux virus in 5 easy steps but you hang onto that "magical thinking" because it sure did protect all those Apple users from the non existent MacDefender and MacGuardian...oh wait. Well it at least protected all those android users because of the excellent Linux kernel protecting them...oh wait.
NEWS FLASH: there is NO SUCH THING as an OS that doesn't have bugs and vulnerabilities, which is why you airgap sensitive systems. All your "solution" does is use security by obscruity alongside a truly shitastic ecosystem where a billion devs "do their own thing" and make changes for the sake of change, make things incompatible for no damned reason other than they can, and where the kernel on up is like the shifting sand with ZERO QA or QC so the driver that works now probably won't work when the 6 month upgrade deathmarch comes. Hell even one of the Red Hat Devs says the current desktop is shit, and you wanna hoist it off on somebody who is barely able to use a PC? Yeah maybe if he hates his dad's guts and wants to see him suffer maybe. After all a broken machine is 100% virus proof as well, not gonna be very useful though.
My dad was the same way, here is how you solve that. You set up Win 7 (or whichever one he's on) to time out to the screensaver after 20 minutes and have it require a password, since everybody knows his regular password (and this is strictly for local access) I'd suggest using his social. You then set up a limited user in Win 7 that doesn't require a password and ONLY has the software you pre-approve of. In the case of my dad's PC it has only Comodo Dragon with ABP, no IE links anywhere, no file explorer, and the Windows Games, that's it, that's all the can run. If they don't like it? Go fucking home and hose your own system, thanks a bunch.
Now if my idiot cousin or my dumbass uncle come over they can still check their mail, hell my cousin can even shop on amazon for parts for that damned vette he is putting together, but they can NOT install shit, modify shit, or mess shit up. Works like a charm friend, I used to have to deal with my dad's system all the time, now with this in combination to the little "idiot proofing" I posted earlier? Haven't had to mess with it for over a year now, and even when I did have to mess with it it was simply to load a new USB HDD and set the backup schedule as his old one finally bought the farm.
You are forgetting about Hollywood Accounting which allows them to make record profits WHILE not paying the artists shit AND in some cases actually getting rebates from Uncle Sam! After all this is the same bunch of scum that had the big brass balls to say "Bat Out Of Hell I", an album that just FYI has the RECORD for the longest time for an album on the Billboard Top 200, didn't make a cent and which caused Meatloaf to go bankrupt not once but twice trying to get paid anything for his record setting album. This is also the same group of pricks that say "If your album came out before iTunes we don't owe you shit on digital sales" which is why Cheap trick and Styx and several other big 70s acts are now suing because they haven't seen a single PENNY from iTunes sales, they kept every cent!
So excuse me if I say "Please snatch every damned song you can" to everybody out there, between their bribery to get copyrights turned into Valenti's "Forever minus a single day" (if there is a hell may he rot) and fucking the artists out of the mere pittance they were due in the first place? These cocksuckers complaining about people ripping them off is like a mugger having the gall to bitch about how while he was busy mugging your ass somebody broke into his place and stold his stereo! Boo fucking hoo, please go DIAF you worthless leeches on the ass of society. All you do is rob kids by paying them a pittance and then find ways to make sure they don't even get that while you lock the music they worked so hard to create behind a paywall and demand they pay you every time they play their own song. Fuck off and die, you rich old pieces of human waste.
And enjoy your libel suit. Of course it won't matter if they haven't got a leg to stand on and you'll win in court because that will cost you several plane flights and 6 figures in lawyers fees.
You simply don't work for the big corps as a contractor as 9 times out of 10 you say "welcome" they'll say "mat!" and walk right over you. I have seen guys put out of business because trying to get these greedy fucks to pay is like squeezing blood out of a stone. the longer they can go without paying you the more they can get in interest on the money so they aren't out shit, meanwhile your ass ends up on the breadline.
If it were me I'd stop all work for said corp and talk to a lawyer. sometimes a letter written on legal stationary will be enough but you better learn your lesson and not do shit for them again or you'll be doing the same tango every damned time the bill is due.
The problem is the price on BD rarely falls like the price on DVDs. In less than a year that $20 DVD is in the $4-$6 bin, the BD? Still $20-$30 if you can even find the thing. this is especially true of older movies, I was fighting the crowd at the Wally World the other day, they had the Kill Bill DVDs for $4 each, only BD they had was a box with both movies for $40. that is 5 times more, just as I said.
At the end of the day the numbers don't lie, most new releases are selling 30-40 DVDs for every single BD sold, which tells me all I need to know. Most people simply don't care so its gonna be another Laserdisc, in fact I would argue if it weren't for PS3 owners it wouldn't even be selling as much as they are.
Unless he is willing to be full time 24/7 tech support that would be a BAD idea. Just look at the serious guttings that have happened to Linux in just the last 5 years, ALSA for Pulse, Gnome 2 for GnomeShell then this funky ass hybrid of the 2, KDE 3 to KDE 4 (which was frankly shoved out in alpha quality at best by ALL the "user friendly" distros) and finally the changes in the wireless networking that has made USB wireless hit or miss, usually miss.
Frankly if you know what you are doing you can set up an "idiot proof" Windows that short of the old guy clicking "Why yes, I DO want to get infected, STFU and let me get infected!" then nothing is gonna happen. With this system I've had customers that picked up more bugs than a Bangkok whore on coupon day and they are squeaky clean. Everybody ready? Here we go..
You start by doing the most obvious thing, that is making sure all their software is up to date. Once that is finished you get their ass OFF IE onto something that doesn't have a giant bullseye on it, personally I prefer Comodo Dragon as not only does it have low rights mode like Chrome, but it also has Privalert, which will block all the tracking crap (you can of course whitelist any page with a single click, even grandma could do it) and you have the option of Comodo DNS which in this case i would say YES, use it, as it blocks many malware pages from loading. Once its installed go ahead and add ABP, in less he likes ads bugging the shit out of him, and I usually install ForecastFox as its nice to have the 5 day forecast and the radar right there.
Next you install Paragon Backup and Recovery Free as this will let you not only make a hidden backup capsule (think OEM restore partition, only custom made by you and up to date) but you can set it to any kind of schedule you like, including differential, daily, weekly, whatever. I used to use Comodo Time Machine as it allows you to restore even if they hosed the boot image but its not supported on Windows 8. if you are running 7 might want to check it out. Next you install FileHippo Update Checker and tell it to ignore beta releases. the reason you do this is to keep the old guy for falling for the "you need the latest flash, just download "Iz_Not_Bug_Iz_Flash.exe" right now!". you tell him if the little Hippo don't say there is an update there is NO update, period.
Finally you have the AV, here you can use either Avast free or Comodo IS, I prefer the latter as its not as "chatty" and has built in sandboxing by default but some folks like chatty, both are VERY good at stop malware pages before load and Comodo IS sandboxing means if the old guy does try to run something nasty it'll minimize the risk.
so there you have it, it looks more complex than it actually is, takes about an hour all told depending on how out of date the software on the system is. Once its done that's it, just leave them be, they'll be safe as houses. The browser is sandboxed and in low rights mode, you have the AV scanning every page before load, the browser is blocking ads (one of the biggest attack vectors) and tracking crap, and to top it all off the OS has a hidden encrypted partition with a backup image so if they by some miracle ever do figure out how to break something you can have it back up in under 30 minutes, no problem.
It wasn't just the DRM, although that was pretty damned nasty and what fucked solidworks and Quickbooks, it was also the simple fact that some of those programs just was built on top of the older version, never releasing a new build but simply improving the old. The company that made the catalog program released their code when they went under but when I looked at it I was like "Ohhh...so THAT is why you went out of business!" because some of the shit had obviously been written when Win 3.x was the dominant OS and somebody took a "If it ain't broke?" attitude and just kept building on top. I would have had to gut the entire underpinning to fix the damned thing, no wonder they just quit.
But yeah the DRM bullshit was seriously nasty, you don't know how many late 90s games I own that I have to run the cracked version because the stupid SecuROM or Safedisc will try to launch as a 16bit process to inject their buggy 16/32 bit hybrid crap into a 64bit OS, thus if you are lucky crashing, if not trashing the entire OS. When I switched to XP X64 in 05 I quickly learned don't screw with games more than 3 years old, just get the cracked version, it just wasn't worth the risk.
And that is why the things you like are 3-8 times more expensive than what everybody else is paying, because you are a niche buyer, simple as that. whether you like it or not economy of scale makes a BIG difference in price and Sony simply badly overcharged for BD and tried pushing it too early at too high a price and its a flop. last figures I saw had nearly 60 of a new release DVD sold for every copy of BD, this is why many B&Ms like Walmart are sticking the BDs in a corner and devoting more shelf space to DVD, its all about selling as much product as possible.
But I know what you mean, I hang onto my Ranger with its Vulcan V6 even though its a gas hog because it has plenty of power and hauling capacity, the only way to get the same level today would be to buy a huge V8 that blew through gas even worse and took up more parking space. but the masses have spoken and they prefer either no truck or a big ass hemi, no in between so guys like me just have to hang onto what we got. that is what happens when you don't follow the herd, you'll end up on laserdisc while everybody else has VHS.
Then they are gonna have to upmarket it as Apple does and so far we have seen zero indication that either B&N or Amazon is gonna try upmarketing. In fact I would argue just the opposite, I go to Amazon I see fifty ads for the Fire and the E-Ink Kindle is a little mention in the corner.
I stand by my statement, E-Ink dead in 2. in the mobile business its all about economy of scale, and Amazon simply isn't marketing the E-Ink Kindle well. B&N may be but they are an also ran, not likely to gain any real share compared to Amazon who is now an 800 pound gorilla.
Then they should have a counter, showing how many users are required to keep it as part of the "Google family" and how many users it actually has. this would serve two purposes, 1.- Give users that like a particular offering a reason to "rally the troops" and try to drum up more users for a particular service, and 2.- Give those that were simply thinking about trying a chance to decide if its really an alpha, beta, or something that is gonna stick around. After all some actually like being "bleeding edge" while others such as myself fucking HATE being beta testers.
But how many will buy them when the price is $200 versus $60 for a 7 inch dual core with ICS? The problem is for these things to stay at a price people will pay you have to have massive economies of scale and the E-Ink just isn't getting that, the screens cost too much and too few devices use them. compare this to the 7 inch tablets which was reported just last month you could buy dual cores in Hong Kong for $60 each in lots of 1000 and you can easily see where the market is going, price trumps all.
I mean put yourself in the customers shoes...You are Joe average, you don't know squat about these things. There is a B&W unit sitting there for $160+ that people say is good at daylight reading, and right next to it is a full color unit for $70 playing a movie...which would YOU choose? I can tell you what most would choose and it ain't the B&W at more than double the price.
E-Ink was a nice idea but they were too greedy on the royalties and didn't get enough people behind the format to get the price down, whereas 7 inch color displays are a dime a dozen and they are cranking the single core and soon dual core ARM chips out so much that the price is gonna be literally a couple of bucks for a dual core that has an HD decoder chip, its a no brainer which the OEMs are gonna choose.
Oh the sad part is that is after they have been dumbing down the living hell out of the tests since the late 1970s, ever since the NAACP first raised a stink and accused the IQ tests of "being racist" because so many black teens were coming up listed as what would have been labeled retarded in the pre-1975 test.
Of course in a perfect example of why political correctness is a failure instead of asking the obvious question, which would be "What is going on in black schools and neighborhoods that is causing so many kids to test poorly?" they simply lowered the standards, then lowered them some more, then lowered them some more, to the point I heard there are several major districts like Detroit that don't even give the kids IQ tests at all anymore for fear of being called racist.
So sadly that 103 IQ is actually very high because its not counting all those teens that aren't getting tested at all. Depressing huh?
You are gonna have to burn the place to the ground before anything "springs up from the ashes" and when every person with a 401K, every person that is retired and is no longer able to work, is told "All your money is gone, go fuck off and die now" the shit is gonna get UGLY, violent revolution is frankly not out of the question. You will have the teeming masses of poor mixed with pretty much anybody that made less than half a mil all being wiped out overnight and the government unable to pay their bills so no more welfare, disability, social security, that shit is gonna get fucking nasty but quick.
After all you have a country that loves weapons, has a national guard armory in every small town loaded to the gills with 50 cals and RPGs, and as Libya and Syria saw it takes less than 4 hours in your average machine shop to make any old Ford into a technical. Without any belief in the currency there goes your law enforcement because they sure as shit ain't getting shot for free and i have a feeling, again like Libya, that if they turn the military on the people you'll have a large faction turn against the government.
After all I'm sure if you'd have asked the leaders of the USSR in the 70s they'd have told you the USSR was fine and would last another couple of centuries at least. these things have a habit of becoming a firestorm VERY quick and getting completely out of control.
Except its not shipping so kinda pointless to link to NOW, isn't it? Since we have seen so many of these things end up vaporware until they are actually filling orders i really wish people would stop linking to these things, a thousand and one things can make a deal fall through, trouble getting a chip, bad boards from the supplier driving the cost up to high, trouble getting support chips, so until we actually see people getting the units instead of some "pre-order" page its really as much vaporware as a Phantom console.
The average person in the USA, last figures I saw, had an IQ of just 103, now that is the average which of course means half are below that....what would you do with them? Throw them in a camp? make up a war and have a draft so they could be used up as cannon fodder?
You simply can't educate your way out of this, it just won't work. For decades those people could still feed their families, live decent lives, either by working in a factory or some other manual labor and the simple fact is those jobs are gone, more of the few we have left like road work and construction will be gone in less than 30 years.
so I'm sorry but it just won't work, the record number of student loan defaults because these kids are going straight from the graduation to the unemployment line proves that you just can't make an entire society of rocket scientists and even if you could the world doesn't need half a billion rocket scientists.
Well when those workers end up being 30-50%+ of your population you'll see how much consolation those starving masses have for you as they burn the whole thing to the ground.
If you think those starving masses are gonna meekly crawl off and die like they did during the 30s I have some magic beans you might be interested in, the days of the poor meekly crawling off to die are over, they WILL fight to survive and if they gotta get bloody to do it? Oh well.
That is why I tell people be ready, because there is still 2 more bubbles that have yet to burst and when they do shit is gonna get NASTY. The first is the education bubble, which we are already seen record defaults on student loans so that one should be happening soon, followed by the financial bubble which when that one pops not only is your money gonna be worth nothing more than TP, but all those that had 401Ks and 403Bs are gonna be completely wiped out overnight.
You may see some future utopia where the machine does all the work and man lives in luxury, and you may be right, but i think that utopia is gonna be paid for in blood as those at the top try to hoard all the loot the machines make for them and then are shocked when the peasants show them what happened to the rich under a certain period of French History.
This is why I have been saying for years that capitalism, like communism and fascism and every other ism, is simply doomed. i mean what is the entire basis of capitalism? trading your labor for capital which you then trade for what you want...but what if nobody wants your labor?
This is why I believe that ALL of the governments currently in power around the world WILL end in violent upheaval, there is simply no way to avoid it. The rich that control the means of production certainly aren't gonna want their system to be overthrown, yet there are children being born at this very moment that will simply have no way of trading their labor for capital because their labor simply isn't needed. you are playing education musical chairs and eventually the ones left with a seat will number in the few hundred thousands while you have billions of people, the numbers just won't add up and these people won't just quietly crawl off to die.
I mean look at our current situation, you have millions out of work and many millions more being paid directly or indirectly by the state in "make work" jobs, like take the stink over Walmart paying such low wages. Anybody think that if Walmart was forced to pay a living wage they couldn't replace a good 80%+ of those jobs with machines? or how about fast food? you could have all fast food joints replaced by automated assembly lines and I would argue that the food would end up better as you'd take out the variables and the mistakes and in the long run it would be cheaper than paying those people a living wage.
To me what finally proves beyond a shadow of a doubt the current system is doomed is this little fact...you could wipe out half the people on this planet, literally line up and execute half of the people currently alive and the quality of living wouldn't go down in fact it would go UP because those that were left would actually be valuable for their labor!
A person with an IQ of 94 is simply never gonna be a rocket scientist and even those with higher IQs will find less and less work available because hundreds are fighting for the same job, so the educational treadmill is gonna fail which is what we are seeing now, all of these kids with worthless educations because their labor isn't needed. so the only real choices are to bury the carcass that is capitalism or pretend it still works while paying the vast majority to do nothing.
Which is why I tell my customers to avoid free services, especially by Google and MSFT, until they become massively popular because both companies tend to throw shit at the wall and if it doesn't become a massive hit it gets dumped, users be damned.
Killing services that have hundreds of thousands, possibly even a million or more users because they don't fit some metric of popular is a good way to keep people from trying your new offerings. And since Google makes its money showing users of those offerings ads it is really not good business.
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The problem is like in X86 there isn't any real competition and I'd say its worse than in X86 because at least AMD, which I've been building exclusively for the past 5+ years, the performance is "good enough" for the vast majority of users including the gamers but in the HDD arena the competition is making such piss poor products that I'd be afraid to buy them.
You see pre-flood we had 4 players in the game, Hitachi, Samsung, Seagate, and WD, but now there is only WD and Seagate and ever since the Maxtor buyout Seagate quality has really gone down the shitter so there isn't really any choice but WD. Pre-flood I was buying Samsung EcoGreens at $35 a TB but since the buyouts I've found anything that Seagate makes over 500Gb to be Russian roulette with your data while the WDs have a MUCH lower failure rate, at least from what I've seen in the shop.
So I'd say what they are doing certainly isn't illegal, although why they allowed Seagate and WD to buy out the competition to make it a duopoly I'll never know, but since Seagate seems unable to fix the serious failure rate of their over 500Gb drives you have WD charging 40%+ over what Seagate is charging and they'll get it as nobody wants to risk losing their data. Just go look at any of the BF and Xmas sales and you'll see what I mean, the Seagates are selling for $60-$70 for 1Tb, $70-$80 for a TB and a half, while WD is selling for $100 a Tb, $150 for a 2TB and they can't seem to keep them in stock whereas the Seagates have been on sale for weeks and they appear to have plenty of stock left.
Its not the market itself keeping the prices high, its the fact you really only have one supplier worth buying. Like I said you can take an AMD quad or Hexa and even the gamers will be happy with the performance but NOBODY is happy when they buy that cheapo Seagate 1.5TB and it craps itself in 3 months and takes their data with it. WD knows this so they keep their prices high, knowing that all it takes is getting burned by Seagate for a time or two for the customers to see its better to spend the money than lose their stuff. This is just a perfect example of "you get what you pay for" where someone who makes a better product charges more than the guy making cheap shit and this is why the prices remain high on the WD side of the aisle, they know their competition just can't seem to make a good product ATM.
What inflated? I've seen 2Tb for $99, 1Tb for $70 and the prices continue to fall. and when it comes to SSDs you have to watch for the hot/crazy scale which as a retailer who has gamer customers into the double digits when it comes to SSDs because of all the failures i can tell you is a BIG problem.
In fact with the prices falling the way they are I'd say the ONLY problem we have is Seagate. Instead of Seagate raising up Maxtor it appears that Maxtor brought down Seagate, with Seagate drives being sold cheaper and cheaper due to the high failure rates. During the BF and Xmas sales so far I've seen WD charge 40%+ markups not because that price is a fair market value but because like Intel WD knows that their "competition" can't really compete on anything but price so they feel no need to lower their prices.
Now I don't know if this is true or not, just what I heard, but here is the scuttlebutt I was told when it comes to Seagate: When Seagate bought Maxtor they got the cheap ARM controllers from Maxtor and that when combined with piss poor firmware is making the Seagates die left and right. From what I was told the ARM chips get too hot and when they do the firmware starts fucking up, it fails to "see" where the end sectors of the drive are and tries to go past end of the drive and bye bye drive. I know that the failure rate on anything Seagate above 500GB from what I've seen in the shop is just pathetic, I've had to RMA enough of them i won't even touch a Seagate larger than 500GB ATM. Since most people don't care about the drive itself but the data this is a serious problem, I even had to walk a guy through building a clean box so he could swap the platters on a less than 3 month old Seagate in the hopes of getting his pictures back.
But I'll tell you like I tell my customers that SSDs are ONLY useful for certain use cases, like any tool you have to make sure that you have the right tool for the job. If its a laptop or netbook AND you have limited non cloud based data or are religious about backups? Then SSDs make sense there, less power usage and no moving parts make it a good fit especially if you pull the drive and slap it in an external and use it to hold backups of the OS and important data. If its gonna be used on a desktop as an OS drive AND all your data as well as backups of the OS are gonna be kept on a HDD? Then it makes sense, the increased speed is worth the risk. if its gonna be a mission critical system or you are working on data you can't constantly backup and would hurt if you lost? Then there it is NOT a good fit, the high failure rate makes the risk too great for any advantages.
Now as far as HDDs go from the shop here is what I've found, again YMMV but in order from best to least I've found the best to be pre-buyout Samsung and Hitachi drives, especially the EcoGreen on the samsung as their excellent firmware and well thought out use of the 32Mb cache makes them test nearly as fast and sometimes faster than a 7200RPM drive while putting out MUCH less heat and taking insane abuse, we're talking construction trailers and warehouses where the systems get seriously nasty with dirt and grime, followed by the WD drives and finally Seagate which over 500Gb I wouldn't trust with anything I cared about.
So if you want to go SSDs just remember the hot/crazy scale and backup often, and avoid the OCZ drives like an STD because from what I've seen they are just garbage. Like Seagate this is reflected in the prices, with the better quality Intel and Samsung drives carrying a much higher per GB price than the OCZ because the OCZs fail like crazy. Why they can't put a simple ARM chip that would take over if the main controller dies and simply allow the drive to be used as read only so you could get your data off I don't know, but from what I've seen here in the shop over 90% of SSDs fail not because the cells fail, but because the controller dies. Until they fix this serious problem I'd be leery of trusting my data to an SSD.
For those that aren't aware there is a REASON why AMD can't get "fully behind the Open Source Drivers" and that is because there is a section of each chip they can't legally allow access to, the HDMI HDCP decoders. Since they have integrated that into the GPU there is simply no way for them to open that up, the code isn't theirs to give. Intel has their HDMI HDCP more separate than AMD does because their chips are all about the CPU and the GPU is simply supposed to be "good enough" for basic video watching and the like. Since AMD has been more about the GPU everything is tightly coupled around that GPU so they just can't give you 100% access, not without ending up blacklisted and unable to play any content that uses HDCP.
But this should be a perfect test of the FOSS community, to see if they are worth supporting or not. AMD has done EXACTLY what you asked, and opened every bit of code that was theirs to give, so if their sales don't go up because the community goes "LOL use Nvidia proprietary drivers" then the hardware manufacturers will see how pointless it is to support FOSS, as AMD will have done all that work and not gotten any more sales as a result. At the end of the day if you don't support the companies that do as you ask then frankly nobody is gonna bother, after all it costs money to have a lawyer sign off on opening tons of code and docs and if they see no ROI for doing so why bother?
If you want to game on a laptop the Liano quad laptops are pretty nice, its not gonna play Crysis cranked out but for most games its fine. Just remember to put the fastest memory it'll take as those APUs are more affected by fast memory then a CPU since both GPU and CPU are accessing the memory. But its really hard to even find a discrete in a laptop anymore since the APUs came out, hardly anybody puts a discrete when the APU is "good enough" for most folks.
Exactly, just look at how many companies have been crushed like a bug by Walmart. A local ice cream vendor got all starry eyed at getting their product in Walmart, the result? after 90 years in business they had to sell the company, Walmart fucked them so bad with late payments they literally couldn't keep the lights on. huffy bikes, Vlassic pickles, all got crushed like bug by Walmart and then later bought out at firesale prices by Walmart itself or one of its friends when they couldn't pay their bills because Walmart stretched out their payments long past due and left them hanging.
This is why you don't EVER do shit on credit. If they want your services then they can damned well pay for them up front and if they won't? that right there should tell you ALL you need to know. I have NEVER seen a case where a company refused to pay up front for the work where the one doing the work didn't end up getting fucked, hell one of my best customers was a graphics designer and engineer that just sold everything he owned to move out west because the very large local college strung him along for damned near a year on payment for a big job and he ended up going under. I've said it before and I'll say it again, you say "welcome" and they'll say "mat" and walk right over you.
In a business relationship they have to EARN your trust and the SECOND, the very second, that company was sold you should have treated it like a brand new company and demanded cash on the barrelhead until they proved they could pay their bills on time. if they don't like it? Well then they are just looking for someone to fuck anyway, let 'em hit the bricks.
Hell it damned near happened to me, I got offered a job to outfit this large business with computers, they said they had heard how I had built several lines for local businesses based on their workloads and they were quite happy with the results so they wanted the same deal but made it clear "all our financial transactions are taken care of on a twice yearly basis" and I told them I don't work like that and walked away. Sure enough one of my rivals took the job, I ended up getting a ton of equipment at auction dirt cheap when he went under because that "twice yearly" turned into 2 and a half years and he was left hanging for around 25k worth of computer builds and laptops.
Here ya go, 6 core AMD for $230 after MIR all you got to do is add the hard drive. the HD4350 that comes with it is far enough behind the curve that they should have the bugs worked out and if you don't like it? At this price you can just sell the card and slap an Nvidia in there no problem. I have one of the X6 CPUs and I can tell ya they are great,turbocore makes short work of jobs that only need a couple of fast cores and with 6 cores to share the load you can multitask all day long with no problem. it comes with 8gb of RAM and a DVD burner, just pick whatever SSD or HDD suits your fancy and bob's your uncle.
At this price you can afford to take a chance and it shouldn't be hard to sell the graphics card if it doesn't do to suit you.
Sadly this is true, but there IS a reason for that: for some reason people seem to turn off their fucking brains when it comes to things like Twitter, email, FB, and say shit that frankly they really wouldn't have ever said face to face with other people.
I mean how many times have we seen a company investigated and they trot out the emails and you're like "WTF dude? you are just talking about what could very easily be illegal or at the least several damaging shit, and you are just throwing it in an email and hoping somebody don't hit reply all?". And that effect seems to be amplified when it comes to anything social, if they stay on it more than a couple of hours their guards get let down like they've been doing shooters and the next thing you know they are just blabbing away about shit that should never leave the inside of the company.
So there is a VERY good reason to not want your employees within a hundred miles of anything social because once that shit goes viral the cat is out of the bag and its like something in that damned social crap just turns people's brains off.
And you don't even have the balls to make an account so why should anybody listen to you? Oh and here is How to write a Linux virus in 5 easy steps but you hang onto that "magical thinking" because it sure did protect all those Apple users from the non existent MacDefender and MacGuardian...oh wait. Well it at least protected all those android users because of the excellent Linux kernel protecting them...oh wait.
NEWS FLASH: there is NO SUCH THING as an OS that doesn't have bugs and vulnerabilities, which is why you airgap sensitive systems. All your "solution" does is use security by obscruity alongside a truly shitastic ecosystem where a billion devs "do their own thing" and make changes for the sake of change, make things incompatible for no damned reason other than they can, and where the kernel on up is like the shifting sand with ZERO QA or QC so the driver that works now probably won't work when the 6 month upgrade deathmarch comes. Hell even one of the Red Hat Devs says the current desktop is shit, and you wanna hoist it off on somebody who is barely able to use a PC? Yeah maybe if he hates his dad's guts and wants to see him suffer maybe. After all a broken machine is 100% virus proof as well, not gonna be very useful though.
My dad was the same way, here is how you solve that. You set up Win 7 (or whichever one he's on) to time out to the screensaver after 20 minutes and have it require a password, since everybody knows his regular password (and this is strictly for local access) I'd suggest using his social. You then set up a limited user in Win 7 that doesn't require a password and ONLY has the software you pre-approve of. In the case of my dad's PC it has only Comodo Dragon with ABP, no IE links anywhere, no file explorer, and the Windows Games, that's it, that's all the can run. If they don't like it? Go fucking home and hose your own system, thanks a bunch.
Now if my idiot cousin or my dumbass uncle come over they can still check their mail, hell my cousin can even shop on amazon for parts for that damned vette he is putting together, but they can NOT install shit, modify shit, or mess shit up. Works like a charm friend, I used to have to deal with my dad's system all the time, now with this in combination to the little "idiot proofing" I posted earlier? Haven't had to mess with it for over a year now, and even when I did have to mess with it it was simply to load a new USB HDD and set the backup schedule as his old one finally bought the farm.
You are forgetting about Hollywood Accounting which allows them to make record profits WHILE not paying the artists shit AND in some cases actually getting rebates from Uncle Sam! After all this is the same bunch of scum that had the big brass balls to say "Bat Out Of Hell I", an album that just FYI has the RECORD for the longest time for an album on the Billboard Top 200, didn't make a cent and which caused Meatloaf to go bankrupt not once but twice trying to get paid anything for his record setting album. This is also the same group of pricks that say "If your album came out before iTunes we don't owe you shit on digital sales" which is why Cheap trick and Styx and several other big 70s acts are now suing because they haven't seen a single PENNY from iTunes sales, they kept every cent!
So excuse me if I say "Please snatch every damned song you can" to everybody out there, between their bribery to get copyrights turned into Valenti's "Forever minus a single day" (if there is a hell may he rot) and fucking the artists out of the mere pittance they were due in the first place? These cocksuckers complaining about people ripping them off is like a mugger having the gall to bitch about how while he was busy mugging your ass somebody broke into his place and stold his stereo! Boo fucking hoo, please go DIAF you worthless leeches on the ass of society. All you do is rob kids by paying them a pittance and then find ways to make sure they don't even get that while you lock the music they worked so hard to create behind a paywall and demand they pay you every time they play their own song. Fuck off and die, you rich old pieces of human waste.
And enjoy your libel suit. Of course it won't matter if they haven't got a leg to stand on and you'll win in court because that will cost you several plane flights and 6 figures in lawyers fees.
You simply don't work for the big corps as a contractor as 9 times out of 10 you say "welcome" they'll say "mat!" and walk right over you. I have seen guys put out of business because trying to get these greedy fucks to pay is like squeezing blood out of a stone. the longer they can go without paying you the more they can get in interest on the money so they aren't out shit, meanwhile your ass ends up on the breadline.
If it were me I'd stop all work for said corp and talk to a lawyer. sometimes a letter written on legal stationary will be enough but you better learn your lesson and not do shit for them again or you'll be doing the same tango every damned time the bill is due.
The problem is the price on BD rarely falls like the price on DVDs. In less than a year that $20 DVD is in the $4-$6 bin, the BD? Still $20-$30 if you can even find the thing. this is especially true of older movies, I was fighting the crowd at the Wally World the other day, they had the Kill Bill DVDs for $4 each, only BD they had was a box with both movies for $40. that is 5 times more, just as I said.
At the end of the day the numbers don't lie, most new releases are selling 30-40 DVDs for every single BD sold, which tells me all I need to know. Most people simply don't care so its gonna be another Laserdisc, in fact I would argue if it weren't for PS3 owners it wouldn't even be selling as much as they are.
Unless he is willing to be full time 24/7 tech support that would be a BAD idea. Just look at the serious guttings that have happened to Linux in just the last 5 years, ALSA for Pulse, Gnome 2 for GnomeShell then this funky ass hybrid of the 2, KDE 3 to KDE 4 (which was frankly shoved out in alpha quality at best by ALL the "user friendly" distros) and finally the changes in the wireless networking that has made USB wireless hit or miss, usually miss.
Frankly if you know what you are doing you can set up an "idiot proof" Windows that short of the old guy clicking "Why yes, I DO want to get infected, STFU and let me get infected!" then nothing is gonna happen. With this system I've had customers that picked up more bugs than a Bangkok whore on coupon day and they are squeaky clean. Everybody ready? Here we go..
You start by doing the most obvious thing, that is making sure all their software is up to date. Once that is finished you get their ass OFF IE onto something that doesn't have a giant bullseye on it, personally I prefer Comodo Dragon as not only does it have low rights mode like Chrome, but it also has Privalert, which will block all the tracking crap (you can of course whitelist any page with a single click, even grandma could do it) and you have the option of Comodo DNS which in this case i would say YES, use it, as it blocks many malware pages from loading. Once its installed go ahead and add ABP, in less he likes ads bugging the shit out of him, and I usually install ForecastFox as its nice to have the 5 day forecast and the radar right there.
Next you install Paragon Backup and Recovery Free as this will let you not only make a hidden backup capsule (think OEM restore partition, only custom made by you and up to date) but you can set it to any kind of schedule you like, including differential, daily, weekly, whatever. I used to use Comodo Time Machine as it allows you to restore even if they hosed the boot image but its not supported on Windows 8. if you are running 7 might want to check it out. Next you install FileHippo Update Checker and tell it to ignore beta releases. the reason you do this is to keep the old guy for falling for the "you need the latest flash, just download "Iz_Not_Bug_Iz_Flash.exe" right now!". you tell him if the little Hippo don't say there is an update there is NO update, period.
Finally you have the AV, here you can use either Avast free or Comodo IS, I prefer the latter as its not as "chatty" and has built in sandboxing by default but some folks like chatty, both are VERY good at stop malware pages before load and Comodo IS sandboxing means if the old guy does try to run something nasty it'll minimize the risk.
so there you have it, it looks more complex than it actually is, takes about an hour all told depending on how out of date the software on the system is. Once its done that's it, just leave them be, they'll be safe as houses. The browser is sandboxed and in low rights mode, you have the AV scanning every page before load, the browser is blocking ads (one of the biggest attack vectors) and tracking crap, and to top it all off the OS has a hidden encrypted partition with a backup image so if they by some miracle ever do figure out how to break something you can have it back up in under 30 minutes, no problem.
It wasn't just the DRM, although that was pretty damned nasty and what fucked solidworks and Quickbooks, it was also the simple fact that some of those programs just was built on top of the older version, never releasing a new build but simply improving the old. The company that made the catalog program released their code when they went under but when I looked at it I was like "Ohhh...so THAT is why you went out of business!" because some of the shit had obviously been written when Win 3.x was the dominant OS and somebody took a "If it ain't broke?" attitude and just kept building on top. I would have had to gut the entire underpinning to fix the damned thing, no wonder they just quit.
But yeah the DRM bullshit was seriously nasty, you don't know how many late 90s games I own that I have to run the cracked version because the stupid SecuROM or Safedisc will try to launch as a 16bit process to inject their buggy 16/32 bit hybrid crap into a 64bit OS, thus if you are lucky crashing, if not trashing the entire OS. When I switched to XP X64 in 05 I quickly learned don't screw with games more than 3 years old, just get the cracked version, it just wasn't worth the risk.
And that is why the things you like are 3-8 times more expensive than what everybody else is paying, because you are a niche buyer, simple as that. whether you like it or not economy of scale makes a BIG difference in price and Sony simply badly overcharged for BD and tried pushing it too early at too high a price and its a flop. last figures I saw had nearly 60 of a new release DVD sold for every copy of BD, this is why many B&Ms like Walmart are sticking the BDs in a corner and devoting more shelf space to DVD, its all about selling as much product as possible.
But I know what you mean, I hang onto my Ranger with its Vulcan V6 even though its a gas hog because it has plenty of power and hauling capacity, the only way to get the same level today would be to buy a huge V8 that blew through gas even worse and took up more parking space. but the masses have spoken and they prefer either no truck or a big ass hemi, no in between so guys like me just have to hang onto what we got. that is what happens when you don't follow the herd, you'll end up on laserdisc while everybody else has VHS.
Then they are gonna have to upmarket it as Apple does and so far we have seen zero indication that either B&N or Amazon is gonna try upmarketing. In fact I would argue just the opposite, I go to Amazon I see fifty ads for the Fire and the E-Ink Kindle is a little mention in the corner.
I stand by my statement, E-Ink dead in 2. in the mobile business its all about economy of scale, and Amazon simply isn't marketing the E-Ink Kindle well. B&N may be but they are an also ran, not likely to gain any real share compared to Amazon who is now an 800 pound gorilla.
Then they should have a counter, showing how many users are required to keep it as part of the "Google family" and how many users it actually has. this would serve two purposes, 1.- Give users that like a particular offering a reason to "rally the troops" and try to drum up more users for a particular service, and 2.- Give those that were simply thinking about trying a chance to decide if its really an alpha, beta, or something that is gonna stick around. After all some actually like being "bleeding edge" while others such as myself fucking HATE being beta testers.
But how many will buy them when the price is $200 versus $60 for a 7 inch dual core with ICS? The problem is for these things to stay at a price people will pay you have to have massive economies of scale and the E-Ink just isn't getting that, the screens cost too much and too few devices use them. compare this to the 7 inch tablets which was reported just last month you could buy dual cores in Hong Kong for $60 each in lots of 1000 and you can easily see where the market is going, price trumps all.
I mean put yourself in the customers shoes...You are Joe average, you don't know squat about these things. There is a B&W unit sitting there for $160+ that people say is good at daylight reading, and right next to it is a full color unit for $70 playing a movie...which would YOU choose? I can tell you what most would choose and it ain't the B&W at more than double the price.
E-Ink was a nice idea but they were too greedy on the royalties and didn't get enough people behind the format to get the price down, whereas 7 inch color displays are a dime a dozen and they are cranking the single core and soon dual core ARM chips out so much that the price is gonna be literally a couple of bucks for a dual core that has an HD decoder chip, its a no brainer which the OEMs are gonna choose.
Oh the sad part is that is after they have been dumbing down the living hell out of the tests since the late 1970s, ever since the NAACP first raised a stink and accused the IQ tests of "being racist" because so many black teens were coming up listed as what would have been labeled retarded in the pre-1975 test.
Of course in a perfect example of why political correctness is a failure instead of asking the obvious question, which would be "What is going on in black schools and neighborhoods that is causing so many kids to test poorly?" they simply lowered the standards, then lowered them some more, then lowered them some more, to the point I heard there are several major districts like Detroit that don't even give the kids IQ tests at all anymore for fear of being called racist.
So sadly that 103 IQ is actually very high because its not counting all those teens that aren't getting tested at all. Depressing huh?
You are gonna have to burn the place to the ground before anything "springs up from the ashes" and when every person with a 401K, every person that is retired and is no longer able to work, is told "All your money is gone, go fuck off and die now" the shit is gonna get UGLY, violent revolution is frankly not out of the question. You will have the teeming masses of poor mixed with pretty much anybody that made less than half a mil all being wiped out overnight and the government unable to pay their bills so no more welfare, disability, social security, that shit is gonna get fucking nasty but quick.
After all you have a country that loves weapons, has a national guard armory in every small town loaded to the gills with 50 cals and RPGs, and as Libya and Syria saw it takes less than 4 hours in your average machine shop to make any old Ford into a technical. Without any belief in the currency there goes your law enforcement because they sure as shit ain't getting shot for free and i have a feeling, again like Libya, that if they turn the military on the people you'll have a large faction turn against the government.
After all I'm sure if you'd have asked the leaders of the USSR in the 70s they'd have told you the USSR was fine and would last another couple of centuries at least. these things have a habit of becoming a firestorm VERY quick and getting completely out of control.
Except its not shipping so kinda pointless to link to NOW, isn't it? Since we have seen so many of these things end up vaporware until they are actually filling orders i really wish people would stop linking to these things, a thousand and one things can make a deal fall through, trouble getting a chip, bad boards from the supplier driving the cost up to high, trouble getting support chips, so until we actually see people getting the units instead of some "pre-order" page its really as much vaporware as a Phantom console.
The average person in the USA, last figures I saw, had an IQ of just 103, now that is the average which of course means half are below that....what would you do with them? Throw them in a camp? make up a war and have a draft so they could be used up as cannon fodder?
You simply can't educate your way out of this, it just won't work. For decades those people could still feed their families, live decent lives, either by working in a factory or some other manual labor and the simple fact is those jobs are gone, more of the few we have left like road work and construction will be gone in less than 30 years.
so I'm sorry but it just won't work, the record number of student loan defaults because these kids are going straight from the graduation to the unemployment line proves that you just can't make an entire society of rocket scientists and even if you could the world doesn't need half a billion rocket scientists.
Well when those workers end up being 30-50%+ of your population you'll see how much consolation those starving masses have for you as they burn the whole thing to the ground.
If you think those starving masses are gonna meekly crawl off and die like they did during the 30s I have some magic beans you might be interested in, the days of the poor meekly crawling off to die are over, they WILL fight to survive and if they gotta get bloody to do it? Oh well.
That is why I tell people be ready, because there is still 2 more bubbles that have yet to burst and when they do shit is gonna get NASTY. The first is the education bubble, which we are already seen record defaults on student loans so that one should be happening soon, followed by the financial bubble which when that one pops not only is your money gonna be worth nothing more than TP, but all those that had 401Ks and 403Bs are gonna be completely wiped out overnight.
You may see some future utopia where the machine does all the work and man lives in luxury, and you may be right, but i think that utopia is gonna be paid for in blood as those at the top try to hoard all the loot the machines make for them and then are shocked when the peasants show them what happened to the rich under a certain period of French History.
This is why I have been saying for years that capitalism, like communism and fascism and every other ism, is simply doomed. i mean what is the entire basis of capitalism? trading your labor for capital which you then trade for what you want...but what if nobody wants your labor?
This is why I believe that ALL of the governments currently in power around the world WILL end in violent upheaval, there is simply no way to avoid it. The rich that control the means of production certainly aren't gonna want their system to be overthrown, yet there are children being born at this very moment that will simply have no way of trading their labor for capital because their labor simply isn't needed. you are playing education musical chairs and eventually the ones left with a seat will number in the few hundred thousands while you have billions of people, the numbers just won't add up and these people won't just quietly crawl off to die.
I mean look at our current situation, you have millions out of work and many millions more being paid directly or indirectly by the state in "make work" jobs, like take the stink over Walmart paying such low wages. Anybody think that if Walmart was forced to pay a living wage they couldn't replace a good 80%+ of those jobs with machines? or how about fast food? you could have all fast food joints replaced by automated assembly lines and I would argue that the food would end up better as you'd take out the variables and the mistakes and in the long run it would be cheaper than paying those people a living wage.
To me what finally proves beyond a shadow of a doubt the current system is doomed is this little fact...you could wipe out half the people on this planet, literally line up and execute half of the people currently alive and the quality of living wouldn't go down in fact it would go UP because those that were left would actually be valuable for their labor!
A person with an IQ of 94 is simply never gonna be a rocket scientist and even those with higher IQs will find less and less work available because hundreds are fighting for the same job, so the educational treadmill is gonna fail which is what we are seeing now, all of these kids with worthless educations because their labor isn't needed. so the only real choices are to bury the carcass that is capitalism or pretend it still works while paying the vast majority to do nothing.
Which is why I tell my customers to avoid free services, especially by Google and MSFT, until they become massively popular because both companies tend to throw shit at the wall and if it doesn't become a massive hit it gets dumped, users be damned.
Killing services that have hundreds of thousands, possibly even a million or more users because they don't fit some metric of popular is a good way to keep people from trying your new offerings. And since Google makes its money showing users of those offerings ads it is really not good business.