I have to wonder how much of the supposed "obesity" and illnesses can end up being traced to all the chemicals we are ingesting and are exposed to every damned day of our lives? I had a friend that was always sick with one thing or another, had problems with his weight, moved out into the middle of nowhere in the desert and all of his problems went away once he was no longer sucking down chemicals all the time.
You look at the tests of the water that comes out the tap, the foods we eat, hell you can test the blood of a newborn and find plastic floating in the bloodstream. I would love to see someone just set vials up with the correct amounts of this and that chemical that the average person in the USA ingests because i'm sure it would shock most people.
This is why I think E-Readers are doomed. My family and friends that like books like more than the LOOK of the book, they like the feel, they like the smell, they like being able to just chunk it around, dog ear a page, etc. Whereas those that like digital devices will naturally like something that can read AND surf AND check their email AND watch videos.
If the price of E-Ink had dropped a LOT faster, if they would have come up with even 16 bit color, then maybe E-Readers would have some life left, but when you can get a 1.2Ghz Cortex A8 tablet with ICS for $80-$100? Well its obvious to me which one is gonna be the winner. Mark my words, tablets with dual core CPUs for less than $60 this time next year for a 7 inch, which will be the final nail in the coffin.
Hell its STILL a ripoff Godel, I often see new DVDs for $10-$12, the same movie in BD, no extras, no nothing, is close to $40.
With DVD all the hassles of VHS are gone and I've seen good upscaling DVD players for as little as $50. Most people i know look at a DVD on their new widescreen and say "It looks okay to me" and that is the end of that, they just don't see paying sometimes triple the cost for a BD when the DVD is "good enough" for them.
Again there is a pretty big difference, the psycho will do things that are NOT in their best interests, the socio does EVERYTHING for their best interests. A psycho might shoot up a rest home, the socio will steal their retirement money and leave them to starve with zero remorse.
This difference is always why you see plenty of sociopaths in politics and as CEOs, its that "the world revolves around me, fuck everybody else" attitude that lets them make vast fortunes. Look at Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, i would argue both were sociopaths. While Woz was building the Apple II Steve fucked him out of his share on a breakout game they sold to Atari. Did Steve need the money? Fuck no, he was a Berkeley grad with rich parents but he didn't care because he deserved all the money as far as he was concerned, it didn't matter that he didn't write a line of code, he sold it so fuck the guy that made it, friend or not. You see the same thing plenty of times in Gates' history as well, including smiling to Job's face and lying his ass off while he was stealing the Mac design for Windows.
So I'd say its a pretty big difference, not too many real psychos that run fortune 50 companies, plenty of socios that do, because at the end of the day this is THEIR world, you are merely here to serve THEM as far as they are concerned.
Actually on some boards you could undervolt the P4 so it wasn't as bad of a piggie, and the 65nm Cedar Mill chips weren't too bad either, about 85w which is average for a desktop. While I agree that the P4 wasn't a great chip the simple fact is the jobs most folks have, surfing, burning CDs, listening to music, all of those can be done on a 2Ghz P4 just fine, especially if it has 2gb of RAM.
But I have nothing but good things to say of the Athlons of that time, pretty much the polar opposite of the power piggie bulldozers of today. in fact I still have a socket 754 sempron that I use for a nettop at the shop, maxes out at around 35w and for surfing and downloading it runs just fine, even Win 7 runs fine as long as I don't care about Aero which I don't.
Because you WILL run into programs that will still shit themselves on 64bit OSes sadly. I ran into this when I first switched back in 05, it turned out the disk catalog program I had been using for the better part of a decade had 16/32 bit code in its DLLs and the company no longer existed, boy that was "fun" having to re-scan every damned backup discs i had going back to 1998. I also found that certain programs like Solidworks and Quickbooks can be picky as hell when it comes to which bit the OS is, in fact SW only started supporting 64 bit in 2009, before that the program would crap itself if you tried to run on a 64bit OS. I had a customer who kept an Athlon X2 with Win 7 32 just for his SW.
As for why run Win 7 32bit? the memory management on XP was deep fried ass, that's why. You can fire up both XP 32 and XP 64 and compare them to Win 7 and its like a bad joke, XP will pimpslap the shit out of swap, even when there was plenty of memory free, in fact until Win 7 came out I was using a RAMDisk just to speed up XP so it would quit slamming the HDD even though I had memory. With Win 7 what you think is "bloat" is actually caching which DOES make a BIG difference, with the 8Gb I have now on XP X64 I would have less than 2Gb used and it would start smacking the swap, with Win 7 I have just 500Mb of RAM free but that is because all the programs I use are cached in RAM which means no waiting, its instantly launched.
Nobody around here uses UPS, hence why I see so many burnt boards and why my chip drawer is always fricking full. yeah shame you don't live nearby as i thow away 1.4Ghz-1.8Ghz P4s all the damed time, I always hated those socket 423 and 478 P4s, suck too much power.
And yeah seeing a cooked Tyan made me a sad panda, but seeing cooked AMD boards always makes me a sad panda anyway, back in the day i loved the hell out of those T-Birds and Barton chips. Still waiting for a good 754 Athlon to walk through the door, I have a 1.8Ghz Sempron 754 I use as a nettop in the shop, uses hardly any power and quiet as a churchmouse but I keep getting socket As dammit.
But as I said the throw aways now are starting to get some early pentium Ds and Athlon X2s, of course the bitch is the laptops, hate to throw those away but good luck working on them. I got a C2D in my closet that needs a screen, a C2D that just needs a keyboard replacement, nice 17 inch I may keep that myself for a spare, and the one that makes me a sad pands every time I open the closet, a 12 inch netbook with an ACTUAL ATHLON X2, not a Bobcat but an actual to God Athlon X2 with an HD4350 discrete with 256Mb of memory! That one the guy ran over the power cord with the vaccuum and cut it in half while it was plugged in, don't know if he fried the power input or what, one of these days I'm gonna have to take it to the cell phone shop down the street and see if they can fix it for me, having a real Athlon in a netbook would be sweeeeet!
I do, plenty of poor single moms out there that would like to have a PC but ain't got one. usually the only thing they are paying from me is for a cheap USB/mouse combo because most of the units came with ball mice and I ain't letting anybody keep that garbage, trying to keep a ball mouse working was too big a PITA.
let your old pal hairy show ya what to do, what you do is go by some of the local charities, His House, churches, places where folks go when they are hurting and let them know you are giving away some stuff and they WILL end up either knowing somebody that can use it or find somebody who can, and once the word gets around you'll have more folks needing machines than you got machines to hand out. Here's a little story about one that really touched me..
So I just got done replacing the units in this SMB which they let me keep the old P4s, these were those little bookshelf type Compaqs and Dells, what I would do is slap in a boot and nuke in front of them after moving anything they wanted to keep and just zero out the drives. So I got my truck loaded up when this old school chum that is teaching a typing class at a battered women's shelter calls me up, asks if I can swing by and see if I can upgrade this gal's PC. he says it won't run the software and she needs to be able to practice at home. So I get there and I swear its a fricking Win 3.1 setup, we're talking MAYBE 10Mhz with like 2mb of RAM, this is in 2007 BTW. So I get to looking and I can hear him telling her "Don't you worry, my buddy is a wiz and if he can't boost it nobody can" so I tell her "Where is your car at? back it up to my truck" and i pop the trunk lid on my bed and start loading her a couple of the units.
She says "Oh I can't afford to buy any right now" and I tell her she is doing me a favor, I don't have the room in the shop for these and they are ready to go, fresh installs of XP and everything. Well I load her up with the full boat, monitors and all, and she is crying like anything then because she can't believe anybody would just give her computers like that. Anyway i get an email from my buddy 6 months later, he helped her find a decent job in a little office somewhere and she brought one of the PCs back to him once she got her a laptop so he could pass it to somebody else, the other unit being used by her kids for schoolwork.
So yeah, you can still do some good, you just have to let the right folks know you are willing to help out.
Since forever? Look up "Send texts from your PC" to see there are hundreds of services and programs that will let you shoot out a text using a PC, this is how all those spammers send those "You have won a (insert company) $1000 gift card!" text spams, you can even use a botnet to send the texts so you don't even pay for Internet other than the C&C.
Its actually quite simple if one thinks about it. Red ochre was plentiful and black can be made with the carbon from any fire, so there ya go. I'm sure the other colors were much harder to gather and were a bigger pain to deal with so they were most likely only used for very special things, such as painting the corpse of a fallen king. After all this is why royalty back in the middle ages had royal blue and purple, those dyes were very hard to make so only royalty could afford to buy it, simple as that.
But if your greens and blues costs 3 slaves an ounce you sure as hell ain't gonna waste it painting on a wall, are ya?
Maybe if you're a 20 year old with perfect eyesight, but how many of those will be willing to buy $1000 TVs? The whole reason Blu Ray has been a flop is the average viewer can't tell the difference between an upscaled DVD and a BD enough to make it worth the money, and the last figures i saw had 3D TV also ending up in the "People don't buy this shit" column, so really who cares?
We ALL know why they are doing this, its the same reason they try to push 3D on us every so many years since the 1950s, its because it lets them charge more per butt in the seat, and i have no problem with that, I really don't. But when you look at what people are actually buying for their homes you see a shitload of 720P and 1080P bottom of the line sets, the 120Hz sets ain't selling for shit because frankly most people don't care and their DVDs aren't HD anyway so why should they spend the money?
Until they are selling 120Hz 60FPS sets for $199 at the Best Buy AND all the programming is also in that format? Give it up chuck, its another teeny tiny niche that won't sell for squat. I mean look at how many gave up their HD sats and cable for the compressed all to hell netflix, at the end of the day its "good enough" and that is all the masses give a shit about.
The problem is that as I have pointed out several times the mistaken belief that normal folks are gonna deal with all that bullshit just to save a few bucks, that inside every Suzy the checkout girl is a Bash programmer waiting to come out, that grandma is soaking in her tub with a book on how to compile from source. If they were to just say "All we want is to make an OS for programmers and system admins, we don't care about anybody else" then fine, glad to know somebody has found a teeny niche they are happy with serving, the same way eComStation supports older banking systems I have NO problem with that.
But pretending its a conspiracy, its the OEMs, its retailers like me that are keeping GPLed software from gaining is just insulting. At the end of the day most of my users are simply using the web so frankly it doesn't fucking matter WHAT OS I put on the thing, but my time is $35 an hour and at that price a single forum hunt because "update foo broke my drivers" quickly costs me more than a system builders copy of Win 7 and that is why I won't carry Linux, simple as that. It is simply unsuitable for the Home and SMB markets because it is just too likely to shit itself on the first update. I mean if my users have to have a second machine running Windows so they can Google for fixes when the first one craps the GPU driver and drops them in single user mode I mean why in the fuck wouldn't I just put on Windows in the first place and save my customers the time and hassle?
As I have said for years, as long as there is a redistribution clause things will NOT get any better, just different but NOT better. And frankly it isn't even about force, although I agree if you have to put a gun to their head the battle is already over, its about one simple fact: If you spend a million in R&D on a product and I can clone that product and undercut you or even offer it free because I have ZERO R&D costs because you did all the work, what is the incentive for you to send a million on R&D? None, there is NO incentive. Things get better on the server side because it fits the "blessed 3" in that the companies using Linux invest in it because they are selling NOT the software but access to the servers (hardware, #2 on the blessed 3) such as hosting or Google letting you use their servers for search in exchange for them showing you ads.
At the end of the day Apple and MSFT spend hundreds of millions on fixing their bugs so you can't compete unless your OS is at LEAST as polished as theirs, but without the money thanks to the blessed 3 all you get is half assed broken shit because for free all you are gonna get is egos and bad attitudes because the devs take the "its free, go fuck off if you don't like it" attitude since they can't be fired and aren't making squat.
But the problem with that kind of thinking is this Crosshair...any enemy that has tech good enough to smack out F-Teens out of the sky with our modern countermeasures? is gonna have nukes so its game over anyway, one EMP and most of the stuff is gonna be scrap (since last I checked most of our stuff ain't built for NBC wars) and what isn't is gonna be taken out by the incoming tactical nuke strikes.
I mean there is a REASON why we have never had another WWII since the 1940s, where we have gone up against a technological equal, its because they all got nukes now and nobody wants WWIII. Because of this the ONLY wars we are gonna get is proxy wars or goat herders, nobody is gonna risk a war between nuclear powers. hell even China whose behind Russia and the USA on nuke tech can make the entire west coast glow in the dark, so other than proxy fights and saber rattling we ain't gonna do shit to them and they ain't gonna do shit to us.
So if you are gonna plan for WWIII, then plan for WWIII and make everything NBC and be ready to hand out nuclear artillery and bombs, because if you look at the map the ones we have any chance of fighting today? no damned different than what we ran into in Iraq, 30+ year old Soviet junk that has been patched and upgraded piecemeal with frankly piss poor tactics and pilots. Iran, Syria, Africa, hell I doubt we'd even risk a fight with NK for fear the Chinese might get pissy or NK might lob a nuke at Seoul.
So it seems to me that when you look at actual likely targets we have the game plan down cold WITHOUT needing the tanks. You send in the stealths to blind the C&C and make their SAMS into scrap, which thanks to sats we know weeks in advance where all that shit is, you send in the wild weasels along with the first bombing runs after the stealths are done to take out any stragglers,, then once that is done between the APCs and air power any heavy tanks they try to move are just gonna be sitting ducks. Then the APCs do what they do best, which is mopping up the ground troops and crowd control.
So I would agree with you IF this was still the cold war and it looked like we may be rolling tanks across EU to face down the T-90s which are backed up by kick ass mobile SAMS, but the odds are better that you win the powerball 3 times in a row than that ever happening. Instead the biggest threats are the same thing we saw in desert storm I, a bunch of old Soviet shit backed up by a creaky as hell C&C that can be taken out with a single flight. I mean look at Iran Crosshair, their newest "big bad" plane is nothing but a knock off of the F-5s we sold them in...what? 1972? Just as their new gunships are nothing but home built knock offs of the cobras we sold the Shah.
at the end of the day unless we get a POTUS that is frankly batshit we just aren't gonna risk a nuclear nightmare by picking on somebody that could give us a fair fight, and the targets that this leaves simply isn't up to the challenge of even our 30 year old tech.
I think the death of XP will be the death of my refurbbing, Win 7 and 8 require more GPU power than these old P4s have and the cost of an AGP card and Win 7/8 will be more than these are worth so to the dump they'll go. I mean sure I could do like some of the other shops and slap on Win 7 Pirate Edition but I don't want to mess with hacker crap as its just not worth the trouble.
So when that day comes anything slower than a Pentium D or Athlon X2 will be stripped and go into the trash, just not worth the effort after XP is EOL.
In all these years I found ONE, just one mind you, use for an old P1, and that was an old lumber mill that had a C&C that would ONLY run on an ISA board running DOS 3. I ended up selling them my first 2 gamer boxes and those things were built like tanks so the C&C will have died before those two systems are both toast.
But any kind of day to day use there really isn't any point, you can find P4s being tossed all day long because nobody wants the things and they are several orders of magnitude faster than the top of the line P2 chips, much less the 386/486 chips. And if low power is your goal you can pick an Atom board for around $80, an AMD board for $100, or for $130 get the Bobcat kit where it is already in a nice VCR style case with PSU, just slap in a cheap 2gb RAMstick and a $20 HDD and you have a system for less than $200 that runs rings around the 386 while using less watts under load than a 386 box will use idling because the old PSUs were inefficient as hell.
Nope, I think the board it was in was a Tyan but the board got fried, I think they roasted a trace connecting the video to the rest of the board. That one seems to happen a lot around here, probably because the power lines in the main section of town is old as the hills and you get spikes and sags. hell the building I'm living in was built in 1929 and was built on a foundation that was poured before the civil war.
And you must start looking for a higher class of dumpster, I have a couple of guys that keep an eye out for me and i rarely get anything slower than a 2GHz anymore. in fact sitting across from me in the corner is a first gen Core Celeron, a Pentium D Media Center, and another dead socket A AMD, man I hate to keep tossing those as I always liked the AMD chips but the odds of me getting another socket A are slim to none and I already have two of the fastest socket As sitting in my CPU drawer. Its the same thing with those LGA775s, I have more of those CPUs than I ever could find boards for and its just not worth spending any money buying a board for those old chips.
Oh I wouldn't be surprised if some day they trip over a cave in the middle of nowhere and find proto-writing that dates a hell of a lot farther back. The problem is what was most likely used was red ochre which was the first easily gathered pigment. We know this because we have found red ochre dust in ancient graves. Problem is that red ochre chips and flakes off quite easily so if you want writing to last thousands of years that ain't the stuff to be using for the paint.
But you can take a little kid, barely able to walk and talk, hand him some finger paints and he is gonna start drawing showing that the creative spark to express is about as natural as breathing to the human animal. Since all proto-writing started off as crude shapes that represented real world objects that simply got more abstract as time went on and it was used more then if humans have a natural desire to create and express it is logical to think they would have started as soon as they had paint. Even the cave drawings we have found seem to be depicting stories, such as hunts or great battles, so who is to say there isn't some cave we haven't found yet with the first primitive writing going back long before when we thought it started?
Our leaders aren't psychopaths...they are sociopaths, there is a difference you know. Psychopaths will do things that aren't in their best interests whereas with American politicians no matter who ELSE has to get screwed they are getting the money and the book deal, count on it.
Exactly, they have ruined their rep when it comes to email because they have been so spammy so myself and everybody I know automatically have anything emailed from FB go straight to spam. I mean you expect us to actually read a single email after you sent us something like 400 spam posts about any stupid Zynga game anybody we know has ever played?
The only logical thing one can deduce from this is that they simply didn't want their users openions on the matter, as all they would have done is have a click through when you logged into FB and they would have had damned near 100% participation. The fact they didn't use what would be the most obvious avenue for anybody with a functioning brain cell just shows they wanted to slip this one under the door without looking like they were saying "fuck you!" to the users. Oh and FYI that is EXACTLY what they are doing, as the votes they DID get said in giant letters "DO NOT WANT" yet they are completely ignoring those users because they didn't get 30%...which they went out of their way to make sure they wouldn't get!
Exactly a nuke isn't gonna be worth much if you can't even hit within 20 miles of your target, especially since what i read on their nuke tests had the thing about a little over half the Hiroshima bomb. So with a nuke that weak (as far as nukes go) you are not only gonna have to have a delivery system accurate enough to get within a couple of miles of the target but you're also gonna have to be able to get it to burst at just the right height for maximum damage.
But from the looks of things what we have here is similar to what a lot of third world dictatorships have tried to do, and that is take the old Scud designs and just make it bigger with more stages. Problem is the Scud was basically a rocket artillery system, it just wasn't ever designed for long range accuracy because that is what the Soviets had the ICBMs for, but of course they didn't export their ICBMs (that I know of, could be wrong) so all these different countries, Iraq, Iran, NK, built around the Scud because that is what they could get their hands on.
So I really think this is a combo of weenie waving and insurance, weenie waving so they don't look as weak as they actually are and insurance to keep someone like the UN, China, or the USA from deciding that regime change is in order. All that will end up coming of this is they'll end up getting some more aid to prop them up awhile longer and when that runs out you'll have another weenie waving event to remind the world they are still there and to get another aid check.
But we have yet to see them have a 100% successful test of their rockets and from what we have seen these things couldn't hit a barn the size of Kansas, much less target the USA with the thing. Hell I'd be more worried about the damned thing blowing up over NK and having radiation spread all over the Korean peninsula than I would be them actually being able to target a US city, they just don't seem to have the expertise.
Not to mention who don't like to fuck with those irritating poll takers? I had a friend that every time was asked about religion on what of those stupid things would put down "The Church Of The SubGenius" and I have switched back and forth between the FSM and since George Carlin passed I list "The Great Electron" because of that bit he did on religion.
So who wouldn't think it was funny to list themselves as Jedi if that were an option? After all this IS the same country that gave birth to The Ministry of Silly Walks.
Not to mention everybody seems to be ignoring some pretty relevant facts about the case. 1.-The cops talked to Assange before he left, said there was no reason to hold him, 2.- Both girls said it was NOT rape, in fact one actually went out while he was asleep and bought him breakfast and then had sex with him again after he ate, 3.- There is NOTHING in Swedish law that says you have to question anybody only on Swedish soil, in fact there are several cases on record where Swedish police have questioned people in other countries, and finally the most telling 4.- The UK said they would be happy to send him over, and his lawyers said the same thing if they would agree to a simple statement saying he was NOT gonna be handed over to the USA where he would be made an example of. The Swedish authorities REFUSED to agree to this simple statement, which should frankly be all the evidence you need that this don't have jack shit to do with a sexual misconduct charge since that is a local beef.
So if anybody actually believes it has a damned thing to do with Assange not wearing a rubber I have some magic beans you might be interested in. he aired the dirty laundry of the USA, and while they were able to get their puppets in the press to cover it up and spend all their time talking about how Assange was an evil rapist terrorist monster, they still want Assange to make an "example" out of him so the next Manning to come along will not only be scared shitless of his own safety but anybody that could possibly publish what evidence he has will say "Fuck that, look what they did to Assange!" which is also known as a chilling effect.
I urge everyone here to watch The End Of America by journalist Naomi Wolf, where she lays out step by step using historical evidence on how a free society quickly becomes non free and the "playbook" as she calls it on how that comes about. this isn't paranoia, in fact she is VERY conservative about each of the steps that have already happened here, more conservative than i think she should be actually. But as you watch the video don't forget to remind yourself that this little Jewish girl is now on the TSA watchlist and gets the third degree every time she tries to board a plane, her crime? Talking about constitutional law and what rights the American people have.
So anybody that thinks Assange would be safe or would get a fair shake if he goes to Sweden needs to remember that if a little middle class Jewish girl can end up on the watchlist for the express purpose of harassing her for daring to talk about constitutional rights then frankly nobody is safe.
To me what proves the redistribution clause is simply a way for RMS to try to force everyone to work for free is one simple fact...the printer story, which RMS claims is what made him realize the need for free software would be completely solved without having the redistribution clause. Would he be able to fix his problem? yep, he'd have the code. Could he modify it? Yes again, because he would have the code sitting right there. Could he share his modifications so everyone could fix the same problem? Game mods are released for non free games all the time, often with the encouragement of the company, so no change there. the ONLY thing that would change is that GPL software wouldn't be trapped by the "blessed 3" ways of survival so that companies like Canonical could actually fix bugs, clean up messy code, and provide QA and QC without going broke doing so.
And you are correct that many in the community use "free as in beer" as an excuse to push out crappy buggy software, under the guise of "If its free you can't complain!" which I always counter with "If somebody offered you a 'free sandwich' and it turned out to be 95% shit and 5% ham, would you eat it?" because you give me free garbage and its still garbage, it does nothing to help me and instead hinders me because I'm dealing with frankly amateur hour bugs because nobody can make a living fixing them so they don't get fixed.
At the end of the day if their goal is to get people to actually use free software then quality HAS to be job #1, otherwise the vast majority just won't bother. you look at the feature set of LO and compare it to MSO there just isn't any comparison, its like saying Gimp can be a drop in replacement for Photoshop. Are there people that can get their work done in LO and Gimp? Sure but they are a minority that frankly are using so little of the features they could just as easily use something web based like Google docs and get the same results.
I would argue that this, this right here, is why the more locked down proprietary stuff is winning and GPL software is more and more being left out, because "free as in freedom!" is being used as a crutch and since most software won't fit under the blessed 3 model then it simply won't get any better. Notice how I asked how games and desktops could survive under the blessed 3 and never got a single answer? because there isn't one, the blessed 3 only works in a couple of niches and even in the enterprise support contracts are dying in favor of web based and consultants, so soon GPL will be even more marginalized under the blessed 2, whereas those that can actually make their living selling software will have the resources to make their product better.
Hell I can take a copy of XP RTM, install my drivers and software, then upgrade it through all 3 service packs AND all the patches that came after and every single driver and app will still be working, could you do the same with ANY Linux distro? I think we all know the answer to that, and that is why Linux has no share on the desktop, even with MSFT charging over $100 a copy.
Actually that is why I'm either loved or hated anywhere I go on the net (when I told a friend of mine my handle he said "Oh yeah I've heard of you, half the guys I hang out with think you'd be great to have a beer with, the other half hopes you die of ass cancer!") because the two things I absolutely loathe are "magical thinking" and hypocrisy so when i see the same old groupthink and bullshit being spewed as gospel i just have to destroy them with the truth.
And I actually enjoy it when they run back to their bubble, no different than how I get a nice warm fuzzy feeling when some FOSS zealot calls me shill or astroturfer or troll (I call 'em FOSSies because like Moonies it becomes a religion to them, and those three words are their equivalent of faggot, nigger, and cocksucker) because it lets the entire audience see how full of shit they really are. Its always the same, I'll point out facts which bursts their magical thinking, they will try to come up with a counter, I'll hit them with citations backing up the facts, then it always ends with them calling me filthy names like "shill" or "You're one of THEM!" which just shows everyone how they simply can't come up with any actual evidence to back up their position so all they can do is call names like a 14 year old Halo player that just got spanked.
So I would argue that it IS bursting their bubble, because the whole point of them pushing their shit on the net is to gain more followers and by pointing out all the holes in their magical thinking all they can do is go "La La La, I'm right faggot, La La LA" which of course makes them look like little punks and helps turn people sitting on the fence AWAY from their cause, thus negating the entire point of placing it on the web in the first place.
At the end of the day I don't care what "ism" it is, communism, capitalism, libertarianism, it ALL has the same basic flaw, the magical thinking that says "If only X would happen then everyone would play fair and things would be better!" which time and time again has proven to be a lie. It ALWAYS starts the same, the "ism" is implemented and soon after those with wealth start manipulating the rules to consolidate power, it becomes more and more corrupt, until finally the people lose faith in the "ism" and the whole thing, either peacefully or by violent overthrow, collapses only for the whole thing to start over with a different "ism".
You see THIS is why I would argue keeping 386 (hell anything below the P4, that's the 686 right?) is just pointless, its not like even the poorest of the poor is gonna be trying to run a 386 or 486 anymore, hell you can find freebies and dumpster bait several orders of magnitude faster than that so its really pointless.
And I know what you mean about older hardware, we PC shop guys are notorious for being packrats but there comes a time when you just have to let that stuff go. Hell I really need to clean out the chip drawer at the shop as there are several working CPUs in there I just know I'm never gonna trip over a free board for and even if I did nobody would want it, but I just hate throwing out working gear, ya know?
But there just isn't a point in 386 or 486 support, not when you can get an ARM thumbstick for $25 that will run rings around it while using less power than a 486 PSU loses to heat, if you just have to have x86 support you can find those AMD Bobcat boards for less than $100 while being 80 TIMES faster (1600MHz X2) and using less than 10w of power for most loads.
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I have to wonder how much of the supposed "obesity" and illnesses can end up being traced to all the chemicals we are ingesting and are exposed to every damned day of our lives? I had a friend that was always sick with one thing or another, had problems with his weight, moved out into the middle of nowhere in the desert and all of his problems went away once he was no longer sucking down chemicals all the time.
You look at the tests of the water that comes out the tap, the foods we eat, hell you can test the blood of a newborn and find plastic floating in the bloodstream. I would love to see someone just set vials up with the correct amounts of this and that chemical that the average person in the USA ingests because i'm sure it would shock most people.
This is why I think E-Readers are doomed. My family and friends that like books like more than the LOOK of the book, they like the feel, they like the smell, they like being able to just chunk it around, dog ear a page, etc. Whereas those that like digital devices will naturally like something that can read AND surf AND check their email AND watch videos.
If the price of E-Ink had dropped a LOT faster, if they would have come up with even 16 bit color, then maybe E-Readers would have some life left, but when you can get a 1.2Ghz Cortex A8 tablet with ICS for $80-$100? Well its obvious to me which one is gonna be the winner. Mark my words, tablets with dual core CPUs for less than $60 this time next year for a 7 inch, which will be the final nail in the coffin.
Hell its STILL a ripoff Godel, I often see new DVDs for $10-$12, the same movie in BD, no extras, no nothing, is close to $40.
With DVD all the hassles of VHS are gone and I've seen good upscaling DVD players for as little as $50. Most people i know look at a DVD on their new widescreen and say "It looks okay to me" and that is the end of that, they just don't see paying sometimes triple the cost for a BD when the DVD is "good enough" for them.
Again there is a pretty big difference, the psycho will do things that are NOT in their best interests, the socio does EVERYTHING for their best interests. A psycho might shoot up a rest home, the socio will steal their retirement money and leave them to starve with zero remorse.
This difference is always why you see plenty of sociopaths in politics and as CEOs, its that "the world revolves around me, fuck everybody else" attitude that lets them make vast fortunes. Look at Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, i would argue both were sociopaths. While Woz was building the Apple II Steve fucked him out of his share on a breakout game they sold to Atari. Did Steve need the money? Fuck no, he was a Berkeley grad with rich parents but he didn't care because he deserved all the money as far as he was concerned, it didn't matter that he didn't write a line of code, he sold it so fuck the guy that made it, friend or not. You see the same thing plenty of times in Gates' history as well, including smiling to Job's face and lying his ass off while he was stealing the Mac design for Windows.
So I'd say its a pretty big difference, not too many real psychos that run fortune 50 companies, plenty of socios that do, because at the end of the day this is THEIR world, you are merely here to serve THEM as far as they are concerned.
Actually on some boards you could undervolt the P4 so it wasn't as bad of a piggie, and the 65nm Cedar Mill chips weren't too bad either, about 85w which is average for a desktop. While I agree that the P4 wasn't a great chip the simple fact is the jobs most folks have, surfing, burning CDs, listening to music, all of those can be done on a 2Ghz P4 just fine, especially if it has 2gb of RAM.
But I have nothing but good things to say of the Athlons of that time, pretty much the polar opposite of the power piggie bulldozers of today. in fact I still have a socket 754 sempron that I use for a nettop at the shop, maxes out at around 35w and for surfing and downloading it runs just fine, even Win 7 runs fine as long as I don't care about Aero which I don't.
Because you WILL run into programs that will still shit themselves on 64bit OSes sadly. I ran into this when I first switched back in 05, it turned out the disk catalog program I had been using for the better part of a decade had 16/32 bit code in its DLLs and the company no longer existed, boy that was "fun" having to re-scan every damned backup discs i had going back to 1998. I also found that certain programs like Solidworks and Quickbooks can be picky as hell when it comes to which bit the OS is, in fact SW only started supporting 64 bit in 2009, before that the program would crap itself if you tried to run on a 64bit OS. I had a customer who kept an Athlon X2 with Win 7 32 just for his SW.
As for why run Win 7 32bit? the memory management on XP was deep fried ass, that's why. You can fire up both XP 32 and XP 64 and compare them to Win 7 and its like a bad joke, XP will pimpslap the shit out of swap, even when there was plenty of memory free, in fact until Win 7 came out I was using a RAMDisk just to speed up XP so it would quit slamming the HDD even though I had memory. With Win 7 what you think is "bloat" is actually caching which DOES make a BIG difference, with the 8Gb I have now on XP X64 I would have less than 2Gb used and it would start smacking the swap, with Win 7 I have just 500Mb of RAM free but that is because all the programs I use are cached in RAM which means no waiting, its instantly launched.
Nobody around here uses UPS, hence why I see so many burnt boards and why my chip drawer is always fricking full. yeah shame you don't live nearby as i thow away 1.4Ghz-1.8Ghz P4s all the damed time, I always hated those socket 423 and 478 P4s, suck too much power.
And yeah seeing a cooked Tyan made me a sad panda, but seeing cooked AMD boards always makes me a sad panda anyway, back in the day i loved the hell out of those T-Birds and Barton chips. Still waiting for a good 754 Athlon to walk through the door, I have a 1.8Ghz Sempron 754 I use as a nettop in the shop, uses hardly any power and quiet as a churchmouse but I keep getting socket As dammit.
But as I said the throw aways now are starting to get some early pentium Ds and Athlon X2s, of course the bitch is the laptops, hate to throw those away but good luck working on them. I got a C2D in my closet that needs a screen, a C2D that just needs a keyboard replacement, nice 17 inch I may keep that myself for a spare, and the one that makes me a sad pands every time I open the closet, a 12 inch netbook with an ACTUAL ATHLON X2, not a Bobcat but an actual to God Athlon X2 with an HD4350 discrete with 256Mb of memory! That one the guy ran over the power cord with the vaccuum and cut it in half while it was plugged in, don't know if he fried the power input or what, one of these days I'm gonna have to take it to the cell phone shop down the street and see if they can fix it for me, having a real Athlon in a netbook would be sweeeeet!
I do, plenty of poor single moms out there that would like to have a PC but ain't got one. usually the only thing they are paying from me is for a cheap USB/mouse combo because most of the units came with ball mice and I ain't letting anybody keep that garbage, trying to keep a ball mouse working was too big a PITA.
let your old pal hairy show ya what to do, what you do is go by some of the local charities, His House, churches, places where folks go when they are hurting and let them know you are giving away some stuff and they WILL end up either knowing somebody that can use it or find somebody who can, and once the word gets around you'll have more folks needing machines than you got machines to hand out. Here's a little story about one that really touched me..
So I just got done replacing the units in this SMB which they let me keep the old P4s, these were those little bookshelf type Compaqs and Dells, what I would do is slap in a boot and nuke in front of them after moving anything they wanted to keep and just zero out the drives. So I got my truck loaded up when this old school chum that is teaching a typing class at a battered women's shelter calls me up, asks if I can swing by and see if I can upgrade this gal's PC. he says it won't run the software and she needs to be able to practice at home. So I get there and I swear its a fricking Win 3.1 setup, we're talking MAYBE 10Mhz with like 2mb of RAM, this is in 2007 BTW. So I get to looking and I can hear him telling her "Don't you worry, my buddy is a wiz and if he can't boost it nobody can" so I tell her "Where is your car at? back it up to my truck" and i pop the trunk lid on my bed and start loading her a couple of the units.
She says "Oh I can't afford to buy any right now" and I tell her she is doing me a favor, I don't have the room in the shop for these and they are ready to go, fresh installs of XP and everything. Well I load her up with the full boat, monitors and all, and she is crying like anything then because she can't believe anybody would just give her computers like that. Anyway i get an email from my buddy 6 months later, he helped her find a decent job in a little office somewhere and she brought one of the PCs back to him once she got her a laptop so he could pass it to somebody else, the other unit being used by her kids for schoolwork.
So yeah, you can still do some good, you just have to let the right folks know you are willing to help out.
Since forever? Look up "Send texts from your PC" to see there are hundreds of services and programs that will let you shoot out a text using a PC, this is how all those spammers send those "You have won a (insert company) $1000 gift card!" text spams, you can even use a botnet to send the texts so you don't even pay for Internet other than the C&C.
Its actually quite simple if one thinks about it. Red ochre was plentiful and black can be made with the carbon from any fire, so there ya go. I'm sure the other colors were much harder to gather and were a bigger pain to deal with so they were most likely only used for very special things, such as painting the corpse of a fallen king. After all this is why royalty back in the middle ages had royal blue and purple, those dyes were very hard to make so only royalty could afford to buy it, simple as that.
But if your greens and blues costs 3 slaves an ounce you sure as hell ain't gonna waste it painting on a wall, are ya?
Maybe if you're a 20 year old with perfect eyesight, but how many of those will be willing to buy $1000 TVs? The whole reason Blu Ray has been a flop is the average viewer can't tell the difference between an upscaled DVD and a BD enough to make it worth the money, and the last figures i saw had 3D TV also ending up in the "People don't buy this shit" column, so really who cares?
We ALL know why they are doing this, its the same reason they try to push 3D on us every so many years since the 1950s, its because it lets them charge more per butt in the seat, and i have no problem with that, I really don't. But when you look at what people are actually buying for their homes you see a shitload of 720P and 1080P bottom of the line sets, the 120Hz sets ain't selling for shit because frankly most people don't care and their DVDs aren't HD anyway so why should they spend the money?
Until they are selling 120Hz 60FPS sets for $199 at the Best Buy AND all the programming is also in that format? Give it up chuck, its another teeny tiny niche that won't sell for squat. I mean look at how many gave up their HD sats and cable for the compressed all to hell netflix, at the end of the day its "good enough" and that is all the masses give a shit about.
The problem is that as I have pointed out several times the mistaken belief that normal folks are gonna deal with all that bullshit just to save a few bucks, that inside every Suzy the checkout girl is a Bash programmer waiting to come out, that grandma is soaking in her tub with a book on how to compile from source. If they were to just say "All we want is to make an OS for programmers and system admins, we don't care about anybody else" then fine, glad to know somebody has found a teeny niche they are happy with serving, the same way eComStation supports older banking systems I have NO problem with that.
But pretending its a conspiracy, its the OEMs, its retailers like me that are keeping GPLed software from gaining is just insulting. At the end of the day most of my users are simply using the web so frankly it doesn't fucking matter WHAT OS I put on the thing, but my time is $35 an hour and at that price a single forum hunt because "update foo broke my drivers" quickly costs me more than a system builders copy of Win 7 and that is why I won't carry Linux, simple as that. It is simply unsuitable for the Home and SMB markets because it is just too likely to shit itself on the first update. I mean if my users have to have a second machine running Windows so they can Google for fixes when the first one craps the GPU driver and drops them in single user mode I mean why in the fuck wouldn't I just put on Windows in the first place and save my customers the time and hassle?
As I have said for years, as long as there is a redistribution clause things will NOT get any better, just different but NOT better. And frankly it isn't even about force, although I agree if you have to put a gun to their head the battle is already over, its about one simple fact: If you spend a million in R&D on a product and I can clone that product and undercut you or even offer it free because I have ZERO R&D costs because you did all the work, what is the incentive for you to send a million on R&D? None, there is NO incentive. Things get better on the server side because it fits the "blessed 3" in that the companies using Linux invest in it because they are selling NOT the software but access to the servers (hardware, #2 on the blessed 3) such as hosting or Google letting you use their servers for search in exchange for them showing you ads.
At the end of the day Apple and MSFT spend hundreds of millions on fixing their bugs so you can't compete unless your OS is at LEAST as polished as theirs, but without the money thanks to the blessed 3 all you get is half assed broken shit because for free all you are gonna get is egos and bad attitudes because the devs take the "its free, go fuck off if you don't like it" attitude since they can't be fired and aren't making squat.
But the problem with that kind of thinking is this Crosshair...any enemy that has tech good enough to smack out F-Teens out of the sky with our modern countermeasures? is gonna have nukes so its game over anyway, one EMP and most of the stuff is gonna be scrap (since last I checked most of our stuff ain't built for NBC wars) and what isn't is gonna be taken out by the incoming tactical nuke strikes.
I mean there is a REASON why we have never had another WWII since the 1940s, where we have gone up against a technological equal, its because they all got nukes now and nobody wants WWIII. Because of this the ONLY wars we are gonna get is proxy wars or goat herders, nobody is gonna risk a war between nuclear powers. hell even China whose behind Russia and the USA on nuke tech can make the entire west coast glow in the dark, so other than proxy fights and saber rattling we ain't gonna do shit to them and they ain't gonna do shit to us.
So if you are gonna plan for WWIII, then plan for WWIII and make everything NBC and be ready to hand out nuclear artillery and bombs, because if you look at the map the ones we have any chance of fighting today? no damned different than what we ran into in Iraq, 30+ year old Soviet junk that has been patched and upgraded piecemeal with frankly piss poor tactics and pilots. Iran, Syria, Africa, hell I doubt we'd even risk a fight with NK for fear the Chinese might get pissy or NK might lob a nuke at Seoul.
So it seems to me that when you look at actual likely targets we have the game plan down cold WITHOUT needing the tanks. You send in the stealths to blind the C&C and make their SAMS into scrap, which thanks to sats we know weeks in advance where all that shit is, you send in the wild weasels along with the first bombing runs after the stealths are done to take out any stragglers,, then once that is done between the APCs and air power any heavy tanks they try to move are just gonna be sitting ducks. Then the APCs do what they do best, which is mopping up the ground troops and crowd control.
So I would agree with you IF this was still the cold war and it looked like we may be rolling tanks across EU to face down the T-90s which are backed up by kick ass mobile SAMS, but the odds are better that you win the powerball 3 times in a row than that ever happening. Instead the biggest threats are the same thing we saw in desert storm I, a bunch of old Soviet shit backed up by a creaky as hell C&C that can be taken out with a single flight. I mean look at Iran Crosshair, their newest "big bad" plane is nothing but a knock off of the F-5s we sold them in...what? 1972? Just as their new gunships are nothing but home built knock offs of the cobras we sold the Shah.
at the end of the day unless we get a POTUS that is frankly batshit we just aren't gonna risk a nuclear nightmare by picking on somebody that could give us a fair fight, and the targets that this leaves simply isn't up to the challenge of even our 30 year old tech.
I think the death of XP will be the death of my refurbbing, Win 7 and 8 require more GPU power than these old P4s have and the cost of an AGP card and Win 7/8 will be more than these are worth so to the dump they'll go. I mean sure I could do like some of the other shops and slap on Win 7 Pirate Edition but I don't want to mess with hacker crap as its just not worth the trouble.
So when that day comes anything slower than a Pentium D or Athlon X2 will be stripped and go into the trash, just not worth the effort after XP is EOL.
In all these years I found ONE, just one mind you, use for an old P1, and that was an old lumber mill that had a C&C that would ONLY run on an ISA board running DOS 3. I ended up selling them my first 2 gamer boxes and those things were built like tanks so the C&C will have died before those two systems are both toast.
But any kind of day to day use there really isn't any point, you can find P4s being tossed all day long because nobody wants the things and they are several orders of magnitude faster than the top of the line P2 chips, much less the 386/486 chips. And if low power is your goal you can pick an Atom board for around $80, an AMD board for $100, or for $130 get the Bobcat kit where it is already in a nice VCR style case with PSU, just slap in a cheap 2gb RAMstick and a $20 HDD and you have a system for less than $200 that runs rings around the 386 while using less watts under load than a 386 box will use idling because the old PSUs were inefficient as hell.
Nope, I think the board it was in was a Tyan but the board got fried, I think they roasted a trace connecting the video to the rest of the board. That one seems to happen a lot around here, probably because the power lines in the main section of town is old as the hills and you get spikes and sags. hell the building I'm living in was built in 1929 and was built on a foundation that was poured before the civil war.
And you must start looking for a higher class of dumpster, I have a couple of guys that keep an eye out for me and i rarely get anything slower than a 2GHz anymore. in fact sitting across from me in the corner is a first gen Core Celeron, a Pentium D Media Center, and another dead socket A AMD, man I hate to keep tossing those as I always liked the AMD chips but the odds of me getting another socket A are slim to none and I already have two of the fastest socket As sitting in my CPU drawer. Its the same thing with those LGA775s, I have more of those CPUs than I ever could find boards for and its just not worth spending any money buying a board for those old chips.
Oh I wouldn't be surprised if some day they trip over a cave in the middle of nowhere and find proto-writing that dates a hell of a lot farther back. The problem is what was most likely used was red ochre which was the first easily gathered pigment. We know this because we have found red ochre dust in ancient graves. Problem is that red ochre chips and flakes off quite easily so if you want writing to last thousands of years that ain't the stuff to be using for the paint.
But you can take a little kid, barely able to walk and talk, hand him some finger paints and he is gonna start drawing showing that the creative spark to express is about as natural as breathing to the human animal. Since all proto-writing started off as crude shapes that represented real world objects that simply got more abstract as time went on and it was used more then if humans have a natural desire to create and express it is logical to think they would have started as soon as they had paint. Even the cave drawings we have found seem to be depicting stories, such as hunts or great battles, so who is to say there isn't some cave we haven't found yet with the first primitive writing going back long before when we thought it started?
Our leaders aren't psychopaths...they are sociopaths, there is a difference you know. Psychopaths will do things that aren't in their best interests whereas with American politicians no matter who ELSE has to get screwed they are getting the money and the book deal, count on it.
Exactly, they have ruined their rep when it comes to email because they have been so spammy so myself and everybody I know automatically have anything emailed from FB go straight to spam. I mean you expect us to actually read a single email after you sent us something like 400 spam posts about any stupid Zynga game anybody we know has ever played?
The only logical thing one can deduce from this is that they simply didn't want their users openions on the matter, as all they would have done is have a click through when you logged into FB and they would have had damned near 100% participation. The fact they didn't use what would be the most obvious avenue for anybody with a functioning brain cell just shows they wanted to slip this one under the door without looking like they were saying "fuck you!" to the users. Oh and FYI that is EXACTLY what they are doing, as the votes they DID get said in giant letters "DO NOT WANT" yet they are completely ignoring those users because they didn't get 30%...which they went out of their way to make sure they wouldn't get!
Exactly a nuke isn't gonna be worth much if you can't even hit within 20 miles of your target, especially since what i read on their nuke tests had the thing about a little over half the Hiroshima bomb. So with a nuke that weak (as far as nukes go) you are not only gonna have to have a delivery system accurate enough to get within a couple of miles of the target but you're also gonna have to be able to get it to burst at just the right height for maximum damage.
But from the looks of things what we have here is similar to what a lot of third world dictatorships have tried to do, and that is take the old Scud designs and just make it bigger with more stages. Problem is the Scud was basically a rocket artillery system, it just wasn't ever designed for long range accuracy because that is what the Soviets had the ICBMs for, but of course they didn't export their ICBMs (that I know of, could be wrong) so all these different countries, Iraq, Iran, NK, built around the Scud because that is what they could get their hands on.
So I really think this is a combo of weenie waving and insurance, weenie waving so they don't look as weak as they actually are and insurance to keep someone like the UN, China, or the USA from deciding that regime change is in order. All that will end up coming of this is they'll end up getting some more aid to prop them up awhile longer and when that runs out you'll have another weenie waving event to remind the world they are still there and to get another aid check.
But we have yet to see them have a 100% successful test of their rockets and from what we have seen these things couldn't hit a barn the size of Kansas, much less target the USA with the thing. Hell I'd be more worried about the damned thing blowing up over NK and having radiation spread all over the Korean peninsula than I would be them actually being able to target a US city, they just don't seem to have the expertise.
Not to mention who don't like to fuck with those irritating poll takers? I had a friend that every time was asked about religion on what of those stupid things would put down "The Church Of The SubGenius" and I have switched back and forth between the FSM and since George Carlin passed I list "The Great Electron" because of that bit he did on religion.
So who wouldn't think it was funny to list themselves as Jedi if that were an option? After all this IS the same country that gave birth to The Ministry of Silly Walks.
Not to mention everybody seems to be ignoring some pretty relevant facts about the case. 1.-The cops talked to Assange before he left, said there was no reason to hold him, 2.- Both girls said it was NOT rape, in fact one actually went out while he was asleep and bought him breakfast and then had sex with him again after he ate, 3.- There is NOTHING in Swedish law that says you have to question anybody only on Swedish soil, in fact there are several cases on record where Swedish police have questioned people in other countries, and finally the most telling 4.- The UK said they would be happy to send him over, and his lawyers said the same thing if they would agree to a simple statement saying he was NOT gonna be handed over to the USA where he would be made an example of. The Swedish authorities REFUSED to agree to this simple statement, which should frankly be all the evidence you need that this don't have jack shit to do with a sexual misconduct charge since that is a local beef.
So if anybody actually believes it has a damned thing to do with Assange not wearing a rubber I have some magic beans you might be interested in. he aired the dirty laundry of the USA, and while they were able to get their puppets in the press to cover it up and spend all their time talking about how Assange was an evil rapist terrorist monster, they still want Assange to make an "example" out of him so the next Manning to come along will not only be scared shitless of his own safety but anybody that could possibly publish what evidence he has will say "Fuck that, look what they did to Assange!" which is also known as a chilling effect.
I urge everyone here to watch The End Of America by journalist Naomi Wolf, where she lays out step by step using historical evidence on how a free society quickly becomes non free and the "playbook" as she calls it on how that comes about. this isn't paranoia, in fact she is VERY conservative about each of the steps that have already happened here, more conservative than i think she should be actually. But as you watch the video don't forget to remind yourself that this little Jewish girl is now on the TSA watchlist and gets the third degree every time she tries to board a plane, her crime? Talking about constitutional law and what rights the American people have.
So anybody that thinks Assange would be safe or would get a fair shake if he goes to Sweden needs to remember that if a little middle class Jewish girl can end up on the watchlist for the express purpose of harassing her for daring to talk about constitutional rights then frankly nobody is safe.
To me what proves the redistribution clause is simply a way for RMS to try to force everyone to work for free is one simple fact...the printer story, which RMS claims is what made him realize the need for free software would be completely solved without having the redistribution clause. Would he be able to fix his problem? yep, he'd have the code. Could he modify it? Yes again, because he would have the code sitting right there. Could he share his modifications so everyone could fix the same problem? Game mods are released for non free games all the time, often with the encouragement of the company, so no change there. the ONLY thing that would change is that GPL software wouldn't be trapped by the "blessed 3" ways of survival so that companies like Canonical could actually fix bugs, clean up messy code, and provide QA and QC without going broke doing so.
And you are correct that many in the community use "free as in beer" as an excuse to push out crappy buggy software, under the guise of "If its free you can't complain!" which I always counter with "If somebody offered you a 'free sandwich' and it turned out to be 95% shit and 5% ham, would you eat it?" because you give me free garbage and its still garbage, it does nothing to help me and instead hinders me because I'm dealing with frankly amateur hour bugs because nobody can make a living fixing them so they don't get fixed.
At the end of the day if their goal is to get people to actually use free software then quality HAS to be job #1, otherwise the vast majority just won't bother. you look at the feature set of LO and compare it to MSO there just isn't any comparison, its like saying Gimp can be a drop in replacement for Photoshop. Are there people that can get their work done in LO and Gimp? Sure but they are a minority that frankly are using so little of the features they could just as easily use something web based like Google docs and get the same results.
I would argue that this, this right here, is why the more locked down proprietary stuff is winning and GPL software is more and more being left out, because "free as in freedom!" is being used as a crutch and since most software won't fit under the blessed 3 model then it simply won't get any better. Notice how I asked how games and desktops could survive under the blessed 3 and never got a single answer? because there isn't one, the blessed 3 only works in a couple of niches and even in the enterprise support contracts are dying in favor of web based and consultants, so soon GPL will be even more marginalized under the blessed 2, whereas those that can actually make their living selling software will have the resources to make their product better.
Hell I can take a copy of XP RTM, install my drivers and software, then upgrade it through all 3 service packs AND all the patches that came after and every single driver and app will still be working, could you do the same with ANY Linux distro? I think we all know the answer to that, and that is why Linux has no share on the desktop, even with MSFT charging over $100 a copy.
Actually that is why I'm either loved or hated anywhere I go on the net (when I told a friend of mine my handle he said "Oh yeah I've heard of you, half the guys I hang out with think you'd be great to have a beer with, the other half hopes you die of ass cancer!") because the two things I absolutely loathe are "magical thinking" and hypocrisy so when i see the same old groupthink and bullshit being spewed as gospel i just have to destroy them with the truth.
And I actually enjoy it when they run back to their bubble, no different than how I get a nice warm fuzzy feeling when some FOSS zealot calls me shill or astroturfer or troll (I call 'em FOSSies because like Moonies it becomes a religion to them, and those three words are their equivalent of faggot, nigger, and cocksucker) because it lets the entire audience see how full of shit they really are. Its always the same, I'll point out facts which bursts their magical thinking, they will try to come up with a counter, I'll hit them with citations backing up the facts, then it always ends with them calling me filthy names like "shill" or "You're one of THEM!" which just shows everyone how they simply can't come up with any actual evidence to back up their position so all they can do is call names like a 14 year old Halo player that just got spanked.
So I would argue that it IS bursting their bubble, because the whole point of them pushing their shit on the net is to gain more followers and by pointing out all the holes in their magical thinking all they can do is go "La La La, I'm right faggot, La La LA" which of course makes them look like little punks and helps turn people sitting on the fence AWAY from their cause, thus negating the entire point of placing it on the web in the first place.
At the end of the day I don't care what "ism" it is, communism, capitalism, libertarianism, it ALL has the same basic flaw, the magical thinking that says "If only X would happen then everyone would play fair and things would be better!" which time and time again has proven to be a lie. It ALWAYS starts the same, the "ism" is implemented and soon after those with wealth start manipulating the rules to consolidate power, it becomes more and more corrupt, until finally the people lose faith in the "ism" and the whole thing, either peacefully or by violent overthrow, collapses only for the whole thing to start over with a different "ism".
You see THIS is why I would argue keeping 386 (hell anything below the P4, that's the 686 right?) is just pointless, its not like even the poorest of the poor is gonna be trying to run a 386 or 486 anymore, hell you can find freebies and dumpster bait several orders of magnitude faster than that so its really pointless.
And I know what you mean about older hardware, we PC shop guys are notorious for being packrats but there comes a time when you just have to let that stuff go. Hell I really need to clean out the chip drawer at the shop as there are several working CPUs in there I just know I'm never gonna trip over a free board for and even if I did nobody would want it, but I just hate throwing out working gear, ya know?
But there just isn't a point in 386 or 486 support, not when you can get an ARM thumbstick for $25 that will run rings around it while using less power than a 486 PSU loses to heat, if you just have to have x86 support you can find those AMD Bobcat boards for less than $100 while being 80 TIMES faster (1600MHz X2) and using less than 10w of power for most loads.