What is pathetic is that every one of us who did the testing on the DP and CP told MSFT repeatedly this was a BAD move, and if you'd have asked any of us retailers we'd have been happy to point out why. As of this moment less than 2% of the X86 units are touch screens and Win 8 just sucks balls without touch, also the metro UI is so obviously designed for tablets and NOT for desktops that it hurts. For example the left right swipe, which makes sense on a tablet you are holding like a book but its a royal PITA to deal with on a non touch laptop with a touchpad.
In the end I think this little anecdote about my personal experience with Win 8 pretty much says it all. I had Win 8 running in my shop on a NICE AMD mini-tower, we're talking triple core Athlon with 4 Gb of RAM, 500Gb HDD and DVD burner, all wrapped up in this very sharp red and black case with silver accents, just really great looking. For the nearly 7 months I had that unit out on the floor running Win 8? I got not ONE offer to buy the unit, not a single one. When Win 8 RTM was released and I saw they didn't do a damned thing to fix all the points I had been complaining about I wiped it and put Win 7 HP on it...it was sold just 4 days later. Hmmm...7 months with NO sale with Win 8, Win 7 sold 4 days. yeah...really not hard for me as a retailer to see its a turkey.
So just like with Vista this is a Windows OS that won't be getting sold on units in my shop, I'll make sure to buy only Win 7 laptops and all my builds will be Win 7 as well. MSFT may be able to afford to throw sales down the shitter but I can't and the people have spoken. ironically my sales have gone up since Win 8 was released because people come in and say "Have you seen that new Windows? its awful! Can you get me something with the real Windows on it?" and sure enough when they see my systems are running "the real Windows" its another sale for me, thanks MSFT.
Why did this AC get marked insightful while the other guy who pointed out that military tests have been VERY favorable to the objects being tested for...ohh... I'd say the last 80+ years?
What the military considers a "test" and what happens when you actually use the thing in combat conditions have been shown time and time again to be nowhere close, this goes all the way back to the mark 14 torpedo in WWII that the military said passed all the tests with flying colors, yet in reality if the thing didn't just blow up in the middle of the water because the magnetic exploder was faulty it would go completely under the target since it ran as much as 25 feet too deep or it would just clang against the hull of the ship since the contact fuse was also shit. the only good thing about it was when the damned thing turned on you you at least had just as much chance as the enemy of it turning out to be a dud, which is why we only lost two subs to it.
So if anything those ratings should be reversed, as its pretty common knowledge that with the DoD and the defense contractors so chummy the tests are rigged as much as possible to give the thing being tested a favorable outcome, be it giving the Patriot a low flying level target coming in at a known height and trajectory,, similar conditions being given to the Phalanx, hell I could sit here and list weapons that passed military "tests' with flying colors only to turn out to be crap in the field all day, its not exactly like this is a revelation here.
Uhhh...how EXACTLY is that Anti US rant insightful? If you think the USA is politically correct we have NOTHING on the EU, your free speech there better not offend anybody or you may be looking at jail time.
Do I think the USA kisses too much corporate ass? oh hell yeah. Do I think the UN, the same bunch that put Muslim countries on a panel for women's rights, would do a better job? Oh hell no! personally i think NOBODY should have control over the internet but if somebody has to I'd feel safer with the USA, which at least does have a history of protecting speech even if some find it offensive, than the UN who has a lot more countries that are against free speech than are for it.
But that at least is appealing to a geeks love of free tech, hell you'd be amazed how many times I've had my truck full of damned nice gear some corp threw out because one of my friends would call and say "Dude get your truck down here NOW, there is a ton of killer towers buddy!" and damned if I wouldn't find CC numbers and all kinds of shit, half the time the corps would even yank the drives.
However in the case of the txt you are about as likely to get free anything as you are to get millions from a Nigerian price yet people still fall for it, why? if you sent them the exact same message word for word in an email they would toss it, so what makes a txt magically different?
All I can figure is that people simply aren't used to seeing scams by phone and they look at the smart phone system as "new" therefor it must somehow be immune. I have only seen similar behavior in geeks when they switch from Windows to mac or Linux, they act like the switch somehow gives them magical powers, they can go to any site no matter how dodgy, never patch the OS, yet they are shocked when they get something like MacDefender or find out their bandwidth is being taken by somebody that has turned their Linux machine into a spam relay.
Since you worked on MeeGo would you PLEASE point out it wasn't ready and had serious issues next time the whole "The big bad M$ came and killed poor little MeeGo!" myth comes around again?
Please speak up, I'm sure as an insider you could shed a LOT of light and bust this myth once and for all, its not like MeeGo was this perfect mobile OS just sitting there ready to ship but the "evil M$ Mole" killed it, it simply wasn't up to the task of taking android and iOS on and they didn't have the right people there capable of bringing it up to speed in time.
Look at the post below you friend, even those that worked on the MeeGo team said it wasn't even alpha quality, no way in hell it could compete with iOS 3 and Android 2 which were out when Elop took the reins. And Symbian? Really? That would be like saying if you threw enough money at PalmOS 1 (the old 3.1 looking PalmOS Garnet) that you could have a product that could compete with android and iOS. I'm sorry but Symbian was a low rent OS that was designed for low resource dumbphones, it would have had to have had the entire graphical and networking stacks trashed and started over, no way in hell he could have got that out the door in less than 6 months. And the third OS was a JavaSE based mess that they had been working on for ages and was basically a pig, so it would have been pointless to try to save it.
So I'm sorry but you can't bring a guy in when the bow is already under and the ship is filling with water fast and expect him to magically raise the ship with nothing but what he has on hand. I urge you to go read the blogs of the MeeGo devs from that period, this isn't a secret ya know, even they said a year to a year and a half MINIMUM to get up to the level of iOS 2 because there was serious issues both with memory leaks and with the networking stack sucking power. Nobody is gonna buy a phone that crashes every couple of hours because it runs out of memory or you have to plug in every time you want to get on the web.
At the end of the day what you had was a horribly fragmented company without a single product that could be sold in the high end space, not one. So his choices were either jump into the meat grinder that was Android ( and even then the market was flooded with cheap smartphones running Android, anybody with eyes could see that market was saturated and 90% of the customers were buying strictly on price, and Nokia never was competitive in the "el cheapo" markets like Motorola) or take WinPhone and let MSFT foot the bill for the advertising they couldn't afford.
So I don't see how you think he had another call, MeeGo wasn't even in beta and you know you can not just magically throw more devs on a project and make it come out quicker, and between all the infighting and internal politics all three OSes were WAY behind and had serious issues. In a way its exactly what Apple found themselves in in the late 90s with the pink and blue teams, only there was no NeXT to buy to save their behind because HP was willing to pay Dr Insaneo prices for WebOS...which they promptly sat on as they didn't know WTF to do with it, so that only left them 2 options, get curbstomped in the Android mosh pit, or let MSFT bring in a team of engineers (on their dime no less) as well as pay the ad budgets and practically give them the OS for nothing.
But if they would have hired somebody 5 years earlier I think your plan would have had merit, they could have EOLed Symbian, tossed the JavaSE based, and sunk the resources into MeeGo and had a serious competitor. But that was then, this is now, and they virtually ZERO money coming from smartphones, the bottom was falling out of dumbphones which all could see were doomed anyway (hell Walmart now sells $50 Android phones with their El Cheapo prepaid plans, no way higher priced Nokia hardware could compete with THOSE prices) so frankly no matter what you think of Elop I would state that being put in the big chair we all would have made the same call, not like they had time to just start over what with Android and iPhones exploding.
And I wouldn't listen to him either. I just don't get it, this wasn't him getting caught in some moment he thought he was off camera, whacko RMS went and DID IT ON STAGE during a fricking lecture no less! I mean how whack a doodle do you have to get before people go "You know, maybe listening to this guy isn't the brightest of ideas".
Lets face it folks the guy gets more bizarre as he goes along, he acts like a 5 year old (putting the name of a company you don't like into the language of your license? Really?) and as his munching down on toe jam on stage at a lecture shows he either doesn't have the good sense or just doesn't give a fuck about doing truly gross shit in front of God and everybody, on camera no less, so WHY does anybody listen to him?
If there HAS to be a spokesman for FOSS, you have so many other choices that actually make FOSS look intelligent, Linus Torvalds and Eric Raymond just to name two and at least they aren't acting like a crazy homeless guy on camera or isn't calling what he doesn't like about a company "sins" like he's the fricking pope.
Even the download manager isn't a "You must use this!" hell they don't even try to get folks to lean one way or another, they simply point out their download manager lets you throw everything in a queue and download them one at a time, along with allowing you to pause it. And since once you have your games using EITHER downloading manually or the manager that you never have to use or even have the manager installed? I really don't think its an apt comparison.
This is why I think it'll end up being Steam and GOG, because GOG games can run next to Steam games without needing multiple clients, unlike origin, D2D, and the rest. And since Steam has more users than all the other ones put together, has huge sales, takes care of MP and chat and matchmaking its simply the better gaming service to have and when combined with GOG you have access to this huge library going back 30+ years and its as easy as "click here to get game" so its no wonder these two work great together.
As I said we've all seen this dance before with music, we had over a dozen services by 2004 all using different clients and DRM schema, now we are down to iTunes and Amazon which together with Amazon selling CDs as well as MP3s you can get pretty much any music you want quickly and easily from these two services, so too will this come to pass for games and movies. You'll end up with 2 because nobody will want one company to hold that much control over a market and as Ubisoft and others have begun removing the DRM from their games they'll be able to have them on both services.
If it continues as it has what you'll see is the games cheaper on Steam, with the choice of DLC and/or bundles, or if you want it with zero DRM you can pay a bit more at GOG but they'll throw in strategy guides and soundtracks and other swag to make up for the price difference. What matters is we'll have it all cheap, easy, and fast and IMHO this will be what ends up wiping out piracy, you'll be able to spend a few bucks a month and have access to pretty much anything you want at any time which is a win for consumers as far as I'm concerned.
I'm sorry but my Google Fu does sucketh, it was El Reg, ZDNet, or C-Net, I get emails from all 3 which is where I read about it. in the end it was losing the keyboard, he even broke his rule of using JUST the iPhone or iPad by using a BT keyboard and even then he said it was just crimping him too badly so he went back to his Macbook.
This is also why Win 8 and Surface are bombs. Any retailer can tell you that you can NOT slap a $100k price tag on a Mustang and expect it to compete with the exotic sportscars, all you'll do is pile up a bunch of Mustangs in the warehouse. With Win 8, both RT and pro, they have tried to turn Windows, a Walmart brand, into a boutique upscale brand like Apple and failing miserably.
I have no doubt MSFT under Ballmer will end up burying the things in a landfill rather than admit they are a flop and dump them on Woot! at a price people would pay, maybe by Win 9 They will come to their senses and focus Windows on what it does best, which is X86 desktops and laptops NOT tablets and cell phones.
This is just another perfect example of "company doesn't listen to customers, company gets boned" which we have seen play out again and again and again. if it wasn't making a profit, or costing more in dev time that it was raking in? Then sure I could see pulling the plug, but its obvious that they yanked it to try to "force" more customers onto their "new hotness" and it blew up in their face.
How EXACTLY are they "restricting it artificially" pray tell? If you want an XP license today you can get software assurance, an MSDN, or just buy a retail copy, that is three different ways to get XP right there.
People simply aren't buying XP because more and more software has skipped Vista and moved straight to Win 7/8 so as XP gets ever longer in the tooth (Good Lord its over a decade old folks, and has patches on top of patches and doesn't even have support for more than 3Gb of RAM) all the remaining XP machines out there are legacy boxes that people for one reason or another have just not decided to upgrade. this is understandable as most people don't want to spend money upgrading some 7 year old PC that requires more expensive parts than a new one, but that isn't any kind of restriction, that's just common sense.
And if you'll be happy to show us a reliable (IE not a "ZOMFG M$ is gonna kill the servers and burn babies ZOMFG!" blog post) source that has a single quote from MSFT about killing the activation servers? The only quote I've seen from MSFT is a quote saying if they decide to kill the activation servers they will simply point the systems to a page where they can download a simple activation killer, no different than how you can still find the KBs and patches for Win2K at Microsoft, they just don't support it anymore so if you run it you're on your own.
So I don't see how they can't obtain XP, several ways to buy it and I'd be happy to provide links but I figure most can Google, hell you can even use WSUS Offline and set up your own XP (Or 2K3, or Vista, or 7) Update server and keep installing XP all you want, you just won't be getting support after Apr 2014 which since we are talking about an OS that came out when the average system was a 400Mhz PII with 64Mb of RAM? Really not unreasonable and frankly longer than anybody else out there. Does Apple still support OSX 1? Does Linux still provide patches to Debian 2 or whatever was released in 2001? Nope, so I really don't get why anybody is having a fit over this, hell they gave it twice the lifespan of Win9X and have made 10 years of support standard on ALL of their OSes, not just Pro and Enterprise like before, but even Basic and Home, so I honestly don't see what is up with the teeth gnashing and double standards.
I mean is anybody REALLY taking that brand new i3 or AMD quad with 4Gb of RAM and slapping XP on it? Because if so they don't need more licenses, they need a cat scan, you are crippling the system with a creaky old OS that was never made to run on the specs we have now and its just nuts. Even the $200 netbooks are several times faster than the workstations were back then, its just pointless to use XP now for anything but legacy apps.
Well there are those that argue that we should go back to bare knuckle boxing as you simply can't hit a human in the head really hard without breaking your own hand so while there were more bloody noses and cuts there was less brain injuries because without padding a hit hard enough to cause brain injury would also leave the guy throwing the punch with a crushed hand.
But the simple fact is this, padding or no padding the human body just wasn't meant to take repeated blows over and over for years, it just wasn't. You can gloss over it, add pads, you just can't take the amount of punishment the average player of ANY of these contact sports take and end up damage free, the human body just don't work like that. Hell even baseball you end up with blown knees, screwed up shoulders, and injured backs, because the types of movements required in major league play are too much for the human body to keep doing for years.
As far as removing the helmets...have you SEEN the steroid monsters that play in the NFL? Sure it might settle down after a few years but I have a feeling the first couple of years after removing the helmets would be a bloodbath. These guys want to win PERIOD, and if they gotta fuck you up to do it? So be it. Look at the stink now about players literally ripping the helmets off the other team because thanks to a new rule that causes the play to end at the moment the helmet is ripped off, so if the team looks like they are gonna have a good run if you can rip the helmet off the other guy you can stop them from scoring. Look up the videos on YouTube to see these guys practically trying to rip the other guy's head off to get the helmet off, they really do NOT give a fuck if they damage the other guy. I have a feeling with no helmets you'd have to have some sort of "broken nose ends the play" or something similar to keep the field from being a bloody mess which means you'd have teams that were behind aiming directly for the face, just as the stupid helmet rule has teams ripping helmets off damned near all the time.
Oh lord not this again. First it was the netbook that was gonna kill "the big bad M$" then it was the tablet, then the phone, now you are gonna say embedded...really? Give it up Sparky, nobody is giving up their desktops or laptops for some 1Ghz ARM embedded in the TV, okay? Hell one of the Apple fanbois tried giving up ALL X86 for a month, just one month, and using nothing but his iPad and his iPhone...what happened? he gave up after a week and a half because it was hobbling him too damned much.
The ONLY thing you got right is that PCs have gotten insanely powerful, but you know what? Computers have been insanely powerful for most of the decade, hasn't stopped people from buying them. What HAS stopped people from buying them is the fact we are in the midst of a global recession (I would argue depression, but whatever) so people simply aren't spending money they don't absolutely have to and with their desktops sporting triples and quads, and their laptops sporting duals capable of 1080p? They really don't have to.
But the simple fact is even with an economy in the shitter we are talking 300 MILLION plus computers being sold, and yes nearly all of them running Windows, why? because that is where the software is. they don't want ersatz software, like Gimp for Photoshop, Tux Racer for DIRT, they want to use the billions of dollars worth of software they are sitting on, everything from Quickbooks to that God awful EasyShare your grandma loves so much, and NONE of that shit is gonna run on some embedded ARM chip.
And I hate to break the news to ya but ARM is about to slam face first into the thermal wall, just as X86 did half a decade ago. This is why the ARM Holdings Group have been talking about "dark silicon" for their last several press releases, and why Nvidia is now up to FIVE, count 'em, five cores in their Tegra chips, only ARM hit the thermal wall with a frankly shitty IPC so they are throwing more cores at it but as we saw with AMD there is only so much you can make up for IPC by throwing more cores at it, because most software today still don't thread for shit.
So X86 isn't going anywhere, Windows will be back up once Ballmer's fat ass is thrown out of the big chair and the abortion known as Win 8 is replaced by a much better Win 9 (Star Trek rule in play) and people will continue to buy hundreds of millions of X86 units every year, just at a slower pace because grandma can't stress out that quad like she could that old P4. Does that mean ARM is gonna disappear? Nope, it means its gonna have an insanely quick race to the bottom and several corps will go broke selling Android units, because by this time next year you'll have 7 inch dual core tablets with Android 5 selling for $50 at the Big Lots, and just like X86 people will find they can't tell the difference between a dual core and a quad so they'll get the cheaper unit. Look at the financials of the companies selling Android, Samsung is barely making a profit as is HTC, the rest are bleeding money.
But to say embedded is gonna take out X86 is as stupid as saying mopeds are gonna take out the trucking industry. They are completely different units built for completely different tasks and I have YET to see a single person, even one, replacing their X86 laptops and desktops for some cell phone chip. Sorry, ain't gonna happen.
Opera cost money and Netscape put out the abortion known as NS4, nuff said.
I'm sorry AC but the other guy is right, hell I was a big NS fan and even I had to put up with IE for a few years because there just wasn't anything out there. Sure you could get a free version of Opera...if you didn't mind 30% of your browser to be a giant flashing adbar, but those of us on limited bandwidth connections really didn't want to pay the bandwidth for opera's ads.
And again look at the numbers, when FF came out people started jumping and then Chrome made even more run away, the second anything better came along we bailed. i know I was one of the first ones using the Moz Suite, followed by FF before it was even called FF and now I'm on a Chrome variant, I honestly don't even know what version of IE comes with Win 7 because I haven't ever fired it up.
You can't blame "The big bad M$" if nobody else is making a decent product, and at the time there really wasn't any decent product that competed. This is the same way MS Office took off BTW, WordPerfect ruled the roost until they didn't bother putting out a Windows version until nearly 2000, before that they put out a badly ported DOS version which crashed and ran like shit. people didn't buy MS Office because they liked it, they bought it because they liked having their work done without 3 crashes making them start from the top multiple times.
It wasn't a "M$ Mole" that fucked Nokia, it was 5 long years of having its thumb up its ass and no direction that killed Nokia.
I mean look at the situation elop had handed to him, they had not one, not two, but THREE different OSes, all of them fighting internally for resources, none of them were up to the task of taking Android and iOS head on, the only thing they had in their favor was dumbphones and anybody with eyes could see dumbphones are going the way of the 8 track. They didn't have the money to compete with HP for WebOS, Apple sure as fuck isn't gonna license them iOS, the MeeGo team was quoted as saying it would "be a year to a year and a half" before it was able to match iOS and Android and of course neither would be standing still during that year and a half, and with Android they would be an also-ran because frankly Samsung and HTC just do Android better than anybody else.
So I honestly don't see what call everyone think Elop should have done, did you want him to get the company curbstomped by putting out a half baked MeeGo? Jump into the race to the bottom that is Android? FYI look at the numbers, Samsung is making a profit but barely, nobody else is looking good right now thanks to all the competition and cheap prices, so what? What could he have done? I mean we all know the best move would have been to get WebOS but that was off the table by the time he got there, so their choices were 1.-Get slaughtered for a year and a half and hope the MeeGo team could pull a miracle out their ass, or 2.- Take a finished product from MSFT and have them foot the bill for advertising it as well.
Hindsight is always 20/20 folks, and if he would have chosen MeeGo or Android they'd be just as fucked as they are now, Android prices are in a freefall and MeeGo simply wasn't done. So he made a call, a call that didn't pan out but frankly other than closing the doors and giving the money back to the stockholders i don't know what other call the guy could have made. maybe if they would have brought somebody in 5 years earlier, maybe if they wouldn't have let their resources get so fragmented, maybe things would have come out differently. But Elop didn't have a time machine, he had to work with what he had which by that point was a sinking ship.
Uhhh...since when did GOG have a client? They got a download manager, but you can use your browser just fine. As for the rest of those all of them put together don't make 10% of what Steam makes so i have a feeling in the next 2 to 3 years they'll all go by the wayside. Hell EA is up the auction block so obviously Origin didn't make the money they hoped, and I don't think I've ever met anybody that uses the others you've named, heck besides D2D I haven't even HEARD of any of them so I don't think they'll be long term.
Everybody seems to forget their history, it was the same way when music first started being offered on the net, you had nearly a dozen companies, some used REAL, some used WMA for DRM, you couldn't find but a percentage of the artists (and rarely their full catalogs) on any one service, etc. Then the weak ones die off and soon you are left with only one or two with huge selections. If I had to guess I'd say Steam and GOG, Steam because it has the most users by far, GOG because of it being DRM free which means you can just buy the games and run them beside Steam no problem. The rest i figure will be DOA in a couple of years, maybe less.
I mean Ubisoft even got rid of their always on DRM, if that don't show things are changing I don't know what does.
But seriously will it matter? Not to be cruel but its not like we all didn't already know getting your brain bashed repeatedly was bad for you, hell look at boxing, not even a helmet there and we have seen so many old boxers drooling on themselves from brain damage it isn't even funny.
But the simple fact is as long as there is huge piles of money to be made from having one guy headbrick the other guy it is NEVER gonna change. if it were ever gonna change boxing would have been outlawed 20 years ago, after all the amount of brain damaged football players is nothing compared to how many boxers get brain damage.
As much as I wish it weren't so as long as the owners and the memorabilia companies and the food vendors and all these others are raking in the cash then these guys are just disposable, sad but true. That is why I think college football and boxing should be banned and the teams have to pay for minor leagues, if these guys are gonna risk getting busted all to hell at least cut them a check for the risk.
They are just trying to cover for the fact the board spent billions more for recent purchases than they were worth, no different than their claims that there was cooked books on their last buy...yeah, 5.5 BILLION in cooked books, sure, uh huh, really buy that.
They are trying to CYA because while they have gone through CEOs like crap through a goose Whitman and the rest of the board were there too and rubber stamped all those crazy buys, even with everybody pointing out they were paying several times what the companies were worth even in the most optimistic outlook. So expect to see more lawsuits and accusations in the coming months as they probably have another 8-10 billion they are gonna have to write off and the board don't want to take the blame they rightfully deserve.
Did these companies overcharge HP? Oh I have no doubt, but considering how many billions they have pissed away the past few years its like pointing at a guy with a match and saying "Its HIS fault!" while the board is taking flamethrowers to the corporate headquarters. hey! Maybe they can pay Nokia several times what its worth for their HQ? Would fit right in with the rest of their lamebrained purchases of late.
I agree this is great and i hope more jump on board. If you want the customers you have to give them what THEY want, which is easy, cheap, and convenient to use.
THIS is how you actually fight piracy, not the 6 strikes and John Doe bullshit, but making your product so affordable and easy to get it becomes more of a bother to pirate than it is to just get it legal. I know plenty of pirates that have stopped, not because of litigation or draconian laws, but because between netflix, Steam, GOG, and all the channels beginning to put their shows online they simply have more than they could ever possibly watch, listen to, or play, so there really is no need to pirate.
Let us hope that all of the media and game companies see that the net is the future and not something they should fight. Of course this will give the ISPs a heart attack, how will they throw off anybody that actually uses their bandwidth if they are all using legal services? Why they might even have to spend some of their profits to...gasp!...upgrade their capacity! The horror! Won't somebody think of the board?
Because easy trumps secure any day of the week? How many times have we seen "Laptop with tons of unencrypted sensitive information lost"? It doesn't matter if its crooks or credit card companies, easy will ALWAYS come before secure, all it takes is one lazy guy in the org and you're boned.
I mean you think that it'd be obvious when for the fiftieth time you'd see those corporate emails where you'd have some PHB talking about shit that really really REALLY shouldn't have been written down, much less put into an email, that using things like email and text to talk about sensitive and possibly illegal shit was a big no no, but again easy tops secure and humans are lazy so if given a choice between hard and secure or easy and not the later is chosen damned near every time.
This is the part that just blows my mind, that people think warrants are a big deal. Shit go talk to any bail bondsman about warrants and be prepared to be shocked at how those things are passed out like candy.
As long as you aren't asking for a warrant on a "somebody" IE someone that has money and power its really just a rubber stamp. To fight a warrant on procedural grounds can cost several thousand bucks which they know the poor will never afford so its a non issue, they can be as sloppy as they want with regards to warrants and rubber stamp any excuse and since you can't afford the lawyer fees to fight back its legal. This is one of the more obvious ways classism affects this country, the rich get the full protection of the law, the poor have something like a 96% conviction rate.
Sorry i suck at analogies, but here is what gets my goat, and I've found this seems to hold true for anybody over 30 that isn't a geek. Old scam + New tech = success.
For example look at the "You've won a $1000 gift card from (insert store)", now that scam ain't worked online for years except for the completely gullible, the kind that still fall for the Nigerian prince kind of foolish, but you send that exact same email as a text on their smartphone? And you'd be surprised how many will fall for it. I must get a dozen calls from customers a week that if it weren't for me saying "No, its a scam, no major retailer is gonna alert a contest winner by text" they would fall for it hook, line, and sinker...why?
That is the part I just can't figure out, why would simply changing from an email to a text magically drop everybody's defenses? And it ONLY seems to work on those over 30, my oldest had some of his college buddies over the other day and i asked them if they had gotten any and they all said "Sure but its a scam, we just toss 'em". Is there something about being over 30 that keeps you from connecting one tech to another? Are people under 30 naturally more cynical and therefor harder to feel? Damned if I know but its really irritating, its like having to tech the noobs how to deal with the net all over again.
I disagree, if a show is well made it can make one think, its just those types of shows actually require decent actors and writers and thus cost more money than a Honey Boo Boo so what we get is tons of mind numbing drivel.
But a well written show can pose deep questions that will make you think, take Brimstone for example. The question it posed at its core was "When does good become evil?" and it posed that question from several angles. The protagonist for example was sent to hell for killing the man who raped his wife. Now why would that cause him to be sent to hell? he was protecting his family right? well what got him sent to hell was he got off on it. he enjoyed inflicting as much suffering as possible upon the rapist, he savored every moment of pain he could bring and THAT is what got him sent to hell. One of those that escaped from hell he was sent after reported several families to the Nazis, NOT because he actually believed in race or Nazism, but simply because he was a complete coward and rather than accept even the slightest chance of risk to his own person he turned in everyone around him. with that show nothing was black or white, it was all shades of grey and made you truly think about what is considered good and what is considered evil.
So while I agree that we are drowning in a sea of reality crap, TV doesn't always HAVE to be about mind numbing stupidity. The Twilight Zone, Outer Limits, you can have some truly great TV that really makes the audience think but they have to be willing to put in the work, and when they can crap out a Jersey Shore or Honey Boo Boo for peanuts and still get high ratings? Well you can see why TV sucks so badly now.
Exactly, look at your choices. One tax and spend, the other spend and spend, BOTH love bigger government, BOTH love more police powers, BOTH kiss the corporate rings, BOTH kiss the ass of the 1%. And the difference is....what exactly?
People have been voting FOR DECADES for less wars, less military pork, for an end to handing out checks to third world thugs, for their money to be spent here at home...has ANY of it come to pass? The military is bigger than ever and still building trillion dollar turkeys like the Soviets were planning an invasion, we are still handing billion dollar checks to thugs which is then used to torture and murder populaces that then hate the USA, and rightly so since its US guns being used to bash their heads in, our infrastructure falls apart while the top 5% pay the lowest tax rate in history and STILL uses tricks like double dutch and irish whip to make sure they don't even have to pay the pittance they owe, voting is a fucking joke. its a way for the stupid peasants to feel slightly less helpless while the handful at the top rule just like they have for centuries.
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What is pathetic is that every one of us who did the testing on the DP and CP told MSFT repeatedly this was a BAD move, and if you'd have asked any of us retailers we'd have been happy to point out why. As of this moment less than 2% of the X86 units are touch screens and Win 8 just sucks balls without touch, also the metro UI is so obviously designed for tablets and NOT for desktops that it hurts. For example the left right swipe, which makes sense on a tablet you are holding like a book but its a royal PITA to deal with on a non touch laptop with a touchpad.
In the end I think this little anecdote about my personal experience with Win 8 pretty much says it all. I had Win 8 running in my shop on a NICE AMD mini-tower, we're talking triple core Athlon with 4 Gb of RAM, 500Gb HDD and DVD burner, all wrapped up in this very sharp red and black case with silver accents, just really great looking. For the nearly 7 months I had that unit out on the floor running Win 8? I got not ONE offer to buy the unit, not a single one. When Win 8 RTM was released and I saw they didn't do a damned thing to fix all the points I had been complaining about I wiped it and put Win 7 HP on it...it was sold just 4 days later. Hmmm...7 months with NO sale with Win 8, Win 7 sold 4 days. yeah...really not hard for me as a retailer to see its a turkey.
So just like with Vista this is a Windows OS that won't be getting sold on units in my shop, I'll make sure to buy only Win 7 laptops and all my builds will be Win 7 as well. MSFT may be able to afford to throw sales down the shitter but I can't and the people have spoken. ironically my sales have gone up since Win 8 was released because people come in and say "Have you seen that new Windows? its awful! Can you get me something with the real Windows on it?" and sure enough when they see my systems are running "the real Windows" its another sale for me, thanks MSFT.
Why did this AC get marked insightful while the other guy who pointed out that military tests have been VERY favorable to the objects being tested for...ohh... I'd say the last 80+ years?
What the military considers a "test" and what happens when you actually use the thing in combat conditions have been shown time and time again to be nowhere close, this goes all the way back to the mark 14 torpedo in WWII that the military said passed all the tests with flying colors, yet in reality if the thing didn't just blow up in the middle of the water because the magnetic exploder was faulty it would go completely under the target since it ran as much as 25 feet too deep or it would just clang against the hull of the ship since the contact fuse was also shit. the only good thing about it was when the damned thing turned on you you at least had just as much chance as the enemy of it turning out to be a dud, which is why we only lost two subs to it.
So if anything those ratings should be reversed, as its pretty common knowledge that with the DoD and the defense contractors so chummy the tests are rigged as much as possible to give the thing being tested a favorable outcome, be it giving the Patriot a low flying level target coming in at a known height and trajectory,, similar conditions being given to the Phalanx, hell I could sit here and list weapons that passed military "tests' with flying colors only to turn out to be crap in the field all day, its not exactly like this is a revelation here.
Uhhh...how EXACTLY is that Anti US rant insightful? If you think the USA is politically correct we have NOTHING on the EU, your free speech there better not offend anybody or you may be looking at jail time.
Do I think the USA kisses too much corporate ass? oh hell yeah. Do I think the UN, the same bunch that put Muslim countries on a panel for women's rights, would do a better job? Oh hell no! personally i think NOBODY should have control over the internet but if somebody has to I'd feel safer with the USA, which at least does have a history of protecting speech even if some find it offensive, than the UN who has a lot more countries that are against free speech than are for it.
But that at least is appealing to a geeks love of free tech, hell you'd be amazed how many times I've had my truck full of damned nice gear some corp threw out because one of my friends would call and say "Dude get your truck down here NOW, there is a ton of killer towers buddy!" and damned if I wouldn't find CC numbers and all kinds of shit, half the time the corps would even yank the drives.
However in the case of the txt you are about as likely to get free anything as you are to get millions from a Nigerian price yet people still fall for it, why? if you sent them the exact same message word for word in an email they would toss it, so what makes a txt magically different?
All I can figure is that people simply aren't used to seeing scams by phone and they look at the smart phone system as "new" therefor it must somehow be immune. I have only seen similar behavior in geeks when they switch from Windows to mac or Linux, they act like the switch somehow gives them magical powers, they can go to any site no matter how dodgy, never patch the OS, yet they are shocked when they get something like MacDefender or find out their bandwidth is being taken by somebody that has turned their Linux machine into a spam relay.
Since you worked on MeeGo would you PLEASE point out it wasn't ready and had serious issues next time the whole "The big bad M$ came and killed poor little MeeGo!" myth comes around again?
Please speak up, I'm sure as an insider you could shed a LOT of light and bust this myth once and for all, its not like MeeGo was this perfect mobile OS just sitting there ready to ship but the "evil M$ Mole" killed it, it simply wasn't up to the task of taking android and iOS on and they didn't have the right people there capable of bringing it up to speed in time.
Look at the post below you friend, even those that worked on the MeeGo team said it wasn't even alpha quality, no way in hell it could compete with iOS 3 and Android 2 which were out when Elop took the reins. And Symbian? Really? That would be like saying if you threw enough money at PalmOS 1 (the old 3.1 looking PalmOS Garnet) that you could have a product that could compete with android and iOS. I'm sorry but Symbian was a low rent OS that was designed for low resource dumbphones, it would have had to have had the entire graphical and networking stacks trashed and started over, no way in hell he could have got that out the door in less than 6 months. And the third OS was a JavaSE based mess that they had been working on for ages and was basically a pig, so it would have been pointless to try to save it.
So I'm sorry but you can't bring a guy in when the bow is already under and the ship is filling with water fast and expect him to magically raise the ship with nothing but what he has on hand. I urge you to go read the blogs of the MeeGo devs from that period, this isn't a secret ya know, even they said a year to a year and a half MINIMUM to get up to the level of iOS 2 because there was serious issues both with memory leaks and with the networking stack sucking power. Nobody is gonna buy a phone that crashes every couple of hours because it runs out of memory or you have to plug in every time you want to get on the web.
At the end of the day what you had was a horribly fragmented company without a single product that could be sold in the high end space, not one. So his choices were either jump into the meat grinder that was Android ( and even then the market was flooded with cheap smartphones running Android, anybody with eyes could see that market was saturated and 90% of the customers were buying strictly on price, and Nokia never was competitive in the "el cheapo" markets like Motorola) or take WinPhone and let MSFT foot the bill for the advertising they couldn't afford.
So I don't see how you think he had another call, MeeGo wasn't even in beta and you know you can not just magically throw more devs on a project and make it come out quicker, and between all the infighting and internal politics all three OSes were WAY behind and had serious issues. In a way its exactly what Apple found themselves in in the late 90s with the pink and blue teams, only there was no NeXT to buy to save their behind because HP was willing to pay Dr Insaneo prices for WebOS...which they promptly sat on as they didn't know WTF to do with it, so that only left them 2 options, get curbstomped in the Android mosh pit, or let MSFT bring in a team of engineers (on their dime no less) as well as pay the ad budgets and practically give them the OS for nothing.
But if they would have hired somebody 5 years earlier I think your plan would have had merit, they could have EOLed Symbian, tossed the JavaSE based, and sunk the resources into MeeGo and had a serious competitor. But that was then, this is now, and they virtually ZERO money coming from smartphones, the bottom was falling out of dumbphones which all could see were doomed anyway (hell Walmart now sells $50 Android phones with their El Cheapo prepaid plans, no way higher priced Nokia hardware could compete with THOSE prices) so frankly no matter what you think of Elop I would state that being put in the big chair we all would have made the same call, not like they had time to just start over what with Android and iPhones exploding.
And I wouldn't listen to him either. I just don't get it, this wasn't him getting caught in some moment he thought he was off camera, whacko RMS went and DID IT ON STAGE during a fricking lecture no less! I mean how whack a doodle do you have to get before people go "You know, maybe listening to this guy isn't the brightest of ideas".
Lets face it folks the guy gets more bizarre as he goes along, he acts like a 5 year old (putting the name of a company you don't like into the language of your license? Really?) and as his munching down on toe jam on stage at a lecture shows he either doesn't have the good sense or just doesn't give a fuck about doing truly gross shit in front of God and everybody, on camera no less, so WHY does anybody listen to him?
If there HAS to be a spokesman for FOSS, you have so many other choices that actually make FOSS look intelligent, Linus Torvalds and Eric Raymond just to name two and at least they aren't acting like a crazy homeless guy on camera or isn't calling what he doesn't like about a company "sins" like he's the fricking pope.
Even the download manager isn't a "You must use this!" hell they don't even try to get folks to lean one way or another, they simply point out their download manager lets you throw everything in a queue and download them one at a time, along with allowing you to pause it. And since once you have your games using EITHER downloading manually or the manager that you never have to use or even have the manager installed? I really don't think its an apt comparison.
This is why I think it'll end up being Steam and GOG, because GOG games can run next to Steam games without needing multiple clients, unlike origin, D2D, and the rest. And since Steam has more users than all the other ones put together, has huge sales, takes care of MP and chat and matchmaking its simply the better gaming service to have and when combined with GOG you have access to this huge library going back 30+ years and its as easy as "click here to get game" so its no wonder these two work great together.
As I said we've all seen this dance before with music, we had over a dozen services by 2004 all using different clients and DRM schema, now we are down to iTunes and Amazon which together with Amazon selling CDs as well as MP3s you can get pretty much any music you want quickly and easily from these two services, so too will this come to pass for games and movies. You'll end up with 2 because nobody will want one company to hold that much control over a market and as Ubisoft and others have begun removing the DRM from their games they'll be able to have them on both services.
If it continues as it has what you'll see is the games cheaper on Steam, with the choice of DLC and/or bundles, or if you want it with zero DRM you can pay a bit more at GOG but they'll throw in strategy guides and soundtracks and other swag to make up for the price difference. What matters is we'll have it all cheap, easy, and fast and IMHO this will be what ends up wiping out piracy, you'll be able to spend a few bucks a month and have access to pretty much anything you want at any time which is a win for consumers as far as I'm concerned.
I'm sorry but my Google Fu does sucketh, it was El Reg, ZDNet, or C-Net, I get emails from all 3 which is where I read about it. in the end it was losing the keyboard, he even broke his rule of using JUST the iPhone or iPad by using a BT keyboard and even then he said it was just crimping him too badly so he went back to his Macbook.
This is also why Win 8 and Surface are bombs. Any retailer can tell you that you can NOT slap a $100k price tag on a Mustang and expect it to compete with the exotic sportscars, all you'll do is pile up a bunch of Mustangs in the warehouse. With Win 8, both RT and pro, they have tried to turn Windows, a Walmart brand, into a boutique upscale brand like Apple and failing miserably.
I have no doubt MSFT under Ballmer will end up burying the things in a landfill rather than admit they are a flop and dump them on Woot! at a price people would pay, maybe by Win 9 They will come to their senses and focus Windows on what it does best, which is X86 desktops and laptops NOT tablets and cell phones.
This is just another perfect example of "company doesn't listen to customers, company gets boned" which we have seen play out again and again and again. if it wasn't making a profit, or costing more in dev time that it was raking in? Then sure I could see pulling the plug, but its obvious that they yanked it to try to "force" more customers onto their "new hotness" and it blew up in their face.
How EXACTLY are they "restricting it artificially" pray tell? If you want an XP license today you can get software assurance, an MSDN, or just buy a retail copy, that is three different ways to get XP right there.
People simply aren't buying XP because more and more software has skipped Vista and moved straight to Win 7/8 so as XP gets ever longer in the tooth (Good Lord its over a decade old folks, and has patches on top of patches and doesn't even have support for more than 3Gb of RAM) all the remaining XP machines out there are legacy boxes that people for one reason or another have just not decided to upgrade. this is understandable as most people don't want to spend money upgrading some 7 year old PC that requires more expensive parts than a new one, but that isn't any kind of restriction, that's just common sense.
And if you'll be happy to show us a reliable (IE not a "ZOMFG M$ is gonna kill the servers and burn babies ZOMFG!" blog post) source that has a single quote from MSFT about killing the activation servers? The only quote I've seen from MSFT is a quote saying if they decide to kill the activation servers they will simply point the systems to a page where they can download a simple activation killer, no different than how you can still find the KBs and patches for Win2K at Microsoft, they just don't support it anymore so if you run it you're on your own.
So I don't see how they can't obtain XP, several ways to buy it and I'd be happy to provide links but I figure most can Google, hell you can even use WSUS Offline and set up your own XP (Or 2K3, or Vista, or 7) Update server and keep installing XP all you want, you just won't be getting support after Apr 2014 which since we are talking about an OS that came out when the average system was a 400Mhz PII with 64Mb of RAM? Really not unreasonable and frankly longer than anybody else out there. Does Apple still support OSX 1? Does Linux still provide patches to Debian 2 or whatever was released in 2001? Nope, so I really don't get why anybody is having a fit over this, hell they gave it twice the lifespan of Win9X and have made 10 years of support standard on ALL of their OSes, not just Pro and Enterprise like before, but even Basic and Home, so I honestly don't see what is up with the teeth gnashing and double standards.
I mean is anybody REALLY taking that brand new i3 or AMD quad with 4Gb of RAM and slapping XP on it? Because if so they don't need more licenses, they need a cat scan, you are crippling the system with a creaky old OS that was never made to run on the specs we have now and its just nuts. Even the $200 netbooks are several times faster than the workstations were back then, its just pointless to use XP now for anything but legacy apps.
Well there are those that argue that we should go back to bare knuckle boxing as you simply can't hit a human in the head really hard without breaking your own hand so while there were more bloody noses and cuts there was less brain injuries because without padding a hit hard enough to cause brain injury would also leave the guy throwing the punch with a crushed hand.
But the simple fact is this, padding or no padding the human body just wasn't meant to take repeated blows over and over for years, it just wasn't. You can gloss over it, add pads, you just can't take the amount of punishment the average player of ANY of these contact sports take and end up damage free, the human body just don't work like that. Hell even baseball you end up with blown knees, screwed up shoulders, and injured backs, because the types of movements required in major league play are too much for the human body to keep doing for years.
As far as removing the helmets...have you SEEN the steroid monsters that play in the NFL? Sure it might settle down after a few years but I have a feeling the first couple of years after removing the helmets would be a bloodbath. These guys want to win PERIOD, and if they gotta fuck you up to do it? So be it. Look at the stink now about players literally ripping the helmets off the other team because thanks to a new rule that causes the play to end at the moment the helmet is ripped off, so if the team looks like they are gonna have a good run if you can rip the helmet off the other guy you can stop them from scoring. Look up the videos on YouTube to see these guys practically trying to rip the other guy's head off to get the helmet off, they really do NOT give a fuck if they damage the other guy. I have a feeling with no helmets you'd have to have some sort of "broken nose ends the play" or something similar to keep the field from being a bloody mess which means you'd have teams that were behind aiming directly for the face, just as the stupid helmet rule has teams ripping helmets off damned near all the time.
Oh lord not this again. First it was the netbook that was gonna kill "the big bad M$" then it was the tablet, then the phone, now you are gonna say embedded...really? Give it up Sparky, nobody is giving up their desktops or laptops for some 1Ghz ARM embedded in the TV, okay? Hell one of the Apple fanbois tried giving up ALL X86 for a month, just one month, and using nothing but his iPad and his iPhone...what happened? he gave up after a week and a half because it was hobbling him too damned much.
The ONLY thing you got right is that PCs have gotten insanely powerful, but you know what? Computers have been insanely powerful for most of the decade, hasn't stopped people from buying them. What HAS stopped people from buying them is the fact we are in the midst of a global recession (I would argue depression, but whatever) so people simply aren't spending money they don't absolutely have to and with their desktops sporting triples and quads, and their laptops sporting duals capable of 1080p? They really don't have to.
But the simple fact is even with an economy in the shitter we are talking 300 MILLION plus computers being sold, and yes nearly all of them running Windows, why? because that is where the software is. they don't want ersatz software, like Gimp for Photoshop, Tux Racer for DIRT, they want to use the billions of dollars worth of software they are sitting on, everything from Quickbooks to that God awful EasyShare your grandma loves so much, and NONE of that shit is gonna run on some embedded ARM chip.
And I hate to break the news to ya but ARM is about to slam face first into the thermal wall, just as X86 did half a decade ago. This is why the ARM Holdings Group have been talking about "dark silicon" for their last several press releases, and why Nvidia is now up to FIVE, count 'em, five cores in their Tegra chips, only ARM hit the thermal wall with a frankly shitty IPC so they are throwing more cores at it but as we saw with AMD there is only so much you can make up for IPC by throwing more cores at it, because most software today still don't thread for shit.
So X86 isn't going anywhere, Windows will be back up once Ballmer's fat ass is thrown out of the big chair and the abortion known as Win 8 is replaced by a much better Win 9 (Star Trek rule in play) and people will continue to buy hundreds of millions of X86 units every year, just at a slower pace because grandma can't stress out that quad like she could that old P4. Does that mean ARM is gonna disappear? Nope, it means its gonna have an insanely quick race to the bottom and several corps will go broke selling Android units, because by this time next year you'll have 7 inch dual core tablets with Android 5 selling for $50 at the Big Lots, and just like X86 people will find they can't tell the difference between a dual core and a quad so they'll get the cheaper unit. Look at the financials of the companies selling Android, Samsung is barely making a profit as is HTC, the rest are bleeding money.
But to say embedded is gonna take out X86 is as stupid as saying mopeds are gonna take out the trucking industry. They are completely different units built for completely different tasks and I have YET to see a single person, even one, replacing their X86 laptops and desktops for some cell phone chip. Sorry, ain't gonna happen.
Opera cost money and Netscape put out the abortion known as NS4, nuff said.
I'm sorry AC but the other guy is right, hell I was a big NS fan and even I had to put up with IE for a few years because there just wasn't anything out there. Sure you could get a free version of Opera...if you didn't mind 30% of your browser to be a giant flashing adbar, but those of us on limited bandwidth connections really didn't want to pay the bandwidth for opera's ads.
And again look at the numbers, when FF came out people started jumping and then Chrome made even more run away, the second anything better came along we bailed. i know I was one of the first ones using the Moz Suite, followed by FF before it was even called FF and now I'm on a Chrome variant, I honestly don't even know what version of IE comes with Win 7 because I haven't ever fired it up.
You can't blame "The big bad M$" if nobody else is making a decent product, and at the time there really wasn't any decent product that competed. This is the same way MS Office took off BTW, WordPerfect ruled the roost until they didn't bother putting out a Windows version until nearly 2000, before that they put out a badly ported DOS version which crashed and ran like shit. people didn't buy MS Office because they liked it, they bought it because they liked having their work done without 3 crashes making them start from the top multiple times.
It wasn't a "M$ Mole" that fucked Nokia, it was 5 long years of having its thumb up its ass and no direction that killed Nokia.
I mean look at the situation elop had handed to him, they had not one, not two, but THREE different OSes, all of them fighting internally for resources, none of them were up to the task of taking Android and iOS head on, the only thing they had in their favor was dumbphones and anybody with eyes could see dumbphones are going the way of the 8 track. They didn't have the money to compete with HP for WebOS, Apple sure as fuck isn't gonna license them iOS, the MeeGo team was quoted as saying it would "be a year to a year and a half" before it was able to match iOS and Android and of course neither would be standing still during that year and a half, and with Android they would be an also-ran because frankly Samsung and HTC just do Android better than anybody else.
So I honestly don't see what call everyone think Elop should have done, did you want him to get the company curbstomped by putting out a half baked MeeGo? Jump into the race to the bottom that is Android? FYI look at the numbers, Samsung is making a profit but barely, nobody else is looking good right now thanks to all the competition and cheap prices, so what? What could he have done? I mean we all know the best move would have been to get WebOS but that was off the table by the time he got there, so their choices were 1.-Get slaughtered for a year and a half and hope the MeeGo team could pull a miracle out their ass, or 2.- Take a finished product from MSFT and have them foot the bill for advertising it as well.
Hindsight is always 20/20 folks, and if he would have chosen MeeGo or Android they'd be just as fucked as they are now, Android prices are in a freefall and MeeGo simply wasn't done. So he made a call, a call that didn't pan out but frankly other than closing the doors and giving the money back to the stockholders i don't know what other call the guy could have made. maybe if they would have brought somebody in 5 years earlier, maybe if they wouldn't have let their resources get so fragmented, maybe things would have come out differently. But Elop didn't have a time machine, he had to work with what he had which by that point was a sinking ship.
Uhhh...since when did GOG have a client? They got a download manager, but you can use your browser just fine. As for the rest of those all of them put together don't make 10% of what Steam makes so i have a feeling in the next 2 to 3 years they'll all go by the wayside. Hell EA is up the auction block so obviously Origin didn't make the money they hoped, and I don't think I've ever met anybody that uses the others you've named, heck besides D2D I haven't even HEARD of any of them so I don't think they'll be long term.
Everybody seems to forget their history, it was the same way when music first started being offered on the net, you had nearly a dozen companies, some used REAL, some used WMA for DRM, you couldn't find but a percentage of the artists (and rarely their full catalogs) on any one service, etc. Then the weak ones die off and soon you are left with only one or two with huge selections. If I had to guess I'd say Steam and GOG, Steam because it has the most users by far, GOG because of it being DRM free which means you can just buy the games and run them beside Steam no problem. The rest i figure will be DOA in a couple of years, maybe less.
I mean Ubisoft even got rid of their always on DRM, if that don't show things are changing I don't know what does.
But seriously will it matter? Not to be cruel but its not like we all didn't already know getting your brain bashed repeatedly was bad for you, hell look at boxing, not even a helmet there and we have seen so many old boxers drooling on themselves from brain damage it isn't even funny.
But the simple fact is as long as there is huge piles of money to be made from having one guy headbrick the other guy it is NEVER gonna change. if it were ever gonna change boxing would have been outlawed 20 years ago, after all the amount of brain damaged football players is nothing compared to how many boxers get brain damage.
As much as I wish it weren't so as long as the owners and the memorabilia companies and the food vendors and all these others are raking in the cash then these guys are just disposable, sad but true. That is why I think college football and boxing should be banned and the teams have to pay for minor leagues, if these guys are gonna risk getting busted all to hell at least cut them a check for the risk.
They are just trying to cover for the fact the board spent billions more for recent purchases than they were worth, no different than their claims that there was cooked books on their last buy...yeah, 5.5 BILLION in cooked books, sure, uh huh, really buy that.
They are trying to CYA because while they have gone through CEOs like crap through a goose Whitman and the rest of the board were there too and rubber stamped all those crazy buys, even with everybody pointing out they were paying several times what the companies were worth even in the most optimistic outlook. So expect to see more lawsuits and accusations in the coming months as they probably have another 8-10 billion they are gonna have to write off and the board don't want to take the blame they rightfully deserve.
Did these companies overcharge HP? Oh I have no doubt, but considering how many billions they have pissed away the past few years its like pointing at a guy with a match and saying "Its HIS fault!" while the board is taking flamethrowers to the corporate headquarters. hey! Maybe they can pay Nokia several times what its worth for their HQ? Would fit right in with the rest of their lamebrained purchases of late.
I agree this is great and i hope more jump on board. If you want the customers you have to give them what THEY want, which is easy, cheap, and convenient to use.
THIS is how you actually fight piracy, not the 6 strikes and John Doe bullshit, but making your product so affordable and easy to get it becomes more of a bother to pirate than it is to just get it legal. I know plenty of pirates that have stopped, not because of litigation or draconian laws, but because between netflix, Steam, GOG, and all the channels beginning to put their shows online they simply have more than they could ever possibly watch, listen to, or play, so there really is no need to pirate.
Let us hope that all of the media and game companies see that the net is the future and not something they should fight. Of course this will give the ISPs a heart attack, how will they throw off anybody that actually uses their bandwidth if they are all using legal services? Why they might even have to spend some of their profits to...gasp!...upgrade their capacity! The horror! Won't somebody think of the board?
Because easy trumps secure any day of the week? How many times have we seen "Laptop with tons of unencrypted sensitive information lost"? It doesn't matter if its crooks or credit card companies, easy will ALWAYS come before secure, all it takes is one lazy guy in the org and you're boned.
I mean you think that it'd be obvious when for the fiftieth time you'd see those corporate emails where you'd have some PHB talking about shit that really really REALLY shouldn't have been written down, much less put into an email, that using things like email and text to talk about sensitive and possibly illegal shit was a big no no, but again easy tops secure and humans are lazy so if given a choice between hard and secure or easy and not the later is chosen damned near every time.
This is the part that just blows my mind, that people think warrants are a big deal. Shit go talk to any bail bondsman about warrants and be prepared to be shocked at how those things are passed out like candy.
As long as you aren't asking for a warrant on a "somebody" IE someone that has money and power its really just a rubber stamp. To fight a warrant on procedural grounds can cost several thousand bucks which they know the poor will never afford so its a non issue, they can be as sloppy as they want with regards to warrants and rubber stamp any excuse and since you can't afford the lawyer fees to fight back its legal. This is one of the more obvious ways classism affects this country, the rich get the full protection of the law, the poor have something like a 96% conviction rate.
Sorry i suck at analogies, but here is what gets my goat, and I've found this seems to hold true for anybody over 30 that isn't a geek. Old scam + New tech = success.
For example look at the "You've won a $1000 gift card from (insert store)", now that scam ain't worked online for years except for the completely gullible, the kind that still fall for the Nigerian prince kind of foolish, but you send that exact same email as a text on their smartphone? And you'd be surprised how many will fall for it. I must get a dozen calls from customers a week that if it weren't for me saying "No, its a scam, no major retailer is gonna alert a contest winner by text" they would fall for it hook, line, and sinker...why?
That is the part I just can't figure out, why would simply changing from an email to a text magically drop everybody's defenses? And it ONLY seems to work on those over 30, my oldest had some of his college buddies over the other day and i asked them if they had gotten any and they all said "Sure but its a scam, we just toss 'em". Is there something about being over 30 that keeps you from connecting one tech to another? Are people under 30 naturally more cynical and therefor harder to feel? Damned if I know but its really irritating, its like having to tech the noobs how to deal with the net all over again.
I disagree, if a show is well made it can make one think, its just those types of shows actually require decent actors and writers and thus cost more money than a Honey Boo Boo so what we get is tons of mind numbing drivel.
But a well written show can pose deep questions that will make you think, take Brimstone for example. The question it posed at its core was "When does good become evil?" and it posed that question from several angles. The protagonist for example was sent to hell for killing the man who raped his wife. Now why would that cause him to be sent to hell? he was protecting his family right? well what got him sent to hell was he got off on it. he enjoyed inflicting as much suffering as possible upon the rapist, he savored every moment of pain he could bring and THAT is what got him sent to hell. One of those that escaped from hell he was sent after reported several families to the Nazis, NOT because he actually believed in race or Nazism, but simply because he was a complete coward and rather than accept even the slightest chance of risk to his own person he turned in everyone around him. with that show nothing was black or white, it was all shades of grey and made you truly think about what is considered good and what is considered evil.
So while I agree that we are drowning in a sea of reality crap, TV doesn't always HAVE to be about mind numbing stupidity. The Twilight Zone, Outer Limits, you can have some truly great TV that really makes the audience think but they have to be willing to put in the work, and when they can crap out a Jersey Shore or Honey Boo Boo for peanuts and still get high ratings? Well you can see why TV sucks so badly now.
Exactly, look at your choices. One tax and spend, the other spend and spend, BOTH love bigger government, BOTH love more police powers, BOTH kiss the corporate rings, BOTH kiss the ass of the 1%. And the difference is....what exactly?
People have been voting FOR DECADES for less wars, less military pork, for an end to handing out checks to third world thugs, for their money to be spent here at home...has ANY of it come to pass? The military is bigger than ever and still building trillion dollar turkeys like the Soviets were planning an invasion, we are still handing billion dollar checks to thugs which is then used to torture and murder populaces that then hate the USA, and rightly so since its US guns being used to bash their heads in, our infrastructure falls apart while the top 5% pay the lowest tax rate in history and STILL uses tricks like double dutch and irish whip to make sure they don't even have to pay the pittance they owe, voting is a fucking joke. its a way for the stupid peasants to feel slightly less helpless while the handful at the top rule just like they have for centuries.