Actually I had an argument with a Microsoftie over this as yes you COULD have the appstore, hell they could have even backported it to Win 7 and made it a part of action center as well as a gadget. Instead they fucked up and killed Internet TV, which was the one gadget everybody liked, when they could have just transitioned over to the appstore and while showing them shows had ads that said "Like this episode? we can sell you the whole season right now!" and actually generated sales.
That is why I said if they would have put someone who actually knows customers instead of a PHB they could have been making money on BOTH Win 7 and Win 8, the whole thing was just handled so fucking bad there is zero hope now. BTW did you know both QB and Quicken will NOT support Win 8 except in the latest version? that software can go $600+, so right there they just lost the SMB market who live by QB/Quicken.
I would have spent 4 years in detention, because i already knew how to balance a checkbook and spewing dates with zero discussion of the events would have bored me to tears? hell in JHS I was so damned bored I reprogrammed their BASIC computers to insult those that got wrong answers, when the teachers were panicking over a "master hacker" attacking their class the one teacher that actually knew me just rolled their eyes and said "just go drag his butt in here and make him fix it, he probably rigged it to just insult you too if you try to undo it" which was true, if you didn't know the master password it would just call you an idiot.
You're welcome, when I talked to the Panthers girl after class it turned out both she and I had been on opposite sides of the field for those games, since we helped the jocks we got great seats front and center for the games so at all those games I was directly across the field from her, we just never met.
I actually wish that were true, then they would be consistently listenable, but all their stuff from the mid 90s on is just lame. Where is the "You shook me" or "Shoot to thrill" after 94? They don't exist. AC USED to be able to write the most catchy hooks, you would hear an AC song and be singing along because you...just couldn't HELP but like it, it was too damned upbeat and catchy. it was great music to go flying down the freeway to.
I'm sorry but you listen to the later singles and they are just...meh. the hooks are NOT catchy, you don't remember the songs 3 minutes after hearing them, like many bands that were once good they just ran out of gas. This is why so many like their live shows, they have enough back catalog that they can just play the hits and not have to worry about the new stuff, but strictly on quality of hooks and catchy songs the later stuff just blows.
Yeah and you get what you pay for. I swear it seems like MSFT gives Linux a perfect opportunity to grab some share instead of jogging their way to the finish line while MSFT limps along they promptly shoot themselves in the foot and then plop down in the middle of the track to write some shell scripts while MSFT wins by default. During Vista it was the mess than is Pulse being dropped not even alpha quality into most distros, and with Win 8 its like all the UI teams went "ZOMFG have you seen my new iPad? its so awesome!" and promptly tried to out Apple in the bling dept and made a giant fricking mess of everything.
In the end its the very nature of free as in beer that I think ultimately dooms Linux on the desktop, as since they aren't getting paid for their products (and thus don't have to worry about being fired when they bomb) the devs just ignore what their users tell them and instead just scratch their own itches, public and share be damned. And at the end of the day nobody cares about free as in freedom/beer if the actual product sucks, Win 7 is $100 and good until 2020, that is $14 a year so really not worth saving that $14 if you have to deal with a PITA OS. This is of course the opposite of server where the OS can cost thousands which is why Linux does well there, free as in beer matters when you are shelling out thousands, for a hundred bucks? meh, who cares.
Oh that's nothing, you want telling watch this video of a bog standard average user plopped down in front of a new Win 8 system, just like what would happen if they bought one and brought it home without taking classes for the damned thing first. This is EXACTLY what I saw from the 7 months I had a unit running in my shop for folks to play with, only with more frustration and anger that they were having trouble with even basic tasks. Nothing pisses someone off more than to feel helpless, and if you don't have all the keyboard shortcuts memorized (Protip: The vast majority of Windows users are "clicky clicky" mouse users and don't know the shortcuts) you will quickly feel overwhelmed and helpless.
That is why for months guys like me that work with average users have been saying things the reviews now confirm which is Win 8 is THAT bad from a user perspective. Now if it works for you? I'm happy for you, but I bet you are nothing like the average user, instead being more of a keyboard heavy power user. But the only features I've seen that make Win 8 has some advantage over Win 7, hybrid boot, hyper-V, on demand services..these frankly are vastly outweighed by the boat anchor that is the metro UI.
Why they simply couldn't have let the USER choose when UI they wanted is beyond me, you know it would have been trivial to simply leave the Win 7 desktop UI in the system and let the user switch at any time. probably afraid nobody would take the WinPhone which the metro UI seems to be designed to force us to "learn to love" but if the combo of user backlash and low sales has proven anything, its that most agree with me that Win 8 is a pass.
I'm sorry but you are wrong, you are mixing up the creationists and young earthers and those are most of the time two different groups. I've heard creationists say that the earth is indeed billions of years old and early man around in some form for millions of years, their argument is simply on the "How?" and while I consider their arguments basically a "God of the gaps" argument most are NOT young earthers, who believe Adam rode on dinos or that Satan ran around with a shovel burying fake bones to turn us away from their God.
And climate change is a different kettle of fish, you might want to look up "The temperature in 1880 is getting colder" to see there is some evidence out there that somebody is futzing with the numbers to make the change more dramatic. Are we changing the climate? I say there is evidence for both theories, such as the medieval warming period on the nay side and the acidity of the oceans on the yay side, and I think carbon credits is nothing but a scam cooked up by a few fat cats to squeeze more money out of the lower classes while bypassing it themselves with carbon credit shell corps and shipping factories to China where they won't have to pay for the carbon emissions. personally i think with a combo of nuclear, bio diesel, and renewables we can have cleaner power which should be desirable regardless of AGW but then the leeches couldn't make a mint and the NIMBYs have a fit if you build squat (Look at how China will have TWENTY FIVE reactors built in the time it takes one to get through committee here) so it really doesn't matter as politics and greed will keep the whole thing deadlocked.
Funnily enough all the jocks just loved me, because it was a "football school" and instead of actually going to class for my 4 years of HS (which I just got in trouble when I was sent to class in JHS because I was bored, even got to a point a teacher accused me of cheating because I was better at math in my head than he could do with pen and paper) so instead of going to class i was given my own classroom and when the jocks had study hall they were sent to me so I could teach them enough to pass the minimums required to play.
I'll never forget how it happened, my first day of HS and the first class was gym, which I couldn't stand anyway, and damned if the coach doesn't say the first thing "Any of you that aren't ready to give me 10 laps can just leave right now" and while the other sheep just sat there I started heading for the door. When others saw me get up about a third joined me and when the coach asked what I was doing I simply said "following your instructions!" LOL, needless to say that got me sent to the study hall as the principal told the coach "You NEVER tell them they can leave, what are you thinking?"
So there I am in study hall, which is run by the football coach, and he sees me reading "best sci/fi writers of the 70s" and he demands I come up there and bring the book, thinking I'm hiding comics or a dirty mag like some 80s sitcom. When he looks at the book and asks if I can actually understand all this "sci/fi babble" I begin explaining the nature of the grandfather paradox being used in the story I'm reading and not a minute in he just gets this glazed look and says "Enough! You come with me, and bring your class list" and he takes it from me and goes from class to class and says "See this kid? He gets an A and is marked present no matter what"..of course being a smartass I ask "Why not an A+?" and get told not to be a wiseass. Next thing I know I've got my own classroom, filled with jocks that have played the feetsball all their lives and I swear their spelling was "flour" and "stuud" for flower and stood. When I told my parents what was going on and why I wouldn't have homework...well ever, they said "Why are we not surprised? just keep working with your computers and reading books, you'll be better off anyway" which was true, from what I saw their math classes were so dumbed down it was barely above balancing a checkbook and their history classes were just spewing dates with zero context or discussion about the events.
So I feel for ya, its just a shame you didn't go to a football school so you could have just bypassed the bullshit. a couple of years later I was sitting in on a programming class at the local college and when the teacher asked about our backgrounds and I told the story he was like "No way, you telling me you NEVER had to go to class, take ANY tests, and got a perfect score and a diploma?" and sure enough a little gal in the backed popped up and said "OMG you too? That was what I did at my school too!" and I said "Go Lions!" and she laughed and said "Go Panthers! We beat your team twice and you beat us twice, it was pretty evenly matched those years" and the teacher just stood there with a fish out of water expression, but when you were smart and went to a football school that was just how things worked. I moved back to town a few years ago and really wasn't surprised to see the school itself was average but the gym and field were state of the art, that is what you get at football schools.
Exactly Crosshair and to some extent they also had this problem with the emotion engine on the PS2, and this when combined with the amount of money they've lost in recent years makes me believe the rumor is true that the PS4 is gonna have an AMD APU instead of the cell or another POWER based chip.
Lets face it the cell just never caught on, there was talk and even a few products made of a cell chip on a PCIe bus for CGI and video renders but the price never dropped and so it flopped and supposedly it a real PITA to code for. Compare this to the AMD APU, its a bog standard X86-64 with Radeon graphics, so games can be ported from the PC with almost zero effort, which means instead of PCs getting games along with the X360 and the PS3 getting them late if ever they could have PS4 games released at the same time as PC games thus making for a better library.
So the question becomes whether or not they are gonna have backwards compatibility and I bet no, the cell cost too much to add the cost of a chip to every unit just to play the PS3 library. More likely they will tell those that want BC to just hang onto their PS3 (which they may continue to support like the PS2 but I kind of doubt it as its expensive to make) and since all the new games will be on the PS4 most will probably just switch. Not to mention one thing the Radeon APUs are known for is great multimedia performance so you could replace your STBs with the PS4 and have it do everything.
Exactly, they give out more doe than buck tags for precisely that reason, to insure the herds stay at manageable levels. And you are right about deer being smart, my mom doesn't allow hunting on her land and one herd has figured this out so a large buck with a flock of does pretty much camp in her backyard on hunting season. my GF loves to have us stay the night at mom's just so she can have her early morning cup of coffee while watching the herd, they are smart enough to realize we aren't a threat and will get within 40 feet of the back glass.
But as I said I got to see first hand what it is like with zero hunting, what you got was starved deer everywhere and tons of accidents involving deer running in front of cars. My late aunt lost her favorite car that way, deer shot right in front of her and ended up an ornament. of course we all had venison that winter but because of overpopulation it wasn't as good as previous years.
Yes because the majority are gonna use hyper-V and have multiple monitors...facepalm. Even you admit that is a niche, and as a retailer who deals primarily with SMBs and home users I can't think of a single one that uses or even asked about hyper-V and I have exactly ONE customer with two monitors...and he's quite happy with his Phenom I X3 and Win 7.
The simple fact is when you add in all the factors, people having more power than they know what to do with, a dead economy that makes many leery of buying a new system they frankly don't need, and adding a touch centric UI that requires a more expensive system ON TOP of all those other factors? It would be like naming your new luxury liner "Titanic II" and saying the first run is gonna be in jan in the Atlantic...its just doomed to fail.
Exactly and some states are a hell of a lot stronger on private property rights. I know here in the south what it says on the books and what is actually true is two different things, judges here are pretty pro property rights and unless it was the cops spying on other people's property is pretty much a big no no, especially screwing with the hunters.
And do these "animal rights" bunches know what will happen if you get rid of the hunters? i do because deer hunting was banned for a couple of years here while a court case was being fought, what you ended up with was huge herds of sickly starving deer running into the streets and causing quite a few accidents and a couple of deaths. Whether they like it or not unless they are willing to MASSIVELY repopulate predators like panthers, cougars, bears, wolves, and deal with the "Little Suzy was eaten by a bear" stories since we humans are fat and slow when little thus perfect predator chow? Well then you are just gonna have to put up with the hunters, because the game animals breed like bunnies because of thousands of years of dealing with large amounts of predators that just don't exist in the wild in the numbers to keep their population in check.
so while I don't personally hunt (sitting out in the cold woods for hours freezing my nuts off ain't my thing) I personally have no problem with them,k because i know without them you'll have a huge overpopulation problem very quickly.
Bimbo Newton Crosby, the whole point of Win 8 is Metro, if you are just sticking with the classic desktop you are better off having the REAL desktop of Win 7 that the gimped half baked one in Win 8. and its obvious to any of use it more than a few minutes that Win metro is a touch screen tablet UI...problem is less than 2% of ALL computers sold now or in the past is touch, so its a UI for a system that is almost never seen in the wild. hell my local Wally World has over 27 laptops and desktops and only ONE is a touch, an iMac ripoff by HP.
But what is really gonna doom Win 8 is the reality of the situation when it comes to X86, which is thus: When Intel and AMD went from MHz wars to core wars they quickly built systems so fucking powerful that Joe average just can't stress even a 5 year old system, so why do they need to buy a new one? The LOW END systems i was selling 5 years ago was AMD Phenom I triples and quads (remember the TLB bug? I got a pile of those chips dirt cheap and I found you had better odds of winning the Powerball than hitting the TLB bug) with 3Gb-4Gb of RAM and 400Gb-500Gb HDDs...now what average user is gonna actually slam that system? They aren't. The same thing has been the case in laptops for about 4 years now, with even the low end mainstream systems sporting dual cores with a couple of Gb of RAM, and what do people do with them? Surf, listen to music, watch videos...none of which is gonna slam even a low end Pentium or Turion dual.
so you have one of the worst economic downturns in decades, you have customers with fire breathing funny cars that could just as easily be running compacts...and you're surprised nobody is buying, when you add a fucked up touchscreen UI to the mix? In a dead economy you do NOT raise the prices, just ask Intel how many Ultrabooks are sitting in warehouses or on shelves gathering dust, so adding a fucked up beta quality PITA UI on top of a bad situation was just begging for fail. Well congrats MSFT, you finally made vista look good.
All they would have had to do is ask us grunts on the front lines, we could have told you it was gonna bomb. I had a Win 8 system set up in my shop from Feb to Sept to let folks try it out and NOBODY liked it, they found it confusing and a PITA. I heard comments like "This is a joke, right? You're pulling my leg" and "How do i get it to just act like Windows?" and "But YOU can get the REAL Windows...right?"
Personally I'm all for trying new things and staying ahead of the curve, when all the home users were on WinME I was running Win2K, when everyone else was running XP I was on XP X64 from the day of its release, i even fought the bugs with Vista for 6 months as a beta tester before giving up but Win 8...its the first MSFT OS I'm gonna have absolutely nothing to do with, because its like tying a boat anchor to my productivity. I multitask, this is sucktastic on win 8, and trying to fight the Metro screen with a touchpad is the height of frustration.
So i'll say the same thing I did when i saw how my customers viewed Win 8, its a lemon, its gonna bomb. Kinda telling that in the 7 months I had Win 8 running on that nice AMD multicore not a single person, not one mind you, wanted to buy that system or even offered me anything for it, I put win 7 on it? I sold it 5 days later. That tells me as a retailer all I really need to know.
Sorry I didn't think to bookmark it but the last spec I saw had the GPU right around the HD4650 as far as performance, so its better than the other consoles but certainly behind compared to the PC. Makes sense though when you think how long it takes to go from the drawing board to shelves as the HD4650 was pretty respectable 3 years ago when they would have started designing.
Well its a balancing act, make it too hard and many companies won't bother, same thing happened to Sega with the Saturn that was more powerful than the PS1 but didn't look it because it was a royal bitch to write games for. So you want to give yourself enough power that the system will look good 5 years from now (the typical life of a console before the downturn) but you don't want to make it so complex that nobody will put in the work but you.
And if the rumors are true IBM and AMD are gonna be the winners next gen, because the rumor has all of the consoles using their GPU and at least one (PS4) using their APU, so no matter who wins IBM and AMD will be cashing the checks. I have to wonder if this isn't the reason that the Steambox is supposedly gonna have an Intel CPU/APU and an Nvidia GPU, I wouldn't be surprised if looking at being shut out of the next gen consoles that Nvidia offered a sweetheart deal to Valve to go green for their console.
That was the same thing that put Sega in a death spiral that they never recovered from. The Saturn was a more powerful system, but because they didn't see the sudden explosion of 3D they had to bolt on a second processor at the last minute and having to program for 2 CPU plus a GPU made it a royal PITA to program so many of the games looked the same or worse as nobody took the time to optimize for the design. if you look at games like Virtua Fighter (where they used one chip for each fighter) they were getting better 3D than the PS1 but they were the only company that would put in the work.
If the rumors are true and the PS4 is a standard AMD APU with an ARM chip for DRM then I'd have to say Sony learned their lesson about exotic chips, lets just hope that it isn't like Sega and too little too late.
2 things make your comparison worthless...1.-Nvidia is ripping a good chunk of the underlying guts out and running their own, which i really don't see valve going to all that trouble for an OS with a 1% share, and 2.- Nvidia isn't specifically doing this TO GET DRM ON A PLATFORM CONTROLLED BY THE GPL and those that treat the GPL like the ten commandments.
So I'm sorry, but comparing a binary blob, which just FYI they have to employ and entire fricking dev team to constantly update because all the guts futzing by Linus and pals break drivers, to an entire software and gaming platform built around DRM, is about as pointless and off topic as they come and what is sad is you were marked insightful for such a horribly bad comparison. You might as well have said "Linux desktops has ZERO issues, why my router has run for a decade with zero updates!" for all the good that comparison is.
What amazes me is how many refuse to learn their history, back in the NS VS IE days they BOTH were dirty as hell when it came to proprietary crap...remember the "blink" tag that made Geocities a nightmare? That was NS that came up with that.
So we need to get rid of ALL proprietary extensions and if the W3C is too damned slow at implementing new tech then kick their asses to the curb and start a new org, seeing as how we've ended up with this mess because W3C is too damned slow.
Yeah but you just gotta LOVE the irony, as everyone bitched their ass off when MSFT was pushing IE with broken half assed standards, and rallied around how "FOSS would bring open standards to everybody!" so now that a FOSS browser has 90% share? Its just as non standard and its extensions just as proprietary as IE ever was.
But as bizarre as who is pointing this out you're right that proprietary extensions DO NOT belong on the web, we need to have everything using standards because not only does this screw MSFT, it screws Mozilla, and Opera, and anybody that doesn't use Webkit. Anybody remember how quickly IE specific bugs would spread like wildfire because everybody was using it? We don't need to trade one monopoly for another, so down with Webkit specific extensions.
The reason we are seeing more and more crap is simple....money. If given the choice of selling games or selling games AND shows AND music? Well its a no brainer for the company, although to be fair frankly I have a lot of customers that own consoles and the vast majority? Only play games on the things.
As for TFA...how many of us have been saying the SECOND it was first announced that Steam was coming to Linux that the whole reason for it was a Steambox console? Like it or not Linux as a desktop platform has pretty much flatline for quite awhile now, pretty much staying at 1% with almost no growth, but as Google showed with Android you can make a hell of an embedded platform with it and as long as they stick with GPL V2 they can TiVo the hell out of it and thus have the DRM required by the game and media companies to get the content.
So will it work? Possibly, after all if rumors are true the Xbox Next and PS4 are both gonna be X86 AMD APUs so you'd have three systems running X86, I'm sure Valve will come up with a nice dev kit to make porting your game from the PC to the Steambox easy, and of course they have a long relationship with game developers so that's always a plus.
I wouldn't bet the farm on Steam staying on Linux proper for very long though, as we already see the distros starting to balk at the license terms and again like it or not Steam IS DRM which I have a feeling those core devs that work on the vital subsystems and treat the GPL like the ten commandments will probably go out of their way to make sure their updates "accidently" break Steam. Hell the last time I pointed this out I got a dozen posts basically saying "The GPL win win!" like it can magically get all the publishers just open up their games and switch to the honor system with their 100 million dollar triple A titles...yeah right.
More likely Valve will put out one or two releases, the devs will break it and say "Well if you'd simply open up your code and get rid of the DRM that wouldn't happen" and Valve will simply say "Due to lack of popular demand we are ending Steam on the Linux platform, all those that bought games on it can have their games transferred to the PC or Steambox account" and that will be the end of that. The GPL and DRM will never be compatible so Linux just won't be a gaming platform, simple as that.
And if the wind doesn't blow for 3 days then they are building it in the wrong place. They should try the Ozark hollows instead, the wind just whips off those mountains through those hollows pretty much 24/7.
But at the end of the day we all know what this is REALLY about, its the simple fact that when you figure in all the costs the electric vehicles simply don't make economic sense. The batteries cost too much to make, don't last long enough, and when you figure the mining and disposal for the batteries I'd frankly be amazed if you could break even without government subsidies, much less come out ahead.
The better way to go would be to build a "people's car" that is preferably less than $20k and would run on diesel so you could use biodiesel to wean us off of oil. Until we have a major breakthrough on battery tech it simply doesn't make sense to go electric on cars.
Well when your stated goal is to bring about the end of the world so all those people you don't like can get smited while you end up buddy buddy with the boss?
yeah I'd personally call that cultish at the very least. The third temple is on the "to do" list as a sign to bring about the end of the world.
Hell before the Internet there was a family member's dirty VCR tapes you sneak a peak at and before that there was the dirty mags, heel you go back to the first caves humans lived in and they find smut.
So I just don't get the "ZOMFG little Timmy might see a titty!" bullshit, just let Timmy know that the porn is just as fake as every other film and quit having a damned fit already
I'll never forget what Joe Bob Briggs said about America, I bet it applies to the UK too "America: Where you can't show a titty unless there is a knife in it". Personally if it came down to my teen boy watching a porno, preferably one of the educational ones like the Nina Hartley great sex, but hell any porno, even that Avengers spoof where they painted Chyna green, or watching torture porn like Hostel? I'd hand him a bag of popcorn and say "Try not to choke on the popcorn when you see the She Hulk, kinda hard to paint everything lime green ya know"
Slashdot Mirror
Actually I had an argument with a Microsoftie over this as yes you COULD have the appstore, hell they could have even backported it to Win 7 and made it a part of action center as well as a gadget. Instead they fucked up and killed Internet TV, which was the one gadget everybody liked, when they could have just transitioned over to the appstore and while showing them shows had ads that said "Like this episode? we can sell you the whole season right now!" and actually generated sales.
That is why I said if they would have put someone who actually knows customers instead of a PHB they could have been making money on BOTH Win 7 and Win 8, the whole thing was just handled so fucking bad there is zero hope now. BTW did you know both QB and Quicken will NOT support Win 8 except in the latest version? that software can go $600+, so right there they just lost the SMB market who live by QB/Quicken.
I would have spent 4 years in detention, because i already knew how to balance a checkbook and spewing dates with zero discussion of the events would have bored me to tears? hell in JHS I was so damned bored I reprogrammed their BASIC computers to insult those that got wrong answers, when the teachers were panicking over a "master hacker" attacking their class the one teacher that actually knew me just rolled their eyes and said "just go drag his butt in here and make him fix it, he probably rigged it to just insult you too if you try to undo it" which was true, if you didn't know the master password it would just call you an idiot.
You're welcome, when I talked to the Panthers girl after class it turned out both she and I had been on opposite sides of the field for those games, since we helped the jocks we got great seats front and center for the games so at all those games I was directly across the field from her, we just never met.
I actually wish that were true, then they would be consistently listenable, but all their stuff from the mid 90s on is just lame. Where is the "You shook me" or "Shoot to thrill" after 94? They don't exist. AC USED to be able to write the most catchy hooks, you would hear an AC song and be singing along because you...just couldn't HELP but like it, it was too damned upbeat and catchy. it was great music to go flying down the freeway to.
I'm sorry but you listen to the later singles and they are just...meh. the hooks are NOT catchy, you don't remember the songs 3 minutes after hearing them, like many bands that were once good they just ran out of gas. This is why so many like their live shows, they have enough back catalog that they can just play the hits and not have to worry about the new stuff, but strictly on quality of hooks and catchy songs the later stuff just blows.
Yeah and you get what you pay for. I swear it seems like MSFT gives Linux a perfect opportunity to grab some share instead of jogging their way to the finish line while MSFT limps along they promptly shoot themselves in the foot and then plop down in the middle of the track to write some shell scripts while MSFT wins by default. During Vista it was the mess than is Pulse being dropped not even alpha quality into most distros, and with Win 8 its like all the UI teams went "ZOMFG have you seen my new iPad? its so awesome!" and promptly tried to out Apple in the bling dept and made a giant fricking mess of everything.
In the end its the very nature of free as in beer that I think ultimately dooms Linux on the desktop, as since they aren't getting paid for their products (and thus don't have to worry about being fired when they bomb) the devs just ignore what their users tell them and instead just scratch their own itches, public and share be damned. And at the end of the day nobody cares about free as in freedom/beer if the actual product sucks, Win 7 is $100 and good until 2020, that is $14 a year so really not worth saving that $14 if you have to deal with a PITA OS. This is of course the opposite of server where the OS can cost thousands which is why Linux does well there, free as in beer matters when you are shelling out thousands, for a hundred bucks? meh, who cares.
Oh that's nothing, you want telling watch this video of a bog standard average user plopped down in front of a new Win 8 system, just like what would happen if they bought one and brought it home without taking classes for the damned thing first. This is EXACTLY what I saw from the 7 months I had a unit running in my shop for folks to play with, only with more frustration and anger that they were having trouble with even basic tasks. Nothing pisses someone off more than to feel helpless, and if you don't have all the keyboard shortcuts memorized (Protip: The vast majority of Windows users are "clicky clicky" mouse users and don't know the shortcuts) you will quickly feel overwhelmed and helpless.
That is why for months guys like me that work with average users have been saying things the reviews now confirm which is Win 8 is THAT bad from a user perspective. Now if it works for you? I'm happy for you, but I bet you are nothing like the average user, instead being more of a keyboard heavy power user. But the only features I've seen that make Win 8 has some advantage over Win 7, hybrid boot, hyper-V, on demand services..these frankly are vastly outweighed by the boat anchor that is the metro UI.
Why they simply couldn't have let the USER choose when UI they wanted is beyond me, you know it would have been trivial to simply leave the Win 7 desktop UI in the system and let the user switch at any time. probably afraid nobody would take the WinPhone which the metro UI seems to be designed to force us to "learn to love" but if the combo of user backlash and low sales has proven anything, its that most agree with me that Win 8 is a pass.
I'm sorry but you are wrong, you are mixing up the creationists and young earthers and those are most of the time two different groups. I've heard creationists say that the earth is indeed billions of years old and early man around in some form for millions of years, their argument is simply on the "How?" and while I consider their arguments basically a "God of the gaps" argument most are NOT young earthers, who believe Adam rode on dinos or that Satan ran around with a shovel burying fake bones to turn us away from their God.
And climate change is a different kettle of fish, you might want to look up "The temperature in 1880 is getting colder" to see there is some evidence out there that somebody is futzing with the numbers to make the change more dramatic. Are we changing the climate? I say there is evidence for both theories, such as the medieval warming period on the nay side and the acidity of the oceans on the yay side, and I think carbon credits is nothing but a scam cooked up by a few fat cats to squeeze more money out of the lower classes while bypassing it themselves with carbon credit shell corps and shipping factories to China where they won't have to pay for the carbon emissions. personally i think with a combo of nuclear, bio diesel, and renewables we can have cleaner power which should be desirable regardless of AGW but then the leeches couldn't make a mint and the NIMBYs have a fit if you build squat (Look at how China will have TWENTY FIVE reactors built in the time it takes one to get through committee here) so it really doesn't matter as politics and greed will keep the whole thing deadlocked.
Funnily enough all the jocks just loved me, because it was a "football school" and instead of actually going to class for my 4 years of HS (which I just got in trouble when I was sent to class in JHS because I was bored, even got to a point a teacher accused me of cheating because I was better at math in my head than he could do with pen and paper) so instead of going to class i was given my own classroom and when the jocks had study hall they were sent to me so I could teach them enough to pass the minimums required to play.
I'll never forget how it happened, my first day of HS and the first class was gym, which I couldn't stand anyway, and damned if the coach doesn't say the first thing "Any of you that aren't ready to give me 10 laps can just leave right now" and while the other sheep just sat there I started heading for the door. When others saw me get up about a third joined me and when the coach asked what I was doing I simply said "following your instructions!" LOL, needless to say that got me sent to the study hall as the principal told the coach "You NEVER tell them they can leave, what are you thinking?"
So there I am in study hall, which is run by the football coach, and he sees me reading "best sci/fi writers of the 70s" and he demands I come up there and bring the book, thinking I'm hiding comics or a dirty mag like some 80s sitcom. When he looks at the book and asks if I can actually understand all this "sci/fi babble" I begin explaining the nature of the grandfather paradox being used in the story I'm reading and not a minute in he just gets this glazed look and says "Enough! You come with me, and bring your class list" and he takes it from me and goes from class to class and says "See this kid? He gets an A and is marked present no matter what"..of course being a smartass I ask "Why not an A+?" and get told not to be a wiseass. Next thing I know I've got my own classroom, filled with jocks that have played the feetsball all their lives and I swear their spelling was "flour" and "stuud" for flower and stood. When I told my parents what was going on and why I wouldn't have homework...well ever, they said "Why are we not surprised? just keep working with your computers and reading books, you'll be better off anyway" which was true, from what I saw their math classes were so dumbed down it was barely above balancing a checkbook and their history classes were just spewing dates with zero context or discussion about the events.
So I feel for ya, its just a shame you didn't go to a football school so you could have just bypassed the bullshit. a couple of years later I was sitting in on a programming class at the local college and when the teacher asked about our backgrounds and I told the story he was like "No way, you telling me you NEVER had to go to class, take ANY tests, and got a perfect score and a diploma?" and sure enough a little gal in the backed popped up and said "OMG you too? That was what I did at my school too!" and I said "Go Lions!" and she laughed and said "Go Panthers! We beat your team twice and you beat us twice, it was pretty evenly matched those years" and the teacher just stood there with a fish out of water expression, but when you were smart and went to a football school that was just how things worked. I moved back to town a few years ago and really wasn't surprised to see the school itself was average but the gym and field were state of the art, that is what you get at football schools.
Exactly Crosshair and to some extent they also had this problem with the emotion engine on the PS2, and this when combined with the amount of money they've lost in recent years makes me believe the rumor is true that the PS4 is gonna have an AMD APU instead of the cell or another POWER based chip.
Lets face it the cell just never caught on, there was talk and even a few products made of a cell chip on a PCIe bus for CGI and video renders but the price never dropped and so it flopped and supposedly it a real PITA to code for. Compare this to the AMD APU, its a bog standard X86-64 with Radeon graphics, so games can be ported from the PC with almost zero effort, which means instead of PCs getting games along with the X360 and the PS3 getting them late if ever they could have PS4 games released at the same time as PC games thus making for a better library.
So the question becomes whether or not they are gonna have backwards compatibility and I bet no, the cell cost too much to add the cost of a chip to every unit just to play the PS3 library. More likely they will tell those that want BC to just hang onto their PS3 (which they may continue to support like the PS2 but I kind of doubt it as its expensive to make) and since all the new games will be on the PS4 most will probably just switch. Not to mention one thing the Radeon APUs are known for is great multimedia performance so you could replace your STBs with the PS4 and have it do everything.
Exactly, they give out more doe than buck tags for precisely that reason, to insure the herds stay at manageable levels. And you are right about deer being smart, my mom doesn't allow hunting on her land and one herd has figured this out so a large buck with a flock of does pretty much camp in her backyard on hunting season. my GF loves to have us stay the night at mom's just so she can have her early morning cup of coffee while watching the herd, they are smart enough to realize we aren't a threat and will get within 40 feet of the back glass.
But as I said I got to see first hand what it is like with zero hunting, what you got was starved deer everywhere and tons of accidents involving deer running in front of cars. My late aunt lost her favorite car that way, deer shot right in front of her and ended up an ornament. of course we all had venison that winter but because of overpopulation it wasn't as good as previous years.
Yes because the majority are gonna use hyper-V and have multiple monitors...facepalm. Even you admit that is a niche, and as a retailer who deals primarily with SMBs and home users I can't think of a single one that uses or even asked about hyper-V and I have exactly ONE customer with two monitors...and he's quite happy with his Phenom I X3 and Win 7.
The simple fact is when you add in all the factors, people having more power than they know what to do with, a dead economy that makes many leery of buying a new system they frankly don't need, and adding a touch centric UI that requires a more expensive system ON TOP of all those other factors? It would be like naming your new luxury liner "Titanic II" and saying the first run is gonna be in jan in the Atlantic...its just doomed to fail.
Exactly and some states are a hell of a lot stronger on private property rights. I know here in the south what it says on the books and what is actually true is two different things, judges here are pretty pro property rights and unless it was the cops spying on other people's property is pretty much a big no no, especially screwing with the hunters.
And do these "animal rights" bunches know what will happen if you get rid of the hunters? i do because deer hunting was banned for a couple of years here while a court case was being fought, what you ended up with was huge herds of sickly starving deer running into the streets and causing quite a few accidents and a couple of deaths. Whether they like it or not unless they are willing to MASSIVELY repopulate predators like panthers, cougars, bears, wolves, and deal with the "Little Suzy was eaten by a bear" stories since we humans are fat and slow when little thus perfect predator chow? Well then you are just gonna have to put up with the hunters, because the game animals breed like bunnies because of thousands of years of dealing with large amounts of predators that just don't exist in the wild in the numbers to keep their population in check.
so while I don't personally hunt (sitting out in the cold woods for hours freezing my nuts off ain't my thing) I personally have no problem with them,k because i know without them you'll have a huge overpopulation problem very quickly.
Bimbo Newton Crosby, the whole point of Win 8 is Metro, if you are just sticking with the classic desktop you are better off having the REAL desktop of Win 7 that the gimped half baked one in Win 8. and its obvious to any of use it more than a few minutes that Win metro is a touch screen tablet UI...problem is less than 2% of ALL computers sold now or in the past is touch, so its a UI for a system that is almost never seen in the wild. hell my local Wally World has over 27 laptops and desktops and only ONE is a touch, an iMac ripoff by HP.
But what is really gonna doom Win 8 is the reality of the situation when it comes to X86, which is thus: When Intel and AMD went from MHz wars to core wars they quickly built systems so fucking powerful that Joe average just can't stress even a 5 year old system, so why do they need to buy a new one? The LOW END systems i was selling 5 years ago was AMD Phenom I triples and quads (remember the TLB bug? I got a pile of those chips dirt cheap and I found you had better odds of winning the Powerball than hitting the TLB bug) with 3Gb-4Gb of RAM and 400Gb-500Gb HDDs...now what average user is gonna actually slam that system? They aren't. The same thing has been the case in laptops for about 4 years now, with even the low end mainstream systems sporting dual cores with a couple of Gb of RAM, and what do people do with them? Surf, listen to music, watch videos...none of which is gonna slam even a low end Pentium or Turion dual.
so you have one of the worst economic downturns in decades, you have customers with fire breathing funny cars that could just as easily be running compacts...and you're surprised nobody is buying, when you add a fucked up touchscreen UI to the mix? In a dead economy you do NOT raise the prices, just ask Intel how many Ultrabooks are sitting in warehouses or on shelves gathering dust, so adding a fucked up beta quality PITA UI on top of a bad situation was just begging for fail. Well congrats MSFT, you finally made vista look good.
All they would have had to do is ask us grunts on the front lines, we could have told you it was gonna bomb. I had a Win 8 system set up in my shop from Feb to Sept to let folks try it out and NOBODY liked it, they found it confusing and a PITA. I heard comments like "This is a joke, right? You're pulling my leg" and "How do i get it to just act like Windows?" and "But YOU can get the REAL Windows...right?"
Personally I'm all for trying new things and staying ahead of the curve, when all the home users were on WinME I was running Win2K, when everyone else was running XP I was on XP X64 from the day of its release, i even fought the bugs with Vista for 6 months as a beta tester before giving up but Win 8...its the first MSFT OS I'm gonna have absolutely nothing to do with, because its like tying a boat anchor to my productivity. I multitask, this is sucktastic on win 8, and trying to fight the Metro screen with a touchpad is the height of frustration.
So i'll say the same thing I did when i saw how my customers viewed Win 8, its a lemon, its gonna bomb. Kinda telling that in the 7 months I had Win 8 running on that nice AMD multicore not a single person, not one mind you, wanted to buy that system or even offered me anything for it, I put win 7 on it? I sold it 5 days later. That tells me as a retailer all I really need to know.
Sorry I didn't think to bookmark it but the last spec I saw had the GPU right around the HD4650 as far as performance, so its better than the other consoles but certainly behind compared to the PC. Makes sense though when you think how long it takes to go from the drawing board to shelves as the HD4650 was pretty respectable 3 years ago when they would have started designing.
Well its a balancing act, make it too hard and many companies won't bother, same thing happened to Sega with the Saturn that was more powerful than the PS1 but didn't look it because it was a royal bitch to write games for. So you want to give yourself enough power that the system will look good 5 years from now (the typical life of a console before the downturn) but you don't want to make it so complex that nobody will put in the work but you.
And if the rumors are true IBM and AMD are gonna be the winners next gen, because the rumor has all of the consoles using their GPU and at least one (PS4) using their APU, so no matter who wins IBM and AMD will be cashing the checks. I have to wonder if this isn't the reason that the Steambox is supposedly gonna have an Intel CPU/APU and an Nvidia GPU, I wouldn't be surprised if looking at being shut out of the next gen consoles that Nvidia offered a sweetheart deal to Valve to go green for their console.
That was the same thing that put Sega in a death spiral that they never recovered from. The Saturn was a more powerful system, but because they didn't see the sudden explosion of 3D they had to bolt on a second processor at the last minute and having to program for 2 CPU plus a GPU made it a royal PITA to program so many of the games looked the same or worse as nobody took the time to optimize for the design. if you look at games like Virtua Fighter (where they used one chip for each fighter) they were getting better 3D than the PS1 but they were the only company that would put in the work.
If the rumors are true and the PS4 is a standard AMD APU with an ARM chip for DRM then I'd have to say Sony learned their lesson about exotic chips, lets just hope that it isn't like Sega and too little too late.
2 things make your comparison worthless...1.-Nvidia is ripping a good chunk of the underlying guts out and running their own, which i really don't see valve going to all that trouble for an OS with a 1% share, and 2.- Nvidia isn't specifically doing this TO GET DRM ON A PLATFORM CONTROLLED BY THE GPL and those that treat the GPL like the ten commandments.
So I'm sorry, but comparing a binary blob, which just FYI they have to employ and entire fricking dev team to constantly update because all the guts futzing by Linus and pals break drivers, to an entire software and gaming platform built around DRM, is about as pointless and off topic as they come and what is sad is you were marked insightful for such a horribly bad comparison. You might as well have said "Linux desktops has ZERO issues, why my router has run for a decade with zero updates!" for all the good that comparison is.
What amazes me is how many refuse to learn their history, back in the NS VS IE days they BOTH were dirty as hell when it came to proprietary crap...remember the "blink" tag that made Geocities a nightmare? That was NS that came up with that.
So we need to get rid of ALL proprietary extensions and if the W3C is too damned slow at implementing new tech then kick their asses to the curb and start a new org, seeing as how we've ended up with this mess because W3C is too damned slow.
Yeah but you just gotta LOVE the irony, as everyone bitched their ass off when MSFT was pushing IE with broken half assed standards, and rallied around how "FOSS would bring open standards to everybody!" so now that a FOSS browser has 90% share? Its just as non standard and its extensions just as proprietary as IE ever was.
But as bizarre as who is pointing this out you're right that proprietary extensions DO NOT belong on the web, we need to have everything using standards because not only does this screw MSFT, it screws Mozilla, and Opera, and anybody that doesn't use Webkit. Anybody remember how quickly IE specific bugs would spread like wildfire because everybody was using it? We don't need to trade one monopoly for another, so down with Webkit specific extensions.
What I want to know is since when has Rich Text Files been able to run code, and what moron thought THAT was a good idea?
The reason we are seeing more and more crap is simple....money. If given the choice of selling games or selling games AND shows AND music? Well its a no brainer for the company, although to be fair frankly I have a lot of customers that own consoles and the vast majority? Only play games on the things.
As for TFA...how many of us have been saying the SECOND it was first announced that Steam was coming to Linux that the whole reason for it was a Steambox console? Like it or not Linux as a desktop platform has pretty much flatline for quite awhile now, pretty much staying at 1% with almost no growth, but as Google showed with Android you can make a hell of an embedded platform with it and as long as they stick with GPL V2 they can TiVo the hell out of it and thus have the DRM required by the game and media companies to get the content.
So will it work? Possibly, after all if rumors are true the Xbox Next and PS4 are both gonna be X86 AMD APUs so you'd have three systems running X86, I'm sure Valve will come up with a nice dev kit to make porting your game from the PC to the Steambox easy, and of course they have a long relationship with game developers so that's always a plus.
I wouldn't bet the farm on Steam staying on Linux proper for very long though, as we already see the distros starting to balk at the license terms and again like it or not Steam IS DRM which I have a feeling those core devs that work on the vital subsystems and treat the GPL like the ten commandments will probably go out of their way to make sure their updates "accidently" break Steam. Hell the last time I pointed this out I got a dozen posts basically saying "The GPL win win!" like it can magically get all the publishers just open up their games and switch to the honor system with their 100 million dollar triple A titles...yeah right.
More likely Valve will put out one or two releases, the devs will break it and say "Well if you'd simply open up your code and get rid of the DRM that wouldn't happen" and Valve will simply say "Due to lack of popular demand we are ending Steam on the Linux platform, all those that bought games on it can have their games transferred to the PC or Steambox account" and that will be the end of that. The GPL and DRM will never be compatible so Linux just won't be a gaming platform, simple as that.
And if the wind doesn't blow for 3 days then they are building it in the wrong place. They should try the Ozark hollows instead, the wind just whips off those mountains through those hollows pretty much 24/7.
But at the end of the day we all know what this is REALLY about, its the simple fact that when you figure in all the costs the electric vehicles simply don't make economic sense. The batteries cost too much to make, don't last long enough, and when you figure the mining and disposal for the batteries I'd frankly be amazed if you could break even without government subsidies, much less come out ahead.
The better way to go would be to build a "people's car" that is preferably less than $20k and would run on diesel so you could use biodiesel to wean us off of oil. Until we have a major breakthrough on battery tech it simply doesn't make sense to go electric on cars.
Well when your stated goal is to bring about the end of the world so all those people you don't like can get smited while you end up buddy buddy with the boss?
yeah I'd personally call that cultish at the very least. The third temple is on the "to do" list as a sign to bring about the end of the world.
Hell before the Internet there was a family member's dirty VCR tapes you sneak a peak at and before that there was the dirty mags, heel you go back to the first caves humans lived in and they find smut.
So I just don't get the "ZOMFG little Timmy might see a titty!" bullshit, just let Timmy know that the porn is just as fake as every other film and quit having a damned fit already
I'll never forget what Joe Bob Briggs said about America, I bet it applies to the UK too "America: Where you can't show a titty unless there is a knife in it". Personally if it came down to my teen boy watching a porno, preferably one of the educational ones like the Nina Hartley great sex, but hell any porno, even that Avengers spoof where they painted Chyna green, or watching torture porn like Hostel? I'd hand him a bag of popcorn and say "Try not to choke on the popcorn when you see the She Hulk, kinda hard to paint everything lime green ya know"