Bimbo Newton Crosby, the guys that keep saying "Just use Linux!" have no damned clue about this kind of specialist gear, how it has NEVER been supported by Linux, how there is ZERO chance the company that made it offered FOSS drivers or software for it (since vendor lock in is so high on specialist gear) and how the cost of having to pay an entire team of developers to reverse engineer this stuff, not to mention possible lawsuits from the company that made it since like you pointed out they use DRM like dongles so DMCA applies, means its about like saying "get magical fairies to make it work for you!" for all the usage such statements has IRL.
I'm sorry but Linux is for programmers and BY programmers and the odds of it having drivers for such a funky specialized piece of equipment, one where the company that made it probably never gave a shit about Linux and may have even gone OOB years ago? Virtually nil.
The people like you that look at Linux as a panacea don't get into the nitty gritty logistics we are talking here because if you did you wouldn't even suggest it. What they would have to do if they followed your advice would be to reverse engineer the drivers for the hardware (no small task and NOT cheap), build their own software to run the scans, again no small task, and then have everything certified for HIPPA compliance where sure as fuck is NO small task and expensive as hell.
So I'm sorry but Linux would be a BAD IDEA with a capital B. The best plan would be to isolate the system on a VLAN and let their users access that way, this would allow them to keep XP without worrying about lack of support after 2014. Since XP lasted so long you can still find many newer systems with XP drivers so they will be able to get plenty of replacement systems for probably a good decade. A LOT cheaper than following your advice.
Uhhhh...isn't that what VLANs are for? so you can have it ONLY on the LAN and not on the WAN? I'll admit its been awhile since I had to support a large corp as I prefer dealing with home user and SMBs, but I thought that was networking 101, don't risk the expensive specialized gear by just sticking it on the net, am I wrong?
Uhhh....you can do that in XP proper without all the VM bullshit, just have a disc image on a partition and if anything goes wrong you can just roll it back. I've been doing this for years with customers using the free Comodo Time Machine (although I'm having to try out Paragon as CTM is no longer supported but still works on XP-Win 7) and if anything goes wrong they just hit the Home key on boot, pick "clean restore" and voila! Back up and running in under 20 minutes. Since i have their docs on a different partition they don't even risk losing anything, easy peasy and no VM hassles.
You see? THIS, this right here, is why Ballmer should have been fired a half a fricking decade ago. if his fat ass would have gotten Longhorn out on schedule (Nooo...Vista is NOT Longhorn, Ballmer had them throw Longhorn out and and start over because it was more like XP X64 and not as bling heavy as Ballmer wanted, had to compete with Apple on the shiny ya know) then so many wouldn't be trapped on XP now, but it took so damned long to get Vista out the door, and it was half assed and reeked of fail anyway, that XP hung onto to the point many simply can't afford to trash it because too damned many other systems depend on it.
What MSFT should have done is bust ass on XP Mode in Win 7 with a mantra of "if it runs on XP, it works in XP Mode" and made damned sure all those businesses could just switch without downtime, maybe even supported cloning existing XP installs for XP Mode VMs, but Ballmer is too damned busy drooling on an iPad to see he is royally fucking up and losing the business market, the bread and butter of MSFT. Stupid, that's what it is, fucking stupid.
Actually one of the gaming sites decided to test that theory, sorry I don't have a link but my Google Fu does sucketh, so they placed XP and Vista on different amounts of cores to see where Vista gave the advantage...final score? 16, that's where Vista started to run away from XP, was on 16 cores.
Now if this guy was MY customer? I'd have to tell him that for his specific use case a switch from XP to Win 7 would make no sense unless his specialized code would run in XP Mode, then and ONLY then would it be worth the switch. Because the odds that he is running this on something with more than 16 cores is virtually nil, and the cost to upgrade will be more than any benefit he sees for such a specialized use case.
Weeeelllllll...yes and no. There are many damned good reasons to upgrade from XP to Win 7, but 7 to 8? not really any i can think of unless you have a tablet.
You see XP was made at a time when 256Mb of RAM was only for the rich, so naturally its 32 bit only. The XP X64 that was released later was really Win2K3 Workstation with the Fisher Price UI tacked on and it frankly wasn't well supported and damned near impossible to find in the wild as the OEMs didn't go for it. Then there is the fact that it was released in 2001, so now its patches have patches which leads to instability, then there is of course "WinRot" which I can keep a new system from developing but once WinRot has set it? Too late, gotta wipe.
Then there are the pluses Win 7 brings, a MUCH better UI and file system explorer that finally defaults to two pane which makes file ops easier, breadcrumbs and jumplists make getting back to where you were easy peasy, and of course the biggest one is FINALLY somebody at MSFT got a fucking clue and instituted sane memory management, where the OS will actually USE extra memory as a cache for most used programs, thus unlike XP the more you use Win 7 the faster it gets as it learns your habits and caches what you use the most.
Out of all my systems I have only ONE XP unit left, its an old circa 2004 Sempron a customer traded in that because its soooo low power makes for a great nettop at the shop, but all I ever use it for is to look up specs and download drivers. if all you use XP for is a "browser in a box"? Then its fine, although you'd probably just as well served by a tablet in that case, but if you do any kind of actual work on your PC then XP really just doesn't cut it anymore, its just creaky and buggy and crashy and has some bad design flaws that will never be fixed.
Now when I fire up a machine and see XP knowing I'm gonna have to work on it I just groan, its like going back to Win9X, just ancient crap. I mean its fricking 11 years old for the love of the FSM!
This is why "Windows 7 is the new XP" because frankly the PCs released directly before and after Win 7 are such monsters that the average user won't need to replace until the hardware actually fails. lets look at what I was selling on the low end of my new builds 5 years ago...Phenom I X3s and X4s with 3-4gb of RAM and 300Gb+ HDDs. Now is there anything that your average user does that is gonna stress that system? remember these were my "$450-$500 specials" so weren't anywhere near even high end for the time, in fact the only reason i used quads more than X2s was the TLB bug and core 2 issue meant I could get those chips extra cheap. Hell I have a customer running the latest Solidworks on an X3 and is quite happy with the system.
So when you add to this a dead economy and Windows 8 being a tweeting twitting FB shitting frankenstein monster mash up of Windows and WinPhone its a recipe for failure. People simply don't need new systems, even the Core Duo first gen and Turion X2 laptops i sold are running just fine, that is why I've been branching off into HTPCs and home theater setups, because nobody needs a new desktop when they have a multicore with tons of RAM they aren't even stressing.
Yeah the TEA party did SOOOO well, their reps got stuck in a corner and told to "STFU and cash the check bitches" and that was the end of that. The simple fact is YOU CAN'T CHANGE A CORRUPTED SYSTEM BY WORKING WITHIN THAT SYSTEM because its fucking corrupted duh! That is like thinking if you play 3 card monty long enough you'll find the lady, its just not gonna happen.
I'm sorry but all you can do is grab as much as you possibly can and wait for the system to collapse, that's ALL you can do. When people that can write million dollar checks are your opponents all the organizing in the world has ZERO effect, because whomever you get in there will be bribed before the week is out, you are playing a rigged game you can NEVER win, the only winning move is not to play the game at all and like the USSR wait for the inevitable collapse.
Record companies do the same shit, I've known bands that had to break up because they got fucked on contracts and the way the record companies set up all the shells and dummies you can be sued BY them but good fucking luck suing them, its like trying to hit ghosts.
This is why I believe no empire will last more than a few centuries, the laws get so badly tilted to those at the top people just stop following the laws and the entire society falls apart. You look throughout history and time and time again you see it, either slowly like the Roman Empire or on fast forward like the USSR, but in every case people just stop following the rules and the whole system collapses. i truly believe the same will happen to the USA when the financial bubble bursts, you are gonna have so much printed money that its worthless and without being able to break out the checkbook to keep the peasants playing the game you'll find shit breaks down REAL quick. Scary but you look at history and that's just how it goes, as Lenin said "Capitalists will sell you the rope you intend to hang them with" because those at the top get so damned greedy they refuse to see the train heading towards them because it might cut into their profits.
I'm sorry but if you were any more full of shit your eyes would be brown. First Intel won't let AMD die anymore than MSFT would allow Apple to die in 97, it puts too big a bullseye on Intel for antitrust. if they have to give them the first gen core designs and a couple of guys? they'll do it, because it will cost them too much not to have a token competitor.
Second you are selling the same shit MSFT sold with Vista? remember that? How much easier it was? Didn't go over well though did it? Look at the reviews of 8 and what are the common themes? Stupid, pointless, retarded, frankenstein...these are NOT good words billy! These are the "words of failure" and are actually WORSE than they were for Vista? remember Vista? It amazes me how many Win 8 apologists seem to forget that Vista tanked and the users got what they wanted...which was Win 7, which is XP with better under the hood guts.
But you keep believing the hype Billy, me I'm gonna kick back with my popcorn and laugh! Win 8 is gonna make Vista look like a fricking hit, and Ballmer will most likely FINALLY get the fucking boot, which should have happened 6 fucking years ago when he failed to get a functional OS out the door for so long. In fact if it weren't for the fact that they can fall back on Win 7 I'd bet on MSFT dying before AMD, after all AMD still owns the low end market, you can buy quad laptops for $400 thanks to AMD, MSFT on the other hand has ZERO share in mobile and with intel and AMD selling multicores so cheap nobody needs to replace their OS but once or twice a decade. I have plenty of customers on Phenom I X3s that are happy with the performance.
Finally "young know how to reinstall their OS"? BWA HA HA HA HA HA...oh you were serious? BWA HA HA HA HA...They grew up on cell phones, they know less than shit about computers or OSes or even what to fucking do other than take it to somebody, News Flash I have plenty of under 30 customers, my oldest is in college and sends a LOT of work my way because the college kids know even less than those that grew up on Win9X. I ask them questions and the only answer I get is "Its broke, it needs to be fixed" because they don't even have the vocabulary to explain what is broke. Ever see Star Trek TNG with the retard aliens? Welcome to the future Billy.
That's funny because I'm typing this on a circa 2004 Sempron that I use as a nettop here at the shop and it runs just fine with XP, in fact I have Win 7 HP running in a dual boot and while I'm sticking with XP while I slowly but surely find replacements for all the old software I have on here it runs just fine. The key with Windows is do NOT starve it of RAM, that is the one place the OEMs really fucked up for the longest time, putting teeny tiny amounts of RAM. I have 2Gb of RAM in the Sempron, max it'll hold, and its responsive. In fact its responsive enough I've held off swapping the CPU for an Athlon64 simply because I see no point. maybe when I switch to Win 7 I'll see a point, but it plays SD videos off of YouTube and surfs and downloads just fine, and that's what I use it for so as long as it does its job it'll stay.
Uhhh...didn't bother to actually read the link, did you? The content creator wanted to give it to Netflix DRM FREE and they refused to allow it, so the author wanted to tell people "hey after you get done watching this if you like it you can have a free copy" which again simply looks good on Netflix but again they refused.
Lets face it, Netflix is the Ubisoft of video, they looooooves their DRM and they ain't gonna let anybody dare avoid their DRM crappiness, no way no how, even when the content creators don't want the shit!
e) Windows 8 has put a lot of doubt in everyone's minds as to whether they will be able to get the Win 7 units they'll need so they are taking a "wait and see" approach.
Lucky for me I was able to get all my customers switched to Win 7 and we are all gonna stay right where we are, but I can totally understand why some would stay with XP. Money is tight, you have a bunch of units that may not run it (I kept Win 7 Upgrade Adviser on a stick along with SIW so I had a good overview of what kind of hardware I was dealing with and any issues, although most chose to buy my $500 quad specials instead of keeping the P4s) and Windows 8 is making a LOT of folks nervous, because that tweeting twitting facebook shitting cellphone OS is NOT what a business users wants nor needs in the office.
So MSFT has nobody to blame but themselves. Instead of taking the worry out for business by making it clear that Win 7 would still be available they are dumping out the beta quality mess that is Win 8 without a care in the world, businesses just don't turn on a dime MSFT, you have to do program testing and hardware testing...its a hell of a lot of work before you can finally start rolling out units. it was a hell of a headache for me and I only deal with SMBs, I can't even imagine what it must be like for an IT guy stuck with 5,000+ units to switch..ugh. Stay with XP as long as you can and if you are lucky Ballmer will get fired before you have to switch and they'll bring in someone who understand business instead of a Steve Jobs wannabe.
Uhhh...EA is up for sale, proving the free market works. if enough people don't like something, like say Vista or Win 8, it flops and the company has to listen or go under. But with all the hoops you've set up for yourself frankly you need to just stick with Linux, because you are about as much of a PC gamer as someone with an old Win98 box in the corner. You can count the number of games without a tied online component released in the past few years on 2 hands with fingers left over, not that it matters because you ain't playing shit made this decade with a lame VM adding an assload of translation layers between you and the hardware.
And WTF does "trust" have to do with shit? You think MSFT is gonna sneak through your window and beat your ass? Hell its three damned checkboxes and Windows won't phone home for anything, even updates. Using a network analyzer I can tell you Windows 7 by default calls home for exactly THREE, count 'em three things, it checks for updates, if you don't uncheck the box it'll download artist info like album and year for tunes in WMP, and again if you don't uncheck the box it'll check in once a day so you have the latest TV guide in WMC, that's it, that's all. There is nothing to "trust" as MSFT has separate servers just for those tasks there isn't any way for MSFT to "jump the sandbox" and put stuff in through those inputs, precisely because if MSFT could do it some malware writer could figure out how to use the same vector. Even WGA isn't included by default in Windows Updates, only as an optional download thanks to the Vista fiasco.
So seriously dude just buy a console already although frankly even those are now having DLC and online tied to an account. Because with that many restrictions placed upon yourself its like saying "I watch TV, but only masterpiece theater, and only when its English and only when its hosted by a certain host"...well fuck, you don't really watch TV then do ya? the few games that will work under all those restrictions frankly will work on Linux or even on an iPhone, not really any point for the hoops of insanity.
Thank you for proving my point, its NOT a universal event, its happening in the large black communities, yet the politically correct like yourself refuse to even look at the data because we can't come up with white or asian mobs doing the same thing. News Flash..Its NOT RACIST TO POINT OUT THE NUMBERS JUST BECAUSE YOU DON'T LIKE WHAT THEY SAY but instead we'll have whole generations of black youth practically born to fail because people like you refuse to see the hard data right in front of your face.
Again don't take MY word for it, go to the FBI's crime information website and look at the data yourself, and note that for the past 25 years they have been ordered to skew that data in the name of political correctness by counting ALL non black crime, asian, latino, middle eastern, as "white" to try to rig the numbers and you STILL have on average 8 to 1 when it comes to violent crimes committed by blacks vs committed by their new definition of white.
I'm sorry if the data doesn't support your politically correct worldview but it don't. Again we need to find out WHY the black neighborhoods are going through this so that we can correct it, otherwise YOU are being racist because you are setting up the entire black community to be looked down upon as a failure and violent subset of the larger whole. Its just as racist as affirmative action which automatically assumes blacks simply aren't smart enough to compete without being a protected class and the underlying cause is the same, racist beliefs that you are smarter and better, they are stupider and more violent and unable to care for themselves. its classic victim mentality and its a cancer.
Yeah the 1% that own the ISPs and media cartels, works fucking great for them. they can constantly raise prices, never do shit about raising quality or having to worry about real competition, hell they can wipe their asses with $100 notes while snorting coke off the asses of $1000 a night hookers. too bad they numbers so little you could fit tham all in the average HS gym and have seats left over while We, the people get fucked.
Hey what do ya know, we agree completely that dark silicon is a retarded idea, which is why I said ARM isn't gonna be any different than X86 in a couple of years, with no more room to scale up and no where left to go.
What killed the MHz wars? The thermal wall. What is gonna kill the mobile wars? The "thin is in" aesthetic Apple is pushing combined with power hungry chips sucking batteries dead. In both cases while the chips themselves COULD continue going up, hell I've had buddies with last gen netburst singles and dual that managed to get over 4.7GHz on air, the problem is people simply won't accept the retarded trade offs in return for more powerful chips. in X86 you got to the point you needed a fricking AC unit for the damned PC and in mobile you are quickly reaching a point where the unit is about as "mobile" as a desktop on a dolly because you are simply going from one outlet to the next thanks to the iSliver battery not holding enough charge to actually use the smart side of the smartphone.
But I agree with you 100%, we see Intel and AMD both pushing more cores than all but the most hardcore users will EVER use simply because they have more silicon than they know what to do with, and on the ARM side you have dark silicon because they have more transistors than the mini iSliver batteries can reliably feed. While Apple has been conditioning users to carry a charger everywhere there really isn't much higher you can go as long as things stay as they are, simply because nobody wants a phone that is worthless without an outlet. hell you might as well just get a cheaper POTS phone if you are gonna be married to the outlets anyway.
Simple its a glorified thin client and is completely worthless without the net, duh!
I honestly don't see how anybody can think it can compete at that price point when you have both the new Atom dual core netbooks and several nice tablets at that same price and unlike Chrome OS they can all be useful offline. or even better spend a little more and get one of the Bobcat dual core units, there you not only get Windows Home instead of basic but you get a chip that does 1080p over HDMI so when you get home you can use the netbook as an HTPC.
so i'm sorry but TFA is wrong, it didn't sell at $500 and its not gonna sell at $250, people aren't gonna pay the same price as a full netbook for a glorified thin client. if they want these to sell $100-$150 would be the correct price point, as it would give you a better experience than the low end tablets and be $100 cheaper than the Atom netbooks.
I think you are wrong and here is why...Vista. Remember Vista? Remember how many said it would be the OS that gave the market to Linux, or that the iPhone would be the new desktop? So what happened?
Simple people stuck with XP instead because everyone and their dog has Windows programs they want to run and they couldn't do that at all or without major studying and hoop jumping in the case of Linux. There is a reason why you see article after article proclaiming "Windows 7 is the new XP" because that is what it is. People like Win 7, it runs nice even on first gen dual cores, and it lets them keep all those Windows programs that they know and prefer over having to start from scratch.
You see there is some facts the press just refuses to speak of and which makes the numbers they tout meaningless. 1.-When MSFT, Intel, and AMD were putting up those crazy year after year numbers we were in a "MHz war" where a PC that was just 2 years old would struggle to run the newest software because taking advantage of faster single threaded performance is easy, whereas many programs simply won't or can't multithread so for a user of those programs there will be no difference they can tell between the first gen Athlon X2 and the latest octo-core monster. 2.- When AMD and Intel switched to cores over MHz the chips rapidly became more powerful than the jobs the users had by an insane amount, hell i have businesses running Phenom I multicores and they simply can't even come up with enough useful work to slam even a chip 5 years old. so for them there really isn't a point in getting a new machine before the previous one dies, even the first gen Core Duo and Turion X2 laptops do all your basic tasks with cycles left over.
Now for the ARM side..1.- ARM units are by and large disposable. How many phones do you have sitting in a sock drawer? Talking to customers from all different backgrounds i can tell you the average number is four. 2.- for every Asus Transformer or iPad you are selling probably 30 on the low end, just like the PC you are seeing a race to the bottom, hell I'd argue its coming faster for ARM than it did for X86. 3.- ARM is going through its very own MHz war, where programs released today will struggle on that 2 year old tablet or smartphone if they will run at all. 4.- finally just as X86 ran into a wall so too is ARM about to hit a wall, only with ARM its gonna be power and not heat.
So X86 isn't going anywhere and neither is Windows, the OEMs will simply sell "Windows 8" systems that are just Win 7 along with a DVD of Win 8 nobody will use, this lets Ballmer save face while keeping the OEMs from talking about jumping ship. Intel has Medifield running on phones and tablets already overseas, and AMD has Hondo so those that want the tablet form factor but want to run all their Windows software will be able to do so, and there are still hundreds of millions of desktops and laptops sold each year, that's nothing to sneeze at. Its just in a dead economy people ain't blowing money to replace what works fine and while there are plenty out there that don't have a tablet yet while everyone has a desktop or laptop or often both.
But Win 8 won't be the death knell of X86 anymore than Vista was, there is simply too much Windows software that folks want and need to run out there.
Not to mention the current system if you pay for it DOES NOT WORK. Look up the "Wil Wheaton rant Dr Who" about he fricking paid for the Dr Who videos on Amazon only to find when he went across the border to fricking Canada of all places to work his videos WOULD NOT PLAY. what about all of us with netbooks? Legally there is NO WAY for me to watch movies without an Internet connection except by dragging a fricking battery sucking external DVD wherever I go. Will ANY of the media cartels just sell me a damn.avi or.mkv so I can play it on my netbook, or my media tank, or my PC when it doesn't have an Internet connection? NO!!
How sad that people will actually defend these douchnozzles when its the exact same shit that drove piracy in music, while you could get a standard.MP3 that would play anywhere on P2P the only format they would sell you was a DRMed up the ass.WMA that was constantly calling you a dirty pirate and refusing to play.
In fact I'd say the ONLY company that has gotten it right? Valve with Steam. with the constant sales buying a digital copy is frankly cheaper than a rental or paying for the bandwidth to download from TPB, it runs just fine with no net connection for i believe its a month but the longest I've been without net is a week so i can't be sure of the number, you get extras for buying like matchmaking,chat, and no longer having to deal with patches, in short they give you a REASON to buy from them whereas the cartels just say "Take our shitty service or we'll fucking spank you" while making damned sure to offer their content in such a way that's its in every way inferior to the pirated version.
Like I said though the bitch with this isn't the cartels, its the ISPs who would love nothing more than to have a legal way to just toss anybody that dares use even a third of what they pay for. mark my words the ISPs will give some "We support the American economy by fighting those that steal content" or some such horseshit when in reality they'll simply label anybody that uses more bandwidth than your average soccer mom a pirate and punt them. Sad that while we invented the net we're gonna end up on the short bus while the rest of the world is rocking 100Mbit lines. hell we are even getting stomped by Romania now.
The real elephant corpse stinkin' up the room though is while the whole "cloud everything" might work in the enterprise frankly its consumers NOT enterprise driving sales and the consumers are getting squeezed by the ISPs with ever higher prices and lower caps. The whole "Do everything in the cloud" idea was tried a decade ago and it bombed then and it'll bomb even worse now. Hell why do you think the ISPs were so willing to go along with the 6 strikes shit? Because it'll let them cherry pick their customers and only keep the ones that don't use a tenth of what they pay for, letting them oversubscribe that much worse without having to run any new lines!
As for Win 8? YOU know its shit, I know its shit, even my little old lady customers that tried out the Win 8 system i have sitting in the shop hated the damned thing. The #1 reaction by far I got to Win 8 at the shop was "Why would I want my computer to act like a cellphone?" because lets face it, that is what it is, its the bastard hybrid Frankenstein between WinPhone and Windows and frankly does neither role well. And honestly I think the whole "BYOD" thing is overhyped as those customers I have that are bringing their iPad to work are using it as a glorified netbook/notepad. They still have and use their laptops, they just carry the iPad for the basic mundane tasks that's all.
Saying the tablets are gonna kill the PC is like saying mopeds are gonna wipe out truck sales because the moped is so easy to park. Its two totally different use cases with VERY little overlap, the reason PC sales are down is simply because for the past several years both AMD and Intel have been selling monsters that are several times more powerful than what the user actually needs so people don't see the point of upgrading as often, that's all. ARM is at the point where the PC was in the mid 90s, where a unit from 2 years ago would struggle with the latest programs, no different than how that 700MHz P3 was quickly made obsolete thanks to the ever rising clocks and software designed to take advantage of it.
Mark my words but I think you'll see the exact same thing that happened to X86 happen to ARM very soon, only whereas X86 hit a thermal wall with ARM its gonna be the battery, even the ARM holdings group has been talking about having "dark silicon" because the battery would go dead so fast as to make the unit worthless if they turned on all the silicon. Mark my words when that happens other than the Apple fans for whom using last year's model is like wearing last year's fashions most will see no point in the constant replacing and will stick with what they have until it breaks. We are already seeing a race to the bottom just as we saw on the PC, with many talking about how dual core ARM tablets will be sub $80, maybe even sub $50, so its just a matter of time before ARM ends up just like X86, not replaced until the previous one croaks.
They have a similar scam going on with all those natural gas wildcatters that are doing the fracking. you see the actual NG company doesn't "own" anything, they lease everything from the equipment to the copier from a shell corp they set up. if they cause a nasty mess, get sued for not paying out the mineral rights or damaging adjacent property? They just burn the company, after all on the books it shows that have zero assets and nothing but debt, then they just start a new company and lease the stuff back from the shell corp.
I have no doubt Righthaven did something similar, I bet the only things they had on the books was the website and some office equipment. This is just another way the system is completely broken, the laws have been written by sleazy lawyers that make sure they leave loopholes that only they and their rich friends can really afford to use but which when called upon means they can just walk away at any time without having to pay shit. I bet if you look at their books and compare it to what is owed they'll be lucky if they get a half a cent on the dollar, hell I wouldn't be surprised if the EFF doesn't get a red cent.
This is why you can really "win" in court against these kind of bums because when its all said and done they can just start another company and learn from their mistakes and do it all over again and all you'll have to show for winning is a worthless judgement and a bunch of lawyer fees.
But with GNU you have the right to modify and redistribute and I kinda doubt Netflix allows that to occur so if it were licensed under GNU they would be in violation.
Oh good lord step away from the keyboard? do you HONESTLY think you can resell ANY game with an online component anymore? And just FYI but if Steam ever went under, which considering they've doubled their profits every year for 7 years I'm seriously doubting that would happen, but lets say it did...you DO know you can go to Gamecopyworld and just get a crack...yes? No different than you'd have to do with any other modern retail game and at least with Steam I'm paying less than a rental and I'm not ending up with a bunch of hidden shit like Starfuck.
And why in the hell are you even playing PC games if you hate MSFT THAT damned much? just buy yourself a PS3 already. XP is over a decade old, its creaky as fuck and its patches has patches, its just not a good OS. Hell if you hate MSFT that damned much just go to TPB and get a copy of Win 7 Tiny already, at least then you'd have the latest DirectX and its actually smaller than a fully patched XP and lighter to boot.
But tying a boat anchor to your system like that just don't make any damned sense, just fricking buy the console already, most of the new games coming out require DX 10 or better so you'll be SOL if you stick with XP anyway. Hell if you insist on playing on a computer just buy a fricking Mac, although if you think your lousy $40 is gonna affect MSFT in any way, shape, or form I have some magic beans you might be interested in.
There is principles and there is zealotry, try not to let the former become the latter, its not good for you.
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Bimbo Newton Crosby, the guys that keep saying "Just use Linux!" have no damned clue about this kind of specialist gear, how it has NEVER been supported by Linux, how there is ZERO chance the company that made it offered FOSS drivers or software for it (since vendor lock in is so high on specialist gear) and how the cost of having to pay an entire team of developers to reverse engineer this stuff, not to mention possible lawsuits from the company that made it since like you pointed out they use DRM like dongles so DMCA applies, means its about like saying "get magical fairies to make it work for you!" for all the usage such statements has IRL.
I'm sorry but Linux is for programmers and BY programmers and the odds of it having drivers for such a funky specialized piece of equipment, one where the company that made it probably never gave a shit about Linux and may have even gone OOB years ago? Virtually nil.
The people like you that look at Linux as a panacea don't get into the nitty gritty logistics we are talking here because if you did you wouldn't even suggest it. What they would have to do if they followed your advice would be to reverse engineer the drivers for the hardware (no small task and NOT cheap), build their own software to run the scans, again no small task, and then have everything certified for HIPPA compliance where sure as fuck is NO small task and expensive as hell.
So I'm sorry but Linux would be a BAD IDEA with a capital B. The best plan would be to isolate the system on a VLAN and let their users access that way, this would allow them to keep XP without worrying about lack of support after 2014. Since XP lasted so long you can still find many newer systems with XP drivers so they will be able to get plenty of replacement systems for probably a good decade. A LOT cheaper than following your advice.
Uhhhh...isn't that what VLANs are for? so you can have it ONLY on the LAN and not on the WAN? I'll admit its been awhile since I had to support a large corp as I prefer dealing with home user and SMBs, but I thought that was networking 101, don't risk the expensive specialized gear by just sticking it on the net, am I wrong?
Uhhh....you can do that in XP proper without all the VM bullshit, just have a disc image on a partition and if anything goes wrong you can just roll it back. I've been doing this for years with customers using the free Comodo Time Machine (although I'm having to try out Paragon as CTM is no longer supported but still works on XP-Win 7) and if anything goes wrong they just hit the Home key on boot, pick "clean restore" and voila! Back up and running in under 20 minutes. Since i have their docs on a different partition they don't even risk losing anything, easy peasy and no VM hassles.
You see? THIS, this right here, is why Ballmer should have been fired a half a fricking decade ago. if his fat ass would have gotten Longhorn out on schedule (Nooo...Vista is NOT Longhorn, Ballmer had them throw Longhorn out and and start over because it was more like XP X64 and not as bling heavy as Ballmer wanted, had to compete with Apple on the shiny ya know) then so many wouldn't be trapped on XP now, but it took so damned long to get Vista out the door, and it was half assed and reeked of fail anyway, that XP hung onto to the point many simply can't afford to trash it because too damned many other systems depend on it.
What MSFT should have done is bust ass on XP Mode in Win 7 with a mantra of "if it runs on XP, it works in XP Mode" and made damned sure all those businesses could just switch without downtime, maybe even supported cloning existing XP installs for XP Mode VMs, but Ballmer is too damned busy drooling on an iPad to see he is royally fucking up and losing the business market, the bread and butter of MSFT. Stupid, that's what it is, fucking stupid.
Actually one of the gaming sites decided to test that theory, sorry I don't have a link but my Google Fu does sucketh, so they placed XP and Vista on different amounts of cores to see where Vista gave the advantage...final score? 16, that's where Vista started to run away from XP, was on 16 cores.
Now if this guy was MY customer? I'd have to tell him that for his specific use case a switch from XP to Win 7 would make no sense unless his specialized code would run in XP Mode, then and ONLY then would it be worth the switch. Because the odds that he is running this on something with more than 16 cores is virtually nil, and the cost to upgrade will be more than any benefit he sees for such a specialized use case.
Weeeelllllll...yes and no. There are many damned good reasons to upgrade from XP to Win 7, but 7 to 8? not really any i can think of unless you have a tablet.
You see XP was made at a time when 256Mb of RAM was only for the rich, so naturally its 32 bit only. The XP X64 that was released later was really Win2K3 Workstation with the Fisher Price UI tacked on and it frankly wasn't well supported and damned near impossible to find in the wild as the OEMs didn't go for it. Then there is the fact that it was released in 2001, so now its patches have patches which leads to instability, then there is of course "WinRot" which I can keep a new system from developing but once WinRot has set it? Too late, gotta wipe.
Then there are the pluses Win 7 brings, a MUCH better UI and file system explorer that finally defaults to two pane which makes file ops easier, breadcrumbs and jumplists make getting back to where you were easy peasy, and of course the biggest one is FINALLY somebody at MSFT got a fucking clue and instituted sane memory management, where the OS will actually USE extra memory as a cache for most used programs, thus unlike XP the more you use Win 7 the faster it gets as it learns your habits and caches what you use the most.
Out of all my systems I have only ONE XP unit left, its an old circa 2004 Sempron a customer traded in that because its soooo low power makes for a great nettop at the shop, but all I ever use it for is to look up specs and download drivers. if all you use XP for is a "browser in a box"? Then its fine, although you'd probably just as well served by a tablet in that case, but if you do any kind of actual work on your PC then XP really just doesn't cut it anymore, its just creaky and buggy and crashy and has some bad design flaws that will never be fixed.
Now when I fire up a machine and see XP knowing I'm gonna have to work on it I just groan, its like going back to Win9X, just ancient crap. I mean its fricking 11 years old for the love of the FSM!
This is why "Windows 7 is the new XP" because frankly the PCs released directly before and after Win 7 are such monsters that the average user won't need to replace until the hardware actually fails. lets look at what I was selling on the low end of my new builds 5 years ago...Phenom I X3s and X4s with 3-4gb of RAM and 300Gb+ HDDs. Now is there anything that your average user does that is gonna stress that system? remember these were my "$450-$500 specials" so weren't anywhere near even high end for the time, in fact the only reason i used quads more than X2s was the TLB bug and core 2 issue meant I could get those chips extra cheap. Hell I have a customer running the latest Solidworks on an X3 and is quite happy with the system.
So when you add to this a dead economy and Windows 8 being a tweeting twitting FB shitting frankenstein monster mash up of Windows and WinPhone its a recipe for failure. People simply don't need new systems, even the Core Duo first gen and Turion X2 laptops i sold are running just fine, that is why I've been branching off into HTPCs and home theater setups, because nobody needs a new desktop when they have a multicore with tons of RAM they aren't even stressing.
Yeah the TEA party did SOOOO well, their reps got stuck in a corner and told to "STFU and cash the check bitches" and that was the end of that. The simple fact is YOU CAN'T CHANGE A CORRUPTED SYSTEM BY WORKING WITHIN THAT SYSTEM because its fucking corrupted duh! That is like thinking if you play 3 card monty long enough you'll find the lady, its just not gonna happen.
I'm sorry but all you can do is grab as much as you possibly can and wait for the system to collapse, that's ALL you can do. When people that can write million dollar checks are your opponents all the organizing in the world has ZERO effect, because whomever you get in there will be bribed before the week is out, you are playing a rigged game you can NEVER win, the only winning move is not to play the game at all and like the USSR wait for the inevitable collapse.
Record companies do the same shit, I've known bands that had to break up because they got fucked on contracts and the way the record companies set up all the shells and dummies you can be sued BY them but good fucking luck suing them, its like trying to hit ghosts.
This is why I believe no empire will last more than a few centuries, the laws get so badly tilted to those at the top people just stop following the laws and the entire society falls apart. You look throughout history and time and time again you see it, either slowly like the Roman Empire or on fast forward like the USSR, but in every case people just stop following the rules and the whole system collapses. i truly believe the same will happen to the USA when the financial bubble bursts, you are gonna have so much printed money that its worthless and without being able to break out the checkbook to keep the peasants playing the game you'll find shit breaks down REAL quick. Scary but you look at history and that's just how it goes, as Lenin said "Capitalists will sell you the rope you intend to hang them with" because those at the top get so damned greedy they refuse to see the train heading towards them because it might cut into their profits.
I'm sorry but if you were any more full of shit your eyes would be brown. First Intel won't let AMD die anymore than MSFT would allow Apple to die in 97, it puts too big a bullseye on Intel for antitrust. if they have to give them the first gen core designs and a couple of guys? they'll do it, because it will cost them too much not to have a token competitor.
Second you are selling the same shit MSFT sold with Vista? remember that? How much easier it was? Didn't go over well though did it? Look at the reviews of 8 and what are the common themes? Stupid, pointless, retarded, frankenstein...these are NOT good words billy! These are the "words of failure" and are actually WORSE than they were for Vista? remember Vista? It amazes me how many Win 8 apologists seem to forget that Vista tanked and the users got what they wanted...which was Win 7, which is XP with better under the hood guts.
But you keep believing the hype Billy, me I'm gonna kick back with my popcorn and laugh! Win 8 is gonna make Vista look like a fricking hit, and Ballmer will most likely FINALLY get the fucking boot, which should have happened 6 fucking years ago when he failed to get a functional OS out the door for so long. In fact if it weren't for the fact that they can fall back on Win 7 I'd bet on MSFT dying before AMD, after all AMD still owns the low end market, you can buy quad laptops for $400 thanks to AMD, MSFT on the other hand has ZERO share in mobile and with intel and AMD selling multicores so cheap nobody needs to replace their OS but once or twice a decade. I have plenty of customers on Phenom I X3s that are happy with the performance.
Finally "young know how to reinstall their OS"? BWA HA HA HA HA HA...oh you were serious? BWA HA HA HA HA...They grew up on cell phones, they know less than shit about computers or OSes or even what to fucking do other than take it to somebody, News Flash I have plenty of under 30 customers, my oldest is in college and sends a LOT of work my way because the college kids know even less than those that grew up on Win9X. I ask them questions and the only answer I get is "Its broke, it needs to be fixed" because they don't even have the vocabulary to explain what is broke. Ever see Star Trek TNG with the retard aliens? Welcome to the future Billy.
That's funny because I'm typing this on a circa 2004 Sempron that I use as a nettop here at the shop and it runs just fine with XP, in fact I have Win 7 HP running in a dual boot and while I'm sticking with XP while I slowly but surely find replacements for all the old software I have on here it runs just fine. The key with Windows is do NOT starve it of RAM, that is the one place the OEMs really fucked up for the longest time, putting teeny tiny amounts of RAM. I have 2Gb of RAM in the Sempron, max it'll hold, and its responsive. In fact its responsive enough I've held off swapping the CPU for an Athlon64 simply because I see no point. maybe when I switch to Win 7 I'll see a point, but it plays SD videos off of YouTube and surfs and downloads just fine, and that's what I use it for so as long as it does its job it'll stay.
Uhhh...didn't bother to actually read the link, did you? The content creator wanted to give it to Netflix DRM FREE and they refused to allow it, so the author wanted to tell people "hey after you get done watching this if you like it you can have a free copy" which again simply looks good on Netflix but again they refused.
Lets face it, Netflix is the Ubisoft of video, they looooooves their DRM and they ain't gonna let anybody dare avoid their DRM crappiness, no way no how, even when the content creators don't want the shit!
You forgot one:
e) Windows 8 has put a lot of doubt in everyone's minds as to whether they will be able to get the Win 7 units they'll need so they are taking a "wait and see" approach.
Lucky for me I was able to get all my customers switched to Win 7 and we are all gonna stay right where we are, but I can totally understand why some would stay with XP. Money is tight, you have a bunch of units that may not run it (I kept Win 7 Upgrade Adviser on a stick along with SIW so I had a good overview of what kind of hardware I was dealing with and any issues, although most chose to buy my $500 quad specials instead of keeping the P4s) and Windows 8 is making a LOT of folks nervous, because that tweeting twitting facebook shitting cellphone OS is NOT what a business users wants nor needs in the office.
So MSFT has nobody to blame but themselves. Instead of taking the worry out for business by making it clear that Win 7 would still be available they are dumping out the beta quality mess that is Win 8 without a care in the world, businesses just don't turn on a dime MSFT, you have to do program testing and hardware testing...its a hell of a lot of work before you can finally start rolling out units. it was a hell of a headache for me and I only deal with SMBs, I can't even imagine what it must be like for an IT guy stuck with 5,000+ units to switch..ugh. Stay with XP as long as you can and if you are lucky Ballmer will get fired before you have to switch and they'll bring in someone who understand business instead of a Steve Jobs wannabe.
Uhhh...EA is up for sale, proving the free market works. if enough people don't like something, like say Vista or Win 8, it flops and the company has to listen or go under. But with all the hoops you've set up for yourself frankly you need to just stick with Linux, because you are about as much of a PC gamer as someone with an old Win98 box in the corner. You can count the number of games without a tied online component released in the past few years on 2 hands with fingers left over, not that it matters because you ain't playing shit made this decade with a lame VM adding an assload of translation layers between you and the hardware.
And WTF does "trust" have to do with shit? You think MSFT is gonna sneak through your window and beat your ass? Hell its three damned checkboxes and Windows won't phone home for anything, even updates. Using a network analyzer I can tell you Windows 7 by default calls home for exactly THREE, count 'em three things, it checks for updates, if you don't uncheck the box it'll download artist info like album and year for tunes in WMP, and again if you don't uncheck the box it'll check in once a day so you have the latest TV guide in WMC, that's it, that's all. There is nothing to "trust" as MSFT has separate servers just for those tasks there isn't any way for MSFT to "jump the sandbox" and put stuff in through those inputs, precisely because if MSFT could do it some malware writer could figure out how to use the same vector. Even WGA isn't included by default in Windows Updates, only as an optional download thanks to the Vista fiasco.
So seriously dude just buy a console already although frankly even those are now having DLC and online tied to an account. Because with that many restrictions placed upon yourself its like saying "I watch TV, but only masterpiece theater, and only when its English and only when its hosted by a certain host"...well fuck, you don't really watch TV then do ya? the few games that will work under all those restrictions frankly will work on Linux or even on an iPhone, not really any point for the hoops of insanity.
Thank you for proving my point, its NOT a universal event, its happening in the large black communities, yet the politically correct like yourself refuse to even look at the data because we can't come up with white or asian mobs doing the same thing. News Flash..Its NOT RACIST TO POINT OUT THE NUMBERS JUST BECAUSE YOU DON'T LIKE WHAT THEY SAY but instead we'll have whole generations of black youth practically born to fail because people like you refuse to see the hard data right in front of your face.
Again don't take MY word for it, go to the FBI's crime information website and look at the data yourself, and note that for the past 25 years they have been ordered to skew that data in the name of political correctness by counting ALL non black crime, asian, latino, middle eastern, as "white" to try to rig the numbers and you STILL have on average 8 to 1 when it comes to violent crimes committed by blacks vs committed by their new definition of white.
I'm sorry if the data doesn't support your politically correct worldview but it don't. Again we need to find out WHY the black neighborhoods are going through this so that we can correct it, otherwise YOU are being racist because you are setting up the entire black community to be looked down upon as a failure and violent subset of the larger whole. Its just as racist as affirmative action which automatically assumes blacks simply aren't smart enough to compete without being a protected class and the underlying cause is the same, racist beliefs that you are smarter and better, they are stupider and more violent and unable to care for themselves. its classic victim mentality and its a cancer.
Yeah the 1% that own the ISPs and media cartels, works fucking great for them. they can constantly raise prices, never do shit about raising quality or having to worry about real competition, hell they can wipe their asses with $100 notes while snorting coke off the asses of $1000 a night hookers. too bad they numbers so little you could fit tham all in the average HS gym and have seats left over while We, the people get fucked.
Hey what do ya know, we agree completely that dark silicon is a retarded idea, which is why I said ARM isn't gonna be any different than X86 in a couple of years, with no more room to scale up and no where left to go.
What killed the MHz wars? The thermal wall. What is gonna kill the mobile wars? The "thin is in" aesthetic Apple is pushing combined with power hungry chips sucking batteries dead. In both cases while the chips themselves COULD continue going up, hell I've had buddies with last gen netburst singles and dual that managed to get over 4.7GHz on air, the problem is people simply won't accept the retarded trade offs in return for more powerful chips. in X86 you got to the point you needed a fricking AC unit for the damned PC and in mobile you are quickly reaching a point where the unit is about as "mobile" as a desktop on a dolly because you are simply going from one outlet to the next thanks to the iSliver battery not holding enough charge to actually use the smart side of the smartphone.
But I agree with you 100%, we see Intel and AMD both pushing more cores than all but the most hardcore users will EVER use simply because they have more silicon than they know what to do with, and on the ARM side you have dark silicon because they have more transistors than the mini iSliver batteries can reliably feed. While Apple has been conditioning users to carry a charger everywhere there really isn't much higher you can go as long as things stay as they are, simply because nobody wants a phone that is worthless without an outlet. hell you might as well just get a cheaper POTS phone if you are gonna be married to the outlets anyway.
Simple its a glorified thin client and is completely worthless without the net, duh!
I honestly don't see how anybody can think it can compete at that price point when you have both the new Atom dual core netbooks and several nice tablets at that same price and unlike Chrome OS they can all be useful offline. or even better spend a little more and get one of the Bobcat dual core units, there you not only get Windows Home instead of basic but you get a chip that does 1080p over HDMI so when you get home you can use the netbook as an HTPC.
so i'm sorry but TFA is wrong, it didn't sell at $500 and its not gonna sell at $250, people aren't gonna pay the same price as a full netbook for a glorified thin client. if they want these to sell $100-$150 would be the correct price point, as it would give you a better experience than the low end tablets and be $100 cheaper than the Atom netbooks.
I think you are wrong and here is why...Vista. Remember Vista? Remember how many said it would be the OS that gave the market to Linux, or that the iPhone would be the new desktop? So what happened?
Simple people stuck with XP instead because everyone and their dog has Windows programs they want to run and they couldn't do that at all or without major studying and hoop jumping in the case of Linux. There is a reason why you see article after article proclaiming "Windows 7 is the new XP" because that is what it is. People like Win 7, it runs nice even on first gen dual cores, and it lets them keep all those Windows programs that they know and prefer over having to start from scratch.
You see there is some facts the press just refuses to speak of and which makes the numbers they tout meaningless. 1.-When MSFT, Intel, and AMD were putting up those crazy year after year numbers we were in a "MHz war" where a PC that was just 2 years old would struggle to run the newest software because taking advantage of faster single threaded performance is easy, whereas many programs simply won't or can't multithread so for a user of those programs there will be no difference they can tell between the first gen Athlon X2 and the latest octo-core monster. 2.- When AMD and Intel switched to cores over MHz the chips rapidly became more powerful than the jobs the users had by an insane amount, hell i have businesses running Phenom I multicores and they simply can't even come up with enough useful work to slam even a chip 5 years old. so for them there really isn't a point in getting a new machine before the previous one dies, even the first gen Core Duo and Turion X2 laptops do all your basic tasks with cycles left over.
Now for the ARM side..1.- ARM units are by and large disposable. How many phones do you have sitting in a sock drawer? Talking to customers from all different backgrounds i can tell you the average number is four. 2.- for every Asus Transformer or iPad you are selling probably 30 on the low end, just like the PC you are seeing a race to the bottom, hell I'd argue its coming faster for ARM than it did for X86. 3.- ARM is going through its very own MHz war, where programs released today will struggle on that 2 year old tablet or smartphone if they will run at all. 4.- finally just as X86 ran into a wall so too is ARM about to hit a wall, only with ARM its gonna be power and not heat.
So X86 isn't going anywhere and neither is Windows, the OEMs will simply sell "Windows 8" systems that are just Win 7 along with a DVD of Win 8 nobody will use, this lets Ballmer save face while keeping the OEMs from talking about jumping ship. Intel has Medifield running on phones and tablets already overseas, and AMD has Hondo so those that want the tablet form factor but want to run all their Windows software will be able to do so, and there are still hundreds of millions of desktops and laptops sold each year, that's nothing to sneeze at. Its just in a dead economy people ain't blowing money to replace what works fine and while there are plenty out there that don't have a tablet yet while everyone has a desktop or laptop or often both.
But Win 8 won't be the death knell of X86 anymore than Vista was, there is simply too much Windows software that folks want and need to run out there.
Not to mention the current system if you pay for it DOES NOT WORK. Look up the "Wil Wheaton rant Dr Who" about he fricking paid for the Dr Who videos on Amazon only to find when he went across the border to fricking Canada of all places to work his videos WOULD NOT PLAY. what about all of us with netbooks? Legally there is NO WAY for me to watch movies without an Internet connection except by dragging a fricking battery sucking external DVD wherever I go. Will ANY of the media cartels just sell me a damn .avi or .mkv so I can play it on my netbook, or my media tank, or my PC when it doesn't have an Internet connection? NO!!
How sad that people will actually defend these douchnozzles when its the exact same shit that drove piracy in music, while you could get a standard .MP3 that would play anywhere on P2P the only format they would sell you was a DRMed up the ass .WMA that was constantly calling you a dirty pirate and refusing to play.
In fact I'd say the ONLY company that has gotten it right? Valve with Steam. with the constant sales buying a digital copy is frankly cheaper than a rental or paying for the bandwidth to download from TPB, it runs just fine with no net connection for i believe its a month but the longest I've been without net is a week so i can't be sure of the number, you get extras for buying like matchmaking,chat, and no longer having to deal with patches, in short they give you a REASON to buy from them whereas the cartels just say "Take our shitty service or we'll fucking spank you" while making damned sure to offer their content in such a way that's its in every way inferior to the pirated version.
Like I said though the bitch with this isn't the cartels, its the ISPs who would love nothing more than to have a legal way to just toss anybody that dares use even a third of what they pay for. mark my words the ISPs will give some "We support the American economy by fighting those that steal content" or some such horseshit when in reality they'll simply label anybody that uses more bandwidth than your average soccer mom a pirate and punt them. Sad that while we invented the net we're gonna end up on the short bus while the rest of the world is rocking 100Mbit lines. hell we are even getting stomped by Romania now.
The real elephant corpse stinkin' up the room though is while the whole "cloud everything" might work in the enterprise frankly its consumers NOT enterprise driving sales and the consumers are getting squeezed by the ISPs with ever higher prices and lower caps. The whole "Do everything in the cloud" idea was tried a decade ago and it bombed then and it'll bomb even worse now. Hell why do you think the ISPs were so willing to go along with the 6 strikes shit? Because it'll let them cherry pick their customers and only keep the ones that don't use a tenth of what they pay for, letting them oversubscribe that much worse without having to run any new lines!
As for Win 8? YOU know its shit, I know its shit, even my little old lady customers that tried out the Win 8 system i have sitting in the shop hated the damned thing. The #1 reaction by far I got to Win 8 at the shop was "Why would I want my computer to act like a cellphone?" because lets face it, that is what it is, its the bastard hybrid Frankenstein between WinPhone and Windows and frankly does neither role well. And honestly I think the whole "BYOD" thing is overhyped as those customers I have that are bringing their iPad to work are using it as a glorified netbook/notepad. They still have and use their laptops, they just carry the iPad for the basic mundane tasks that's all.
Saying the tablets are gonna kill the PC is like saying mopeds are gonna wipe out truck sales because the moped is so easy to park. Its two totally different use cases with VERY little overlap, the reason PC sales are down is simply because for the past several years both AMD and Intel have been selling monsters that are several times more powerful than what the user actually needs so people don't see the point of upgrading as often, that's all. ARM is at the point where the PC was in the mid 90s, where a unit from 2 years ago would struggle with the latest programs, no different than how that 700MHz P3 was quickly made obsolete thanks to the ever rising clocks and software designed to take advantage of it.
Mark my words but I think you'll see the exact same thing that happened to X86 happen to ARM very soon, only whereas X86 hit a thermal wall with ARM its gonna be the battery, even the ARM holdings group has been talking about having "dark silicon" because the battery would go dead so fast as to make the unit worthless if they turned on all the silicon. Mark my words when that happens other than the Apple fans for whom using last year's model is like wearing last year's fashions most will see no point in the constant replacing and will stick with what they have until it breaks. We are already seeing a race to the bottom just as we saw on the PC, with many talking about how dual core ARM tablets will be sub $80, maybe even sub $50, so its just a matter of time before ARM ends up just like X86, not replaced until the previous one croaks.
They have a similar scam going on with all those natural gas wildcatters that are doing the fracking. you see the actual NG company doesn't "own" anything, they lease everything from the equipment to the copier from a shell corp they set up. if they cause a nasty mess, get sued for not paying out the mineral rights or damaging adjacent property? They just burn the company, after all on the books it shows that have zero assets and nothing but debt, then they just start a new company and lease the stuff back from the shell corp.
I have no doubt Righthaven did something similar, I bet the only things they had on the books was the website and some office equipment. This is just another way the system is completely broken, the laws have been written by sleazy lawyers that make sure they leave loopholes that only they and their rich friends can really afford to use but which when called upon means they can just walk away at any time without having to pay shit. I bet if you look at their books and compare it to what is owed they'll be lucky if they get a half a cent on the dollar, hell I wouldn't be surprised if the EFF doesn't get a red cent.
This is why you can really "win" in court against these kind of bums because when its all said and done they can just start another company and learn from their mistakes and do it all over again and all you'll have to show for winning is a worthless judgement and a bunch of lawyer fees.
But with GNU you have the right to modify and redistribute and I kinda doubt Netflix allows that to occur so if it were licensed under GNU they would be in violation.
Oh good lord step away from the keyboard? do you HONESTLY think you can resell ANY game with an online component anymore? And just FYI but if Steam ever went under, which considering they've doubled their profits every year for 7 years I'm seriously doubting that would happen, but lets say it did...you DO know you can go to Gamecopyworld and just get a crack...yes? No different than you'd have to do with any other modern retail game and at least with Steam I'm paying less than a rental and I'm not ending up with a bunch of hidden shit like Starfuck.
And why in the hell are you even playing PC games if you hate MSFT THAT damned much? just buy yourself a PS3 already. XP is over a decade old, its creaky as fuck and its patches has patches, its just not a good OS. Hell if you hate MSFT that damned much just go to TPB and get a copy of Win 7 Tiny already, at least then you'd have the latest DirectX and its actually smaller than a fully patched XP and lighter to boot.
But tying a boat anchor to your system like that just don't make any damned sense, just fricking buy the console already, most of the new games coming out require DX 10 or better so you'll be SOL if you stick with XP anyway. Hell if you insist on playing on a computer just buy a fricking Mac, although if you think your lousy $40 is gonna affect MSFT in any way, shape, or form I have some magic beans you might be interested in.
There is principles and there is zealotry, try not to let the former become the latter, its not good for you.