For all those that say Elop was trying to kill Nokia for MSFT....uhhh hello? MSFT IS TRYING TO KILL MSFT so what would be the point? Its not like these things didn't already had a high chance of being giant fails before but at THAT pricing? For a Windows that won't actually run Windows programs, has less apps than iOS and Android, and from a company who has a history of abandoning customers in mobile and leaving them hung out to dry (WinMo 6.5, Zune, Kin, Sidekick, WinPhone 7) does ANYBODY think this thing is gonna be anything but the biggest fucking flop since Vista?
I swear to God just yesterday I was dropping some files off with the boys and the Surface commercial came on, you know, the lame "everybody click" one? My 73 year old mom said "What's that?" and when I told her that it was a Windows that don't run Windows programs and priced the same as an iPad she fricking died laughing! Even my 73 year old mom knew that going head to head against the iPad is suicide! She just kept saying "That is just so stupid! Why would anybody buy that thing?" and I have to agree, this is a product with no real selling point, priced to be in the same room with a product that is huge and beats it on buzz, apps, even resale value, and to top off the massive fail it won't even run Windows X86 which is the ONLY reason people buy Windows!
The only nice thing about this is that in a year you'll find this on Woot! for $100 ala Touchpad. If anybody needed proof that Ballmer is the worst CEO in corporate right now? Here ya go, I swear the man makes the Pepsi guy at Apple look like a genius. Same price as an iPad...yeah right.
The controller. I've had 2 of my gamer customers lose SSDs to controller failure. Easy to spot as you flip the switch there is nothing, the drive doesn't even show up in BIOS. This is why I warn folks that if they are going SSD they need to have a backup strategy they religiously stick to, because if that controller fails they are SOL. With HDDs I've been able to get a lot of data off a badly dying drive but with SSDs once the controller goes so too goes the drive.
While we agree on many things Crosshair on this one you are DEAD WRONG. Look up the number of Muslims in a country and how the violence goes UP the more Muslims you have. If the country is 100% Muslim no problem right? WRONG as then the Imams start jockeying and fighting each other for control!
And tell me friend...what does the west have to do with the Shia murdering the Sunni and vice versa? that has only be going on...ohhh...about 600 YEARS now and shows no let up in sight.
Remember friend you are a cow to them, that's right, a cow. You might want to read this with just a few snippets of what they think of you infidel, and I'll just end with some quotes from their own book that illustrates better than i ever could why there can NEVER be peace with Islam:
Quran 4:89: They (infidels) desire that you should disbelieve as they have disbelieved, so that you might be (all) alike; therefore take not from among them friends until they fly (their homes) in Allah's way; but if they turn back, then seize them and kill them wherever you find them, and take not from among them a friend or a helper.
Quran 8:12: Instill terror into the hearts of the unbelievers;
Quran 2:191: kill the disbelievers wherever we find them
Quran 22:19-22: for them (the unbelievers) garments of fire shall be cut and there shall be poured over their heads boiling water whereby whatever is in their bowels and skin shall be dissolved and they will be punished with hooked iron rods.
Quran 8:12: Your Lord inspired the angels with the message: I will terrorize the unbelievers. Therefore smite them on their necks and every joint and incapacitate them. Strike off their heads and cut off each of their fingers and toes.
Quran 8:7: Allah wished to confirm the truth by His words: Wipe the infidels out to the last.
Quran 8:59: The infidels should not think that they can get away from us. Prepare against them whatever arms and weaponry you can muster so that you may terrorize them. They are your enemy and Allah's enemy.
Quran 8:60: Prepare against them whatever arms and cavalry you can muster that you may strike terror in the enemies of Allah, and others besides them not known to you.
Quran 9.29 Fight those who do not believe in Allah, nor in the latter day, nor do they prohibit what Allah and His Apostle have prohibited, nor follow the religion of truth, out of those who have been given the Book, until they pay the tax in acknowledgment of superiority and they are in a state of subjection.
Quran 47:4: Strike off the heads of the disbelievers and, after making a wide slaughter among them, carefully tie up the remaining captives.
Uhhh...why would it affect your HTPC? Simply use the net and get all the shows you want WHEN you want and with less commercials to boot. I have built several HTPCs for customers and between Win 7 MC Internet TV, Hulu Basic, and YouTube they have so many shows to choose from they could watch TV from sun up to sun down and never watch all the great shows out there. And that of course isn't counting using BT to get shows, this is just the legal means.
As a nice bonus you can get an E350 barebone which since you won't have to be encoding like a DVR will work great and only costs $130 for the barebone with nice case and PSU and for those that don't want to spend the money on Win 7 HP you can just download OpenELEC which has the XBMC 10 foot UI and has a prebuilt build for AMD Fusion chips like the E350, couldn't be simpler.
So I see no reason why this should affect your HTPC, its just one more reason to just buy bare cable for the net and say screw their TV offerings. I personally haven't bothered plugging in the free converter they handed me or my capture card because with Internet TV and all the shows on the net frankly there is more TV than I have hours in the day. Lately I've been on a classic kick so I'm watching Kolchak and Night Gallery here at the shop while I work. Its nice, less commercials than I deal with on cable, and couldn't be easier to do.
No religious people are seeking not to think, that's pretty much it. They don't have to take responsibility for anything as its all "God's plan" so they can just follow the little book and turn off their brains and not have to worry about doubts or grey areas or anything like that, its simply "Don't think just do what the book says".
This is why Islam is so damned dangerous as its that attitude taken to its obvious extreme. Here you have a religion that tells you which hand to wipe your ass with, how many times to shake your dick after you piss, and which positions you can fuck your wife in, its the ultimate book for brainless drones. No wonder you get them strapping bombs to themselves, just one more order to follow, just as they have their entire pointless thought free existence.
Uhhh...dumbass? yeah the speed limits on our freeways is 70MPH with a minimum in most places of 55MPH. Do you honestly think a 37HP vehicle is even gonna be able to meet the minimum speed?
The reason they can get away with this cracker jack toy in India is because frankly India don't have jack shit for laws when it comes to their streets. Its well known that in most cities there that street lights and signs are treated more as "suggestions" than any kind of rule and we've all seen the truly crazy shit you'll see strapped to bikes and scooters over there, shit that if you tried it here in the USA you wouldn't make it a block before being busted.
So please keep your elitist Eurotrash attitude to yourself, mmkay? This is an American site, with an article about a car coming to America, If you would allow that tinker toy on your roads that's YOUR business. Of course you've let your politicians tax you to the point you pay 3 times for a liter what we pay for a gallon so frankly why anybody should listen to a people that would put up with getting assraped like that is beyond me.
I only hope that you aren't in one of the countries that use the Euro, as it looks like that little experiment is gonna hit the shitter, might want to exchange your currency for USD now before the only thing its good for is wiping your ass. Mark my words, Greece bails by Feb, followed by Spain and Portugal, after that stick a fork.
It's also the most brilliant scam the rich have ever come up with. Think about it, how do you keep the peasant slaving away while you live like a God, without the peasants rising up and demanding not to be treated like shit and stomped on? By telling them the sky bully rewards peasants when they die! Kinda a "40 acres and a mule" that of course nobody even has to provide, because its invisible acres and mule in an invisible land.
There is a reason why all the major religions allude to followers being sheep ya know, its because sheep are dumb animals you can fleece and slaughter.
Yeah cause its the gubment that allows Chinese slave labor to compete, allows H1-Bs to be brought in and paid low wages to compete against students that are paying $60K+ minimum for their education...you know, you're right! We should become a nationalist isolationist state JUST LIKE China and India!
I'm sure then you support an end to the free market lie and the supporting of our students and workforce by ending slave labor with protectionist policies, H1-Bs, and money havens like the Caymans being used to dodge taxes like Mittens did...right?
Which is why I just don't get it. You FINALLY start to get a little uptick so...you fuck your loyal customers in the ass, depreciate your API so the phone is now worthless, and then just to let a big ripping fart right into the face of those loyal customers AND Nokia you announce this months before the phone comes out, thus making sure that all those WinPhone 7 units will rot in warehouses. i looked online and you still see retailers trying to sell these things for $300+...how long before they realize that MSFT fucked 'em and their inventory isn't worth a hundred bucks?
If they would have just offered a cheap trade in plan people could still be buying the WinPhone 7 units, upgrade them to 7.8, and when they were ready switch to Win 8 without getting reamed. instead the retailers get stuck with stock they can't move, the users get stuck with a contract on a phone that won't have shit for apps and has ZERO resale, the developers that have ANY fucking sense at all will avoid Win 8 like the plague, because what is to stop them from announcing WinPhone 9 in 6 months and making all their efforts worthless?
I swear to God you couldn't make the MSFT "mobile strategy" any more of a train wreck if you tried. this is why me and the other shops stocked up on Win 7 and will be avoiding Win 8 like the clap, because its obvious their plans for the entire platform change from minute to minute and I'm betting its Vista all over again. Burning all those mobile users was just the rotten shit icing on a foul dead cat carcass cake.
While true its a slash-ad I have to say the humble bundles have been nice. For those that haven't picked it up yet the last bundle I saw had the original Torchlight which is quite fun.
Between the bundles and GOG its never been easier to get cheap DRM free games and if more software follows that model? That's a good thing in my book. Although I personally have no problem with Steam DRM I AM glad to see the day coming when there is no more Starfuck or SecuROM to screw with systems.
Sure they can! Why that's why we have higher student defaults than ever before in history, because of all those non existent jobs they can use to pay off the crushing debt they find themselves in!
Wake up chuck, the jobs aren't there to be had and the bill collectors will hound you to the grave, i should know as they carried out a nice kid downstairs who slit his wrists after being unable to get out of the mountain of debt and not being able to find anything but a McJob. I find it funny how the corps can just file bankruptcy and start again tomorrow under a new name but they will never allow anyone to escape the student loans, no matter how obvious that they'll never be able to pay them off with the ever dwindling number of jobs we have.
My advice if you were my customer? Keep an eye on the Tiger kits and when they have one of their "$199 specials" like they had recently with a Phenom II quad snatch one along with an HD4850 (can be found in many places for $40) and make yourself a SW render box. No need to buy anything more than a KVM switch to use your existing setup and that way you have a system that can be stripped down and dedicated just to SW performance.
This way you can keep your i5 system with Nvidia graphics for CUDA and be able to continue working while even heavy renders are going on with the SW box and you can switch back and forth between the two with a keyboard shortcut. Because from what I've seen SW just seems to play nicer with AMD GPUs and the AMD parts are so cheap right now you can build a pretty nice system for very little.
Uhhh...dude? You DO realize you just used the "we'll lose money on each unit and make it up on volume!" excuse, yes? the only place they had real share by 2010, which is when Elop got the job, was in feature phones where the RETAIL PRICE, not wholesale but retail price, is less than $20, most selling less than $15...there just ain't no money to be made on cheap shitty Tracphones anymore. Hell Walmart is selling a smartphone for $70 with their prepaid, the age of the dumbphones is gone and betting the future on dumbphones would be like betting on cassettes.
Agaion do I wish they would have brought him or somebody else in early enough they could have made a different call? Absolutely. If they would have killed the other two OSes and bet it all on Maemo in 07, or if they'd have bought WebOS? Then things might be VERY different. But nobody is making shit on Android but Samsung, their stocks and sales were cratering, their internal OSes didn't compete and couldn't gain mass market appeal with the N series selling less than 4 million units WORLDWIDE...there just wasn't any other call to make that would have done anything for the company, that's all.
What is sad is their conclusion is the same thing we have been saying, quote "the conclusion is crystal clear: there are very few arguments in favor of the FX CPU right now." and as a system builder that is exactly what I've been saying. I can get Thuban X6, Deneb and Athlon quads all for cheaper than I can get an FX with an equal or greater number of cores and the performance is equal or in single threaded better and against the Intel chips in the same price range it gets curbstomped.
Did you know that AMD hasn't had a single slot in Tom's hardware "Best chip for $xxx" in several quarters? they can't even rule the low end anymore because the Sandy based Pentiums while having less cores stomps them so badly on IPC and gaming as you pointed out rarely goes beyond 2 cores so there really isn't a selling point for FX. Most of my customers simply can't come up with enough work to stress a triple, much less a quad, so bolting on ever more cores to make up for low performance per core really doesn't help.
Frankly to be able to compete they'd need to shave another $40 off the FX8 and get it down to where the Thubans are selling now, and $25 off the frankly piss poor FX4 and FX6 but if the rumors are true they've got razor thin margins on the FX line thanks to poor yields which the previous chip didn't suffer from. Its just a seriously bad time for AMD, the FX chips suck, they canceled the successor to bobcat that was supposed to come out last year which while having low margins was a cheap chip with high yields but now that the next version of bobcat will end up coming out right at the same time as the latest Atom so that's not good, and finally Trinity just doesn't do good on the power usage, like FX the Bulldozer/piledriver design just doesn't do well with low power which with the popularity of mobile is seriously bad news. Its just not a good place for AMD right now that's for sure.
And don't forget we aren't talking about a single core Intel VS an 8 core AMD here, we are comparing with both the Thuban, 6 cores and Turbocore, and the i5 2500K which gives you 4 cores and turbo. And sadly in both cases the single core performance is better than the half core design of the FX while costing as much as $60 LESS for the Thuban and less than $40 more for the Intel.
Hell I've been getting Thubans for $89-$120 depending on if they are having a sale with the average price at $110. What does AMD have in that price range in the FX line? The FX6 which the critic have firmly trounced for its bad performance against not only the Pentium G520 but also the Thuban. And that isn't even bring the Deneb Phenoms and Athlons into the mix which can be had for even cheaper now.
In the end i just can't see a selling point for FX unless you buy the FX8 and are one of the very few people that have a ton of loads where you can hit all 8 cores constantly, like image batch processing or video transcoding. Hell even then because of such piss poor single thread performance i'd have to wonder if you wouldn't be better off with the Thuban X6 or the i5 2500K, with the money you saved on the chip by going thuban you could add a 60gb SSD which would stomp an FX with a HDD, or with the Intel have killer IPC and a 3.7GHz turbo while having 4 cores that would probably chew through the loads nearly as fast as the FX does with 8.
Its just not a good design, any way you slice it. That's why I'll keep selling Phenoms and Athlons until i can't get 'em cheap anymore, along with llano and Bobcat mobiles, and hope that the former Apple/Athlon 64 chip designer they hired can come up with something better.
The big problem is...and again if you are happy with it I'm glad, as i tell the guys that buy Apple if at the end of the day if it works for you personally that is all that should matter to you, is this:...8 cores is a niche that frankly 99%+ of the population will have ZERO use for in this chips lifetime. Know what the big seller is here? the X3 chips, why? because frankly most users can't find enough useful work to fill up triple cores. So you have a niche that lets face it, pretty much leaves gamers, yet your new chip performs worse than the previous one for that niche while cost more and being in the same price range as the Intel i5 which again curbstomps.
Then you have the whole "half core" issue which be honest man...its retarded, it really is. First of all they didn't tell MSFT who is now royally fucking AMD by refusing to fix it except in Win 8, they even pulled the patch because it screwed more than it fixed, its pretty obvious it was designed for the APUs which again, zero appeal to gamers as they don't want IGP graphics and the IGPs built on chip kills OCing ability, and it ties a boat anchor to most games and fucks up Steam which your own article notes.
Again this chip? Its Netburst man, its just netburst all over again. Intel thought they could get the clocks high enough that the stalls from having a long pipeline would be covered by MHz and HT, AMD thinks they can cover for worse than Phenom single core by ramping up clocks and stacking on the cores yet...who the fuck needs 8 half cores? I can get the Thubans for a good $45-$60 cheaper than FX, add $20 or more for Denebs or Athlon triples and quads....so sell it to me, what use is this to my customers? What could possibly justify the increased cost, and why should I buy the FX over the i5?
So if it works for you, you like the Win 8 Metrosexual UI and are happy switching so Windows don't tie a boat anchor? I'm happy for you, I really am. But forget the FX 81x0 chips for a minute and look at the lower SKUs, the FX4 and FX6...now what is the selling point there? Hell you can't even use ACC to take a shot at a poor man's upgrade like you could with the Athlons and Phenoms. Hell do you know how many successful unlocks I've seen here at the shop? We are talking a good 75% good unlocks here but again Thuban is going for $89-$120 and at that price who cares about all the extra BS and worse performance just to have a pair of integer modules that most will never use?
In the end what was keeping AMD in the game is all the system builders like me and OEMs pushing the whole "bang for the buck" mantra but the FX chips don't even have that, in the work most have day to day an FX4 will suck worse than a Deneb and will frankly barely beat an Athlon X4 unless you crank the locks, with the FX4100 scoring especially shitty in real world tests, and again the chips its competing against are not only even with it or even better on performance but frankly since the release of the FX they don't even get a single slot on Tom's hardware "Best chips for $xxx" list as the Sandy Pentiums again stomp the FX4 and are cheaper than the FX4, so what's the selling point?
I'm sorry but we'll just have to agree to disagree as I'm getting such low prices on Phenoms and Athlons and I can't find a single selling point for the FX chips. My gamer customers are better off with Thuban and i5 as they are sticking with Win 7 for now and Win 7 and games don't know what to make of the FX, the regular customers don't need 8 cores and the FX6 and FX4 are more expensive with truly lackluster performance per watt and overall performance...frankly again the only real niche I see for the FX is those that automatically think "Moar is better" and servers where you can buy a 16 core FX for around half what you can for an Intel with the same number of cores.
So I'll stick as long as I can to selling the AM3+ Phenoms and Athlons, as well as selling Liano and Bobcat units, but when they are gone if they don't have something better suited for my customers I'm just gon
But you have to look at what market they are going for and its pretty obvious they ain't trying to go for the "CCC bargain basement Android" market but iPhone turf.
Now I'm sorry but you can't do things worse than an already established and popular brand and not expect to bomb. Its already been widely reported they spent $450 in ads for every person they got to sign a 2 year contract to take a WinPhone so its obvious they are committed to the brand...why not go all the way instead of half ass? Remember people get stuck for 2 damned years with these phones, that's 2 years to be stewing and building hatred against the brand.
And in the end how much would it have really cost them? They could have sold those refurb units for $99 a pop on Woot!, got the people taking advantage of the offer to sign up for a 2 year extension to their existing contract which I'm sure the carriers would have been happy to kick them back a little for each customer they could count on for another 2 years above their existing contract, and it most importantly would have built damned good positive buzz, which when you are a VERY far behind third place is a 3 man race is EXACTLY what you want.
Again this is why I hate comparing the Gates MSFT to the Ballmer MSFT, as Gates was evil but at least he was smart. You look at Ballmer's reign and it just looks like what would happen if you put the PHB in charge of a multi-billion dollar company, just a slow mo train wreck. They can't afford to end up locked out of this crucial market, yet bonehead moves like this seriously hurt their chances, its just stupid.
Then you offer a cheap upgrade path to your loyal customers not give them a trollface and let a big nasty fart in their general direction.
I mean a company the fucking size of MSFT shouldn't need me, a little PC retailer in the middle of BFA, to explain economics 101 to them but I guess i have to...Hey MSFT? yeah com 'ere. you see its is like this Sparky, you make people happy? they tell 3 to 5 friends and that is how you build what is called "word of mouth" but when you give them a trollface and fuck 'em over? then they not only tell over a dozen that you suck and your products are shit but they make blogs, they jump into forums, you'd be surprised how badly people that feel like they were fucked over will want to hurt you back.
Again I should NOT have to explain this shit, its business 101. This is why I'll ALWAYS offer some kind of trade in on a new unit, even if I'm just gonna take that trade in and throw it in the garbage because it makes people feel like they are being treated fairly, which REALLY fucking matters MSFT. Hell you could have refurbed those Win 7 units, put them on Woot! and made some of your money back while more importantly giving people who were loyal to you a reason to stay loyal instead of filling the net with "You fucking suck!" rants.
I man for the love of God you couldn't even do this ONE thing right? Hell you like ripping off Apple and even Apple, the kings of hardware churn, support at least ONE upgrade per unit! So if you needed the hardware to be upgraded for Win 8 fine, no problem, at least give a reason those units that are for sale now with Win 7 should be bought and give those that already bought a reason to stay with you.
Because I hate to break the news to ya but you ain't got billions of dollars in third party software to keep them loyal like you do Windows, so this was a seriously fucking retarded move, but what can we expect under Ballmer was seriously fucking retarded moves? I swear he thinks its 1999 and Windows can just walk in and take over a market without trying...wrong.
THANK YOU AC!!! It just amazes me how many act like Elop took over in like 2005 when in reality it was already into 2010 when he took them helm.
As you pointed out the Android margins were already getting as razor thin as the PC, with so many competing for such a small sliver of the pie it wasn't racing to the bottom, it was plunging like a 747 with its wings sheared off, Maemo wasn't even beta quality, the company was split into 3 competing projects and NONE of them up to the task of going head to head with iOS and Android, WebOS was off the table and Apple sure as fuck ain't gonna license iOS....where else could he go?
Again VERY little money in Android by 2010 because you had a couple of companies that pretty much owned, Asus and Samsung and HTC, everybody else was just..... well everybody else, fighting over their scraps and even with as big a piece as HTC got their earnings suck, it was 20 fricking 10 so they couldn't just sit on ass for another year and a half to get Maemo production ready and the ONLY place they had left with any real dominance was in the "waaaay past razor and into generic tissue paper thin" feature or dumbphone market where you are looking at phones that retail, not wholesale but retail mind you, for less than $20 with many places carrying $10 phones...where the fuck were they supposed to go? What was Elop supposed to get out the door? Become just another faceless company in a fricking ocean full of Android devices? How many CCC Android phones are out right now?
I'm sorry, but while we can ALL agree the call didn't work out i honestly don't see how he had any other choice in the matter. He didn't have an OS that could compete, the one he could have took for free had everyone and their dog and their dog's stuffed toy cranking out units that had already started the prices to freefall, like I said if he would have gotten WebOS at an affordable price? things might have been different but at least the MSFT money as you said helped to at least slow the flaming crash of the company some.
I just don't see why everyone picks on Elop when by the time they brought him in the time had passed and he was given no good options. They didn't have the money, nor the time, to get anything of their own out the door. Any way you slice it Elop was just screwed and made the best call he could make, its just there weren't any good calls he could have done in its place.
Well I didn't say he was a NICE guy, I said he was a SMART guy and one can be a smart guy and a bit of an asshole, see Gates, Ellison, Jobs, hell a bit of doucheyness seems to go with the turf.
But if not him and again if the world HAS to have a face for FOSS, why not Perens? he's also very smart and thoughtful and as far as i know he's...a really nice guy. i looked and I can't find anybody really saying anything bad about him personally or personality wise, just disagreeing on some of his points.
RMS reminds me of the crazy guy they find on the street corner for the reporter to talk to because he looks like a "character" while ignoring he's...well crazy. I mean for the love of God he took his fricking socks off in the middle of a lecture, on fricking stage no less in front of a packed house, and ATE HIS OWN TOE FUNK!!!!!! I mean WTF can you even say about that? I think eating nasty shit out of your toes should pretty much make your chances of being talked to on complex issues moot. I mean with all his crazy views, the "voluntary pedo is okay", the toe thing, the kissing the ass of dictators and being all "Yay dictators!"...
WTF people??? Seriously WHAT THE FUCK??? If I didn't know better I'd think this was a parody made by those that don't like FOSS, like the way Apple always portrayed MSFT as fat boring office nerds and MSFT always made Apple to be...well douchey hipsters.
so if you are gonna have somebody as the "go to" guy for these issues? Please please PLEASE pick somebody, ANYBODY else, not someone that comes off as this creepy fat cult leader type you expect to break out the koolaid and start talking about the mothership, okay? I mean for the love of God folks, is that REALLY the image you want the world to think of when they think FOSS? Some fat unshaved crazy basement dweller full of crackpot theories and with a seriously creepy "keep him away from the little kids" kinda vibe? Really?
Oh no, that would infer a just and reasonable God.
Nope its all written in this mess of VB 1-6 by some guy named Chuck who thought comments were for pussies and when in doubt GOTO it, thus proving we actually live in the evil mirror verse. haven't you noticed all the goatees man? Its a dead giveaway.../strokes goatee while having an evil smirk/
Well according to him that is EXACTLY what happened, the CEO they had before this last guy basically just culled the entire braintrust, all the Cyrix and Athlon64 guys that did all the hand designs and replaced them with low level grunts and computer layouts. I remember when i read his rant thinking "Hmmm...now where did I see this same play before? Oh yeah when Circuit City fired all the experienced salesmen and replaced them with mickey D's workers." and that didn't work out too well.
But there IS a reason to hope, they did just hire the guy responsible for the Apple A6 who just so happened to be one of the leads on the Athlon64 team. So hopefully he'll "get the band back together" and get some of the best of the hand designers back and give us another great chip like the Athlon64 because honestly? he couldn't do any worse than faildozer.
And of course you can always build an AM3+ system now while the Thubans are so dirt cheap, I picked one up for a customer last week on sale for $89! Six full cores for that cheap? Talk about a no brainer. Hell even when its not on sale you can get the 1035Ts and 1045ts for less than $120, and the new AM3+ boards from guys like Asrock hold 32Gb of RAM and with that much RAM and 6 cores that can keep most happy and do what you wanna do.
Wellll..and i'm sure I'll get hate for pointing this out...I really think Elop honestly didn't have a choice to make. i man look at the company he took over, they had no less than THREE noncompeting OSes, maemo, Java based Symbian, and the other one I always forget, but they had 3 different OSes, all trying to backstab and steal each other's thunder while losing share slowly but surely, they didn't have the money to pay the crazy price HP paid for WebOS and Maemo just was nowhere near ready and certainly wouldn't compete in the shape it was in, the only place they had real share was in dumbphones and the Indian and Chinese markets were already coming out with dirt cheap Android phones. So Elop made a call, frankly the only call i think he could have made, and it just...well it didn't work, that shit happens in business.
Now I ALREADY know what the fanbois are gonna scream, "Why they could have went with Android!" but they are wrong, they could NOT have went with Android and here is why: Not only were they not up to speed on Android which would have taken time they didn't have but more importantly they already saw that Samsung and HTC do Android better than anyone so their higher end hardware would have meant nothing as again, Samsung and HTC already do that better than anybody with Android. it would be like coming out with a HyPhone and wondering why you can't gain share against the iPhone. Duh! Apple has the buzz, they do that style better and people are already familiar with the brand. Go to any Android website with the wayback machine to that time period where Elop was first hired and you'll see it was Samsung this and HTC that, so by the time they got their half ass Android on the market it would look like an expensive also ran, just pointless.
Do I wish Elop could have made another call? Absolutely, I thought WebOS and Nokia would have been a perfect fit, great OS meets great hardware for great products, but they couldn't afford to just toss money like HP did so that just wasn't on the table, Android as I said done better by rivals, and Apple sure as fuck wouldn't license them iOS, so that pretty much left him only TWO choice: Either put everything on Maemo and hope to God they could get the bugs fixed and the OS ready to compete while bleeding share, or take an already finished product and actually get paid for taking it...I'm sure it seemed like a no brainer at the time, but what Elop didn't realize is tying the Windows brand onto a non X86 device is just retarded and doomed. So he made a bad call but honestly I just don't see what other call he could have made that would have turned out ANY differently for Nokia. They were backed into a corner and he had to make the call, the only call he really had.
Because unlike the Pi which is seriously niche the differing arches all had serious mainstream appeal and the support of tons of devs? I mean from 82-87 or so you had serious software being written for multiple archs which could be found in ANY B&M, unlike today where there is X86 on the desk and lap and ARM for the cell and tablet you had serious head on competition between the chips and it really drove innovation there for awhile. Hell for awhile it looked like the 68k and the MOS chips were gonna end up taking the market away from big blue and the X86. Now everyone has their niche and its pretty much static, X86 for desktops and laptops, ARM for tablets and phones, and chips like SPARC and POWER sticking to their server niche.
I got a question, and I'm not trolling here, seriously I wanna know...why does anybody listen to this crackpot? I get he did something good 30 years ago, you wanna give him credit for that okay, fine. But the guy gets more extreme and creepy and just...well "off" for want of a better term, as time goes on, so why does anybody still listen to a self proclaimed "squatter" that tries to stick his 2c in on everything net related yet the guy doesn't even surf, he uses a fricking email daemon to fetch pages...ummm..okay?
I mean do I REALLY have to stick up a link to where the guy sat on a fricking stage in front of a lecture hall FULL of people, took off his socks, and ate toe funk like a crazy homeless guy? Hell the two software projects he's known for he doesn't even have any say in, he had to "bless" the forks when they basically just said "yeah..not really gonna deal with ya anymore there RMS" and he just gets more out there every damned year, so why isn't everyone treating him like the seriously weird guy that he is?
If there HAS to be a spokesman for FOSS make it Torvalds or Perens okay? While I don't agree with either on a lot of issues i'll be the first to give credit where its due and say they are both incredibly smart, have well thought out reasoned arguments for every position they take, and oh yeah, they don't eat their own toe cheese, at least as far as we know.
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For all those that say Elop was trying to kill Nokia for MSFT....uhhh hello? MSFT IS TRYING TO KILL MSFT so what would be the point? Its not like these things didn't already had a high chance of being giant fails before but at THAT pricing? For a Windows that won't actually run Windows programs, has less apps than iOS and Android, and from a company who has a history of abandoning customers in mobile and leaving them hung out to dry (WinMo 6.5, Zune, Kin, Sidekick, WinPhone 7) does ANYBODY think this thing is gonna be anything but the biggest fucking flop since Vista?
I swear to God just yesterday I was dropping some files off with the boys and the Surface commercial came on, you know, the lame "everybody click" one? My 73 year old mom said "What's that?" and when I told her that it was a Windows that don't run Windows programs and priced the same as an iPad she fricking died laughing! Even my 73 year old mom knew that going head to head against the iPad is suicide! She just kept saying "That is just so stupid! Why would anybody buy that thing?" and I have to agree, this is a product with no real selling point, priced to be in the same room with a product that is huge and beats it on buzz, apps, even resale value, and to top off the massive fail it won't even run Windows X86 which is the ONLY reason people buy Windows!
The only nice thing about this is that in a year you'll find this on Woot! for $100 ala Touchpad. If anybody needed proof that Ballmer is the worst CEO in corporate right now? Here ya go, I swear the man makes the Pepsi guy at Apple look like a genius. Same price as an iPad...yeah right.
The controller. I've had 2 of my gamer customers lose SSDs to controller failure. Easy to spot as you flip the switch there is nothing, the drive doesn't even show up in BIOS. This is why I warn folks that if they are going SSD they need to have a backup strategy they religiously stick to, because if that controller fails they are SOL. With HDDs I've been able to get a lot of data off a badly dying drive but with SSDs once the controller goes so too goes the drive.
While we agree on many things Crosshair on this one you are DEAD WRONG. Look up the number of Muslims in a country and how the violence goes UP the more Muslims you have. If the country is 100% Muslim no problem right? WRONG as then the Imams start jockeying and fighting each other for control!
And tell me friend...what does the west have to do with the Shia murdering the Sunni and vice versa? that has only be going on...ohhh...about 600 YEARS now and shows no let up in sight.
Remember friend you are a cow to them, that's right, a cow. You might want to read this with just a few snippets of what they think of you infidel, and I'll just end with some quotes from their own book that illustrates better than i ever could why there can NEVER be peace with Islam:
Quran 4:89: They (infidels) desire that you should disbelieve as they have disbelieved, so that you might be (all) alike; therefore take not from among them friends until they fly (their homes) in Allah's way; but if they turn back, then seize them and kill them wherever you find them, and take not from among them a friend or a helper. Quran 8:12: Instill terror into the hearts of the unbelievers; Quran 2:191: kill the disbelievers wherever we find them Quran 22:19-22: for them (the unbelievers) garments of fire shall be cut and there shall be poured over their heads boiling water whereby whatever is in their bowels and skin shall be dissolved and they will be punished with hooked iron rods. Quran 8:12: Your Lord inspired the angels with the message: I will terrorize the unbelievers. Therefore smite them on their necks and every joint and incapacitate them. Strike off their heads and cut off each of their fingers and toes. Quran 8:7: Allah wished to confirm the truth by His words: Wipe the infidels out to the last. Quran 8:59: The infidels should not think that they can get away from us. Prepare against them whatever arms and weaponry you can muster so that you may terrorize them. They are your enemy and Allah's enemy. Quran 8:60: Prepare against them whatever arms and cavalry you can muster that you may strike terror in the enemies of Allah, and others besides them not known to you. Quran 9.29 Fight those who do not believe in Allah, nor in the latter day, nor do they prohibit what Allah and His Apostle have prohibited, nor follow the religion of truth, out of those who have been given the Book, until they pay the tax in acknowledgment of superiority and they are in a state of subjection. Quran 47:4: Strike off the heads of the disbelievers and, after making a wide slaughter among them, carefully tie up the remaining captives.
Uhhh...why would it affect your HTPC? Simply use the net and get all the shows you want WHEN you want and with less commercials to boot. I have built several HTPCs for customers and between Win 7 MC Internet TV, Hulu Basic, and YouTube they have so many shows to choose from they could watch TV from sun up to sun down and never watch all the great shows out there. And that of course isn't counting using BT to get shows, this is just the legal means.
As a nice bonus you can get an E350 barebone which since you won't have to be encoding like a DVR will work great and only costs $130 for the barebone with nice case and PSU and for those that don't want to spend the money on Win 7 HP you can just download OpenELEC which has the XBMC 10 foot UI and has a prebuilt build for AMD Fusion chips like the E350, couldn't be simpler.
So I see no reason why this should affect your HTPC, its just one more reason to just buy bare cable for the net and say screw their TV offerings. I personally haven't bothered plugging in the free converter they handed me or my capture card because with Internet TV and all the shows on the net frankly there is more TV than I have hours in the day. Lately I've been on a classic kick so I'm watching Kolchak and Night Gallery here at the shop while I work. Its nice, less commercials than I deal with on cable, and couldn't be easier to do.
No religious people are seeking not to think, that's pretty much it. They don't have to take responsibility for anything as its all "God's plan" so they can just follow the little book and turn off their brains and not have to worry about doubts or grey areas or anything like that, its simply "Don't think just do what the book says".
This is why Islam is so damned dangerous as its that attitude taken to its obvious extreme. Here you have a religion that tells you which hand to wipe your ass with, how many times to shake your dick after you piss, and which positions you can fuck your wife in, its the ultimate book for brainless drones. No wonder you get them strapping bombs to themselves, just one more order to follow, just as they have their entire pointless thought free existence.
The reason they can get away with this cracker jack toy in India is because frankly India don't have jack shit for laws when it comes to their streets. Its well known that in most cities there that street lights and signs are treated more as "suggestions" than any kind of rule and we've all seen the truly crazy shit you'll see strapped to bikes and scooters over there, shit that if you tried it here in the USA you wouldn't make it a block before being busted.
So please keep your elitist Eurotrash attitude to yourself, mmkay? This is an American site, with an article about a car coming to America, If you would allow that tinker toy on your roads that's YOUR business. Of course you've let your politicians tax you to the point you pay 3 times for a liter what we pay for a gallon so frankly why anybody should listen to a people that would put up with getting assraped like that is beyond me.
I only hope that you aren't in one of the countries that use the Euro, as it looks like that little experiment is gonna hit the shitter, might want to exchange your currency for USD now before the only thing its good for is wiping your ass. Mark my words, Greece bails by Feb, followed by Spain and Portugal, after that stick a fork.
It's also the most brilliant scam the rich have ever come up with. Think about it, how do you keep the peasant slaving away while you live like a God, without the peasants rising up and demanding not to be treated like shit and stomped on? By telling them the sky bully rewards peasants when they die! Kinda a "40 acres and a mule" that of course nobody even has to provide, because its invisible acres and mule in an invisible land.
There is a reason why all the major religions allude to followers being sheep ya know, its because sheep are dumb animals you can fleece and slaughter.
Yeah cause its the gubment that allows Chinese slave labor to compete, allows H1-Bs to be brought in and paid low wages to compete against students that are paying $60K+ minimum for their education...you know, you're right! We should become a nationalist isolationist state JUST LIKE China and India!
I'm sure then you support an end to the free market lie and the supporting of our students and workforce by ending slave labor with protectionist policies, H1-Bs, and money havens like the Caymans being used to dodge taxes like Mittens did...right?
Which is why I just don't get it. You FINALLY start to get a little uptick so...you fuck your loyal customers in the ass, depreciate your API so the phone is now worthless, and then just to let a big ripping fart right into the face of those loyal customers AND Nokia you announce this months before the phone comes out, thus making sure that all those WinPhone 7 units will rot in warehouses. i looked online and you still see retailers trying to sell these things for $300+...how long before they realize that MSFT fucked 'em and their inventory isn't worth a hundred bucks?
If they would have just offered a cheap trade in plan people could still be buying the WinPhone 7 units, upgrade them to 7.8, and when they were ready switch to Win 8 without getting reamed. instead the retailers get stuck with stock they can't move, the users get stuck with a contract on a phone that won't have shit for apps and has ZERO resale, the developers that have ANY fucking sense at all will avoid Win 8 like the plague, because what is to stop them from announcing WinPhone 9 in 6 months and making all their efforts worthless?
I swear to God you couldn't make the MSFT "mobile strategy" any more of a train wreck if you tried. this is why me and the other shops stocked up on Win 7 and will be avoiding Win 8 like the clap, because its obvious their plans for the entire platform change from minute to minute and I'm betting its Vista all over again. Burning all those mobile users was just the rotten shit icing on a foul dead cat carcass cake.
While true its a slash-ad I have to say the humble bundles have been nice. For those that haven't picked it up yet the last bundle I saw had the original Torchlight which is quite fun.
Between the bundles and GOG its never been easier to get cheap DRM free games and if more software follows that model? That's a good thing in my book. Although I personally have no problem with Steam DRM I AM glad to see the day coming when there is no more Starfuck or SecuROM to screw with systems.
Sure they can! Why that's why we have higher student defaults than ever before in history, because of all those non existent jobs they can use to pay off the crushing debt they find themselves in!
Wake up chuck, the jobs aren't there to be had and the bill collectors will hound you to the grave, i should know as they carried out a nice kid downstairs who slit his wrists after being unable to get out of the mountain of debt and not being able to find anything but a McJob. I find it funny how the corps can just file bankruptcy and start again tomorrow under a new name but they will never allow anyone to escape the student loans, no matter how obvious that they'll never be able to pay them off with the ever dwindling number of jobs we have.
My advice if you were my customer? Keep an eye on the Tiger kits and when they have one of their "$199 specials" like they had recently with a Phenom II quad snatch one along with an HD4850 (can be found in many places for $40) and make yourself a SW render box. No need to buy anything more than a KVM switch to use your existing setup and that way you have a system that can be stripped down and dedicated just to SW performance.
This way you can keep your i5 system with Nvidia graphics for CUDA and be able to continue working while even heavy renders are going on with the SW box and you can switch back and forth between the two with a keyboard shortcut. Because from what I've seen SW just seems to play nicer with AMD GPUs and the AMD parts are so cheap right now you can build a pretty nice system for very little.
Uhhh...dude? You DO realize you just used the "we'll lose money on each unit and make it up on volume!" excuse, yes? the only place they had real share by 2010, which is when Elop got the job, was in feature phones where the RETAIL PRICE, not wholesale but retail price, is less than $20, most selling less than $15...there just ain't no money to be made on cheap shitty Tracphones anymore. Hell Walmart is selling a smartphone for $70 with their prepaid, the age of the dumbphones is gone and betting the future on dumbphones would be like betting on cassettes.
Agaion do I wish they would have brought him or somebody else in early enough they could have made a different call? Absolutely. If they would have killed the other two OSes and bet it all on Maemo in 07, or if they'd have bought WebOS? Then things might be VERY different. But nobody is making shit on Android but Samsung, their stocks and sales were cratering, their internal OSes didn't compete and couldn't gain mass market appeal with the N series selling less than 4 million units WORLDWIDE...there just wasn't any other call to make that would have done anything for the company, that's all.
What is sad is their conclusion is the same thing we have been saying, quote "the conclusion is crystal clear: there are very few arguments in favor of the FX CPU right now." and as a system builder that is exactly what I've been saying. I can get Thuban X6, Deneb and Athlon quads all for cheaper than I can get an FX with an equal or greater number of cores and the performance is equal or in single threaded better and against the Intel chips in the same price range it gets curbstomped.
Did you know that AMD hasn't had a single slot in Tom's hardware "Best chip for $xxx" in several quarters? they can't even rule the low end anymore because the Sandy based Pentiums while having less cores stomps them so badly on IPC and gaming as you pointed out rarely goes beyond 2 cores so there really isn't a selling point for FX. Most of my customers simply can't come up with enough work to stress a triple, much less a quad, so bolting on ever more cores to make up for low performance per core really doesn't help.
Frankly to be able to compete they'd need to shave another $40 off the FX8 and get it down to where the Thubans are selling now, and $25 off the frankly piss poor FX4 and FX6 but if the rumors are true they've got razor thin margins on the FX line thanks to poor yields which the previous chip didn't suffer from. Its just a seriously bad time for AMD, the FX chips suck, they canceled the successor to bobcat that was supposed to come out last year which while having low margins was a cheap chip with high yields but now that the next version of bobcat will end up coming out right at the same time as the latest Atom so that's not good, and finally Trinity just doesn't do good on the power usage, like FX the Bulldozer/piledriver design just doesn't do well with low power which with the popularity of mobile is seriously bad news. Its just not a good place for AMD right now that's for sure.
And don't forget we aren't talking about a single core Intel VS an 8 core AMD here, we are comparing with both the Thuban, 6 cores and Turbocore, and the i5 2500K which gives you 4 cores and turbo. And sadly in both cases the single core performance is better than the half core design of the FX while costing as much as $60 LESS for the Thuban and less than $40 more for the Intel.
Hell I've been getting Thubans for $89-$120 depending on if they are having a sale with the average price at $110. What does AMD have in that price range in the FX line? The FX6 which the critic have firmly trounced for its bad performance against not only the Pentium G520 but also the Thuban. And that isn't even bring the Deneb Phenoms and Athlons into the mix which can be had for even cheaper now.
In the end i just can't see a selling point for FX unless you buy the FX8 and are one of the very few people that have a ton of loads where you can hit all 8 cores constantly, like image batch processing or video transcoding. Hell even then because of such piss poor single thread performance i'd have to wonder if you wouldn't be better off with the Thuban X6 or the i5 2500K, with the money you saved on the chip by going thuban you could add a 60gb SSD which would stomp an FX with a HDD, or with the Intel have killer IPC and a 3.7GHz turbo while having 4 cores that would probably chew through the loads nearly as fast as the FX does with 8.
Its just not a good design, any way you slice it. That's why I'll keep selling Phenoms and Athlons until i can't get 'em cheap anymore, along with llano and Bobcat mobiles, and hope that the former Apple/Athlon 64 chip designer they hired can come up with something better.
The big problem is...and again if you are happy with it I'm glad, as i tell the guys that buy Apple if at the end of the day if it works for you personally that is all that should matter to you, is this:...8 cores is a niche that frankly 99%+ of the population will have ZERO use for in this chips lifetime. Know what the big seller is here? the X3 chips, why? because frankly most users can't find enough useful work to fill up triple cores. So you have a niche that lets face it, pretty much leaves gamers, yet your new chip performs worse than the previous one for that niche while cost more and being in the same price range as the Intel i5 which again curbstomps.
Then you have the whole "half core" issue which be honest man...its retarded, it really is. First of all they didn't tell MSFT who is now royally fucking AMD by refusing to fix it except in Win 8, they even pulled the patch because it screwed more than it fixed, its pretty obvious it was designed for the APUs which again, zero appeal to gamers as they don't want IGP graphics and the IGPs built on chip kills OCing ability, and it ties a boat anchor to most games and fucks up Steam which your own article notes.
Again this chip? Its Netburst man, its just netburst all over again. Intel thought they could get the clocks high enough that the stalls from having a long pipeline would be covered by MHz and HT, AMD thinks they can cover for worse than Phenom single core by ramping up clocks and stacking on the cores yet...who the fuck needs 8 half cores? I can get the Thubans for a good $45-$60 cheaper than FX, add $20 or more for Denebs or Athlon triples and quads....so sell it to me, what use is this to my customers? What could possibly justify the increased cost, and why should I buy the FX over the i5?
So if it works for you, you like the Win 8 Metrosexual UI and are happy switching so Windows don't tie a boat anchor? I'm happy for you, I really am. But forget the FX 81x0 chips for a minute and look at the lower SKUs, the FX4 and FX6...now what is the selling point there? Hell you can't even use ACC to take a shot at a poor man's upgrade like you could with the Athlons and Phenoms. Hell do you know how many successful unlocks I've seen here at the shop? We are talking a good 75% good unlocks here but again Thuban is going for $89-$120 and at that price who cares about all the extra BS and worse performance just to have a pair of integer modules that most will never use?
In the end what was keeping AMD in the game is all the system builders like me and OEMs pushing the whole "bang for the buck" mantra but the FX chips don't even have that, in the work most have day to day an FX4 will suck worse than a Deneb and will frankly barely beat an Athlon X4 unless you crank the locks, with the FX4100 scoring especially shitty in real world tests, and again the chips its competing against are not only even with it or even better on performance but frankly since the release of the FX they don't even get a single slot on Tom's hardware "Best chips for $xxx" list as the Sandy Pentiums again stomp the FX4 and are cheaper than the FX4, so what's the selling point?
I'm sorry but we'll just have to agree to disagree as I'm getting such low prices on Phenoms and Athlons and I can't find a single selling point for the FX chips. My gamer customers are better off with Thuban and i5 as they are sticking with Win 7 for now and Win 7 and games don't know what to make of the FX, the regular customers don't need 8 cores and the FX6 and FX4 are more expensive with truly lackluster performance per watt and overall performance...frankly again the only real niche I see for the FX is those that automatically think "Moar is better" and servers where you can buy a 16 core FX for around half what you can for an Intel with the same number of cores.
So I'll stick as long as I can to selling the AM3+ Phenoms and Athlons, as well as selling Liano and Bobcat units, but when they are gone if they don't have something better suited for my customers I'm just gon
But you have to look at what market they are going for and its pretty obvious they ain't trying to go for the "CCC bargain basement Android" market but iPhone turf.
Now I'm sorry but you can't do things worse than an already established and popular brand and not expect to bomb. Its already been widely reported they spent $450 in ads for every person they got to sign a 2 year contract to take a WinPhone so its obvious they are committed to the brand...why not go all the way instead of half ass? Remember people get stuck for 2 damned years with these phones, that's 2 years to be stewing and building hatred against the brand.
And in the end how much would it have really cost them? They could have sold those refurb units for $99 a pop on Woot!, got the people taking advantage of the offer to sign up for a 2 year extension to their existing contract which I'm sure the carriers would have been happy to kick them back a little for each customer they could count on for another 2 years above their existing contract, and it most importantly would have built damned good positive buzz, which when you are a VERY far behind third place is a 3 man race is EXACTLY what you want.
Again this is why I hate comparing the Gates MSFT to the Ballmer MSFT, as Gates was evil but at least he was smart. You look at Ballmer's reign and it just looks like what would happen if you put the PHB in charge of a multi-billion dollar company, just a slow mo train wreck. They can't afford to end up locked out of this crucial market, yet bonehead moves like this seriously hurt their chances, its just stupid.
Then you offer a cheap upgrade path to your loyal customers not give them a trollface and let a big nasty fart in their general direction.
I mean a company the fucking size of MSFT shouldn't need me, a little PC retailer in the middle of BFA, to explain economics 101 to them but I guess i have to...Hey MSFT? yeah com 'ere. you see its is like this Sparky, you make people happy? they tell 3 to 5 friends and that is how you build what is called "word of mouth" but when you give them a trollface and fuck 'em over? then they not only tell over a dozen that you suck and your products are shit but they make blogs, they jump into forums, you'd be surprised how badly people that feel like they were fucked over will want to hurt you back.
Again I should NOT have to explain this shit, its business 101. This is why I'll ALWAYS offer some kind of trade in on a new unit, even if I'm just gonna take that trade in and throw it in the garbage because it makes people feel like they are being treated fairly, which REALLY fucking matters MSFT. Hell you could have refurbed those Win 7 units, put them on Woot! and made some of your money back while more importantly giving people who were loyal to you a reason to stay loyal instead of filling the net with "You fucking suck!" rants.
I man for the love of God you couldn't even do this ONE thing right? Hell you like ripping off Apple and even Apple, the kings of hardware churn, support at least ONE upgrade per unit! So if you needed the hardware to be upgraded for Win 8 fine, no problem, at least give a reason those units that are for sale now with Win 7 should be bought and give those that already bought a reason to stay with you.
Because I hate to break the news to ya but you ain't got billions of dollars in third party software to keep them loyal like you do Windows, so this was a seriously fucking retarded move, but what can we expect under Ballmer was seriously fucking retarded moves? I swear he thinks its 1999 and Windows can just walk in and take over a market without trying...wrong.
THANK YOU AC!!! It just amazes me how many act like Elop took over in like 2005 when in reality it was already into 2010 when he took them helm.
As you pointed out the Android margins were already getting as razor thin as the PC, with so many competing for such a small sliver of the pie it wasn't racing to the bottom, it was plunging like a 747 with its wings sheared off, Maemo wasn't even beta quality, the company was split into 3 competing projects and NONE of them up to the task of going head to head with iOS and Android, WebOS was off the table and Apple sure as fuck ain't gonna license iOS....where else could he go?
Again VERY little money in Android by 2010 because you had a couple of companies that pretty much owned, Asus and Samsung and HTC, everybody else was just..... well everybody else, fighting over their scraps and even with as big a piece as HTC got their earnings suck, it was 20 fricking 10 so they couldn't just sit on ass for another year and a half to get Maemo production ready and the ONLY place they had left with any real dominance was in the "waaaay past razor and into generic tissue paper thin" feature or dumbphone market where you are looking at phones that retail, not wholesale but retail mind you, for less than $20 with many places carrying $10 phones...where the fuck were they supposed to go? What was Elop supposed to get out the door? Become just another faceless company in a fricking ocean full of Android devices? How many CCC Android phones are out right now?
I'm sorry, but while we can ALL agree the call didn't work out i honestly don't see how he had any other choice in the matter. He didn't have an OS that could compete, the one he could have took for free had everyone and their dog and their dog's stuffed toy cranking out units that had already started the prices to freefall, like I said if he would have gotten WebOS at an affordable price? things might have been different but at least the MSFT money as you said helped to at least slow the flaming crash of the company some.
I just don't see why everyone picks on Elop when by the time they brought him in the time had passed and he was given no good options. They didn't have the money, nor the time, to get anything of their own out the door. Any way you slice it Elop was just screwed and made the best call he could make, its just there weren't any good calls he could have done in its place.
Well I didn't say he was a NICE guy, I said he was a SMART guy and one can be a smart guy and a bit of an asshole, see Gates, Ellison, Jobs, hell a bit of doucheyness seems to go with the turf.
But if not him and again if the world HAS to have a face for FOSS, why not Perens? he's also very smart and thoughtful and as far as i know he's...a really nice guy. i looked and I can't find anybody really saying anything bad about him personally or personality wise, just disagreeing on some of his points.
RMS reminds me of the crazy guy they find on the street corner for the reporter to talk to because he looks like a "character" while ignoring he's...well crazy. I mean for the love of God he took his fricking socks off in the middle of a lecture, on fricking stage no less in front of a packed house, and ATE HIS OWN TOE FUNK!!!!!! I mean WTF can you even say about that? I think eating nasty shit out of your toes should pretty much make your chances of being talked to on complex issues moot. I mean with all his crazy views, the "voluntary pedo is okay", the toe thing, the kissing the ass of dictators and being all "Yay dictators!"...
WTF people??? Seriously WHAT THE FUCK??? If I didn't know better I'd think this was a parody made by those that don't like FOSS, like the way Apple always portrayed MSFT as fat boring office nerds and MSFT always made Apple to be...well douchey hipsters.
so if you are gonna have somebody as the "go to" guy for these issues? Please please PLEASE pick somebody, ANYBODY else, not someone that comes off as this creepy fat cult leader type you expect to break out the koolaid and start talking about the mothership, okay? I mean for the love of God folks, is that REALLY the image you want the world to think of when they think FOSS? Some fat unshaved crazy basement dweller full of crackpot theories and with a seriously creepy "keep him away from the little kids" kinda vibe? Really?
Oh no, that would infer a just and reasonable God.
Nope its all written in this mess of VB 1-6 by some guy named Chuck who thought comments were for pussies and when in doubt GOTO it, thus proving we actually live in the evil mirror verse. haven't you noticed all the goatees man? Its a dead giveaway.../strokes goatee while having an evil smirk/
Well according to him that is EXACTLY what happened, the CEO they had before this last guy basically just culled the entire braintrust, all the Cyrix and Athlon64 guys that did all the hand designs and replaced them with low level grunts and computer layouts. I remember when i read his rant thinking "Hmmm...now where did I see this same play before? Oh yeah when Circuit City fired all the experienced salesmen and replaced them with mickey D's workers." and that didn't work out too well.
But there IS a reason to hope, they did just hire the guy responsible for the Apple A6 who just so happened to be one of the leads on the Athlon64 team. So hopefully he'll "get the band back together" and get some of the best of the hand designers back and give us another great chip like the Athlon64 because honestly? he couldn't do any worse than faildozer.
And of course you can always build an AM3+ system now while the Thubans are so dirt cheap, I picked one up for a customer last week on sale for $89! Six full cores for that cheap? Talk about a no brainer. Hell even when its not on sale you can get the 1035Ts and 1045ts for less than $120, and the new AM3+ boards from guys like Asrock hold 32Gb of RAM and with that much RAM and 6 cores that can keep most happy and do what you wanna do.
Wellll..and i'm sure I'll get hate for pointing this out...I really think Elop honestly didn't have a choice to make. i man look at the company he took over, they had no less than THREE noncompeting OSes, maemo, Java based Symbian, and the other one I always forget, but they had 3 different OSes, all trying to backstab and steal each other's thunder while losing share slowly but surely, they didn't have the money to pay the crazy price HP paid for WebOS and Maemo just was nowhere near ready and certainly wouldn't compete in the shape it was in, the only place they had real share was in dumbphones and the Indian and Chinese markets were already coming out with dirt cheap Android phones. So Elop made a call, frankly the only call i think he could have made, and it just...well it didn't work, that shit happens in business.
Now I ALREADY know what the fanbois are gonna scream, "Why they could have went with Android!" but they are wrong, they could NOT have went with Android and here is why: Not only were they not up to speed on Android which would have taken time they didn't have but more importantly they already saw that Samsung and HTC do Android better than anyone so their higher end hardware would have meant nothing as again, Samsung and HTC already do that better than anybody with Android. it would be like coming out with a HyPhone and wondering why you can't gain share against the iPhone. Duh! Apple has the buzz, they do that style better and people are already familiar with the brand. Go to any Android website with the wayback machine to that time period where Elop was first hired and you'll see it was Samsung this and HTC that, so by the time they got their half ass Android on the market it would look like an expensive also ran, just pointless.
Do I wish Elop could have made another call? Absolutely, I thought WebOS and Nokia would have been a perfect fit, great OS meets great hardware for great products, but they couldn't afford to just toss money like HP did so that just wasn't on the table, Android as I said done better by rivals, and Apple sure as fuck wouldn't license them iOS, so that pretty much left him only TWO choice: Either put everything on Maemo and hope to God they could get the bugs fixed and the OS ready to compete while bleeding share, or take an already finished product and actually get paid for taking it...I'm sure it seemed like a no brainer at the time, but what Elop didn't realize is tying the Windows brand onto a non X86 device is just retarded and doomed. So he made a bad call but honestly I just don't see what other call he could have made that would have turned out ANY differently for Nokia. They were backed into a corner and he had to make the call, the only call he really had.
Because unlike the Pi which is seriously niche the differing arches all had serious mainstream appeal and the support of tons of devs? I mean from 82-87 or so you had serious software being written for multiple archs which could be found in ANY B&M, unlike today where there is X86 on the desk and lap and ARM for the cell and tablet you had serious head on competition between the chips and it really drove innovation there for awhile. Hell for awhile it looked like the 68k and the MOS chips were gonna end up taking the market away from big blue and the X86. Now everyone has their niche and its pretty much static, X86 for desktops and laptops, ARM for tablets and phones, and chips like SPARC and POWER sticking to their server niche.
I got a question, and I'm not trolling here, seriously I wanna know...why does anybody listen to this crackpot? I get he did something good 30 years ago, you wanna give him credit for that okay, fine. But the guy gets more extreme and creepy and just...well "off" for want of a better term, as time goes on, so why does anybody still listen to a self proclaimed "squatter" that tries to stick his 2c in on everything net related yet the guy doesn't even surf, he uses a fricking email daemon to fetch pages...ummm..okay?
I mean do I REALLY have to stick up a link to where the guy sat on a fricking stage in front of a lecture hall FULL of people, took off his socks, and ate toe funk like a crazy homeless guy? Hell the two software projects he's known for he doesn't even have any say in, he had to "bless" the forks when they basically just said "yeah..not really gonna deal with ya anymore there RMS" and he just gets more out there every damned year, so why isn't everyone treating him like the seriously weird guy that he is?
If there HAS to be a spokesman for FOSS make it Torvalds or Perens okay? While I don't agree with either on a lot of issues i'll be the first to give credit where its due and say they are both incredibly smart, have well thought out reasoned arguments for every position they take, and oh yeah, they don't eat their own toe cheese, at least as far as we know.