Uhhh....MSFT will banhammer this in a week? They DO have the right to blacklist keys ya know, and its obvious this "hack" by the LF will be used for ill, no ends or buts, so any and all Linux keys will end up banhammered and no court in the world will touch them when they trot out malware and a copy of a website where the LF brag about how their workaround "Will let you boot Linux or any other OS". So congrats LF, you just gave MSFT the excuse that will get most if not all Linux distros banned from new hardware, good job!
Well I'm a firm hater of all things politically correct and if there is a problem, like what we are seeing now with black youths forming wolf packs (which sadly I actually had to explain when someone said it was some racist slang when I took it from the German sub tactic of using large numbers as a force multiplier to insure a kill, which is exactly what the packs do, use strength of numbers as a force multiplier) rather than come up with newspeak words like "flash mobs" or pretend there are groups of Asians or whites doing this we should point out "Hey we have a problem here, what are we gonna do about it?" and tackling it head on.
And the reason i have to wonder if its not chemical is who typically eats and drinks the most chemical laden food? Those in the inner city because its cheap. The poor whites are bunched up more in the rural areas where access to cheap non chemical food like farmers market and small town grocers means they aren't getting constantly dosed with chemicals like the inner cities. Living in the south I can tell you a lot of poor folks still can as well, which means even in winter they have access to food without tons of chemicals and there is often at least one hunter in the family which means game meat which again, no chemicals.
And while I agree that constant media bombardment doesn't help things that would be a better explanation of the lone nut job, not the wolf packs. When you have as many as 200+ people in an area perfectly willing to go on a rampage, beating and robbing and just acting like no rules apply to them you have to wonder...what is different in THAT area than in others? its not poverty because the state with the lowest income WV also has the lowest violence levels.
So I think this is something that deserves serious study and all this political correctness is doing is giving fuel to the racist groups. I mean what does anyone think that Whites, Asians, and Latinos are gonna think when they see footage of 30+ black youths rampaging for no reason other than its Thursday? Nothing good I can assure you. that is why this phenomena needs to be studied NOW, so we can find out the root cause and do something about it, because if not the tensions are going to get higher until it becomes a powderkeg and blows up in everyone's faces.
Uhhh..Thoth, buddy? I said PC and NOT desktop. A PC has traditionally been ANY X86 unit that runs either Windows, Mac OSX, or Linux, and frankly from the units you named all you bought was three desktops in a laptop form factor, that's all.
Now personally I never understood WTF people were thinking with the whole "desktop replacement laptop" fad, as laptop parts will ALWAYS be slower, more expensive, and practically impossible to upgrade so you just have to toss instead, but if that makes you happy whatever. Personally I tell my customers to spend as little as possible on the laptop and use the difference on a desktop as I've found whether it costs $400 or $1000 a laptop will typically last 3-5 years and then disintegrate whereas once the desktop has been upgraded as far as it'll go and been found lacking it can always been moved to a secondary role, such as HTPC, kitchen appliance, file server, media tank, whatever.
But I do have to say I do find it funny that you quoted the part where I didn't say desktops to claim that I said desktops..okay, whatever floats your boat pal.
Uhhh Apple and MSFT together hold a pretty damned big chunk of the market and we've even seen some of the new Android devices come out locked down. Don't forget Google wants an appstore too because it lets THEM be the keeper at the gate and get a cut of every sale.
So again WHY do you think so many are pushing the "post PC" mantra? because the big corps are dreaming of the day when everything has a tollbooth with dollar signs in their eyes. Remember a few years back when the head of Sony said you should be charged by the play? while it hasn't gotten THAT bad yet you can see by the pushing of the appstore model they are dreaming of a day when NOTHING will be free, it'll all be charged up the ying yang for and the big three, Google, Apple, and MSFT, will get a cut of every sale. Great for them, sucks big hairy donkey nuts for the consumer.
Frankly Java doesn't bother me as if you aren't working with the enterprise or with a few apps like GoToMyPC its easy enough to avoid, its the Adobe products that bite home users square in the ass. When you look at the combined number of bugs out there for Flash and Reader Adobe has been pretty piss poor when it comes to security yet sadly there are no replacements in sight.
HTML V5 is frankly half ass and piss poor, it sucks CPU cycles like a drunk sucking down free drinks and without GPU acceleration is completely unusable on anything low power, not to mention it doesn't even cover half the use cases of Flash, and all of the PDF readers other than Adobe end up choking on PDFs made by Adobe Acrobat thanks to all the funky features the free versions never seem to get around to implementing.
So while I'll happily give credit to the Google team and hope their patch makes it up the Chromium branch to all the variants quickly there is plenty of other bad software out there besides Java and unlike Java a lot harder to just avoid.
If that is the case i hope you have a big fat wallet, because it'll all be appstores and content charges up the ying yang.
Why do you think MSFT is gonna shit a billion down the crapper on winRT? because of the appstore, they want to be the keeper at the gate just as Apple is. it always amazes me when people talk like its a good thing when we can already see the media companies gouging people for a buck a song and $2.99 an episode.
this is probably the only time I'm glad the mobile carriers are greedy douchebags as their constant raising of prices on their data plans will be the wakeup call for a lot of people I'm hoping. The LAST thing we need is the PC replaced by locked down appstores and content tollbooths, and that is EXACTLY what will happen if we do end up in a "post PC" world.
Uhhh...forget about the TLB bug friend? When it came out the Barcelona chips had the TLB bug AMD basically dumped them on the market at crazy cheap prices. I was getting triple core kits for $175 and quads for $199 which mean i could sell them for $399-$450 and make myself a nice profit while giving the customer an insane amount of power. Hell Starmicro sells the Barcelona triples starting at just $53 so it really wasn't hard to make triple and quad systems for cheap. doesn't really matter WHAT Vista specs were BTW, its not like people were selling 1Ghz Vista systems. just FYI but I just didn't sell Vista at all, I either gave them XP32 if it was 3Gb or XP64 if it was 4Gb, had too many bugs when i was testing Vista for my taste.
And if you sold crappy systems? Well that's a shame, don't know what that has to do with what I was selling in MY shop. I keep one or two off lease systems for the poor folks but I don't count those as they are used. When i talk about what I sold on the low end I'm talking about the new systems, not some junker Billy Bob traded in. I can't believe you actually sold something that didn't even meet Vista Basic specs, if anything slower than 2.2GHz came into my shop i stripped any good parts and punt kicked it into the trash. Now on the poor boxes i won't accept less than a 2.8GHz P4, have a 1.7GHz I'm gonna be chunking in the morning as a matter of fact.
And as for gamers keeping 6 to 7 years? What game out now or due out soon is even gonna stress a 1035T, much less a Core i7? All you have to do is swap out the card and you are golden. hell I'm playing on a 4 year old HD4850 and it just chews through new games with lots of bling and never drops below 30FPS on my 1600x900 monitor. in 6 to 8 months the HD6850s will drop below $70 (I have to buy 3 at a time so me and the boys stay on equal footing) and we'll be able to get another 3 years easy peasy. Games have been more GPU than CPU bound for several years now and if the rumors are true about the PS4 specs then the next gen frankly won't be as good as I have now, at least with 2 out of 3 systems.
So I really don't see what your issue is, except maybe you are confusing "gamers" with "Must win teh benches LOL" geeks that use their PC as an ePeen types. Hell it was only last year when my boys Pentium Ds could no longer run the latest games and even then it was only a handful like LA Noire and Just Cause II. We've just about reached as far as its gonna go as far as games friend, we are already looking at companies putting out less graphically intensive games because the huge costs to make a AAA game means they just can't afford to cut too many people out of the market. Hell Crysis 2 only requires an Athlon X2 at 2.2GHz for the love of Pete!
But you are right about Joe average, I finally had to just build my GF a new system and say "Here hon,merry Xmas, now get rid of the dino because i'm tired of fixing it!" because she was still hanging onto a 3GHz P4. Know what my most popular build is for those types? One of the E350 SFF systems. Its quiet, gives them dual cores and hardware accelerated flash, its cheap and solid as a rock. for those that just do basic tasks its a great little system. of course being a geek I built my GF an Athlon X3, I figure if she is gonna hang onto it for years it might as well be a system i enjoy working on LOL!
Then please be sure to post on every single "Linux is ready for the desktop!" article that they are full of shit, okay? you can't have your cake and eat it too, either its an OS for embedded and server which doesn't give a crap about driver stability or its a desktop, which is it?
Oh and sorry to rain on your parade, but i already tried it with Debian AND CentOS, not gonna even bother with RHEL because that is $400 a year which would make it completely pointless. Wanna know what happened? Sound and wireless fall down and go BOOM! and again this is giving Linux an advantage of less than half the MSFT OS support cycle.
So if you say its not a desktop product then PLEASE, by all means, every time there is a Windows thread on here and someone says "Just use Linux!" you tell him its broken and shouldn't be used as a desktop. funny you mentioned RH because of of their devs agrees with me and says Linux sucks on the desktop and its because of hanging onto outdated ideas like the kernel devs should be responsible for every single driver, which is anybody thought about that for even 5 seconds they'd see how stupid that is. you have maybe 50 guys qualified to write and debug low level system drivers in Linux, you got 10,000+ drivers, and Linus and pals constantly futzing with the internals. Anybody with 2 working brain cells can see the math doesn't work.
So I'm just sick of it, I'm sick of the lies, sick of the FUD from the FOSSies, sick of the out and out bullshit. Either fix the serious issues that Linux has with its core design or kindly accept there will NEVER be any share on the desktop and stop bringing it up. I used Linux exclusively for 5 years and if its one thing I can say without hesitation its that Win2K was a better desktop than the latest Linux. At least you could patch Win2K From RTM to update rollout 5 without any drivers breaking, can't do that with Linux.
Uhhh..the consumers? They'll still want desktops, they just won't replace as often. Look at my LOL customer Ms Pipkin, she had a couple of aging P4s, one for her and one for the kids, and she recently replaced those with an Athlon triple for the family and a quad for herself. her BF who lives in the next town over got irritated that when the grandkids were over she couldn't get on for her daily chat so he had me find her a nice little C60 netbook which she uses now on the couch or when she is working in her sewing room and wants to be able to watch the news and keep up with her chat program.
So at least in my area I'm just not seeing this "post PC world" people are speaking of, if anything people have more PCs than ever. All my customers are simply using the tablet and smartphone as a supplement, not a replacement, such as reading eBooks in bed or checking their emails during commercials. You are still talking about hundreds of millions of units a year being sold with X86, that is nothing to sneeze at, its just that we are gonna see some consolidation like we did at the end of the dotbomb because you have too many players on the field, that's all. I figure we'll end up with 3-5 OEMs and about that many ODMs selling parts Just like how eMachines, Compaq, and Abit were bought out or closed so too will the herd thin and then you'll see they'll be just fine, if not making insane profits like Apple.
That is pretty much the end of the thread right there, congrats AC.
The only thing I would add is all the morons that are hyping "post PC" simply don't understand the consumer or the market. As someone who has been building units since the 386 and still has no problems moving systems i think I can shed some light on their misconception.
You see people aren't "replacing" anything, they are ADDING to what they already have. What happened was the OEMs and MSFT got spoiled by a little blip in computing history called "the MHz war" where everyone pretty much had no choice but to replace all their systems every 3 years because the hardware was jumping in MHz so often and software following the hardware that a 2 year old desktop would be struggling to run the latest software. in one 4 year period I went from 600Mhz-900MHz-1.4Ghz-2.3Ghz, that's a pretty damned big leap in such a short period of time.
But when Intel and AMD hit the thermal wall they decided to switch to cores, and that was a game changer. You see building software to take advantage of a faster single thread? not that hard, trying to build software to take advantage of multiple threads? VERY hard and there are many tasks that simply can't be broken into multiple threads. Now lets look at what I was selling on the low end FIVE years ago...Phenom I X3 or X4 with 4Gb of DDR 2 RAM and a 300-500Gb HDD. Now is they ANY task your average user does that won't run well on those specs? heck i have a customer running the latest Solidworks on Phenom I X3s and is quite happy with the performance. Even the gamers don't need to upgrade near as often, my boys and I are doing great on a couple of Phenom II X6s and a quad and with HD4850s we blow through any game we want to play and those chips are...what? 4 years old now?
The PC isn't going anywhere, in fact I have yet to meet anyone that doesn't have at least 2 if not more. Hell my LOL customer Ms Pipkin has an Athlon triple for the kids, a Phenom II quad for her main system and a little AMD netbook for when all her family is over or she just wants to sit on her couch and chat. The problem is the OEMs got spoiled on the MHz war and didn't see that these insanely cheap triples and quads were just crazy overpowered compared to the kind of work average users like Ms Pipkin do, that's all. Hell I used to replace my system every year and a half like clockwork but now I have an X6 with 8Gb of RAM, the above HD4850, and 3Tb of hard drive space...what more could I possibly need? So X86 isn't going anywhere, my iPad and iPhone customers still have desktops and laptops, they simply use their iDevices on the couch or bed. All that is happening is that PCs won't be replaced until they die, even the gamers will be looking at only swapping every 6 or 7 years, simply because we have got insane amounts of power. this is why I supplement my business with HTPCs and home theater setups, still plenty of uses for an X86 system people haven't considered yet, you just have to show them the advantages.
Which is why we should either manrate the Delta or Atlas rockets or just say fuck it and buy Soyuz off the Russians. I'm sure they'd be happy to take our money, after all many of our rocket motors come from them already, and then we'd have a working solution ready to go.
But sadly that would mean the defense industry couldn't blow through cash like Charlie Sheen blows through coke, we just can't have that. just look at the F22 and F35, trillion dollar turkeys that if we're lucky we'll be able to afford a handful of them and tell our pilots to get in line and they may get a turn flying one in a year or so...sigh, this country is just fucked, isn't it?
So its a dogma issue then? because frankly that is ALL your "link" provides, a bunch of PR BS and dogma. Again if YOU are right then why does EVERYONE ELSE do it the other way? Not just proprietary but free OSes like BSD and OpenSolaris as well?
But if you are right then step right up and take the Pepsi challenge. I will happily take the WORST MSFT OS of this decade, Windows Vista, and you can pick ANY regular release that came out in the same quarter, your choice. We'll install them on the same machine in a dual boot, make sure all the drivers are working, then update them to current. Wanna guess what happens?
I don't have to guess because i have done this several times, with everything from rolling releases like Arch to popular Linux distros like Ubuntu and its ALWAYS the same. Even after multiple service packs and hundreds of patches EVERY SINGLE DRIVER will be working in Vista while Linux? it WILL be a broken mess every. single. time.
you know what the definition of insanity is? its doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. if your way had ANY merits then surely to God ONE DISTRO would survive, just one, but I'll happily repeat the test with any version you like, the results are the same. BTW tried it with BSD and guess what? the drivers kept right on working. if I had a Mac I could probably do the same with OSX, but Linux fall down and go Boom! every single time, you can bet your life on it.
Dude after the whole "sea kitten" episode (for those that don't know PETA tried to get fish labeled "sea kittens" so that people wouldn't eat them) frankly we shouldn't be surprised that they are out of the loop, the batshit crazy, or snooker loopy for our friends on the other side of the pond, often have trouble telling what year it is.
So making things more obtuse, fiddly, and generally a PITA is a GOOD thing?
Ya know, I could make a crack about how "Well that explains Linux in a nutshell" but I won't because the simple fact that you treat programming as a "club" where things should be as hard as possible to "weed out the undesirables" I think explains why Linux has gone nowhere on the desktop better than I ever could, and its toxic attitudes just like yours.
Well while I agree the best solution would be to simply buy a cheap kit and have something decent, we don't know his financial situation and maybe he is hurting, lot of folks are right now ya know.
That said you ought to see what you can get from Tiger if you get the email alerts, its just nuts. I got tired of putting my GF's old P4 back together and since she had 2 grandkids and a son in law with serious health issues (they just had to cut out half his right lung because of a broken major blood vessel, poor bastard) she couldn't afford to get her a new one so I kept an eye out for the sales, ended up getting her an Athlon triple with a 500gb HDD, 4Gb of RAM, DVD burner, and an HD5450 for just $189 after MIR, just crazy. My oldest boy's dual core was getting on in years but before i could spec out the parts he talked his grandpa into getting him one of the kits. For $350 he could a Phenom X6, 8Gb of RAM, DVD burner, 500Gb HDD, and a nice case to put it in, just swapped out his HD4850 and now he chews through LOTRO like it was nothing no matter how big the raiding party. And since I had to buy a new board to take the X6 I got last Xmas I decided the youngest would get my quad and board, the cost of getting the hard drive, case, and burner? less than $100.
So I agree if the guy has even a little money he can get a MUCH nicer system with Win 7, but the fact that he is still running a Win2K system makes me believe he simply hasn't got the cash. I mean you can buy one of those AMD E350 kits for $129, slam in a 300Gb HDD and 4Gb RAM stick and with a copy of Win 8 pro you'd be looking at less than $190 for a dual core with Radeon graphics, but if he is broke that $190 may as well be $190k.
So by working with the very real possibility that he is flat busted given the choice I'd say Win 7 Tiny would probably be the best bet. with XP it'll be dead in a year and a half, Win 7 is supported for another 7 years, and it'll run just fine on seriously old hardware.
It has a list on the desktop of everything they removed along with some.reg files that will let you turn back on anything you would prefer, and of course you can use add/remove Windows features if you'd like a little of the bling back.
I'll tell ya what, see my email in my UID? If you don't want to wipe the machine and try it yourself just give me a holler at that email address, I have an old 2.2GHz P4 that I'm gonna have to wipe anyway and it'll only take like 20 minutes to slap Tiny 7 on it and throw a few files on the thing and try out the folder sharing, then i can just email you the results and you'll know whether its right for you.
Like I said I gotta wipe that machine anyway so it really wouldn't be a biggie to slap it on the KVM here at the shop and run the test for you, just let me know if you want it run or not.
Uhhh...I'm confused as to your complaint about that sentence. I said all other mainstream OSes, then I listed them...and? Would you have preferred I said "such as" instead? I can't think of any other OSes that have any userbase of any noticeable size on the desktop, so what more did you wish me to add?
ReactOS isn't anywhere near ready for daily use, Haiku is about keeping a dead OS alive...what others did you wish me to name? ChromeOS is a thin client, Android is for phones and tablets, what else is there you wanted me to name?
That sounds like a question more for Perens than for Torvalds.
My question for Torvalds would be thus: Now that all mainstream OSes other than yours, BSD, Solaris, OSX, Windows, have a stable ABI to help make sure that drivers continue to work why do you think your way is better than all those other OSes? How can the kernel devs do QA and QC for tens of thousands of drivers when there are so few of you, so many drivers, and such a hectic release schedule? Why is an ABI such a bad thing when it seems to work for everybody else? If it is because you hope to use lack of an ABI to force drivers to be open what do you say to the fact that the most stable graphics driver in Linux is Nvidia, who is closed?
If you are gonna ask the man questions don't play pattycake and throw softballs, give him the hard ones. While I'm sure to be modded down for asking the hard questions and I doubt anybody would have had the guts to ask him I for one would have liked to have seen if he had a truly legitimate answer or if it would have boiled down to dogma or "If things are stable then i can't tweak all I want" instead of having a legitimate programming reason why he thinks his design is better than everyone else on the planet.
Uhhh...I never said malware HAD to have admin rights, i simply said its a braindead design that makes it frankly script kiddie easy to hack a system where everything is running with the second highest privilege, the first being system of course.
That's why I always laugh at those that say "Linux can't get viruses because you never run as root!" because modern malware simply doesn't NEED root to infect a system, look at the KDE look bug, or the infected Quake 3 that was in the repos for a year and a half, as long as they have basic permissions they can still wipe a user's files, send spam, there is a hell of a lot of damage they can do without root. After all nobody is running their Android phones as root but the marketplace has had more bugs than a roach motel in a trailer park.
Dude if it'll run Win2K? It'll run Tiny 7. In fact I'd take the Pepsi challenge against a fully patched XP VS Tiny 7 and I'll win because a fully patched Tiny 7 only uses 240Mb on the desktop whereas a fully patched XP SP3 will use nearly twice that.
Trust me Billy, download a copy and fire it up in a VM if you don't take my word for it, its nuts how thin the guy made Tiny 7. The same guy took XP and managed to get it below 60Mb with an install size smaller than a fully patched Win98SE! I don't care if his gear is last century, if its powerful enough to run ANY web browser (which he has already stated he surfs with opera on it) then it'll run Tiny 7 just as good if not better than what he has now.
The lowest machine i ever tried it on was a Compaq deskpro I was getting ready to chunk because its propeitary triangle PSU cooked. It was a 733Mhz P3 with 384Mb of RAM and ya know what? It ran just fine, if a little slow on boot thanks to that ancient 40gb HDD with a lousy 2Mb buffer. if it'll run on that and let me surf then whatever POS he has will run it just fine.
Seriously man you gotta try it, its just nuts how low they managed to go while still having it run most software, like i said they really ought to hire the guy for their embedded team.
Uhhh...because not only is what he is running a nightmare from a security standpoint but I bet it blows through power like Charlie Sheen blows through coke?
Most of the Win2K machines I've seen that are still usable on the net are Pentium 4s and lets face facts, the P4 was a giant SUV of a power hog. If he can actually slap in a hard drive and RAM sticks (which this is/. so surely if he knows about hardware firewalls he can do a drive install) he can pick up an E350 kit for $130 which will give him a dual core system that will smoke his P4, has hardware accelerated graphics, hell you can even play some Portal or L4D on it if you want. It'll more importantly only take 18w under load and idle at less than 6w which is nothing compared to what your average Prescott P4 sucked down.
Add the $40 Win 8 download and you are looking at less than $250 for a dual core system that will last for years, is silent, and will save him money on both electricity and cooling. So while i'm all for saving older gear that is still useful, hell i use a Sempron 1.8GHz Compaq in the shop as a nettop because its quiet and low power, but there are certain things just not worth saving and that covers pretty much anything made with the netburst arch.
I'd just add his hardware firewall may not help him, i recently had a customer that had a hacker take over the whole system and it turned out he had flashed the firewall after he gained control, so even a full wipe and reinstall did nothing because he could just control the firewall and redirect the system to pages where he had loaded a ton of malware and just slam the system until he found a way into the system again, REALLY nasty.
Actually Billy if he's gonna go to TPB anyway a better choice would be Windows 7 Tiny, it'll take Windows 7 updates just fine, has no phone home and is stripped down enough to fit on a single CD while still running a good 90%+ of the software out there. It was originally designed by gamers to squeeze as much performance as possible out of the hardware by lowering overhead but I've found it works better than XP or even WinFLP when it comes to old hardware. you can slap it on a 1.7GHz P4 with 512Mb of RAM and it'll just fly, anything newer and its like a nitro funny car.
So while I'll personally stick with my 7 HP X64 because I like the extra bells and whistles like WMC and WMP, for those with seriously old hardware 7 Tiny makes a hell of a lot more sense than putting XP on anything anymore.
Well you didn't hear it from me, wink wink nudge nudge, but it sounds like what you want is "Windows 7 Tiny" which I'm sure you can find a copy on the net easy enough. it was originally designed for gamers by gamers that want the updated DirectX without anything else so its stripped to the bone, no IE, no phone home anything, hell it doesn't even come with Media Center or WMP, just the OS stripped down so far it'll fit on a single CD.
I've played with it on systems as weak as a 1Ghz Celeron and I have to say...its quite nice actually, runs even better than Win2K thanks to the better memory management of 7 while having just an insanely low memory footprint, we are talking less than 260Mb on the desktop. It also runs a good 90%+ of the software out there, if it ran on Win2K it'll probably run on 7 Tiny.
So give it a spin. I've tried Windows embedded and WinFLP and frankly the Tiny builds just stomp the living hell out of them on performance. They really ought to hire the Tiny guy to build their embedded OSes, he really schools the WinFLP builds by a country mile.
Oh its MUCH worse than that, because unlike Win9X with Win2K you have an OS with enough guts similar to the next version, which XP is still one of the largest targets for malware there is thanks to its brain dead "hey let's all run as admin!" design that the guy might as well paint a bullseye on the side of the box. Not to mention he has outdated Flash, Reader, and most AV products don't support Win2K anymore?
What you have is a box that will end up with more bugs than a Bangkok whore on coupon day, NOT pretty.
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Uhhh....MSFT will banhammer this in a week? They DO have the right to blacklist keys ya know, and its obvious this "hack" by the LF will be used for ill, no ends or buts, so any and all Linux keys will end up banhammered and no court in the world will touch them when they trot out malware and a copy of a website where the LF brag about how their workaround "Will let you boot Linux or any other OS". So congrats LF, you just gave MSFT the excuse that will get most if not all Linux distros banned from new hardware, good job!
Well I'm a firm hater of all things politically correct and if there is a problem, like what we are seeing now with black youths forming wolf packs (which sadly I actually had to explain when someone said it was some racist slang when I took it from the German sub tactic of using large numbers as a force multiplier to insure a kill, which is exactly what the packs do, use strength of numbers as a force multiplier) rather than come up with newspeak words like "flash mobs" or pretend there are groups of Asians or whites doing this we should point out "Hey we have a problem here, what are we gonna do about it?" and tackling it head on.
And the reason i have to wonder if its not chemical is who typically eats and drinks the most chemical laden food? Those in the inner city because its cheap. The poor whites are bunched up more in the rural areas where access to cheap non chemical food like farmers market and small town grocers means they aren't getting constantly dosed with chemicals like the inner cities. Living in the south I can tell you a lot of poor folks still can as well, which means even in winter they have access to food without tons of chemicals and there is often at least one hunter in the family which means game meat which again, no chemicals.
And while I agree that constant media bombardment doesn't help things that would be a better explanation of the lone nut job, not the wolf packs. When you have as many as 200+ people in an area perfectly willing to go on a rampage, beating and robbing and just acting like no rules apply to them you have to wonder...what is different in THAT area than in others? its not poverty because the state with the lowest income WV also has the lowest violence levels.
So I think this is something that deserves serious study and all this political correctness is doing is giving fuel to the racist groups. I mean what does anyone think that Whites, Asians, and Latinos are gonna think when they see footage of 30+ black youths rampaging for no reason other than its Thursday? Nothing good I can assure you. that is why this phenomena needs to be studied NOW, so we can find out the root cause and do something about it, because if not the tensions are going to get higher until it becomes a powderkeg and blows up in everyone's faces.
Uhhh..Thoth, buddy? I said PC and NOT desktop. A PC has traditionally been ANY X86 unit that runs either Windows, Mac OSX, or Linux, and frankly from the units you named all you bought was three desktops in a laptop form factor, that's all.
Now personally I never understood WTF people were thinking with the whole "desktop replacement laptop" fad, as laptop parts will ALWAYS be slower, more expensive, and practically impossible to upgrade so you just have to toss instead, but if that makes you happy whatever. Personally I tell my customers to spend as little as possible on the laptop and use the difference on a desktop as I've found whether it costs $400 or $1000 a laptop will typically last 3-5 years and then disintegrate whereas once the desktop has been upgraded as far as it'll go and been found lacking it can always been moved to a secondary role, such as HTPC, kitchen appliance, file server, media tank, whatever.
But I do have to say I do find it funny that you quoted the part where I didn't say desktops to claim that I said desktops..okay, whatever floats your boat pal.
Uhhh Apple and MSFT together hold a pretty damned big chunk of the market and we've even seen some of the new Android devices come out locked down. Don't forget Google wants an appstore too because it lets THEM be the keeper at the gate and get a cut of every sale.
So again WHY do you think so many are pushing the "post PC" mantra? because the big corps are dreaming of the day when everything has a tollbooth with dollar signs in their eyes. Remember a few years back when the head of Sony said you should be charged by the play? while it hasn't gotten THAT bad yet you can see by the pushing of the appstore model they are dreaming of a day when NOTHING will be free, it'll all be charged up the ying yang for and the big three, Google, Apple, and MSFT, will get a cut of every sale. Great for them, sucks big hairy donkey nuts for the consumer.
Frankly Java doesn't bother me as if you aren't working with the enterprise or with a few apps like GoToMyPC its easy enough to avoid, its the Adobe products that bite home users square in the ass. When you look at the combined number of bugs out there for Flash and Reader Adobe has been pretty piss poor when it comes to security yet sadly there are no replacements in sight.
HTML V5 is frankly half ass and piss poor, it sucks CPU cycles like a drunk sucking down free drinks and without GPU acceleration is completely unusable on anything low power, not to mention it doesn't even cover half the use cases of Flash, and all of the PDF readers other than Adobe end up choking on PDFs made by Adobe Acrobat thanks to all the funky features the free versions never seem to get around to implementing.
So while I'll happily give credit to the Google team and hope their patch makes it up the Chromium branch to all the variants quickly there is plenty of other bad software out there besides Java and unlike Java a lot harder to just avoid.
If that is the case i hope you have a big fat wallet, because it'll all be appstores and content charges up the ying yang.
Why do you think MSFT is gonna shit a billion down the crapper on winRT? because of the appstore, they want to be the keeper at the gate just as Apple is. it always amazes me when people talk like its a good thing when we can already see the media companies gouging people for a buck a song and $2.99 an episode.
this is probably the only time I'm glad the mobile carriers are greedy douchebags as their constant raising of prices on their data plans will be the wakeup call for a lot of people I'm hoping. The LAST thing we need is the PC replaced by locked down appstores and content tollbooths, and that is EXACTLY what will happen if we do end up in a "post PC" world.
Uhhh...forget about the TLB bug friend? When it came out the Barcelona chips had the TLB bug AMD basically dumped them on the market at crazy cheap prices. I was getting triple core kits for $175 and quads for $199 which mean i could sell them for $399-$450 and make myself a nice profit while giving the customer an insane amount of power. Hell Starmicro sells the Barcelona triples starting at just $53 so it really wasn't hard to make triple and quad systems for cheap. doesn't really matter WHAT Vista specs were BTW, its not like people were selling 1Ghz Vista systems. just FYI but I just didn't sell Vista at all, I either gave them XP32 if it was 3Gb or XP64 if it was 4Gb, had too many bugs when i was testing Vista for my taste.
And if you sold crappy systems? Well that's a shame, don't know what that has to do with what I was selling in MY shop. I keep one or two off lease systems for the poor folks but I don't count those as they are used. When i talk about what I sold on the low end I'm talking about the new systems, not some junker Billy Bob traded in. I can't believe you actually sold something that didn't even meet Vista Basic specs, if anything slower than 2.2GHz came into my shop i stripped any good parts and punt kicked it into the trash. Now on the poor boxes i won't accept less than a 2.8GHz P4, have a 1.7GHz I'm gonna be chunking in the morning as a matter of fact.
And as for gamers keeping 6 to 7 years? What game out now or due out soon is even gonna stress a 1035T, much less a Core i7? All you have to do is swap out the card and you are golden. hell I'm playing on a 4 year old HD4850 and it just chews through new games with lots of bling and never drops below 30FPS on my 1600x900 monitor. in 6 to 8 months the HD6850s will drop below $70 (I have to buy 3 at a time so me and the boys stay on equal footing) and we'll be able to get another 3 years easy peasy. Games have been more GPU than CPU bound for several years now and if the rumors are true about the PS4 specs then the next gen frankly won't be as good as I have now, at least with 2 out of 3 systems.
So I really don't see what your issue is, except maybe you are confusing "gamers" with "Must win teh benches LOL" geeks that use their PC as an ePeen types. Hell it was only last year when my boys Pentium Ds could no longer run the latest games and even then it was only a handful like LA Noire and Just Cause II. We've just about reached as far as its gonna go as far as games friend, we are already looking at companies putting out less graphically intensive games because the huge costs to make a AAA game means they just can't afford to cut too many people out of the market. Hell Crysis 2 only requires an Athlon X2 at 2.2GHz for the love of Pete!
But you are right about Joe average, I finally had to just build my GF a new system and say "Here hon,merry Xmas, now get rid of the dino because i'm tired of fixing it!" because she was still hanging onto a 3GHz P4. Know what my most popular build is for those types? One of the E350 SFF systems. Its quiet, gives them dual cores and hardware accelerated flash, its cheap and solid as a rock. for those that just do basic tasks its a great little system. of course being a geek I built my GF an Athlon X3, I figure if she is gonna hang onto it for years it might as well be a system i enjoy working on LOL!
Then please be sure to post on every single "Linux is ready for the desktop!" article that they are full of shit, okay? you can't have your cake and eat it too, either its an OS for embedded and server which doesn't give a crap about driver stability or its a desktop, which is it?
Oh and sorry to rain on your parade, but i already tried it with Debian AND CentOS, not gonna even bother with RHEL because that is $400 a year which would make it completely pointless. Wanna know what happened? Sound and wireless fall down and go BOOM! and again this is giving Linux an advantage of less than half the MSFT OS support cycle.
So if you say its not a desktop product then PLEASE, by all means, every time there is a Windows thread on here and someone says "Just use Linux!" you tell him its broken and shouldn't be used as a desktop. funny you mentioned RH because of of their devs agrees with me and says Linux sucks on the desktop and its because of hanging onto outdated ideas like the kernel devs should be responsible for every single driver, which is anybody thought about that for even 5 seconds they'd see how stupid that is. you have maybe 50 guys qualified to write and debug low level system drivers in Linux, you got 10,000+ drivers, and Linus and pals constantly futzing with the internals. Anybody with 2 working brain cells can see the math doesn't work.
So I'm just sick of it, I'm sick of the lies, sick of the FUD from the FOSSies, sick of the out and out bullshit. Either fix the serious issues that Linux has with its core design or kindly accept there will NEVER be any share on the desktop and stop bringing it up. I used Linux exclusively for 5 years and if its one thing I can say without hesitation its that Win2K was a better desktop than the latest Linux. At least you could patch Win2K From RTM to update rollout 5 without any drivers breaking, can't do that with Linux.
Uhhh..the consumers? They'll still want desktops, they just won't replace as often. Look at my LOL customer Ms Pipkin, she had a couple of aging P4s, one for her and one for the kids, and she recently replaced those with an Athlon triple for the family and a quad for herself. her BF who lives in the next town over got irritated that when the grandkids were over she couldn't get on for her daily chat so he had me find her a nice little C60 netbook which she uses now on the couch or when she is working in her sewing room and wants to be able to watch the news and keep up with her chat program.
So at least in my area I'm just not seeing this "post PC world" people are speaking of, if anything people have more PCs than ever. All my customers are simply using the tablet and smartphone as a supplement, not a replacement, such as reading eBooks in bed or checking their emails during commercials. You are still talking about hundreds of millions of units a year being sold with X86, that is nothing to sneeze at, its just that we are gonna see some consolidation like we did at the end of the dotbomb because you have too many players on the field, that's all. I figure we'll end up with 3-5 OEMs and about that many ODMs selling parts Just like how eMachines, Compaq, and Abit were bought out or closed so too will the herd thin and then you'll see they'll be just fine, if not making insane profits like Apple.
That is pretty much the end of the thread right there, congrats AC.
The only thing I would add is all the morons that are hyping "post PC" simply don't understand the consumer or the market. As someone who has been building units since the 386 and still has no problems moving systems i think I can shed some light on their misconception.
You see people aren't "replacing" anything, they are ADDING to what they already have. What happened was the OEMs and MSFT got spoiled by a little blip in computing history called "the MHz war" where everyone pretty much had no choice but to replace all their systems every 3 years because the hardware was jumping in MHz so often and software following the hardware that a 2 year old desktop would be struggling to run the latest software. in one 4 year period I went from 600Mhz-900MHz-1.4Ghz-2.3Ghz, that's a pretty damned big leap in such a short period of time.
But when Intel and AMD hit the thermal wall they decided to switch to cores, and that was a game changer. You see building software to take advantage of a faster single thread? not that hard, trying to build software to take advantage of multiple threads? VERY hard and there are many tasks that simply can't be broken into multiple threads. Now lets look at what I was selling on the low end FIVE years ago...Phenom I X3 or X4 with 4Gb of DDR 2 RAM and a 300-500Gb HDD. Now is they ANY task your average user does that won't run well on those specs? heck i have a customer running the latest Solidworks on Phenom I X3s and is quite happy with the performance. Even the gamers don't need to upgrade near as often, my boys and I are doing great on a couple of Phenom II X6s and a quad and with HD4850s we blow through any game we want to play and those chips are...what? 4 years old now?
The PC isn't going anywhere, in fact I have yet to meet anyone that doesn't have at least 2 if not more. Hell my LOL customer Ms Pipkin has an Athlon triple for the kids, a Phenom II quad for her main system and a little AMD netbook for when all her family is over or she just wants to sit on her couch and chat. The problem is the OEMs got spoiled on the MHz war and didn't see that these insanely cheap triples and quads were just crazy overpowered compared to the kind of work average users like Ms Pipkin do, that's all. Hell I used to replace my system every year and a half like clockwork but now I have an X6 with 8Gb of RAM, the above HD4850, and 3Tb of hard drive space...what more could I possibly need? So X86 isn't going anywhere, my iPad and iPhone customers still have desktops and laptops, they simply use their iDevices on the couch or bed. All that is happening is that PCs won't be replaced until they die, even the gamers will be looking at only swapping every 6 or 7 years, simply because we have got insane amounts of power. this is why I supplement my business with HTPCs and home theater setups, still plenty of uses for an X86 system people haven't considered yet, you just have to show them the advantages.
Which is why we should either manrate the Delta or Atlas rockets or just say fuck it and buy Soyuz off the Russians. I'm sure they'd be happy to take our money, after all many of our rocket motors come from them already, and then we'd have a working solution ready to go.
But sadly that would mean the defense industry couldn't blow through cash like Charlie Sheen blows through coke, we just can't have that. just look at the F22 and F35, trillion dollar turkeys that if we're lucky we'll be able to afford a handful of them and tell our pilots to get in line and they may get a turn flying one in a year or so...sigh, this country is just fucked, isn't it?
So its a dogma issue then? because frankly that is ALL your "link" provides, a bunch of PR BS and dogma. Again if YOU are right then why does EVERYONE ELSE do it the other way? Not just proprietary but free OSes like BSD and OpenSolaris as well?
But if you are right then step right up and take the Pepsi challenge. I will happily take the WORST MSFT OS of this decade, Windows Vista, and you can pick ANY regular release that came out in the same quarter, your choice. We'll install them on the same machine in a dual boot, make sure all the drivers are working, then update them to current. Wanna guess what happens?
I don't have to guess because i have done this several times, with everything from rolling releases like Arch to popular Linux distros like Ubuntu and its ALWAYS the same. Even after multiple service packs and hundreds of patches EVERY SINGLE DRIVER will be working in Vista while Linux? it WILL be a broken mess every. single. time.
you know what the definition of insanity is? its doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. if your way had ANY merits then surely to God ONE DISTRO would survive, just one, but I'll happily repeat the test with any version you like, the results are the same. BTW tried it with BSD and guess what? the drivers kept right on working. if I had a Mac I could probably do the same with OSX, but Linux fall down and go Boom! every single time, you can bet your life on it.
Dude after the whole "sea kitten" episode (for those that don't know PETA tried to get fish labeled "sea kittens" so that people wouldn't eat them) frankly we shouldn't be surprised that they are out of the loop, the batshit crazy, or snooker loopy for our friends on the other side of the pond, often have trouble telling what year it is.
So making things more obtuse, fiddly, and generally a PITA is a GOOD thing?
Ya know, I could make a crack about how "Well that explains Linux in a nutshell" but I won't because the simple fact that you treat programming as a "club" where things should be as hard as possible to "weed out the undesirables" I think explains why Linux has gone nowhere on the desktop better than I ever could, and its toxic attitudes just like yours.
Well while I agree the best solution would be to simply buy a cheap kit and have something decent, we don't know his financial situation and maybe he is hurting, lot of folks are right now ya know.
That said you ought to see what you can get from Tiger if you get the email alerts, its just nuts. I got tired of putting my GF's old P4 back together and since she had 2 grandkids and a son in law with serious health issues (they just had to cut out half his right lung because of a broken major blood vessel, poor bastard) she couldn't afford to get her a new one so I kept an eye out for the sales, ended up getting her an Athlon triple with a 500gb HDD, 4Gb of RAM, DVD burner, and an HD5450 for just $189 after MIR, just crazy. My oldest boy's dual core was getting on in years but before i could spec out the parts he talked his grandpa into getting him one of the kits. For $350 he could a Phenom X6, 8Gb of RAM, DVD burner, 500Gb HDD, and a nice case to put it in, just swapped out his HD4850 and now he chews through LOTRO like it was nothing no matter how big the raiding party. And since I had to buy a new board to take the X6 I got last Xmas I decided the youngest would get my quad and board, the cost of getting the hard drive, case, and burner? less than $100.
So I agree if the guy has even a little money he can get a MUCH nicer system with Win 7, but the fact that he is still running a Win2K system makes me believe he simply hasn't got the cash. I mean you can buy one of those AMD E350 kits for $129, slam in a 300Gb HDD and 4Gb RAM stick and with a copy of Win 8 pro you'd be looking at less than $190 for a dual core with Radeon graphics, but if he is broke that $190 may as well be $190k.
So by working with the very real possibility that he is flat busted given the choice I'd say Win 7 Tiny would probably be the best bet. with XP it'll be dead in a year and a half, Win 7 is supported for another 7 years, and it'll run just fine on seriously old hardware.
It has a list on the desktop of everything they removed along with some .reg files that will let you turn back on anything you would prefer, and of course you can use add/remove Windows features if you'd like a little of the bling back.
I'll tell ya what, see my email in my UID? If you don't want to wipe the machine and try it yourself just give me a holler at that email address, I have an old 2.2GHz P4 that I'm gonna have to wipe anyway and it'll only take like 20 minutes to slap Tiny 7 on it and throw a few files on the thing and try out the folder sharing, then i can just email you the results and you'll know whether its right for you.
Like I said I gotta wipe that machine anyway so it really wouldn't be a biggie to slap it on the KVM here at the shop and run the test for you, just let me know if you want it run or not.
Uhhh...I'm confused as to your complaint about that sentence. I said all other mainstream OSes, then I listed them...and? Would you have preferred I said "such as" instead? I can't think of any other OSes that have any userbase of any noticeable size on the desktop, so what more did you wish me to add?
ReactOS isn't anywhere near ready for daily use, Haiku is about keeping a dead OS alive...what others did you wish me to name? ChromeOS is a thin client, Android is for phones and tablets, what else is there you wanted me to name?
That sounds like a question more for Perens than for Torvalds.
My question for Torvalds would be thus: Now that all mainstream OSes other than yours, BSD, Solaris, OSX, Windows, have a stable ABI to help make sure that drivers continue to work why do you think your way is better than all those other OSes? How can the kernel devs do QA and QC for tens of thousands of drivers when there are so few of you, so many drivers, and such a hectic release schedule? Why is an ABI such a bad thing when it seems to work for everybody else? If it is because you hope to use lack of an ABI to force drivers to be open what do you say to the fact that the most stable graphics driver in Linux is Nvidia, who is closed?
If you are gonna ask the man questions don't play pattycake and throw softballs, give him the hard ones. While I'm sure to be modded down for asking the hard questions and I doubt anybody would have had the guts to ask him I for one would have liked to have seen if he had a truly legitimate answer or if it would have boiled down to dogma or "If things are stable then i can't tweak all I want" instead of having a legitimate programming reason why he thinks his design is better than everyone else on the planet.
Uhhh...I never said malware HAD to have admin rights, i simply said its a braindead design that makes it frankly script kiddie easy to hack a system where everything is running with the second highest privilege, the first being system of course.
That's why I always laugh at those that say "Linux can't get viruses because you never run as root!" because modern malware simply doesn't NEED root to infect a system, look at the KDE look bug, or the infected Quake 3 that was in the repos for a year and a half, as long as they have basic permissions they can still wipe a user's files, send spam, there is a hell of a lot of damage they can do without root. After all nobody is running their Android phones as root but the marketplace has had more bugs than a roach motel in a trailer park.
Dude if it'll run Win2K? It'll run Tiny 7. In fact I'd take the Pepsi challenge against a fully patched XP VS Tiny 7 and I'll win because a fully patched Tiny 7 only uses 240Mb on the desktop whereas a fully patched XP SP3 will use nearly twice that.
Trust me Billy, download a copy and fire it up in a VM if you don't take my word for it, its nuts how thin the guy made Tiny 7. The same guy took XP and managed to get it below 60Mb with an install size smaller than a fully patched Win98SE! I don't care if his gear is last century, if its powerful enough to run ANY web browser (which he has already stated he surfs with opera on it) then it'll run Tiny 7 just as good if not better than what he has now.
The lowest machine i ever tried it on was a Compaq deskpro I was getting ready to chunk because its propeitary triangle PSU cooked. It was a 733Mhz P3 with 384Mb of RAM and ya know what? It ran just fine, if a little slow on boot thanks to that ancient 40gb HDD with a lousy 2Mb buffer. if it'll run on that and let me surf then whatever POS he has will run it just fine.
Seriously man you gotta try it, its just nuts how low they managed to go while still having it run most software, like i said they really ought to hire the guy for their embedded team.
Uhhh...because not only is what he is running a nightmare from a security standpoint but I bet it blows through power like Charlie Sheen blows through coke?
Most of the Win2K machines I've seen that are still usable on the net are Pentium 4s and lets face facts, the P4 was a giant SUV of a power hog. If he can actually slap in a hard drive and RAM sticks (which this is /. so surely if he knows about hardware firewalls he can do a drive install) he can pick up an E350 kit for $130 which will give him a dual core system that will smoke his P4, has hardware accelerated graphics, hell you can even play some Portal or L4D on it if you want. It'll more importantly only take 18w under load and idle at less than 6w which is nothing compared to what your average Prescott P4 sucked down.
Add the $40 Win 8 download and you are looking at less than $250 for a dual core system that will last for years, is silent, and will save him money on both electricity and cooling. So while i'm all for saving older gear that is still useful, hell i use a Sempron 1.8GHz Compaq in the shop as a nettop because its quiet and low power, but there are certain things just not worth saving and that covers pretty much anything made with the netburst arch.
I'd just add his hardware firewall may not help him, i recently had a customer that had a hacker take over the whole system and it turned out he had flashed the firewall after he gained control, so even a full wipe and reinstall did nothing because he could just control the firewall and redirect the system to pages where he had loaded a ton of malware and just slam the system until he found a way into the system again, REALLY nasty.
Actually Billy if he's gonna go to TPB anyway a better choice would be Windows 7 Tiny, it'll take Windows 7 updates just fine, has no phone home and is stripped down enough to fit on a single CD while still running a good 90%+ of the software out there. It was originally designed by gamers to squeeze as much performance as possible out of the hardware by lowering overhead but I've found it works better than XP or even WinFLP when it comes to old hardware. you can slap it on a 1.7GHz P4 with 512Mb of RAM and it'll just fly, anything newer and its like a nitro funny car.
So while I'll personally stick with my 7 HP X64 because I like the extra bells and whistles like WMC and WMP, for those with seriously old hardware 7 Tiny makes a hell of a lot more sense than putting XP on anything anymore.
Well you didn't hear it from me, wink wink nudge nudge, but it sounds like what you want is "Windows 7 Tiny" which I'm sure you can find a copy on the net easy enough. it was originally designed for gamers by gamers that want the updated DirectX without anything else so its stripped to the bone, no IE, no phone home anything, hell it doesn't even come with Media Center or WMP, just the OS stripped down so far it'll fit on a single CD.
I've played with it on systems as weak as a 1Ghz Celeron and I have to say...its quite nice actually, runs even better than Win2K thanks to the better memory management of 7 while having just an insanely low memory footprint, we are talking less than 260Mb on the desktop. It also runs a good 90%+ of the software out there, if it ran on Win2K it'll probably run on 7 Tiny.
So give it a spin. I've tried Windows embedded and WinFLP and frankly the Tiny builds just stomp the living hell out of them on performance. They really ought to hire the Tiny guy to build their embedded OSes, he really schools the WinFLP builds by a country mile.
Oh its MUCH worse than that, because unlike Win9X with Win2K you have an OS with enough guts similar to the next version, which XP is still one of the largest targets for malware there is thanks to its brain dead "hey let's all run as admin!" design that the guy might as well paint a bullseye on the side of the box. Not to mention he has outdated Flash, Reader, and most AV products don't support Win2K anymore?
What you have is a box that will end up with more bugs than a Bangkok whore on coupon day, NOT pretty.