Don't you see? You are doing EXACTLY what I accused the community of doing! You had NO problem and lots of praise when they were literally flushing money down a toilet (such as the free CDs) but when they actually have to find a way to keep the lights on and the developers on the payroll its a "screw-you-community, ad-spamming, over-commercialized madness " which just proves my point which there is NO money on the desktop so trying to offer a desktop distro? completely pointless. You either use it as an alpha quality dumping ground to get the community to do free bug testing (Red Hat with Fedora) or you simply go for the enterprise market and ignore the desktop entirely.
If anyone wants to know why there will never ever be a year of the Linux desktop your post is the perfect example of why. To make a distro that could TRULY compete, I mean be able to stand toe to toe on the stability and features of Windows and OSX would easily cost 100 million dollars MINIMUM.
The entire graphics stack needs to be pulled (please don't give me the "X is great" rant because while its good for remote server administration it sucks balls as a desktop graphics stack), the audio subsystem needs to be replaced (Pulse is fucking terrible, the most likely to consistently break on update piece of the Linux stack except for wireless) and wireless is also a mess. ALL of that would have to be replaced along with a significant portion of the internals being forked so Torvalds and pals wouldn't break dozens of drivers each update, because the masses won't put up with that shit. They are used to having ALL their drivers run for the life of the OS, both OSX and Windows can be run from RTM to EOL with thousands of patches and the wireless, sound, graphics, it ALL just works.
But WHERE is this money gonna come from? Who is gonna pay for it? As you note in your own post you are offended by Canonical even trying to keep the lights on, where in the hell would a company get 100 million dollars to do the work that needs doing, not to mention the operating costs to stay afloat while its doing the work? Answer...it won't so Linux desktops are as dead as Dixie. The ONLY reason Linux was able to grab decent share in the server room was that MSFT under Ballmer is a trainwreck whose more concerned about stock prices than serving their customers, they charged assraping prices and adding obvious gouges like user CALs so it was cheaper to pay devs to fix Linux problems than deal with the expensive hedge maze that is WinServer licensing.
But that is NOT the desktop situation, OEM copies of Windows Home are less than $100 and on Oct 26th Win 8 Pro will be just $40, so there is simply no money to be made there for any Linux company. Add to that the fact that due to the viral nature of GPL V3, which yes it IS viral, even RMS admits as much in his blog as his goal was to close the loopholes and force anybody that uses GPL software to BE GPL themselves, so that companies like canonical can't even keep the code they made to make themselves different and there just isn't any way to stay afloat.
The mistake Shuttleworth made was using Linux, he should have used BSD. Then he could have kept his changes, giving Ubuntu a way to set itself apart from the crowd, and he could have charged $20 a copy once the buzz had built up and actually had a source of revenue to keep building and making it even better. In another year or two he may have even had enough cash to make Ubuntu BSD a real competitor to OSX and Windows, instead they will go the way of Xandros and Linspire and the community will go back to a bazillion half baked distros that don't really offer anything that can compete. Sad but that's the way it goes.
Uhhh...how EXACTLY is this flamebait? Gates hasn't been the guy in the big chair in a decade, hasn't even been showing up for much of anything in half a decade. Sure he still has a title but he has made it clear he's too busy with his charity and he's NEVER coming back...which is a damned shame since his hand picked little buddy is a PHB right out of Dilbert but there you go.
I've said several times its time to update the icon, I'll even happily give you a more appropriate image. Picture Ballmer with his tongue sticking out and a MSFT Beanie on, now THAT would pretty much nail what MSFT under Ballmer is like, a "we don't give a shit" attitude with kiddie designs. If you wanted to add delicious icing to that moist cake simply add his bust instead of just his head so you can see his T-Shirt reads "I Heart tablets and phones" which shows all they really seem to give a crap about now.
But Gates is long gone, having the Gates borg makes about as much sense as bitching about Jobs and Apple when he was running NeXT and Scully was at the helm, he just ain't there anymore. Hell anybody who saw Gates coy remarks about Vista before release knows the man ain't in charge anymore or else he wouldn't have let that stinker out the door.
Then...I know, this is shocking...stop treating it as a fricking religion but a product and USE SOMETHING THAT WORKS! That is why I quit bothering to even mess with Linux and went back to Windows because guess what? Crap like switching between a video and a chat window didn't crash the damned desktop and bugs didn't sit around for years and years being ignored!
If anything it just proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that "many eyes' bullshit is just that, because those eyes would have to belong to someone with the skills to fix it and more importantly would have to give a fuck and its obvious that they don't.
Windows 8 is $40 and you can use Start8 to have a traditional desktop if you don't like metro. don't want Windows? OSX will let you have UNIX goodness without the sound crapping itself when an update comes out. The reason why the Linux community is looking like its full of religious nuts like Robert Pogson at linuxInsider is because all those that were sane moved to Windows and Mac to get stuff done.
hell if your hardware is too old for Win 8 just snatch a copy of Win 7 Tiny off of TPB, that thing runs like a dream on as little as a 1GHz with 512Mb of RAM, don't torture yourself using something that the devs obviously don't give a crap if it sucks, life is too short for that shit. Hell if you have to have Linux get a fricking Chromebook, at least that runs without crashing and bugs all over the place.
Dude you have Obama/Biden versus Romney/Ryan and you are worried about corrupting the fricking vote? Hell its Coke VS Pepsi!
I hate to break the news to ya Sparky but the SuperPACs have ALREADY made the thing as crooked as a snake, and it doesn't make a damned who you vote for as there will be a guy in his office in a Gucci suit waiting with a big fat check and an offer for lucrative jobs for his pals as long as he plays ball, and blank checks and cronyism tops voting any day of the week.
Ya know I just have to say...I find this all VERY enlightening.
I mean here we have a company that was the darling of the community, who heaped praise upon it, yet when they are bleeding to death and trying to try to survive what does the community do? "ZOMFG block it!" or "I'm going somewhere else, how dare they try to keep the doors open!" and it just goes to show that ALL the community cares about is "free as in beer".
For a site that supposedly has so many libertarians you'd think TINSTAAFL wouldn't even have to be said, hell the history of the company since Shuttleworth stopped the gravy train has been one of desperation, even unity was an attempt to get an Ubuntu tablet, yet the nerd rage here at Canonical trying to keep the lights on is just incredible.
But I don't think anyone will have to worry for much longer, the era of "Linux for humans" that was Canonical is nearly over. When the community refuses to buy shit and blocks everything the check from Amazon won't even be enough to pay their phone bill. So long Canonical, it was a nice idea, too bad you can't make money on free desktops.
Which just proves what I've been saying, there is no money to be made in Linux desktops. Canonical will join the ranks of Corel, Linspire, Xandros, Mandriva, and more we have forgotten in the list of failed Linux desktop business ventures.
In server you can make money with support, there is simply no business selling support to home and business desktop users. Windows server can cost many thousands of dollars when you figure in the CALs and depending on what features you need, Windows desktops are $100 for Home and $140 for Pro, and a hell of a lot lower than that for OEMs. At numbers that low you have to get huge economies of scale going to pay for the developers, the lights, the building, but its a catch-22 because you can't make money until you get huge economies of scale but you can't survive long enough to get the huge economies of scale because the money runs out.
As I said here more than 2 years ago when Shuttleworth announced he would sink no more millions into Canonical that it was over and now we have the final nail. Look at their history since the Shuttleworth announcement...Ubuntu Netbook (trying to get into the netbook craze after the ship had sailed), selling search results to Yahoo, selling MP3s through Amazon, trying to get into the server business after Shuttleworth talking about how Ubuntu was gonna be "the desktop Linux" for the masses, trying to come up with Ubuntu Phone and Ubuntu TV...their entire history since that announcement has been that of a desperate company trying to find SOME way, any way, to stem the flow of red ink and find a positive revenue stream.
But I've said it before and I'll say it again...Linux on the server, the embedded space? There is money to be made there. as far as Linux on the phone it would be hard to see how Google is gonna make back their billion dollars a year development costs but of course Google wants as many eyeballs as possible so hard to know what their monetary strategy is, but on the desktop? Sorry, not gonna happen, as Shuttleworth found out it costs millions to make and support a Linux desktop and there is just no money there to be made, this is one area where being "free as in beer" hurts more than it helps.
Final prediction? Canonical joins the other dead Linux desktops in a year and a half, maybe sooner. All those based on Ubuntu better be switching to Debian as a base NOW because it won't be much longer before Shuttleworth pulls the plug and hits the lights on his way out. I wouldn't be surprised to read in a month or two he has it up for sale just to try to recoup some of the money, doubt there will be any takers though, just no money in desktops.
I agree you just gotta look at the userbase. Working here at the shop 6 days a week i get to see pretty much what folks use and I can honestly say i haven't seen a person under 60 years old use Hotmail in fricking years. See a lot of younger Yahoo and Gmail users but NEVER Hotmail, they are always folks that have been on the thing since forever and if you got into their Hotmail you'd find a lot of recipes, emails from their Aunt Mildred, any of the data there would be pretty much useless.
Hell I doubt even 10% of their aging userbase even uses 12 characters and I frankly wouldn't be surprised if a good 30%+ are using either their SSNs or their medicare numbers, old folks seem to love to use those numbers.
Hell I'm in the middle of the deep south and even i knew those words and kerfuffle is used down here as well. I think some words just end up common language, like putz or schmuck.
Because the Walgreen's here charges $7 a box for the same box I pay $2.50 for at the Wally world? And both are open 24/7 so its not like I have to go Walgreen's at 3AM.
So while I wouldn't mind a LITTLE markup, triple the fricking price? Even though I live just a block from the Walgreen's and 7 miles away from the Wally world I'll take Wally over Walgreen's any day of the week, that's just highway robbery.
What games AC? Show me ONE, just one mind you, that isn't yet another MP only half assed Q3 ripoff because that is ALL we ever see from these releases. No cool single player games, no really innovative ideas, just the same maps and CTF/DM/TF2 ripoffs over and over AND OVER again.
Again handing someone with zero talent an engine what do you get? Crap. Ripoffs, Same Old Same Old. There may be plenty of FOSS programmers but just from the looks of the output game designers? They be lacking.
Now if you'll excuse me I'm gonna back to my Torchlight II marathon, a game that is actually fun. Like the world needs another MP only CTF/DM game..sheesh.
Well far be it from me to point out/. editors don't actually edit or anything, but would it have really killed either them or the dude that posted it to tell us WTF XBian was? Or why we should care?
I mean not everyone is in the pi builder community, so a couple of words telling what it was, or what its difference between it and the other one was, which again don't know WTF it is except it has something to do with the Pi, would have been nice.
It was SUPPOSED to be a "space truck" that could take both the military (thus saving money) and civilian loads while having a fast enough turnaround time to make space travel truly economical but that's NOT what we ended up with. What we got was a ship that had too small a bed for military payloads, which meant we had to pay for Atlas for the military as well as the shuttle, and as we found the rigors of spaceflight meant that the inspections and work required to get it ready for another flight slowed things down too much to ever make it economical, finally they were supposed to be retired by 86 but because we never could settle on a replacement we kept sending up these aging birds until they finally started falling apart.
Frankly if we can't get the Apollo system back on line economically we ought to just fricking buy Soyuz. I'm sure the Russians would be happy to license their designs and sell us some rockets, we've been using their engines in our rockets for awhile now, why not just go all the way? It'll save us a ton of time and cash, the Russians will be happy for the checks, its a win/win as far as I can see and saves us having to hitch rides just to get anything done. The only other choice I see is man rating the Atlas or Delta rockets which who knows how much that'll cost.
Besides what will it be used for? 300 half assed Quake 3 CTF and DM ripoffs...yay.
Its not the engine that's the problem anymore, its the artwork, level design, AI design, all of that is HARD as hell, so what we get is dozens of Q3 Arena ripoffs since no AI, all you need is some half ass character skins, and the same dozen levels everyone else has...yay.
Personally I would love a SP FOSS game on the level of Bioshock but it looks like we won't even get Redneck Rampage, just an endless parade of Q3 clones...yay.
Its not piracy if you just buy a license, go grab an OEM copy of Win 7 Home and like Crosshair said just leave it on the shelf and run Tiny.
I had it, with full Comodo AV and Firewall, running like a screamin demon and the thing was using less than 340Mb of RAM and it just flew, faster by far than bog standard XP on the same hardware, which just to give you an idea of how weak we are talking it was a 2.1GHz Celeron, 1gb of RAM, 200Gb HDD which Tiny used less than 700Mb of, and an old Geforce 6200 I had laying around. Now with spcs THAT lousy it was truly a joy to run, everything loaded fast, it was stable and solid, and even after applying SP1 and all the patches it still used less than 400Mb and was snappy.
The only catches are thus: If you want to run as a normal user you'll have to make an account, its set up as admin by default (for compatibility with older games of course, like I said it was made for gamers), you'll want to go to driverpacks.net since naturally having it fit on a CD means they removed the Win 7 built in drivers but driverpacks will take care of that, and no Aero because naturally Aero sucks GPU resources so its not good for gaming.
But since MSFT gives out a 90 day trial of Win 7 on its website if I were you I'd download a copy of Win 7 Tiny and try it for 90 days. That will let you see if its right for you and if it is? just pop over to NewEgg and pick up an OEM Win 7 and put it in the closet. Hell the install of Win 7 Tiny comes with a.txt file on the desktop from the creator with a full list of everything he tweaked so theoretically you could do this to any Win 7 disc, its just a hell of a lot of work so why not let some other guy do the tweaking for you?
To me that is what is truly sad, MSFT really did have a "lost decade' thanks to Ballmer caring about stock price more than market share.
If you put me in charge of MSFT I would right that ship and put them head to head against Apple in less than 2 years or they wouldn't owe me a dime. Win 8? You would choose on first boot whether to go with the Win 7 UI (and it wouldn't be the crippled mess that "desktop mode" is, we are talking the FULL Win 7 UI) or Metro so that problem would be solved. In mobile? 2 versions, Home and pro (Pro having all the business tools like AD and GPO support) and it would be $20 to the OEMs for Home and $50 for pro, second problem solved. Server? I would completely destroy Linux by offering 3 versions, SMB, Medium, and Enterprise with prices of $250,$500,$1000 and NO CALs and special discounts if you want to run multiple VMs of Windows.
Instead Ballmer is gonna gouge his way right out of mobile and is practically handing a large chunk of the server market to Linux with the stupid licensing rules. I only hope Win 8 is a WinME style flop and that the board punts Sinofsky and Ballmer like a 30 yard field retrun and brings in somebody with a brain, maybe bring back Allchin or Ozzie who actually knows the customer base and how to grow the company, because its obvious from Ballmer's abysmal track record he doesn't know WTF he is doing.
But it don't really smell like a troll, at least not to me, just bad marketing. A good troll would also put down a brand that would get the fanboys royally pissed, point out something nasty Google or Apple has done and WHAM! You've got epic 200 post troll bait right there.
But these? How do I describe it so you'll understand...oh I know...you ever call HP consumer division for tech support? They hire these Indian guys that read scripts to plug whatever product they want to shill this week, be it HP printers or photo paper or whatever and its soooo badly written, its "Hello have you heard of the wonderful goodness that can be had with HP photopaper? Why your family never looked so luscious in such vivid colors!" and you think "WTF? who talks like that?" I mean when was the last time you used luscious and vivid in a single sentence?
Look, we ALL know Ballmer and Sinofsky are ready to shit pants with fear than Win 8 will be a flop so I can see MSFT hiring some cheap ass Chinese or Indian call center guys to hawk the living shit out of their products. I mean for the love of Pete they are selling Win 8 pro for fricking $40 trying to raise uptake, so is it REALLY hard to believe that on the eve of what may be the biggest flop since WinME they might hire some cheap support guys to shill the living hell out of the forums that geeks hang out at? After all no geeks writing apps and no Win 8 cell phone uptake.
So until i see some actual evidence these are trolls (which if they ARE trolls why don't they troll other topics? I've never seen a troll that didn't just love a good shit stirring) then i'm gonna lean on the side of bad call center shilling.
Besides we recently saw more and more users are even bypassing the search engines and going straight to Amazon and the Kindle just makes that process that much easier.
What worries Walmart is the simple fact for goods you really don't need to try, blank DVDs or cans of soup or diapers or motor oil or books by your favorite authors Amazon is just too damned easy to use. Why should I go get in the truck, waste gas to drive to Wally world, fight the crowds, and go through all the BS along with higher prices when i could just sit on behind with a Kindle and order a pack of blank DVDs or whatever and have it dropped at my doorstep?
Hell since Wally World became just another ChinaMart between NewEgg, Tigerdirect,Steam, and Amazon the only thing I really buy there anymore is cold meds when my sinuses act up and the occasional bakery item. For everything else its just too easy to push a button and have it delivered.
Dude you didn't hear this from me but fuck it, I hate to see anybody wasting hours of their time on broken shit. Look up "Windows 7 Tiny" and just download a copy of that if your hardware is too old for regular Win 7. I can tell you I've run both win 7 and Win 8 CP on a Sempron 1.8GHz with 2gb of RAM, now that is pretty wimpy, but for all I know you have something even wimpier than that so there you go.
Win 7 Tiny was made by gamers to be the "Ultimate Win 7 Gaming OS" so its stripped to the bone, but will still run a good 98% of the software out there. I slapped it on a socket 478 Celeron, the weakest thing I had in the shop at the time and...holy shit dude, that thing fricking screamed. The whole OS takes less than 192Mb of RAM with running as Admin, just 226 when running as standard user. Its also had WGA stripped out so no worries there and it'll run any Win 7 drivers, even XP drivers if you use compatibility mode.
Not that I condone piracy but in this case MSFT left a lot of guys like you with older hardware in a lurch and the hackers just routed around the damage. Hell it even fits on a single CD so you don't even need a DVD to install the thing.
Believe me after 5 years of dealing with linux and having to constantly waste time fighting the damned thing to keep it running i wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy. if you want a legal version they are gonna sell Win 8 pro for $40 and the same guys that made Win 7 Tiny are hard at work stripping the living hell out of it, rumor is it won't even have Metro but Classic Shell built in instead. But I've seen Win 7 Tiny run great on frankly old as dirt hardware, better than XP as a matter of fact, so if you have an older system you want to keep past 2014 might want to give it a spin.
Because being an abused housewife and just taking shit? MUCH better, dumbass. Why do you think Linux has got NO share in 20 years? Hint, its NOT a conspiracy, its because the community will put up with devs that treat you like shit for fricking decades and won't do a damned thing about it.
Look up "Ulrich Drepper asshole" and see what I mean, here was a guy controlling CRITICAL CODE that told anybody that found a bug to literally eat shit and die, what did you do? Took it for a decade and a fricking half!
If you want to know why Linux is dead its YOU, look right in the mirror because guys like YOU that refuse to stand up, refuse to complain, that shout down anybody who points out the devs are treating you like shit! I repeat if any other product on the entire planet worked so poorly and ignored the users it would be in the dustbin of history, and rightly so. But because so many have bought into "The religion of FOSS" it doesn't matter what the devs break, how you get exactly ZERO QA and QC, because you'll take that shit sandwich as long as its free.
BTW did you know Dell has to run their own damned fork of Ubuntu, complete with their own repos, just to keep the damned thing from breaking their systems, even though they only sell a grand total of 8 models? Be happy to provide the links if you'd like. Its THAT kind of shoddy half ass approach that dooms Linux to nothing on the desktop and guys like YOU help it to happen. Congrats, I'm sure MSFT and Apple are grateful.
Funny how that stuff works, huh? Round here I've bought a NIB acoustic bass, beautiful black which I just love, for $60, 5 strings for $50, netbooks for anywhere from $60-$120, again depending on the chips, and can buy really nice Core duo laptops for $125-$150 again depending on how much battery life is left.
The pawnshops on the other hand want $120 for a P4 desktop with crappy CRT monitor, you are not touching ANYTHING in a laptop shape for less than 2 bills, and basses that look like they've been used as baseball bats go for over $100. You walk in there and you can see a guy in the corner just watching auction prices and if anybody brings something in first thing they do? See what its going for on eBay.
Now I tell my friends if they want something nice just have me hit Craigslist and shoot them a heads up when the right one comes along. I recently got a former customer that is a hell of a nice guy a NIB Dell Atom mini 9 for $80 flat, still in the wrapper. The seller got an iPad at the same time and decided he preferred the pad so he just left it in the box. If that would have been at the pawnshop it would have been $225, not a penny less.
Well I agree you can just use a proxy and beat all of the above, but when it comes to drivers...WTF are you doing man? Seriously what the hell? you are using a search engine to find fricking drivers?
Let your friendly neighborhood repairman Hairyfeet help you out there grasshopper, learn how us old greybeards get a system from blank drive to up and running with NO effort in less than an hour and a half, here we go.
1.- Go to Driverpacks and download the packs for any OSes you are gonna be installing, you can even put them all on a thumbdrive or DVD for ease of use.
2.- Go to WSUS Offline and download their update generator. Again simply check the boxes for what you want, they have XP-7, 32 and 64bit, you can even get all the MS Office and.NET patches while you are at it. I personally have every patch from 2K-Win 7 X64 on a shared drive, couldn't be easier to use and the nice thing is you'll never have to waste bandwidth downloading a patch or service pack twice, one time takes care of it
3.- Once you have the machine up and running, after you have run the driverpack and WSUS so you have it all patched and set up nice and neat go to Ninite to take care of most of your third party stuff, your flash and codecs and the like. Again just check the boxes for whatever you want and run it, couldn't be simpler.
4.-The final icing on the delicious cake is to go grab a copy of Comodo Time Machine and when its installed have it make a snapshot and lock it. That will give you your own "roll back to factory state" just like the big OEMs but with all the patches and drivers and third party softare installed. Then set it to make a snapshot daily and if your user bones anything, even if they make it unbootable, they can be back up and running in 15 minutes or less, easy peasy.
Well there you have it, 4 simple little steps that will take you from blank drive to running system hassle free. Your actual interaction time? less than 10 minutes since the majority of its completely automated so you only need to make the selection and go do something while it runs. But don't hunt for drivers on the net, that's just a waste of time and you are just as liable to get a trojan pretending to be a driver as not.
Why did someone mark the AC flamebait? Did anybody click on the guy's user ID? Personally I hate how the word shill is just thrown at frankly everyone that doesn't drink the koolaid around here but...damn, just damn. Every single post the guy has made has been pumping Visual Studio, Silverlight, and Windows mobile. It reads like somebody working at an Indian support center just going off one of those scripts.
And if anybody at MSFT is reading this? Dude quit with the fucking scripts already, nobody IRL talks like that, okay? Its as bad as the buzzword bingo your marketing drones put out, just laaaammmmeee.
So instead of scripts how about...get ready for this, its high concept time...you MAKE PRODUCTS PEOPLE WANT instead huh, huh? I know, total high concept, be sure to give me credit for the innovation there Ballmer!
But the worse part is the math doesn't work! You have X number of devs truly qualified to write and repair low level systems drivers (lets say 100, waaay overestimating but this is giving them benefit of the doubt) and over 100,000 drivers, devs constantly futzing with the internals and a 6 month release schedule.
Question: How are you gonna have ANY QC or QC with conditions like that? Answer: You aren't, even if the few devs they have truly qualified to write and repair low level driver code stay up 24/7/365 then MAYBE they will have gone through the drivers ONCE in 5 years MAYBE. The math? It just don't work. MSFT doesn't have to deal with this problem as the kernel only changes once a decade, same with the driver model, and most of the drivers aren't built and maintained by them anyway, same with Apple. The ones they do maintain they pay millions of dollars to huge teams of devs to deal with this long, slow, tedious and boring work.
So the idea that simply having the code will make it so that the kernel devs can take care of 100,000+ drivers is truly "magical thinking" and anybody using basic math can show its nuts, but still they believe, why? Because like religion they WANT to believe, that is why they attack those that point out the math don't work.
How are you gonna take something that already sounds like shit and make it sound worse? Its like saying putting a little squirt at the end of the huge loud fart is gonna make it worse. Sorry but no, its already a loud nasty ass ripper so while you can say you made it different you did NOT make it worse, the engineer already took care of that FOR you.
The highs are all tinny, the drums sound like cardboard, the bass is a muddy mess, its designed for the 16 year old blasting it through some shitty Sparkomatics with huge shitastic $100 subs, so its as compressed as a long distance phone call. Again its like saying you need a higher bitrate to preserve the flavor of that giant pants ripper, its still gonna sound fucking nasty no matter how you slice it because the engineers have left you something seriously nasty to work with.
As the old saying goes "you can't polish a turd" but if you'd like proof just download Audacity and look at the waveforms yourself, you'll see its just a solid wall no matter if its at 128k or 320k, that is all the engineer gave you to work with, just a nasty compressed mess.
Those are okay, not great but okay, when it comes to an already recorded signal. Frankly they suck big hairy balls live though and again its the dynamics. You can get almost infinite distortion levels from some $400 Peavey Mace head, not even gonna bring up the really nice stuff like a classic Fender or Marshall, just by rolling the volume with your pinky. With modelers like the amplitube you really get all or nothing, the closest it can get is this kind of stair step where you get 100% until you drop the volume X amount, then it drops to 75%, there simply is no natural curve to it.
Now out of my own curiosity, why are you using a Trace Elliot model, when Trace is known for clean bass amps? I'll be the first to admit they make nice EQs but of all the amps someone would model honestly Trace would be the last one I'd think of. BTW if you want one you better be hitting the Craigslist and snatching up a real Trace before they are buried by the sea of clones, since Trace got bought by...shudder...Peavey. Now instead of that nice quality British craftsmanship they are being made right beside the crappy Peavey solid states, just yuck.
I played a brand new one and when the store owner insisted it was "As good as the old ones" I actually went home and grabbed mine just to show him how wrong he was, by then quite a bit of people had piled in. At a volume of 3 my Trace completely obliterated his brand new Trace on 7, the tone was cleaner, the bass fuller, his sounded no better than any crappy muddy Peavey solid state whereas my was rich all the way across the 5 strings without even a pedal attached. The quality difference between the British Trace and the Peavey Trace is like night and day, so if you really like Trace you might want to grab one before people figure out that the classic ones are the good ones and the price goes nuts like the Ampeg SVTs did.
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Don't you see? You are doing EXACTLY what I accused the community of doing! You had NO problem and lots of praise when they were literally flushing money down a toilet (such as the free CDs) but when they actually have to find a way to keep the lights on and the developers on the payroll its a "screw-you-community, ad-spamming, over-commercialized madness " which just proves my point which there is NO money on the desktop so trying to offer a desktop distro? completely pointless. You either use it as an alpha quality dumping ground to get the community to do free bug testing (Red Hat with Fedora) or you simply go for the enterprise market and ignore the desktop entirely.
If anyone wants to know why there will never ever be a year of the Linux desktop your post is the perfect example of why. To make a distro that could TRULY compete, I mean be able to stand toe to toe on the stability and features of Windows and OSX would easily cost 100 million dollars MINIMUM.
The entire graphics stack needs to be pulled (please don't give me the "X is great" rant because while its good for remote server administration it sucks balls as a desktop graphics stack), the audio subsystem needs to be replaced (Pulse is fucking terrible, the most likely to consistently break on update piece of the Linux stack except for wireless) and wireless is also a mess. ALL of that would have to be replaced along with a significant portion of the internals being forked so Torvalds and pals wouldn't break dozens of drivers each update, because the masses won't put up with that shit. They are used to having ALL their drivers run for the life of the OS, both OSX and Windows can be run from RTM to EOL with thousands of patches and the wireless, sound, graphics, it ALL just works.
But WHERE is this money gonna come from? Who is gonna pay for it? As you note in your own post you are offended by Canonical even trying to keep the lights on, where in the hell would a company get 100 million dollars to do the work that needs doing, not to mention the operating costs to stay afloat while its doing the work? Answer...it won't so Linux desktops are as dead as Dixie. The ONLY reason Linux was able to grab decent share in the server room was that MSFT under Ballmer is a trainwreck whose more concerned about stock prices than serving their customers, they charged assraping prices and adding obvious gouges like user CALs so it was cheaper to pay devs to fix Linux problems than deal with the expensive hedge maze that is WinServer licensing.
But that is NOT the desktop situation, OEM copies of Windows Home are less than $100 and on Oct 26th Win 8 Pro will be just $40, so there is simply no money to be made there for any Linux company. Add to that the fact that due to the viral nature of GPL V3, which yes it IS viral, even RMS admits as much in his blog as his goal was to close the loopholes and force anybody that uses GPL software to BE GPL themselves, so that companies like canonical can't even keep the code they made to make themselves different and there just isn't any way to stay afloat.
The mistake Shuttleworth made was using Linux, he should have used BSD. Then he could have kept his changes, giving Ubuntu a way to set itself apart from the crowd, and he could have charged $20 a copy once the buzz had built up and actually had a source of revenue to keep building and making it even better. In another year or two he may have even had enough cash to make Ubuntu BSD a real competitor to OSX and Windows, instead they will go the way of Xandros and Linspire and the community will go back to a bazillion half baked distros that don't really offer anything that can compete. Sad but that's the way it goes.
Uhhh...how EXACTLY is this flamebait? Gates hasn't been the guy in the big chair in a decade, hasn't even been showing up for much of anything in half a decade. Sure he still has a title but he has made it clear he's too busy with his charity and he's NEVER coming back...which is a damned shame since his hand picked little buddy is a PHB right out of Dilbert but there you go.
I've said several times its time to update the icon, I'll even happily give you a more appropriate image. Picture Ballmer with his tongue sticking out and a MSFT Beanie on, now THAT would pretty much nail what MSFT under Ballmer is like, a "we don't give a shit" attitude with kiddie designs. If you wanted to add delicious icing to that moist cake simply add his bust instead of just his head so you can see his T-Shirt reads "I Heart tablets and phones" which shows all they really seem to give a crap about now.
But Gates is long gone, having the Gates borg makes about as much sense as bitching about Jobs and Apple when he was running NeXT and Scully was at the helm, he just ain't there anymore. Hell anybody who saw Gates coy remarks about Vista before release knows the man ain't in charge anymore or else he wouldn't have let that stinker out the door.
Then...I know, this is shocking...stop treating it as a fricking religion but a product and USE SOMETHING THAT WORKS! That is why I quit bothering to even mess with Linux and went back to Windows because guess what? Crap like switching between a video and a chat window didn't crash the damned desktop and bugs didn't sit around for years and years being ignored!
If anything it just proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that "many eyes' bullshit is just that, because those eyes would have to belong to someone with the skills to fix it and more importantly would have to give a fuck and its obvious that they don't.
Windows 8 is $40 and you can use Start8 to have a traditional desktop if you don't like metro. don't want Windows? OSX will let you have UNIX goodness without the sound crapping itself when an update comes out. The reason why the Linux community is looking like its full of religious nuts like Robert Pogson at linuxInsider is because all those that were sane moved to Windows and Mac to get stuff done.
hell if your hardware is too old for Win 8 just snatch a copy of Win 7 Tiny off of TPB, that thing runs like a dream on as little as a 1GHz with 512Mb of RAM, don't torture yourself using something that the devs obviously don't give a crap if it sucks, life is too short for that shit. Hell if you have to have Linux get a fricking Chromebook, at least that runs without crashing and bugs all over the place.
Dude you have Obama/Biden versus Romney/Ryan and you are worried about corrupting the fricking vote? Hell its Coke VS Pepsi!
I hate to break the news to ya Sparky but the SuperPACs have ALREADY made the thing as crooked as a snake, and it doesn't make a damned who you vote for as there will be a guy in his office in a Gucci suit waiting with a big fat check and an offer for lucrative jobs for his pals as long as he plays ball, and blank checks and cronyism tops voting any day of the week.
Ya know I just have to say...I find this all VERY enlightening.
I mean here we have a company that was the darling of the community, who heaped praise upon it, yet when they are bleeding to death and trying to try to survive what does the community do? "ZOMFG block it!" or "I'm going somewhere else, how dare they try to keep the doors open!" and it just goes to show that ALL the community cares about is "free as in beer".
For a site that supposedly has so many libertarians you'd think TINSTAAFL wouldn't even have to be said, hell the history of the company since Shuttleworth stopped the gravy train has been one of desperation, even unity was an attempt to get an Ubuntu tablet, yet the nerd rage here at Canonical trying to keep the lights on is just incredible.
But I don't think anyone will have to worry for much longer, the era of "Linux for humans" that was Canonical is nearly over. When the community refuses to buy shit and blocks everything the check from Amazon won't even be enough to pay their phone bill. So long Canonical, it was a nice idea, too bad you can't make money on free desktops.
Which just proves what I've been saying, there is no money to be made in Linux desktops. Canonical will join the ranks of Corel, Linspire, Xandros, Mandriva, and more we have forgotten in the list of failed Linux desktop business ventures.
In server you can make money with support, there is simply no business selling support to home and business desktop users. Windows server can cost many thousands of dollars when you figure in the CALs and depending on what features you need, Windows desktops are $100 for Home and $140 for Pro, and a hell of a lot lower than that for OEMs. At numbers that low you have to get huge economies of scale going to pay for the developers, the lights, the building, but its a catch-22 because you can't make money until you get huge economies of scale but you can't survive long enough to get the huge economies of scale because the money runs out.
As I said here more than 2 years ago when Shuttleworth announced he would sink no more millions into Canonical that it was over and now we have the final nail. Look at their history since the Shuttleworth announcement...Ubuntu Netbook (trying to get into the netbook craze after the ship had sailed), selling search results to Yahoo, selling MP3s through Amazon, trying to get into the server business after Shuttleworth talking about how Ubuntu was gonna be "the desktop Linux" for the masses, trying to come up with Ubuntu Phone and Ubuntu TV...their entire history since that announcement has been that of a desperate company trying to find SOME way, any way, to stem the flow of red ink and find a positive revenue stream.
But I've said it before and I'll say it again...Linux on the server, the embedded space? There is money to be made there. as far as Linux on the phone it would be hard to see how Google is gonna make back their billion dollars a year development costs but of course Google wants as many eyeballs as possible so hard to know what their monetary strategy is, but on the desktop? Sorry, not gonna happen, as Shuttleworth found out it costs millions to make and support a Linux desktop and there is just no money there to be made, this is one area where being "free as in beer" hurts more than it helps.
Final prediction? Canonical joins the other dead Linux desktops in a year and a half, maybe sooner. All those based on Ubuntu better be switching to Debian as a base NOW because it won't be much longer before Shuttleworth pulls the plug and hits the lights on his way out. I wouldn't be surprised to read in a month or two he has it up for sale just to try to recoup some of the money, doubt there will be any takers though, just no money in desktops.
I agree you just gotta look at the userbase. Working here at the shop 6 days a week i get to see pretty much what folks use and I can honestly say i haven't seen a person under 60 years old use Hotmail in fricking years. See a lot of younger Yahoo and Gmail users but NEVER Hotmail, they are always folks that have been on the thing since forever and if you got into their Hotmail you'd find a lot of recipes, emails from their Aunt Mildred, any of the data there would be pretty much useless.
Hell I doubt even 10% of their aging userbase even uses 12 characters and I frankly wouldn't be surprised if a good 30%+ are using either their SSNs or their medicare numbers, old folks seem to love to use those numbers.
Hell I'm in the middle of the deep south and even i knew those words and kerfuffle is used down here as well. I think some words just end up common language, like putz or schmuck.
Because the Walgreen's here charges $7 a box for the same box I pay $2.50 for at the Wally world? And both are open 24/7 so its not like I have to go Walgreen's at 3AM.
So while I wouldn't mind a LITTLE markup, triple the fricking price? Even though I live just a block from the Walgreen's and 7 miles away from the Wally world I'll take Wally over Walgreen's any day of the week, that's just highway robbery.
What games AC? Show me ONE, just one mind you, that isn't yet another MP only half assed Q3 ripoff because that is ALL we ever see from these releases. No cool single player games, no really innovative ideas, just the same maps and CTF/DM/TF2 ripoffs over and over AND OVER again.
Again handing someone with zero talent an engine what do you get? Crap. Ripoffs, Same Old Same Old. There may be plenty of FOSS programmers but just from the looks of the output game designers? They be lacking.
Now if you'll excuse me I'm gonna back to my Torchlight II marathon, a game that is actually fun. Like the world needs another MP only CTF/DM game..sheesh.
Well far be it from me to point out /. editors don't actually edit or anything, but would it have really killed either them or the dude that posted it to tell us WTF XBian was? Or why we should care?
I mean not everyone is in the pi builder community, so a couple of words telling what it was, or what its difference between it and the other one was, which again don't know WTF it is except it has something to do with the Pi, would have been nice.
But lets face it..the shuttle was a megaflop.
It was SUPPOSED to be a "space truck" that could take both the military (thus saving money) and civilian loads while having a fast enough turnaround time to make space travel truly economical but that's NOT what we ended up with. What we got was a ship that had too small a bed for military payloads, which meant we had to pay for Atlas for the military as well as the shuttle, and as we found the rigors of spaceflight meant that the inspections and work required to get it ready for another flight slowed things down too much to ever make it economical, finally they were supposed to be retired by 86 but because we never could settle on a replacement we kept sending up these aging birds until they finally started falling apart.
Frankly if we can't get the Apollo system back on line economically we ought to just fricking buy Soyuz. I'm sure the Russians would be happy to license their designs and sell us some rockets, we've been using their engines in our rockets for awhile now, why not just go all the way? It'll save us a ton of time and cash, the Russians will be happy for the checks, its a win/win as far as I can see and saves us having to hitch rides just to get anything done. The only other choice I see is man rating the Atlas or Delta rockets which who knows how much that'll cost.
Besides what will it be used for? 300 half assed Quake 3 CTF and DM ripoffs...yay.
Its not the engine that's the problem anymore, its the artwork, level design, AI design, all of that is HARD as hell, so what we get is dozens of Q3 Arena ripoffs since no AI, all you need is some half ass character skins, and the same dozen levels everyone else has...yay.
Personally I would love a SP FOSS game on the level of Bioshock but it looks like we won't even get Redneck Rampage, just an endless parade of Q3 clones...yay.
Its not piracy if you just buy a license, go grab an OEM copy of Win 7 Home and like Crosshair said just leave it on the shelf and run Tiny.
I had it, with full Comodo AV and Firewall, running like a screamin demon and the thing was using less than 340Mb of RAM and it just flew, faster by far than bog standard XP on the same hardware, which just to give you an idea of how weak we are talking it was a 2.1GHz Celeron, 1gb of RAM, 200Gb HDD which Tiny used less than 700Mb of, and an old Geforce 6200 I had laying around. Now with spcs THAT lousy it was truly a joy to run, everything loaded fast, it was stable and solid, and even after applying SP1 and all the patches it still used less than 400Mb and was snappy.
The only catches are thus: If you want to run as a normal user you'll have to make an account, its set up as admin by default (for compatibility with older games of course, like I said it was made for gamers), you'll want to go to driverpacks.net since naturally having it fit on a CD means they removed the Win 7 built in drivers but driverpacks will take care of that, and no Aero because naturally Aero sucks GPU resources so its not good for gaming.
But since MSFT gives out a 90 day trial of Win 7 on its website if I were you I'd download a copy of Win 7 Tiny and try it for 90 days. That will let you see if its right for you and if it is? just pop over to NewEgg and pick up an OEM Win 7 and put it in the closet. Hell the install of Win 7 Tiny comes with a .txt file on the desktop from the creator with a full list of everything he tweaked so theoretically you could do this to any Win 7 disc, its just a hell of a lot of work so why not let some other guy do the tweaking for you?
To me that is what is truly sad, MSFT really did have a "lost decade' thanks to Ballmer caring about stock price more than market share.
If you put me in charge of MSFT I would right that ship and put them head to head against Apple in less than 2 years or they wouldn't owe me a dime. Win 8? You would choose on first boot whether to go with the Win 7 UI (and it wouldn't be the crippled mess that "desktop mode" is, we are talking the FULL Win 7 UI) or Metro so that problem would be solved. In mobile? 2 versions, Home and pro (Pro having all the business tools like AD and GPO support) and it would be $20 to the OEMs for Home and $50 for pro, second problem solved. Server? I would completely destroy Linux by offering 3 versions, SMB, Medium, and Enterprise with prices of $250,$500,$1000 and NO CALs and special discounts if you want to run multiple VMs of Windows.
Instead Ballmer is gonna gouge his way right out of mobile and is practically handing a large chunk of the server market to Linux with the stupid licensing rules. I only hope Win 8 is a WinME style flop and that the board punts Sinofsky and Ballmer like a 30 yard field retrun and brings in somebody with a brain, maybe bring back Allchin or Ozzie who actually knows the customer base and how to grow the company, because its obvious from Ballmer's abysmal track record he doesn't know WTF he is doing.
But it don't really smell like a troll, at least not to me, just bad marketing. A good troll would also put down a brand that would get the fanboys royally pissed, point out something nasty Google or Apple has done and WHAM! You've got epic 200 post troll bait right there.
But these? How do I describe it so you'll understand...oh I know...you ever call HP consumer division for tech support? They hire these Indian guys that read scripts to plug whatever product they want to shill this week, be it HP printers or photo paper or whatever and its soooo badly written, its "Hello have you heard of the wonderful goodness that can be had with HP photopaper? Why your family never looked so luscious in such vivid colors!" and you think "WTF? who talks like that?" I mean when was the last time you used luscious and vivid in a single sentence?
Look, we ALL know Ballmer and Sinofsky are ready to shit pants with fear than Win 8 will be a flop so I can see MSFT hiring some cheap ass Chinese or Indian call center guys to hawk the living shit out of their products. I mean for the love of Pete they are selling Win 8 pro for fricking $40 trying to raise uptake, so is it REALLY hard to believe that on the eve of what may be the biggest flop since WinME they might hire some cheap support guys to shill the living hell out of the forums that geeks hang out at? After all no geeks writing apps and no Win 8 cell phone uptake.
So until i see some actual evidence these are trolls (which if they ARE trolls why don't they troll other topics? I've never seen a troll that didn't just love a good shit stirring) then i'm gonna lean on the side of bad call center shilling.
Besides we recently saw more and more users are even bypassing the search engines and going straight to Amazon and the Kindle just makes that process that much easier.
What worries Walmart is the simple fact for goods you really don't need to try, blank DVDs or cans of soup or diapers or motor oil or books by your favorite authors Amazon is just too damned easy to use. Why should I go get in the truck, waste gas to drive to Wally world, fight the crowds, and go through all the BS along with higher prices when i could just sit on behind with a Kindle and order a pack of blank DVDs or whatever and have it dropped at my doorstep?
Hell since Wally World became just another ChinaMart between NewEgg, Tigerdirect,Steam, and Amazon the only thing I really buy there anymore is cold meds when my sinuses act up and the occasional bakery item. For everything else its just too easy to push a button and have it delivered.
Dude you didn't hear this from me but fuck it, I hate to see anybody wasting hours of their time on broken shit. Look up "Windows 7 Tiny" and just download a copy of that if your hardware is too old for regular Win 7. I can tell you I've run both win 7 and Win 8 CP on a Sempron 1.8GHz with 2gb of RAM, now that is pretty wimpy, but for all I know you have something even wimpier than that so there you go.
Win 7 Tiny was made by gamers to be the "Ultimate Win 7 Gaming OS" so its stripped to the bone, but will still run a good 98% of the software out there. I slapped it on a socket 478 Celeron, the weakest thing I had in the shop at the time and...holy shit dude, that thing fricking screamed. The whole OS takes less than 192Mb of RAM with running as Admin, just 226 when running as standard user. Its also had WGA stripped out so no worries there and it'll run any Win 7 drivers, even XP drivers if you use compatibility mode.
Not that I condone piracy but in this case MSFT left a lot of guys like you with older hardware in a lurch and the hackers just routed around the damage. Hell it even fits on a single CD so you don't even need a DVD to install the thing.
Believe me after 5 years of dealing with linux and having to constantly waste time fighting the damned thing to keep it running i wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy. if you want a legal version they are gonna sell Win 8 pro for $40 and the same guys that made Win 7 Tiny are hard at work stripping the living hell out of it, rumor is it won't even have Metro but Classic Shell built in instead. But I've seen Win 7 Tiny run great on frankly old as dirt hardware, better than XP as a matter of fact, so if you have an older system you want to keep past 2014 might want to give it a spin.
Because being an abused housewife and just taking shit? MUCH better, dumbass. Why do you think Linux has got NO share in 20 years? Hint, its NOT a conspiracy, its because the community will put up with devs that treat you like shit for fricking decades and won't do a damned thing about it.
Look up "Ulrich Drepper asshole" and see what I mean, here was a guy controlling CRITICAL CODE that told anybody that found a bug to literally eat shit and die, what did you do? Took it for a decade and a fricking half!
If you want to know why Linux is dead its YOU, look right in the mirror because guys like YOU that refuse to stand up, refuse to complain, that shout down anybody who points out the devs are treating you like shit! I repeat if any other product on the entire planet worked so poorly and ignored the users it would be in the dustbin of history, and rightly so. But because so many have bought into "The religion of FOSS" it doesn't matter what the devs break, how you get exactly ZERO QA and QC, because you'll take that shit sandwich as long as its free.
BTW did you know Dell has to run their own damned fork of Ubuntu, complete with their own repos, just to keep the damned thing from breaking their systems, even though they only sell a grand total of 8 models? Be happy to provide the links if you'd like. Its THAT kind of shoddy half ass approach that dooms Linux to nothing on the desktop and guys like YOU help it to happen. Congrats, I'm sure MSFT and Apple are grateful.
Funny how that stuff works, huh? Round here I've bought a NIB acoustic bass, beautiful black which I just love, for $60, 5 strings for $50, netbooks for anywhere from $60-$120, again depending on the chips, and can buy really nice Core duo laptops for $125-$150 again depending on how much battery life is left.
The pawnshops on the other hand want $120 for a P4 desktop with crappy CRT monitor, you are not touching ANYTHING in a laptop shape for less than 2 bills, and basses that look like they've been used as baseball bats go for over $100. You walk in there and you can see a guy in the corner just watching auction prices and if anybody brings something in first thing they do? See what its going for on eBay.
Now I tell my friends if they want something nice just have me hit Craigslist and shoot them a heads up when the right one comes along. I recently got a former customer that is a hell of a nice guy a NIB Dell Atom mini 9 for $80 flat, still in the wrapper. The seller got an iPad at the same time and decided he preferred the pad so he just left it in the box. If that would have been at the pawnshop it would have been $225, not a penny less.
Well I agree you can just use a proxy and beat all of the above, but when it comes to drivers...WTF are you doing man? Seriously what the hell? you are using a search engine to find fricking drivers?
Let your friendly neighborhood repairman Hairyfeet help you out there grasshopper, learn how us old greybeards get a system from blank drive to up and running with NO effort in less than an hour and a half, here we go.
1.- Go to Driverpacks and download the packs for any OSes you are gonna be installing, you can even put them all on a thumbdrive or DVD for ease of use.
2.- Go to WSUS Offline and download their update generator. Again simply check the boxes for what you want, they have XP-7, 32 and 64bit, you can even get all the MS Office and .NET patches while you are at it. I personally have every patch from 2K-Win 7 X64 on a shared drive, couldn't be easier to use and the nice thing is you'll never have to waste bandwidth downloading a patch or service pack twice, one time takes care of it
3.- Once you have the machine up and running, after you have run the driverpack and WSUS so you have it all patched and set up nice and neat go to Ninite to take care of most of your third party stuff, your flash and codecs and the like. Again just check the boxes for whatever you want and run it, couldn't be simpler.
4.-The final icing on the delicious cake is to go grab a copy of Comodo Time Machine and when its installed have it make a snapshot and lock it. That will give you your own "roll back to factory state" just like the big OEMs but with all the patches and drivers and third party softare installed. Then set it to make a snapshot daily and if your user bones anything, even if they make it unbootable, they can be back up and running in 15 minutes or less, easy peasy.
Well there you have it, 4 simple little steps that will take you from blank drive to running system hassle free. Your actual interaction time? less than 10 minutes since the majority of its completely automated so you only need to make the selection and go do something while it runs. But don't hunt for drivers on the net, that's just a waste of time and you are just as liable to get a trojan pretending to be a driver as not.
Why did someone mark the AC flamebait? Did anybody click on the guy's user ID? Personally I hate how the word shill is just thrown at frankly everyone that doesn't drink the koolaid around here but...damn, just damn. Every single post the guy has made has been pumping Visual Studio, Silverlight, and Windows mobile. It reads like somebody working at an Indian support center just going off one of those scripts.
And if anybody at MSFT is reading this? Dude quit with the fucking scripts already, nobody IRL talks like that, okay? Its as bad as the buzzword bingo your marketing drones put out, just laaaammmmeee.
So instead of scripts how about...get ready for this, its high concept time...you MAKE PRODUCTS PEOPLE WANT instead huh, huh? I know, total high concept, be sure to give me credit for the innovation there Ballmer!
But the worse part is the math doesn't work! You have X number of devs truly qualified to write and repair low level systems drivers (lets say 100, waaay overestimating but this is giving them benefit of the doubt) and over 100,000 drivers, devs constantly futzing with the internals and a 6 month release schedule.
Question: How are you gonna have ANY QC or QC with conditions like that? Answer: You aren't, even if the few devs they have truly qualified to write and repair low level driver code stay up 24/7/365 then MAYBE they will have gone through the drivers ONCE in 5 years MAYBE. The math? It just don't work. MSFT doesn't have to deal with this problem as the kernel only changes once a decade, same with the driver model, and most of the drivers aren't built and maintained by them anyway, same with Apple. The ones they do maintain they pay millions of dollars to huge teams of devs to deal with this long, slow, tedious and boring work.
So the idea that simply having the code will make it so that the kernel devs can take care of 100,000+ drivers is truly "magical thinking" and anybody using basic math can show its nuts, but still they believe, why? Because like religion they WANT to believe, that is why they attack those that point out the math don't work.
How are you gonna take something that already sounds like shit and make it sound worse? Its like saying putting a little squirt at the end of the huge loud fart is gonna make it worse. Sorry but no, its already a loud nasty ass ripper so while you can say you made it different you did NOT make it worse, the engineer already took care of that FOR you.
The highs are all tinny, the drums sound like cardboard, the bass is a muddy mess, its designed for the 16 year old blasting it through some shitty Sparkomatics with huge shitastic $100 subs, so its as compressed as a long distance phone call. Again its like saying you need a higher bitrate to preserve the flavor of that giant pants ripper, its still gonna sound fucking nasty no matter how you slice it because the engineers have left you something seriously nasty to work with.
As the old saying goes "you can't polish a turd" but if you'd like proof just download Audacity and look at the waveforms yourself, you'll see its just a solid wall no matter if its at 128k or 320k, that is all the engineer gave you to work with, just a nasty compressed mess.
Those are okay, not great but okay, when it comes to an already recorded signal. Frankly they suck big hairy balls live though and again its the dynamics. You can get almost infinite distortion levels from some $400 Peavey Mace head, not even gonna bring up the really nice stuff like a classic Fender or Marshall, just by rolling the volume with your pinky. With modelers like the amplitube you really get all or nothing, the closest it can get is this kind of stair step where you get 100% until you drop the volume X amount, then it drops to 75%, there simply is no natural curve to it.
Now out of my own curiosity, why are you using a Trace Elliot model, when Trace is known for clean bass amps? I'll be the first to admit they make nice EQs but of all the amps someone would model honestly Trace would be the last one I'd think of. BTW if you want one you better be hitting the Craigslist and snatching up a real Trace before they are buried by the sea of clones, since Trace got bought by...shudder...Peavey. Now instead of that nice quality British craftsmanship they are being made right beside the crappy Peavey solid states, just yuck.
I played a brand new one and when the store owner insisted it was "As good as the old ones" I actually went home and grabbed mine just to show him how wrong he was, by then quite a bit of people had piled in. At a volume of 3 my Trace completely obliterated his brand new Trace on 7, the tone was cleaner, the bass fuller, his sounded no better than any crappy muddy Peavey solid state whereas my was rich all the way across the 5 strings without even a pedal attached. The quality difference between the British Trace and the Peavey Trace is like night and day, so if you really like Trace you might want to grab one before people figure out that the classic ones are the good ones and the price goes nuts like the Ampeg SVTs did.