Thank you for giving me a PERFECT example of religious lunacy, now watch how simple logic total demolishes that argument!
Let us say, for the sake of argument, that in each distro you have...ohh 100 guys capable of low level kernel driver work. this is of course bullshit, Red hat MAYBE but everyone else will be lucky if they have 4, and due to the way everyone changes the layouts just enough a LOT of their work won't be cross compatible. But giving the benefit of the doubt let's say 100. Following me? Good now watch how logic destroys your argument.
You have 100 guys, code for 100,000 drivers, a six month release schedule, and devs that shit all over the internals with nary a care in the world to backwards compatibility because they treat their own little fiefdoms as personal vanity projects instead of code millions count on...SEE THE PROBLEM? If you gave your mythical 100 devs, which you in reality have maybe 4, but if you gave your mythical 100 devs qualified to write kernel level driver Bolivian marching powder and kept them up 24/7/365 for all eternity THE MATH WILL STILL NOT WORK.
And it is THIS, this right here, that leaves me gobsmacked and proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that it all comes down to RELIGION, because like religion just a tiny bit of logic and math shows it to be myth, yet you have all these people that refuse to believe you can do these miraculous things that even basic math just obliterates. hell the ONLY argument you have by a kernel dev against an ABI even has the line "may all non free drivers break" which is NOTHING but religious dogma, because NO competent developer is gonna be actually HOPING that drivers for his own system is gonna be broken.
But you go right ahead and believe in the tooth fairy while calling dirty names anybody who points out its impossibility, just remember to be shocked! shocked I tell you! When your OS which you give away for 100% free gains NO SHARE and in fact is beaten by stolen versions of the competitors product several times over. Now when people would rather risk insane fines to steal the other guy's product than take yours for free? How big of a cluebat do you need to get hit in the head with before you wake the hell up?
Dude you know what? This is like arguing over who has the best salt. Its the same old same I don't give a crap which one you pick.
Now Yahoo I thought had the best UI so of course they went and fucked that up, but now? Pretty much same old same. In fact I'd say if you are looking for pictures Bing seems to be the best for that particular niche as its image search UI is really easy to use and lets you customize the hell out of the search without having to use modifers in the search itself, just the UI.
But as far as searches themselves go? You can open Google and Bing side by side and there really isn't much of a difference, well except for the fact that Google tends to go through spells of being pounded by SEO spam, but you can't really blame Google that SEO scumbums are constantly trying to find ways to crack their protections. But as far as the actual searches go, Bing seems to be a little better when looking for reviews, Google seems to be a little bit better when it comes to shopping, but they both will find you what you are looking for.
Frankly if your #1 concern is privacy you aren't gonna be using Bing OR Google, you'll be using DuckDuckGo anyway.
That is nice for YOU and people who gets docs from YOU, but the rest of the world doesn't care and isn't picky about formatting/fonts/templates and LO turns those into word salad. That is why I give LO to my home users but never the business ones, it looks VERY unprofessional to send someone a doc and have the one they send you in return look like something a third grader made.
In the end the reason you'll never beat MS Office with free software is the network effect means that LO can't merely be close, it has to be 100% compatible because otherwise the first doc that gets trashed and LO will be trashed along with it.
Ironically this is another category like browsers where another company was dominant (Netscape in browsers, Wordperfect in office suites) but then royally fucked up and gave the market to MSFT. In the case of browsers it was a disastrous buggy NS 4 release, in the case of office suites it was Wordperfect not only not having a native Windows version ready for launch but after stalling put out their DOS version with a Windows wrapper which made it run like shit.
That doesn't mean you shouldn't keep trying, you may get a shot in the future. look at how MSFT fired the IE team after 6 and let it rot thus letting FOSS browsers become the big growth market that they have, we could see the same thing in office if MSFT tries to force metro UI onto future versions of Office while refusing to sell the non Metro version. But ATM there is just no comparison, complex docs, spreadsheets and presentations just get mangled by LO so MSO keeps the market.
As someone who has actually been in several small bands selling our own CDs i have to call horseshit, why? Because if you don't try to assrape the fans they'll be more than happy to buy your stuff to support you.
We were selling t-shirts and CDs and making a hell of a lot more off of that than we actually were playing, even though we had most if not all the stuff in MP3 format all over various sites, why? Simple the CDs were $10 a pop, same as the shirts and while you bought you could actually take to us (or our GFs/wives if we were on stage) and find out anything you wanted to know..Hell I've had guys walk up to me and go "You're the bass player right? yeah about that riff you did on track 4,what EXACTLY were you doing there because that sounded really cool" and I'd be happy to tell them and even have them come up as soon as we were finished and I'd show him what he wanted to know. I even had a couple of them copy my bass rig, they'd see us play, come up and ask what I was running and a few nights later we'd see them with their band and they had copied me right down to the pedal. I even showed one how to set his EQ like mine because he liked the growl I was getting on the low end.
So if you treat the fans as valuable to you? Then they'll be happy to support you. those that we'd recognize from going to multiple shows were even invited to sit with the wives and GFs or help out setting up the gear so they could ask us all the questions they wanted, a couple had even rented studio time and asked me to play on one of their songs and I happily showed up and did it to help them out. treat folks good? they treat YOU good, simple as that.
I think the reason so many can't tell is the source material. As the old saying goes "garbage in/garbage out". Not saying their taste in music is shit, just saying if you take some top 40 pop song that has already been compressed to within an inch of its life then 128k even is gonna be no different than 320k simply because its ALREADY compressed all to shit so its really not gonna matter.
When it comes to the stuff you hear on the radio the higher bitrates simply don't matter because the song was "pre-trashed" before it ever got to the MP3 encoder. It would be like taking a car that just went through the crusher and saying you can see the difference between hitting that cube with a ball peen hammer vs a sledge, doesn't really make much difference as its already squished all to hell.
See THIS is why I say its religious dogma, these 'problems" of which you speak? I ahte to break the news to ya, but unless you are running ancient legacy crap like WinXP then most people will never have any so putting up with shit like this just makes you look crazy.
And tell me friend are YOU a low level kernel dev? Do YOU have the years of experience in C required to build your own drivers from scratch? No? Then WTF does it matter if you have the code? it does you NO good, and if the devs that DO have the skills don't give a rat's ass (as TFA clearly demonstrates) its completely POINTLESS, as in totally without point, EXCEPT if you look at source like dogma and the whole "code wants to be free" BS.
If you want to know why after TWENTY YEARS of giving the fricking OS away for free Linux is STILL getting curbstomped by competition that charges hundreds, even thousands for their product? Look at TFA and see why. Something everyone with Windows and OSX takes for granted, simply closing the lid and the system goes to sleep, is BROKEN, has been broken for several revs now and its quite clear the devs do not care and treat the internals like their own personal pet projects instead of code that millions depend on to fricking WORK.
Its like mass insanity, that's what it is. If any other product on the planet treated you this way you'd break out the pitchforks, so WTF people? Why take shit just because its free? Free shit is STILL shit and unless YOU are an actual low level dev having the code is as fricking worthless as me handing you the plans for the space shuttle, as you do NOT have the skills to build it, do NOT have the resources to hire someone to build it, so it might as well be plans for the starship Enterprise for all the good it does.
Its the "all or nothing" I personally have a problem with. With a distorted tube amp you can use your pinky to roll off the volume a bit and get everything from balls to the wall to just slightly dirty distortion whereas with sold state all it does is lower the volume, the distortion is just as nasty at half volume as full, no real changes.
Now I'm not saying solid state distortion doesn't have its place, hell I use it myself on a couple of my patches (Zoom B1X, great pedal) to get that growl like in the front of "For Whom The Bell Tolls" but that is ALL it is, a quick effect. for guitar you need a nice throaty bite which the solid states just can't seem to get, no matter how much you tweak. You'd think with how powerful our chips are getting they'd be able to emulate it by now but even the really expensive tube modelers just sound like canned crap.
So while I can't tell you WHY the tubes sound better I CAN tell you that a guitarist with a $2000 tube modeling amp will sound like shit compared to the same guitarist playing the same piece on some $400 Peavey Mace tube amp, not even in the same league.
If the future truly is FB...can we all just board a flight to Mars now PLEASE? How damned sad is it that in a decade or two idiocracy is gonna be a God damned documentary about how they tried to warn us of the dumbing down of the planet.
Yeah I can just imagine a FB styled PS program, you'll have a LOLCats button that makes the text turn into catspeak, a phone button that translates SMS into other languages, a "fuck it up" button that adds trippy effects, the "old shit" button will make it B&W...can we have a nice plague now? Something that will seriously "thin the herd' because if that is the future oh Lord I DO NOT WANT.
For playback yes that's dumb but I think most would agree that for recording guitarists NEED tubes. The distortion from solid state, even $2k+ modeling amps, just sounds like shit. As a bass player i prefer solid state, my Trace Elliot is insanely clean at any volume (weighs a fricking ton though, those 2 ten inches have magnets that are HUGE, its like moving a fricking safe) but I have yet to hear a guitarist, live or recorded, that didn't sound like shit with solid state. In fact the ONLY time I heard one sound really good the guitarist had a pedal using tubes for his distortion and only used the solid state for amplifying the siignal.
Everyone may make fun of tubes but frankly we just haven't figured out how to get a nice fat distortion that responds to the player with solid state, its too brittle and is all or nothing whereas with tubes you can roll off the volume and get dozens of levels of distortion without the harshness. Of course if you WANT harshness, like Black Flag or Pantera then solid states work great, most people don't want their guitar to sound like a chainsaw.
Actually audiophiles prefer vinyl because thanks to the medium you can't compress the living shit out of it and crank everything to 1Db below clipping and have the record still play, it'll jump the groove.
The sad part is if you actually got your hands on some of those fist CD releases? They sound BETTER than vinyl simply because they used the master recordings without alteration and just converted to digital. For a great example look up loudness war on wikipedia, they have an example of a Beatles track from various releases, the first is normal and then with each release they cranked on the compressor until finally the whole thing just looks like a solid wall a hair off clipping.
Because unless you have the masters FLAC is still having to deal with the CD that has been compressed to within an inch of its life thanks to the loudness wars. I can see why Jobs listened to vinyl, ever hear how fricking HUGE a difference not being able to compress the shit out of it makes? My friend has a huge vinyl collection and its like night and day, from the deep tones of the piano in "Come Sail Away" to the warmth of the vocals in any Queen song, its just sooo much better when it isn't compressed to within an inch of its life.
This is why I like buying music from the indie bands, the local indie studios don't torture the sound by adding 50 compressors onto it to make it all 1Db below clipping. I've been fortunate enough to record some tracks in one of the local indie studios and he has a setting he uses for a joke called "Typical studio crap" that if you want to hear what your stuff would sound like after the loudness war has gotten through with it he pushes the button....yuck. Bass sounds like cardboard, guitar sounds whiny, drums sound like its being played under a blanket, compressing the hell out of everything instead of just using a compressor where it is needed (I only use a light compression on my bass to even string response) makes the whole thing just sound like shit.
I'm sure it sounds fine on some teenagers Sparkomatics that he is pumping too much bass through so the entire block can hear him coming, for anyone who actually want to hear the song its total shit. So if Neil can get artists to release the actual master without all the compressed crap? I'm ALL for it, go Neil!
I am just sitting here literally gobsmacked. I mean here you all are, having seriously NASTY problems...yet you put up with it or do the distro tango....WTF people? Why are you not on their forums having a fucking shitfit? Why are you not telling the devs to stop acting like douchebags and quit fucking with the internals so shit isn't constantly fucking breaking like this?
This is why I gave up after nearly 4 years of fighting the damned thing and went back to Windows, and if someone doesn't want Windows I point them toward a Mac. How is ANYTHING ever gonna get better if you just let the devs crap all over the internals any damned time they feel like it and you just take it like an abused housewife...WTF people? Why aren't you royally pissed? Why are you not nailing their balls to the wall? if this were any other product on the planet you would be having massive boycotts and giving them hell. You know that free broken shit is STILL broken shit, correct?
I just don't get it. Religious dogma is the only reason i can think of for putting up with such obvious douchebag behavior, because its obvious the product is NOT working as intended and from the huge list we see here of people with serious issues is not suitable for purpose.
Ahhh...that is what I use Craigslist for, as the local pawnshop has discovered eBay so anything good is gonna be priced no different than its highest eBay selling price. I've been picking up those Atom netbooks for $60-$80 which is frankly all those are worth as far as I'm concerned but if I spot an AMD Bobcat I snatch ASAP. I have one of the EEEs and like you loaded it with 8Gb, great little netbook. After the holidays I'll slap an SSD in it and have a pretty fast little ultra portable for cheap, just great little units.
But I think you'll agree that the Pi is just too limited a chip for HTPC. It can really only accelerate H.264, and then only in the correct flavor as far as bitrate and wrapper, I mean who wants to spend all that time making their media fit the device? A good HTPC should run whatever you throw at it in at least 720p if not full 1080p which is why I recommended those E350s. The E350 rocks when it comes to HTPC, I have accelerated DivX, Flash, MPEG 1/2/4, H.26x, pretty much anything that is even slightly popular is accelerated, easily cooled passively or with a tiny NB fan, and you can get it already put together with a nice case and PSU for just $125 and all you have to do is add the RAM and HDD of your choice.
For an HTPC you really can't beat the E350. That C60 you grabbed will do the job fine, but if someone hadn't lucked into one the E350 can be picked up every day for that price and is already in a nice case that looks good in a TV cabinet.
Uhhh...his bail is set HIGHER than for people that have CORPSES listed among the evidence okay? Now you want to investigate this guy cool, after the whole thing with the DK Rises i can see erring on the side of caution.
But setting his bail higher than serial rapists, bank robbers, and actual "here is the corpses" murderers? i'm sorry but that is off the rails. Spin it however you want that is using bail for political purposes and is wrong.
Yeah they are cheap...but also limited as hell for that function. You have to have the media in the right codec, not have it at too high a bitrate, basically you pretty much have to tailor your media to the device.
A MUCH better device for a cheap HTPC is the E350 kits. You can get the board alone at Amazon for around $70, that gives you a dual core and a Radeon GPU that'll accelerate a heck of a lot of formats, but I prefer the ones with the nice case and PSU for $125. Slap on a copy of Win 7 Home or if you want a free OS then OpenELEC has a Fusion build ready to go. You can use videos in dozen of formats, it multitasks well, its just a better system for an HTPC.
That said there are still a ton of places that the pi makes an excellent device, rocketry, robotics, UAVs, there are a ton of different jobs that this will fit and the fact they keep adding cool features like this is just icing on the cake.
Dude you are running 16bit programs and XP mode is slow? If its Win 7 32bit frankly it shouldn't be any slower unless your programs are GPU accelerated which...its a 16bit program, kinda doubt its using the GPU.
Now if you were trying it on the X64 version? That is understandable because the CPU itself can't really switch gears between 64bit and 16bit on the fly. You are gonna have to think about which is more important to you, having the better performance and more memory of X64 or the really old programs.
At the end of the day though the inescapable fact is unless you are gonna airgap the system you really only have about a year left, that's it. So now is the time to be seriously getting a migration path in place and getting things switched over. Now if you are just gonna airgap the system? Hey no problem, I had a customer do something similar for nearly 2 years with Win2K and Macromedia XRes, he knew that program like the back of his hand so I set him up a 2GHz Athlon with a Gb of RAM and a 2 port KVM switch with a simple crossover cable between it and the net system so that the 2K box didn't have any net access, just a single shared folder he could drop files he needed to work on.
But most people aren't gonna go to the trouble of having two systems with a crossover and KVM just for a single program or even a couple of programs, so you really need to be looking at where you wanna migrate to before the clock runs out. After all Win 8 is nearly here and frankly it sucks ass as a business OS, so I'd at least be grabbing me a Win 7 Home or pro box just in case Ballmer quits selling the boxed versions like he did for awhile after Vista came out. Like the boy scouts say, be prepared.
Question: Have you tried Win 7 Pro with XP Mode? Because I've found since XP Mode is just a specialized VM running on top of Win 7 unless you are trying to run 3D accelerated games on the thing frankly it'll run anything XP will run since its...well just XP in a box. And since you get the XP Mode complete with a licensed XP when you buy Win 7 pro its not like it'll cost anything out of poicket to try it. if you'll go to their website they have a trial version of Win 7 pro so it won't even cost a cent to give it a go and see if it'll fix your problem.
Thank you AC I so rarely get to use this in a sentence...WHOOSH!
The point was NOT "New VS Old" but the simple fact that The Pentium 4 was a BADLY flawed design that honestly should have been sent to the scrapyard the SECOND that the Athlon 64s and Core designs came out. Its a giant power sucking energy hog, its like this monster V8 just blowing through gas and belching smoke and which actually gives you worse performance than a new 4 cyl to use a/. car analogy.
I mean look at what I replaced that secretary's machine with, an E350. That is the AMD Bobcat platform, its probably the weakest system AMD makes right now and you can buy it WITH the board AND the nice HTPC looking case for $125 in kit form. Its a 1.65GHz with a Radeon HD6310 built in, its literally half the speed of the P4 but its IPC blows it away while being more responsive, and power and heat...OMG what a difference! You can run the E350 AND a LCD monitor for less power than the P4 idles at.
So while in most cases an upgrade means getting a new shiny in this case its simply better for everyone. Its better for the bosses, who won't be paying this big cooling bill in the summer and for all the wasted juice of the CRTs and P4s, its better for the office workers who go from these big noisy and slow P4s to something quiet and fast, its just better all the way around.
It was one of them little broiling ones and its VERY nasty, if you are not at work don't take MY word for it, look it up. I seriously doubt its a coincidence that pussy riot's initials are PR, there are several articles by actual artists in the area, both performance artists and more traditional, who say PR was nothing but a handful of stupid attention whores doing anything they could to stir up a stink, not to make a political statement but to try to cash in.
Again that was considered one of their "works" along with trying to take credit for the bridge dick bit, which is noticing a bridge going up and down looks like a dick going hard and soft is considered insightful boy are we in trouble as I bet the very first workmen on the very first draw bridge made that joke decades ago.
I had some customers like that, know what I did? I told them to buy just one new box and compare it to their P4 and if they were happier with the P4 I'd hand them their money back and sell the box.
I picked one of the secretaries that had this awful P4 that sounded like a jet taking off and just belched heat and replaced it with an AMD E350 mini, no heat and noise and of course as i pointed out her power usage dropped to less than 18w while having a faster system. She of course just raved about how much nicer it was and they were sold. So with the exception of a few of the graphics guys that needed more power most were changed out to low power units, E350s for the ones just doing basic office work and low power Phenoms for those that were doing a little more heavy lifting.
For those stuck with a boss that thinks "It ain't broke so don't fix it" let your old pal Hairyfeet tell you how to win them over...point out how much money they are tossing each month on power and AC. The Pentium 4 was probably THE worst chip ever made when it comes to power, since Intel with those long pipes on netburst just kept throwing more and more power trying to beat AMD in MHz, and of course they are nearly always paired with some big ass CRT which is also sucking juice and belching heat all over the place.
So just pick up a Kill-A-Watt and show them how much money they are flushing on electricity and then point out that they are blowing even more on top of that in waste heat that has to be dealt with. Then point out how the low power Intel and AMD chips paired with a power efficient LCDs mean they can run 3 systems for the same power 1 of those P4s is sucking and its really not hard to get them to see the big picture. Heck they can't even use IE6 as an excuse since you can run 6, 7, and 8 in XP Mode and even have it preset to ONLY go to the Intranet app, thus letting you use a safer more modern browser for everything else.
Money may be tight but with an office full of P4s and CRTs it really doesn't take long at all for energy efficient units to pay for themselves. As an added bonus Win 7 is supported until 2020 so you can point out they should be set for the rest of the decade.
As far as driver go simply make your own disc with Windows Unattended CD Creator which will let you add Driverpacks which will cover just about ANY hardware you can come across. Of course even if you NLite the hell out of it with all those drivers you'll have to move up to DVD instead of CD. as for WGA it takes like 20 seconds to re-auth but if you don't want to waste the 20 seconds or are dealing with a machine that doesn't have net and you don't want to do the whole phone thing I'm sure I don't have to tell you there is a little thing called "WGA Killer" which i'm sure you can find easily.
Now that said I have to ask...why? Why would you want to do that? You can run Win 7 on any old P4 or better so unless your hardware is from the last century you shouldn't have a problem, even with older hardware its much better memory management makes the system actually pick up speed as you use it (thanks to intelligent caching and actually using free RAM for cache instead of bitchslapping the paging file like XP does) and with Readyboost any $2 2Gb flash drive can be used like a hybrid drive to speed up small random reads thus further speeding up the system.
If there wasn't something better out? THEN I could understand, in fact while everyone was struggling with XP RTM and SP1 I stayed with Win2K pro but when XP X64 came out I switched because it was the better OS even if you didn't have 4Gb of RAM because of the larger registers and being built on the excellent Win2K3 Server meant it was very stable and a solid system. I tried Vista but got bit by one too many bugs and went back to XP X64 but I switched to Win 7 when the beta came out and never looked back. The system I'm typing this on has been running it since RTM, that's 3 years and in that time I've replaced the CPU, GPU, RAM, board, and HDD and I had to re-auth exactly ONCE when I replaced the board and it took less than 15 seconds by Internet, completely painless.
So I look forward to your reply because i honestly can't see the appeal of running XP now. Win 7 is the first one since XP X64 where I can make a list of features and say "THOSE, those right there, make it the superior OS" and not just for consumers like Win 8 metro-fied, with win 7 you have so many features that are great for workstation users too. Default 2 pane explorer, jumplists and breadcrumbs make it insanely easy to get back to work, better memory management makes large applications run better, better video subsystem with hardware acceleration support means even beta GPU drivers can't crash the whole OS like they could on XP, its just a MUCH better system.
Well you don't know how much these guys got paid to sign that contract, hell they could spend 3 or 4 years just having a damned good time and THEN try something new. Remember a game will take a couple of years from idea to shelves.
Plus if I were a game designer? I could see sitting out for a couple of years, it'll take that long for the new Xbox and PlayStation get out and the new dev tools become mature so i can see letting others take the sucky job of putting out the launch titles.
No matter what they decide to do I wish them well, if for no other reason the fun they gave me in their past before EA came along and like Symantec trashed everything that was good about the company. Good luck guys and thanks for the games.
There is a LOT more to recommend Win 7 than just X64, although that IS good. With Win 7 I have placed it on systems as "old school" as a socket 754 sempron with 2gb of RAM and the system...was actually snappy. Thanks to Win 7 having MUCH better memory management the system has real snap, more than XP, and by slapping a cheapo 2Gb flash drive i had around for Readyboost to take up the small I/Os it loads programs MUCH better.
That said you have a third set of users..those whose systems are frankly overpowered for them. You point out the "good enough" while forgetting that XP was sold until Win 7 was released in 09 so I've seen plenty of duals and even triples with 3Gb of RAM and WinXP. Lets look at the low end of those, the Pentium D 820. That chip was used a LOT in low end systems, heck you can find those chips for like $8 now, they are just so plentiful. Now what does the average user actually DO that would slam this chip? Facebook? watching YouTube? listening to MP3s and burning CDs?
Now I have gotten all my customers to switch to Win 7 by pointing out all the extra features and better performance, but I can understand why some wouldn't change until their systems die. After all its a major PITA to completely replace your OS, and frankly most users won't have the skill so its $100 for the OS and another $$ to pay someone to do it. And with the economy in the toilet why go through that work when you have nearly a year and a half of support left?
But I disagree about admins, Win 7 is frankly a joy to admin and is much less likely to go flaky than WinXP, which you have to remember has had 3 SPs and a ton of patches. Finally Win 7 is easy to use without admin rights, whereas XP is a royal PITA to get programs running without admin rights. You often have to tweak like crazy to get programs to play nice without admin, sure most admins are USED to it, but that doesn't mean its pleasant or fun.
Uhhh...missed the memo buddy? you can kill metro like Raid kills bugs and for free, with either Classic Shell or Start 8 which will turn Win 8 into Win 7 with a few non UI bells and whistles like hybrid boot.
This is why I'm gonna pick me up a couple of copies of Win 8 even though i can't stand metro, they are gonna be selling win 8 pro for $40 which means I'll have Win 7 Pro for $40 a pop, hell that's cheaper than I paid for Win 7 Home, and like Win 7 Home it'll do clean install and install from flash only Win 8 will let you run it from the flash with "Windows To Go" which will be nice for service calls.
As for TFA its not like anybody is making you lease, you can choose to buy it if you want, no different than before. I'm sure they'll offer some extras if you lease but every company does that now, you can still just buy the thing or if you're a home user I'd just slap on libre office, for the tasks home users have it works just fine.
And it'll still run too. I personally run my trusty old MS Office 2K on my Win 7 X64 netbooks and it purrs like a kitten, it'll even open the latest formats just fine with the converter. I have 2K7 on my desktop but I prefer the lightness of 2K on the little netbook and if it ain't broke?
This is nothing but what MSFT has done for years which is give you choices when it comes to the product. just need the basics? Student. Need more? Standard. Still more Pro, full shebang? Enterprise i believe is the one with all the bells and whistles.
All this will do is allow those that want the latest and greatest with all the bells and whistles to have it without buying the whole thing every 3 years. I'm sure they'll have discounts for large enterprises running a shitload of copies and will have lots of web based bells and whistles to go with it.
One thing MSFT has been pretty good with is business software and taking care of the whole business market. I'm sure there are plenty of businesses who probably asked for something like this as it means less out of pocket up front and the cost spread out over the lifetime of contract, just the kind of stuff businesses like.
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Thank you for giving me a PERFECT example of religious lunacy, now watch how simple logic total demolishes that argument!
Let us say, for the sake of argument, that in each distro you have ...ohh 100 guys capable of low level kernel driver work. this is of course bullshit, Red hat MAYBE but everyone else will be lucky if they have 4, and due to the way everyone changes the layouts just enough a LOT of their work won't be cross compatible. But giving the benefit of the doubt let's say 100. Following me? Good now watch how logic destroys your argument.
You have 100 guys, code for 100,000 drivers, a six month release schedule, and devs that shit all over the internals with nary a care in the world to backwards compatibility because they treat their own little fiefdoms as personal vanity projects instead of code millions count on...SEE THE PROBLEM? If you gave your mythical 100 devs, which you in reality have maybe 4, but if you gave your mythical 100 devs qualified to write kernel level driver Bolivian marching powder and kept them up 24/7/365 for all eternity THE MATH WILL STILL NOT WORK.
And it is THIS, this right here, that leaves me gobsmacked and proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that it all comes down to RELIGION, because like religion just a tiny bit of logic and math shows it to be myth, yet you have all these people that refuse to believe you can do these miraculous things that even basic math just obliterates. hell the ONLY argument you have by a kernel dev against an ABI even has the line "may all non free drivers break" which is NOTHING but religious dogma, because NO competent developer is gonna be actually HOPING that drivers for his own system is gonna be broken.
But you go right ahead and believe in the tooth fairy while calling dirty names anybody who points out its impossibility, just remember to be shocked! shocked I tell you! When your OS which you give away for 100% free gains NO SHARE and in fact is beaten by stolen versions of the competitors product several times over. Now when people would rather risk insane fines to steal the other guy's product than take yours for free? How big of a cluebat do you need to get hit in the head with before you wake the hell up?
Dude you know what? This is like arguing over who has the best salt. Its the same old same I don't give a crap which one you pick.
Now Yahoo I thought had the best UI so of course they went and fucked that up, but now? Pretty much same old same. In fact I'd say if you are looking for pictures Bing seems to be the best for that particular niche as its image search UI is really easy to use and lets you customize the hell out of the search without having to use modifers in the search itself, just the UI.
But as far as searches themselves go? You can open Google and Bing side by side and there really isn't much of a difference, well except for the fact that Google tends to go through spells of being pounded by SEO spam, but you can't really blame Google that SEO scumbums are constantly trying to find ways to crack their protections. But as far as the actual searches go, Bing seems to be a little better when looking for reviews, Google seems to be a little bit better when it comes to shopping, but they both will find you what you are looking for.
Frankly if your #1 concern is privacy you aren't gonna be using Bing OR Google, you'll be using DuckDuckGo anyway.
That is nice for YOU and people who gets docs from YOU, but the rest of the world doesn't care and isn't picky about formatting/fonts/templates and LO turns those into word salad. That is why I give LO to my home users but never the business ones, it looks VERY unprofessional to send someone a doc and have the one they send you in return look like something a third grader made.
In the end the reason you'll never beat MS Office with free software is the network effect means that LO can't merely be close, it has to be 100% compatible because otherwise the first doc that gets trashed and LO will be trashed along with it.
Ironically this is another category like browsers where another company was dominant (Netscape in browsers, Wordperfect in office suites) but then royally fucked up and gave the market to MSFT. In the case of browsers it was a disastrous buggy NS 4 release, in the case of office suites it was Wordperfect not only not having a native Windows version ready for launch but after stalling put out their DOS version with a Windows wrapper which made it run like shit.
That doesn't mean you shouldn't keep trying, you may get a shot in the future. look at how MSFT fired the IE team after 6 and let it rot thus letting FOSS browsers become the big growth market that they have, we could see the same thing in office if MSFT tries to force metro UI onto future versions of Office while refusing to sell the non Metro version. But ATM there is just no comparison, complex docs, spreadsheets and presentations just get mangled by LO so MSO keeps the market.
As someone who has actually been in several small bands selling our own CDs i have to call horseshit, why? Because if you don't try to assrape the fans they'll be more than happy to buy your stuff to support you.
We were selling t-shirts and CDs and making a hell of a lot more off of that than we actually were playing, even though we had most if not all the stuff in MP3 format all over various sites, why? Simple the CDs were $10 a pop, same as the shirts and while you bought you could actually take to us (or our GFs/wives if we were on stage) and find out anything you wanted to know..Hell I've had guys walk up to me and go "You're the bass player right? yeah about that riff you did on track 4,what EXACTLY were you doing there because that sounded really cool" and I'd be happy to tell them and even have them come up as soon as we were finished and I'd show him what he wanted to know. I even had a couple of them copy my bass rig, they'd see us play, come up and ask what I was running and a few nights later we'd see them with their band and they had copied me right down to the pedal. I even showed one how to set his EQ like mine because he liked the growl I was getting on the low end.
So if you treat the fans as valuable to you? Then they'll be happy to support you. those that we'd recognize from going to multiple shows were even invited to sit with the wives and GFs or help out setting up the gear so they could ask us all the questions they wanted, a couple had even rented studio time and asked me to play on one of their songs and I happily showed up and did it to help them out. treat folks good? they treat YOU good, simple as that.
I think the reason so many can't tell is the source material. As the old saying goes "garbage in/garbage out". Not saying their taste in music is shit, just saying if you take some top 40 pop song that has already been compressed to within an inch of its life then 128k even is gonna be no different than 320k simply because its ALREADY compressed all to shit so its really not gonna matter.
When it comes to the stuff you hear on the radio the higher bitrates simply don't matter because the song was "pre-trashed" before it ever got to the MP3 encoder. It would be like taking a car that just went through the crusher and saying you can see the difference between hitting that cube with a ball peen hammer vs a sledge, doesn't really make much difference as its already squished all to hell.
See THIS is why I say its religious dogma, these 'problems" of which you speak? I ahte to break the news to ya, but unless you are running ancient legacy crap like WinXP then most people will never have any so putting up with shit like this just makes you look crazy.
And tell me friend are YOU a low level kernel dev? Do YOU have the years of experience in C required to build your own drivers from scratch? No? Then WTF does it matter if you have the code? it does you NO good, and if the devs that DO have the skills don't give a rat's ass (as TFA clearly demonstrates) its completely POINTLESS, as in totally without point, EXCEPT if you look at source like dogma and the whole "code wants to be free" BS.
If you want to know why after TWENTY YEARS of giving the fricking OS away for free Linux is STILL getting curbstomped by competition that charges hundreds, even thousands for their product? Look at TFA and see why. Something everyone with Windows and OSX takes for granted, simply closing the lid and the system goes to sleep, is BROKEN, has been broken for several revs now and its quite clear the devs do not care and treat the internals like their own personal pet projects instead of code that millions depend on to fricking WORK.
Its like mass insanity, that's what it is. If any other product on the planet treated you this way you'd break out the pitchforks, so WTF people? Why take shit just because its free? Free shit is STILL shit and unless YOU are an actual low level dev having the code is as fricking worthless as me handing you the plans for the space shuttle, as you do NOT have the skills to build it, do NOT have the resources to hire someone to build it, so it might as well be plans for the starship Enterprise for all the good it does.
Its the "all or nothing" I personally have a problem with. With a distorted tube amp you can use your pinky to roll off the volume a bit and get everything from balls to the wall to just slightly dirty distortion whereas with sold state all it does is lower the volume, the distortion is just as nasty at half volume as full, no real changes.
Now I'm not saying solid state distortion doesn't have its place, hell I use it myself on a couple of my patches (Zoom B1X, great pedal) to get that growl like in the front of "For Whom The Bell Tolls" but that is ALL it is, a quick effect. for guitar you need a nice throaty bite which the solid states just can't seem to get, no matter how much you tweak. You'd think with how powerful our chips are getting they'd be able to emulate it by now but even the really expensive tube modelers just sound like canned crap.
So while I can't tell you WHY the tubes sound better I CAN tell you that a guitarist with a $2000 tube modeling amp will sound like shit compared to the same guitarist playing the same piece on some $400 Peavey Mace tube amp, not even in the same league.
If the future truly is FB...can we all just board a flight to Mars now PLEASE? How damned sad is it that in a decade or two idiocracy is gonna be a God damned documentary about how they tried to warn us of the dumbing down of the planet.
Yeah I can just imagine a FB styled PS program, you'll have a LOLCats button that makes the text turn into catspeak, a phone button that translates SMS into other languages, a "fuck it up" button that adds trippy effects, the "old shit" button will make it B&W...can we have a nice plague now? Something that will seriously "thin the herd' because if that is the future oh Lord I DO NOT WANT.
For playback yes that's dumb but I think most would agree that for recording guitarists NEED tubes. The distortion from solid state, even $2k+ modeling amps, just sounds like shit. As a bass player i prefer solid state, my Trace Elliot is insanely clean at any volume (weighs a fricking ton though, those 2 ten inches have magnets that are HUGE, its like moving a fricking safe) but I have yet to hear a guitarist, live or recorded, that didn't sound like shit with solid state. In fact the ONLY time I heard one sound really good the guitarist had a pedal using tubes for his distortion and only used the solid state for amplifying the siignal.
Everyone may make fun of tubes but frankly we just haven't figured out how to get a nice fat distortion that responds to the player with solid state, its too brittle and is all or nothing whereas with tubes you can roll off the volume and get dozens of levels of distortion without the harshness. Of course if you WANT harshness, like Black Flag or Pantera then solid states work great, most people don't want their guitar to sound like a chainsaw.
Actually audiophiles prefer vinyl because thanks to the medium you can't compress the living shit out of it and crank everything to 1Db below clipping and have the record still play, it'll jump the groove.
The sad part is if you actually got your hands on some of those fist CD releases? They sound BETTER than vinyl simply because they used the master recordings without alteration and just converted to digital. For a great example look up loudness war on wikipedia, they have an example of a Beatles track from various releases, the first is normal and then with each release they cranked on the compressor until finally the whole thing just looks like a solid wall a hair off clipping.
Because unless you have the masters FLAC is still having to deal with the CD that has been compressed to within an inch of its life thanks to the loudness wars. I can see why Jobs listened to vinyl, ever hear how fricking HUGE a difference not being able to compress the shit out of it makes? My friend has a huge vinyl collection and its like night and day, from the deep tones of the piano in "Come Sail Away" to the warmth of the vocals in any Queen song, its just sooo much better when it isn't compressed to within an inch of its life.
This is why I like buying music from the indie bands, the local indie studios don't torture the sound by adding 50 compressors onto it to make it all 1Db below clipping. I've been fortunate enough to record some tracks in one of the local indie studios and he has a setting he uses for a joke called "Typical studio crap" that if you want to hear what your stuff would sound like after the loudness war has gotten through with it he pushes the button....yuck. Bass sounds like cardboard, guitar sounds whiny, drums sound like its being played under a blanket, compressing the hell out of everything instead of just using a compressor where it is needed (I only use a light compression on my bass to even string response) makes the whole thing just sound like shit.
I'm sure it sounds fine on some teenagers Sparkomatics that he is pumping too much bass through so the entire block can hear him coming, for anyone who actually want to hear the song its total shit. So if Neil can get artists to release the actual master without all the compressed crap? I'm ALL for it, go Neil!
I am just sitting here literally gobsmacked. I mean here you all are, having seriously NASTY problems...yet you put up with it or do the distro tango....WTF people? Why are you not on their forums having a fucking shitfit? Why are you not telling the devs to stop acting like douchebags and quit fucking with the internals so shit isn't constantly fucking breaking like this?
This is why I gave up after nearly 4 years of fighting the damned thing and went back to Windows, and if someone doesn't want Windows I point them toward a Mac. How is ANYTHING ever gonna get better if you just let the devs crap all over the internals any damned time they feel like it and you just take it like an abused housewife...WTF people? Why aren't you royally pissed? Why are you not nailing their balls to the wall? if this were any other product on the planet you would be having massive boycotts and giving them hell. You know that free broken shit is STILL broken shit, correct?
I just don't get it. Religious dogma is the only reason i can think of for putting up with such obvious douchebag behavior, because its obvious the product is NOT working as intended and from the huge list we see here of people with serious issues is not suitable for purpose.
Ahhh...that is what I use Craigslist for, as the local pawnshop has discovered eBay so anything good is gonna be priced no different than its highest eBay selling price. I've been picking up those Atom netbooks for $60-$80 which is frankly all those are worth as far as I'm concerned but if I spot an AMD Bobcat I snatch ASAP. I have one of the EEEs and like you loaded it with 8Gb, great little netbook. After the holidays I'll slap an SSD in it and have a pretty fast little ultra portable for cheap, just great little units.
But I think you'll agree that the Pi is just too limited a chip for HTPC. It can really only accelerate H.264, and then only in the correct flavor as far as bitrate and wrapper, I mean who wants to spend all that time making their media fit the device? A good HTPC should run whatever you throw at it in at least 720p if not full 1080p which is why I recommended those E350s. The E350 rocks when it comes to HTPC, I have accelerated DivX, Flash, MPEG 1/2/4, H.26x, pretty much anything that is even slightly popular is accelerated, easily cooled passively or with a tiny NB fan, and you can get it already put together with a nice case and PSU for just $125 and all you have to do is add the RAM and HDD of your choice.
For an HTPC you really can't beat the E350. That C60 you grabbed will do the job fine, but if someone hadn't lucked into one the E350 can be picked up every day for that price and is already in a nice case that looks good in a TV cabinet.
Uhhh...his bail is set HIGHER than for people that have CORPSES listed among the evidence okay? Now you want to investigate this guy cool, after the whole thing with the DK Rises i can see erring on the side of caution.
But setting his bail higher than serial rapists, bank robbers, and actual "here is the corpses" murderers? i'm sorry but that is off the rails. Spin it however you want that is using bail for political purposes and is wrong.
Yeah they are cheap...but also limited as hell for that function. You have to have the media in the right codec, not have it at too high a bitrate, basically you pretty much have to tailor your media to the device.
A MUCH better device for a cheap HTPC is the E350 kits. You can get the board alone at Amazon for around $70, that gives you a dual core and a Radeon GPU that'll accelerate a heck of a lot of formats, but I prefer the ones with the nice case and PSU for $125. Slap on a copy of Win 7 Home or if you want a free OS then OpenELEC has a Fusion build ready to go. You can use videos in dozen of formats, it multitasks well, its just a better system for an HTPC.
That said there are still a ton of places that the pi makes an excellent device, rocketry, robotics, UAVs, there are a ton of different jobs that this will fit and the fact they keep adding cool features like this is just icing on the cake.
Dude you are running 16bit programs and XP mode is slow? If its Win 7 32bit frankly it shouldn't be any slower unless your programs are GPU accelerated which...its a 16bit program, kinda doubt its using the GPU.
Now if you were trying it on the X64 version? That is understandable because the CPU itself can't really switch gears between 64bit and 16bit on the fly. You are gonna have to think about which is more important to you, having the better performance and more memory of X64 or the really old programs.
At the end of the day though the inescapable fact is unless you are gonna airgap the system you really only have about a year left, that's it. So now is the time to be seriously getting a migration path in place and getting things switched over. Now if you are just gonna airgap the system? Hey no problem, I had a customer do something similar for nearly 2 years with Win2K and Macromedia XRes, he knew that program like the back of his hand so I set him up a 2GHz Athlon with a Gb of RAM and a 2 port KVM switch with a simple crossover cable between it and the net system so that the 2K box didn't have any net access, just a single shared folder he could drop files he needed to work on.
But most people aren't gonna go to the trouble of having two systems with a crossover and KVM just for a single program or even a couple of programs, so you really need to be looking at where you wanna migrate to before the clock runs out. After all Win 8 is nearly here and frankly it sucks ass as a business OS, so I'd at least be grabbing me a Win 7 Home or pro box just in case Ballmer quits selling the boxed versions like he did for awhile after Vista came out. Like the boy scouts say, be prepared.
Question: Have you tried Win 7 Pro with XP Mode? Because I've found since XP Mode is just a specialized VM running on top of Win 7 unless you are trying to run 3D accelerated games on the thing frankly it'll run anything XP will run since its...well just XP in a box. And since you get the XP Mode complete with a licensed XP when you buy Win 7 pro its not like it'll cost anything out of poicket to try it. if you'll go to their website they have a trial version of Win 7 pro so it won't even cost a cent to give it a go and see if it'll fix your problem.
Thank you AC I so rarely get to use this in a sentence...WHOOSH!
The point was NOT "New VS Old" but the simple fact that The Pentium 4 was a BADLY flawed design that honestly should have been sent to the scrapyard the SECOND that the Athlon 64s and Core designs came out. Its a giant power sucking energy hog, its like this monster V8 just blowing through gas and belching smoke and which actually gives you worse performance than a new 4 cyl to use a /. car analogy.
I mean look at what I replaced that secretary's machine with, an E350. That is the AMD Bobcat platform, its probably the weakest system AMD makes right now and you can buy it WITH the board AND the nice HTPC looking case for $125 in kit form. Its a 1.65GHz with a Radeon HD6310 built in, its literally half the speed of the P4 but its IPC blows it away while being more responsive, and power and heat...OMG what a difference! You can run the E350 AND a LCD monitor for less power than the P4 idles at.
So while in most cases an upgrade means getting a new shiny in this case its simply better for everyone. Its better for the bosses, who won't be paying this big cooling bill in the summer and for all the wasted juice of the CRTs and P4s, its better for the office workers who go from these big noisy and slow P4s to something quiet and fast, its just better all the way around.
It was one of them little broiling ones and its VERY nasty, if you are not at work don't take MY word for it, look it up. I seriously doubt its a coincidence that pussy riot's initials are PR, there are several articles by actual artists in the area, both performance artists and more traditional, who say PR was nothing but a handful of stupid attention whores doing anything they could to stir up a stink, not to make a political statement but to try to cash in.
Again that was considered one of their "works" along with trying to take credit for the bridge dick bit, which is noticing a bridge going up and down looks like a dick going hard and soft is considered insightful boy are we in trouble as I bet the very first workmen on the very first draw bridge made that joke decades ago.
I had some customers like that, know what I did? I told them to buy just one new box and compare it to their P4 and if they were happier with the P4 I'd hand them their money back and sell the box.
I picked one of the secretaries that had this awful P4 that sounded like a jet taking off and just belched heat and replaced it with an AMD E350 mini, no heat and noise and of course as i pointed out her power usage dropped to less than 18w while having a faster system. She of course just raved about how much nicer it was and they were sold. So with the exception of a few of the graphics guys that needed more power most were changed out to low power units, E350s for the ones just doing basic office work and low power Phenoms for those that were doing a little more heavy lifting.
For those stuck with a boss that thinks "It ain't broke so don't fix it" let your old pal Hairyfeet tell you how to win them over...point out how much money they are tossing each month on power and AC. The Pentium 4 was probably THE worst chip ever made when it comes to power, since Intel with those long pipes on netburst just kept throwing more and more power trying to beat AMD in MHz, and of course they are nearly always paired with some big ass CRT which is also sucking juice and belching heat all over the place.
So just pick up a Kill-A-Watt and show them how much money they are flushing on electricity and then point out that they are blowing even more on top of that in waste heat that has to be dealt with. Then point out how the low power Intel and AMD chips paired with a power efficient LCDs mean they can run 3 systems for the same power 1 of those P4s is sucking and its really not hard to get them to see the big picture. Heck they can't even use IE6 as an excuse since you can run 6, 7, and 8 in XP Mode and even have it preset to ONLY go to the Intranet app, thus letting you use a safer more modern browser for everything else.
Money may be tight but with an office full of P4s and CRTs it really doesn't take long at all for energy efficient units to pay for themselves. As an added bonus Win 7 is supported until 2020 so you can point out they should be set for the rest of the decade.
As far as driver go simply make your own disc with Windows Unattended CD Creator which will let you add Driverpacks which will cover just about ANY hardware you can come across. Of course even if you NLite the hell out of it with all those drivers you'll have to move up to DVD instead of CD. as for WGA it takes like 20 seconds to re-auth but if you don't want to waste the 20 seconds or are dealing with a machine that doesn't have net and you don't want to do the whole phone thing I'm sure I don't have to tell you there is a little thing called "WGA Killer" which i'm sure you can find easily.
Now that said I have to ask...why? Why would you want to do that? You can run Win 7 on any old P4 or better so unless your hardware is from the last century you shouldn't have a problem, even with older hardware its much better memory management makes the system actually pick up speed as you use it (thanks to intelligent caching and actually using free RAM for cache instead of bitchslapping the paging file like XP does) and with Readyboost any $2 2Gb flash drive can be used like a hybrid drive to speed up small random reads thus further speeding up the system.
If there wasn't something better out? THEN I could understand, in fact while everyone was struggling with XP RTM and SP1 I stayed with Win2K pro but when XP X64 came out I switched because it was the better OS even if you didn't have 4Gb of RAM because of the larger registers and being built on the excellent Win2K3 Server meant it was very stable and a solid system. I tried Vista but got bit by one too many bugs and went back to XP X64 but I switched to Win 7 when the beta came out and never looked back. The system I'm typing this on has been running it since RTM, that's 3 years and in that time I've replaced the CPU, GPU, RAM, board, and HDD and I had to re-auth exactly ONCE when I replaced the board and it took less than 15 seconds by Internet, completely painless.
So I look forward to your reply because i honestly can't see the appeal of running XP now. Win 7 is the first one since XP X64 where I can make a list of features and say "THOSE, those right there, make it the superior OS" and not just for consumers like Win 8 metro-fied, with win 7 you have so many features that are great for workstation users too. Default 2 pane explorer, jumplists and breadcrumbs make it insanely easy to get back to work, better memory management makes large applications run better, better video subsystem with hardware acceleration support means even beta GPU drivers can't crash the whole OS like they could on XP, its just a MUCH better system.
Well you don't know how much these guys got paid to sign that contract, hell they could spend 3 or 4 years just having a damned good time and THEN try something new. Remember a game will take a couple of years from idea to shelves.
Plus if I were a game designer? I could see sitting out for a couple of years, it'll take that long for the new Xbox and PlayStation get out and the new dev tools become mature so i can see letting others take the sucky job of putting out the launch titles.
No matter what they decide to do I wish them well, if for no other reason the fun they gave me in their past before EA came along and like Symantec trashed everything that was good about the company. Good luck guys and thanks for the games.
There is a LOT more to recommend Win 7 than just X64, although that IS good. With Win 7 I have placed it on systems as "old school" as a socket 754 sempron with 2gb of RAM and the system...was actually snappy. Thanks to Win 7 having MUCH better memory management the system has real snap, more than XP, and by slapping a cheapo 2Gb flash drive i had around for Readyboost to take up the small I/Os it loads programs MUCH better.
That said you have a third set of users..those whose systems are frankly overpowered for them. You point out the "good enough" while forgetting that XP was sold until Win 7 was released in 09 so I've seen plenty of duals and even triples with 3Gb of RAM and WinXP. Lets look at the low end of those, the Pentium D 820. That chip was used a LOT in low end systems, heck you can find those chips for like $8 now, they are just so plentiful. Now what does the average user actually DO that would slam this chip? Facebook? watching YouTube? listening to MP3s and burning CDs?
Now I have gotten all my customers to switch to Win 7 by pointing out all the extra features and better performance, but I can understand why some wouldn't change until their systems die. After all its a major PITA to completely replace your OS, and frankly most users won't have the skill so its $100 for the OS and another $$ to pay someone to do it. And with the economy in the toilet why go through that work when you have nearly a year and a half of support left?
But I disagree about admins, Win 7 is frankly a joy to admin and is much less likely to go flaky than WinXP, which you have to remember has had 3 SPs and a ton of patches. Finally Win 7 is easy to use without admin rights, whereas XP is a royal PITA to get programs running without admin rights. You often have to tweak like crazy to get programs to play nice without admin, sure most admins are USED to it, but that doesn't mean its pleasant or fun.
Uhhh...missed the memo buddy? you can kill metro like Raid kills bugs and for free, with either Classic Shell or Start 8 which will turn Win 8 into Win 7 with a few non UI bells and whistles like hybrid boot.
This is why I'm gonna pick me up a couple of copies of Win 8 even though i can't stand metro, they are gonna be selling win 8 pro for $40 which means I'll have Win 7 Pro for $40 a pop, hell that's cheaper than I paid for Win 7 Home, and like Win 7 Home it'll do clean install and install from flash only Win 8 will let you run it from the flash with "Windows To Go" which will be nice for service calls.
As for TFA its not like anybody is making you lease, you can choose to buy it if you want, no different than before. I'm sure they'll offer some extras if you lease but every company does that now, you can still just buy the thing or if you're a home user I'd just slap on libre office, for the tasks home users have it works just fine.
And it'll still run too. I personally run my trusty old MS Office 2K on my Win 7 X64 netbooks and it purrs like a kitten, it'll even open the latest formats just fine with the converter. I have 2K7 on my desktop but I prefer the lightness of 2K on the little netbook and if it ain't broke?
This is nothing but what MSFT has done for years which is give you choices when it comes to the product. just need the basics? Student. Need more? Standard. Still more Pro, full shebang? Enterprise i believe is the one with all the bells and whistles.
All this will do is allow those that want the latest and greatest with all the bells and whistles to have it without buying the whole thing every 3 years. I'm sure they'll have discounts for large enterprises running a shitload of copies and will have lots of web based bells and whistles to go with it.
One thing MSFT has been pretty good with is business software and taking care of the whole business market. I'm sure there are plenty of businesses who probably asked for something like this as it means less out of pocket up front and the cost spread out over the lifetime of contract, just the kind of stuff businesses like.