I'm sorry but that is like comparing a luxury car to a go-cart, no offense. You can manage your entire business with a single QB girl (and they are ALWAYS a girl for some reason, you'd think they had a union or something) and in the home space it'll take care of everything from depreciation to budgeting, there really is no comparison.
Hell if you are gonna use Gnu-Cash you might as well just use a spreadsheet, its really not any more friendly or feature rich, sorry. financial software is just not a niche FOSS devs seem to have much interest in.
Cameras and camcorders dude. In case you haven't noticed cameras and camcorders are dirt cheap, and between that and the 5MP+ ones being built into the smartphones I find customers just chewing through space. An SSD is fine for a mobile as long as you don't have any cams involved, but if they want to take and edit photos? Get a hybrid or plane Jane HDD, they'll need the space.
Because AMD has ONLY said they don't have Android support, nothing at ALL about Linux, whereas Intel used a PowerVR chip which as is common knowledge has exactly jack shit for support and frankly never will because the company that makes them has made it clear they DO NOT CARE and won't be sharing or making shit, no drivers, no specs, if you can reverse engineer you MIGHT be in luck, otherwise? too damned bad.
Meanwhile you want to run Linux on Hondo? you can run Ubuntu or any Debian derivative, Fedora or Red hat, hell if you want the 10 foot UI you can run OpenELEC which is built for HTPCs and has a prebuilt Fusion version just for the Brazos line.
You see unixisc this is the difference between open and closed specs. AMD has opened their specs, even hired driver devs to help the open driver team so frankly there is NO need for them personally to release Linux drivers (which BTW the article ONLY mentions Android, while Intel say very clearly Linux is a no go) because it is ALREADY supporting their chips by giving everything to the community. this is exactly what the kernel devs have asked for for years, no binary blobs, no obfuscation, they have full specs, docs, and working code to use.
On the Atom? You are just fucked, powerVR has made it quite clear they aren't gonna open shit and they haven't opened shit so it really doesn't matter what Intel says, you're fucked because even they don't get to release the code. If you go to any Linux forum and look up PowerVR you'll see you'll be lucky to get VESA as its all having to be reverse engineered from scratch, nothing to work with or docs to look at. that makes a BIG difference when it comes to support. If someone wanted to run Android on Hondo they can take the open Linux driver and recompile for Android, no driver exists for Atom. See the difference?
Uhhh...what does ANY of that have to do with Just Cause II? What you just described already exists, its called Team Fortress 2 and has jack squat to do with the game we are speaking about.
All of that crap might be fine (already done to death, but whatever) on some theoretical future game, but with a mod you have to follow the laws already hard coded into the game engine. And anybody who has played JCII knows that the amount of weaponry in that game is totally batshit. It is the ONLY game that i know of where you can literally be at 30k feet, jump out of a plane, hijack ANOTHER plane while freefalling, use that plane to attack a base and then when the plane is shot all to hell ride the thing like a surfboard right into a base and hop off at the last second and not only survive but actually kick major ass!
Now do you honestly think a game with THAT amount of snooker loopy batshit nuts shitting going on in SP is gonna be better by putting a couple of thousand people loose in the thing? And again we are talking about a game that can pimpslap a decent machine just playing SP, when I had a quad and 2 HD4850s in CF it would STILL drop to damned near 30FPS with the pretty turned up and a lot of explosions. Now that I'm only running a single HD4850 and a hexacore medium high is the best I can go for, can you imagine what having a couple of thousand guys setting off DirectX 10 fireballs every 2 seconds all over the huge cities is gonna do for framerates? If you spend less than $2k on GPUs I seriously doubt you'll get anything but a sideshow in the major cities!
Final verdict, sure it looks cool to watch on YouTube but I want to see actual performance on actual machines with actual people, not beta testers. I have a feeling that any GPU that costs less than a grand will look like a slideshow. Remember we are talking a DX10 game with full physics modeling being given to 2000 guys ALL carrying insane amounts of firepower.
Well from the bottom of my heart please walk off the nearest bridge. You expect us to put up with your shit, beheading people on national TV, acting like its 1399, burning our flag and then give a flying fuck because YOU'RE offended? Really? For offensive lets look at some quotes from your "great book" shall we?
Quran 4:89: They (infidels) desire that you should disbelieve as they have disbelieved, so that you might be (all) alike; therefore take not from among them friends until they fly (their homes) in Allah's way; but if they turn back, then seize them and kill them wherever you find them, and take not from among them a friend or a helper.
Quran 8:12: Instill terror into the hearts of the unbelievers;
Quran 2:191: kill the disbelievers wherever we find them
Quran 22:19-22: for them (the unbelievers) garments of fire shall be cut and there shall be poured over their heads boiling water whereby whatever is in their bowels and skin shall be dissolved and they will be punished with hooked iron rods.
Quran 8:12: Your Lord inspired the angels with the message: I will terrorize the unbelievers. Therefore smite them on their necks and every joint and incapacitate them. Strike off their heads and cut off each of their fingers and toes.
Quran 8:7: Allah wished to confirm the truth by His words: Wipe the infidels out to the last.
Quran 8:59: The infidels should not think that they can get away from us. Prepare against them whatever arms and weaponry you can muster so that you may terrorize them. They are your enemy and Allah's enemy.
Quran 8:60: Prepare against them whatever arms and cavalry you can muster that you may strike terror in the enemies of Allah, and others besides them not known to you.
Quran 9.29 Fight those who do not believe in Allah, nor in the latter day, nor do they prohibit what Allah and His Apostle have prohibited, nor follow the religion of truth, out of those who have been given the Book, until they pay the tax in acknowledgment of superiority and they are in a state of subjection.
Quran 47:4: Strike off the heads of the disbelieversâ and, after making a âoewide slaughter among them, carefully tie up the remaining captives.
Yeah nice book you have there...I put it along with Mao's "Little red book" and Mein Kampf in the "shit the world would be better off without" column. Is it true or is it not your "prophet" took a NINE YEAR OLD GIRL as a bride? Is not every. single. quote. I took from your book correct? does it not say you are allowed to decieve and cheat anyone who doesn't believe? And care to explain the word "Dhimmi" to our audience (hint its similar to cattle, what they think of you).
Many here may be PC and not have the balls but I call it as I see it and your "religion" is a totalitarian POLITICAL movement pretending to be a religion. It has more in common with cults like Heaven's gate than it does with Buddhists or any other mainstream religion. And before anybody wastes their damned breath Yes the Christians had similar shit...900 fucking years ago, but they GREW THE FUCK UP which is apparently more than the Muslims will ever do, instead they will follow a religion that tells them which hand to wipe their ass with and which positions to fuck their wives in...if that ain't a fucking cult I'm Sammy Davis Jr.
I'll get hate for saying this but fuck it, get Quickbooks. They now have a free version and its butt simple to use. If you were formerly using MS Money you should have no problem with QB, its even easier to set up and use and there are a bazillion tutorials on the web if you need to do anything fancy. Its quickly becoming my "go to" for customers that ask about money management and they couldn't be happier, not had a single complaint.
That is like saying "You getting bad gas mileage in your truck isn't correct, because my bass boat gets GREAT mileage" as the Linux variant has VERY little in common with the Windows version, which considering that Windows still have over 85% of the market while Linux has 1.05%? NOT a good thing, not good at all.
But as I said see for yourself, take ANY version of Windows (I tried it on WinXP and 7) and place any of the free taskbar CPU meters in the system and watch. if its a system with a bunch of course simply set affinity to 1 core which will, while not giving you a perfect simulation, will get you closer to a low power system, which are still singles and duals, not hexas and octos.
I've tried this little experiment, in no particular order, simply listing what's in the shop I've tried it on, socket 754 Sempron and Athlon, Socket 775 P4 and Celeron, Brazos C50 and E350 APUs, and AMD Phenom I and Phenom II multicores and in every single one Firefox sucked MORE CPU than Chrome or Opera.
BTW friend if you are on Arch, mind a little advice? Try QTWeb which not only has nice features and frankly stomps FF when it comes to CPU usage but is also 100% cross platform, hell its even portable. Runs on all flavors of Windows, BSD, OSX, and Linux.
Wow, you really WANT a fresh bitchslapping, don't you? Challenge accepted!
Lets see...you have Electronic Arts using DRM, we have Ubisoft still requiring online activation if not always on, and of course the current Linux darling Valve which is you'll stop slurping the GNUoolaid from RMS then you'd know that Steam is THE BIGGEST DRM SYSTEM ON THE PLANET DUMBASS that makes its own secure executable which is LOCKED TO A PLAYER...hmm...locked to a player so nobody can share that, what is it? Sounds familiar, could it be...DRM? Dum dum DUMBASS.
But of course all YOU can do is scream NIGGER which in FOSSie language is called PaidMicrosoftShill, but hey, if your kind didn't act like religious zealots then we couldn't enjoy laughing at you, which we do Alex, we ALL laugh at you, at how you can't even see reality when it is cockslapping you in the face, how no matter how broken a mess the devs hand you you say "Oh please good sir, may I have another?" that's what makes it so damned funny!
Oh wow Alex being a FOSSie and throwing insults, surprise surprise. Hey here is a video of RMS you'll find enlightening and as a public service allow me to post some facts (with links, which of course you can NEVER provide) to give those that aren't sucking GNUoolaid some information about the product you keep championing blindly like a Moonie following his master.
How about a nice kernel exploit? Or how about the guy that wrote EEEBuntu saying Ubuntu sucks? which considering they are the current savior of Linux kinda tells you something.
How sad was it that even when a bug was spreading through OSX there were writers pointing out that's no reason to torture yourself with Linux , after all even a virus ridden OSX actually runs which is more than most distros LOL! But hey, you can always tell them they can fix it otherwise they don't need that right? LOL! And I noticed you just couldn't fricking resist screaming "Nigger!" which in FOSSie is done by screaming PaidMicrosoftShill, hey you think you could throw in one more FOSSie cliche please? Then I'll have a FOSSie Flush ROFL!
But if you didn't have cliches and your pathetic attempts at insults why then you might have to have an independent thought and realize what everybody knows that even when MSFT put out a universally reviled OS you STILL got curb stomped, does that give you ANY clues? or all they all brainwashed by those black choppers that have been following you? Hell when the Chinese were given the choice of your "free OS" or pirating Windows they chose the latter even if it meant staying on XP and using IE fricking 6, LOL! Does that ring ANY bells? A smart person would say "what are we doing wrong the other guy is doing right?" but a FOSSie who is just like a Moonie in that they blindly follow, instead says "Its all a conspiracy! They are all shills keeping the masses from true salvation!" and then you wonder why we all laugh at you because you DON'T Listen, you DON'T learn, and Torvalds could take a big steaming dump and hand it to you and you'd thank him for his generous gift. So enjoy that fresh bitchslapping loony, enjoy the fact that the world really doesn't care...but I do, I enjoy slapping you, it makes me feel all warm and fuzzy.
But I DO hope you agree that this is FUD on the part of Intel. Intel used the PowerVR GPU which we know doesn't support shit on Linux whereas the Hondo is simply Brazos II, an AMD CPU bolted to a Radeon GPU and AMD has already released the specs to Brazos so any bog standard Linux that supports Brazos will support Hondo, its really not that different, simply more careful gating to control power usage.
As someone who has actually used Brazos to build dirt cheap HTPCs running Linux I urge anybody that would love a nice HTPC for practically nothing to take a look at AMD. The OpenELEC Fusion build works great, has the XBMC 10 foot UI with a nice theme and great support for remotes, and you can get the barebone with a nice HTPC case and PSU for $125 on NewEgg or Amazon. Hit the sales and you can have a fully loaded HTPC with a Tb of space for $250, you just can't bat that for a remote controlled HTPC that looks sharp in your den.
I'm picking up my mom a new TV for XMas but her BDay is after that and I can tell you she'll be getting one of those OpenELEC systems, its a really nice OS paired with Brazos and will be just perfect for her to surf from her TV and watch her movies on.
Not to mention phones are treated as worthless disposable devices that are given "free' or at lost cost thanks to the contracts skewing the actual cost.
Look can we all get together and tell these "journalists" to kindly go screw their uninformed clickbait...please? As someone who has been in the trenches since the 386 its REALLY simple, once the MHz wars ended and multicores became cheap PCs went from being "good enough" to insanely overpowered for a good 90% of the planet so like their washer and dryer they don't toss until they break, whereas the cell phone gets flushed by the kiddies, it gets coke spilled on it, its treated as the disposable crap that it is so NO SHIT you're gonna have more of them shipping, because people take better care of their PCs and laptops than they do their "worthless" cell phones.
Here is the perfect example, look at what i was selling on the low end over five years ago: A Phenom I X3 or X4 with 4Gb of DDR 2 and a 300Gb+ HDD. Now is there anything your average user does that isn't gonna be just curbstomped by a multicore like that? FB? Surfing? Office? Quickbooks? Hell I have a customer running the latest Solidworks on a Phenom I X3 and he is happy as a clam with the performance and sees no reason to upgrade. Even gaming can't slam these chips, my youngest is blasting through giant MMOs on a 925 Deneb quad, that is a 4+ year old CPU and most games can't even hit more than two cores and even then don't hit 100%.
We are at the start of a worldwide recession (I would argue depression, but whatever) where even China and India are seeing growth stall and people have less disposable income thanks to inflation and rising gas prices. Whereas before they might have been willing to just throw away a perfectly working system just to have a new shiny now there really isn't the extra $$$ lying around and people are deciding if it isn't broke why fix it?
But other than the iDevices I think we are gonna see the same thing happen in mobile. What is the biggest area growing here in the USA? The pre-paids. Instead of getting raped on 2 year contracts people are finding out they can go to Walmart and get an Android smartphone at prices from $79-$200 and pay $50 a month for unlimited everything. As more and more get tired of the screwing they get from the plans you'll see more and more buying their phones (which I understand is already big in Europe) and when they pay for the thing out of pocket instead of getting it "free"? They'll be more likely to take care of it.
Dude you can break out the ruler and their "creation' is pixel perfect, so much so that you could mix and match furniture between the two games and nobody would ever notice!
And look at the characters, their look, their animations, there isn't a damned original ANYTHING! Not a single thing! Don't you think that that goes above and beyond a simple idea?
Nobody is saying "you can't make a FPS" or "You can't make a tower defense game" but what I'm saying is you at LEAST have to do SOMETHING, anything, that isn't an exact copy of the other guy. Hell you could take guys from different FPS and put them in together and they wouldn't look out of place but they sure as hell wouldn't be exact clones, down to the shading on their pockets. Even the WWII games you could take screencaps of the different characters and there are SOME differences, if nothing else the particular shades they used for the various uniforms. Even Warhol used size, shading, and composition to change the default soup can to give his interpretation.
so nobody is saying you can't use the gameplay mechanics and rough ideas, hell if they did there wouldn't be any FPS games since 90%+ of them is "Generic American Soldier in action movie" but you at least have to do your own take on the idea, put a teeny tiny bit of thought, what Zynga did was "Shrubs VS The Undead" with every single enemy and unit pixel perfect. Hell even the Mockbusters use different characters and storylines and those are MEANT to be ripoffs!
But the big elephant in the room, the one nobody wants to talk about is.....DRM.
Whether everyone likes it or not the game publishers will NOT accept putting games on Linux without DRM you can go look at the numbers on TPB to see why. I personally don't mind Steam DRM as its really pretty benign, easy enough to crack (if for some reason you needed to) and they give you plenty of pluses such as matchmaking, one click shopping and gifting, and chat along with the crazy sales which makes many games honestly cheaper to buy than deal with all the bandwidth sucked running BT.
But we know there is a VERY vocal group, whether minority or majority i honestly don't think anyone knows, that believe the four freedoms are sacrosanct and that ANY DRM is not to be tolerated. We have even seen on previous Steam posts users saying "As long as they don't put it in the repos" and frankly i wouldn't be surprised if some of the devs have similar feeling and wouldn't work to make things break, if for no other reason than to say "See? if you opened up you wouldn't have that problem".
But you simply aren't gonna get mainstream users if they have to jump through flaming hoops and the games that worked yesterday don't work today because they thought updating on Linux was safe. Like it or not games on Windows don't break when you apply updates and that is what the users are gonna expect. Canonical can "say" they are gonna support it but its not like they have the funds to fork the entire distro, since Shuttleworth has already said he's not gonna sink more millions into Canonical who knows if they'll even be here this time next year.
So will you accept DRM, or will you refuse and stay out of the mainstream? that's pretty much your choice in a nutshell, can't have your cake and eat it too, as the publishers will simply never jump on the GPL bandwagon. hell you can count the number of big game houses that have been Linux friendly on one hand with fingers left over.
Personally i think either way its gonna be a hell of an interesting fight, the pragmatists that want Linux to be a contender VS the true believers that don't care if nobody uses it as long as it remains pure.
You see once upon a time we had this thing in X86 called "the MHz War" and for Intel, MSFT, and to a smaller extent AMD it was a good time. It meant that both home users and businesses were chunking their systems every 3 years so they were getting LOTS of business, and they became spoiled to the crazy amount of units they were selling.
But then a funny thing happened. Both Intel and AMD hit a thermal wall close to 4GHz and realized that leaping each other in MHz wasn't gonna continue, so first AMD and then Intel started adding cores instead of raw speed. Now for the consumer this was truly wonderful, no more having a program stall and drag down the system, and you could run as much stuff as you wanted. But then AMD and Intel went from "good enough" to "insanely overpowered' and suddenly you were picking up triples and quads in $300 systems so the users simply didn't HAVE to buy new machines, why their 4 and 5 and even 6 year old machines ran everything they wanted with plenty of cycles left over!
And THAT is why MSFT and Intel and AMD are all trying to get a chunk of the tablet market, its because the average user can take any Phenom I Quad or Core quad and run the thing and be happy for a decade, possibly more. I know I have several customers on Phenom I triples that are still quite happy with their performance and see no reason to buy new systems, and with a little TLC than Turion or Core duo laptop will likewise do anything they want to do.
The ironic part is that Intel and AMD and MSFT are gonna be getting in to what I truly believe is the tail end of the boom. ARM is already talking about "dark silicon" because they are already making chips where you can't run all the transistors without killing the battery and with quad core ARM units already out there, where else is there to go? I predict the wave will last another 2 years, maybe 3, simply because there are many that haven't picked up a tablet yet that might want one. After that it'll be X86 all over again and nobody will toss until the previous one breaks...well except for Apple users, but being caught with last year's iPad is just as unhip as wearing last year's Air Jordans but those three companies i named will never be fashionable like Apple.
The simple fact is unless we come up with some new battery tech along with some way for programmers to use an assload of cores there really isn't anywhere to go, hell even gaming which traditionally spurred sales hasn't been slamming CPUs in awhile, and not because of the consoles either, but because its really fricking hard to split that stuff up into 4 or more threads. And for everything else? what does an average user do that would even stress a Phenom I triple? YouTube? FB? playing MP3s? we just don't have any "killer apps" that can really stress these monsters, even older monsters like Core Quads and Phenom Triples.
Citation please? Because I've not seen anything about "OS detection" in TFA, simply that they aren't gonna be doing support, IE drivers. Nothing stopping you from using the already open drivers and if AMD does as they've done for years the latest Linux drivers will probably have support for this one too.
The only place I've heard of any actual lock down is on WinRT, which is no different than what Apple does with iOS. Surprise surprise, Ballmer copying Apple again, but these aren't ARM they are X86 which means no locks.
And as far as how much support actually costs you might want to ask that question of Nvidia. How many drivers have they had to put out for the same chips on Linux over and over and over again because the devs keep futzing with the internals? like it or not a single Windows driver lasts 10 years, Linux drivers? Maybe a year if you're lucky.
What is a shame, and I'll get hate for saying so but fuck it, truth is truth, is how the Linux community royally fucked over AMD.
What did the community say? What were their words? "If you'll open up your specs we'll support you!" and foolishly AMD not only listened and opened up their specs but actually hired devs to help the open drivers team get their code up to speed quicker. Yet what do we see on every. damned. article. that has anything to do with graphics or Linux? A bazillion posts that say "Buy Nvidia and Intel if you use Linux" which of course gave equipment manufacturers all over the world yet another reason NOT to support Linux.
I swear that after that shit, where the community stabbed AMD in the back to support Intel, whose using PowerVR chips in their Atoms, and Nvidia who won't give you shit but binary blobs and piss off the devs bad enough linus gave them the finger, that the default icon for Linux community ought to be trollface.
Its just a damned shame because if the community would have actually kept their word and AMD sales went up? the hardware manufacturers would have had concrete numbers showing that supporting Linux is smart. Now if AMD makes Windows only APUs I wouldn't blame them a damned bit, after all they did what the community asked only to see them welch on their end.
But the problem is gonna be, as we saw in the video, that while it LOOKS cool as hell this thing is gonna end up being a griefer's paradise.
Show of hands, how many here have played JCII? Well I own and love this game and I can tell you picture being Spiderman with access to the most INSANE amount of firepower you can possibly imagine. We are talking Mach 2+ combat aircraft, choppers, tanks, the amount of pure firepower in this game goes beyond crazy and gets into complete batshit.
But JCII as a massively MP game? With as much fricking firepower that you have on hand unless the mod put you in some random place FAR away from people your ass is gonna be blown up before you get 20 feet thanks to all the rockets flying and bombs going on. And has anybody listed what the system reqs is for this thing? Because I can tell you that the SP game can pimp slap the shit out of your CPU and GPU thanks to all the explosions, and that's the ones YOU are causing! With this there will probably a hundred explosions per second in any even slightly populated area, just because huge weapons are so plentiful. hell you can get a truk truk with a fricking tank gun mounted on it from the black market dropped at your feet!
So while this looks fun as hell in theory in real life I wanna see how this thing does with actual players instead of beta testers and see how bad the lag is with all that shit blowing up constantly. that said if you haven't picked it up yet BUY THIS GAME as its the most fun I've had in years in a game, it makes every action movie look like Driving Miss Daisy by comparison.
It Intel FUD because they went PowerVR friend. As we all know PowerVR chips are notorious for not working worth a shit on Linux and the company that makes the chips and licenses the IP have already made it clear they don't care.
If you read TFA you'll see ALL that is says is the Hondo chips "Won't have Android drivers OOTB"...so what? Android is used on ARM, not X86. If you want to run ANY bog standard X86-64 Linux on this its not gonna be a problem, if it supports Brazos it'll support Hondo as Hondo is just Brazos 2.0. last I checked most linux builds have had Brazos APU support out of the box for at least a couple of releases now and if yours supports Brazos? Its all good.
So don't believe the BS, its all FUD and flamebait because Intel has been catching shit over using PowerVR in their new chip and needed to try to point a finger. Sure Hondo will have Win 8 supported OOTB because that is what the OEMs wanted but since when has Linux required OEMs? You'll have the specs to Hondo, no different than how they've been handing out specs to their other chips, and since Brazos works and Hondo is a variant of Brazos I doubt seriously any major work will need to be done to have it run any Linux you want.
TLDR: Non issue, specs open, should already run OOTB.
Well please keep it up, I know I'd much rather have differing viewpoints instead of mindless groupthink and insults.
As for TFA its total FUD, AMD has already released the specs for Brazos and Hondo is just Brazos 2, they aren't supporting Android because no OEM has asked to use this chip in an Android device so wasting time making drivers that nobody is asking for is just stupid. You'll be able to use any bog standard Linux on this, be it Ubuntu or Debian or whatever, since AMD opened their specs on Brazos ages ago.
Oh and just a little FYI but if anybody wants to use one of those cheap Brazos boards for a killer HTPC? Then you're in luck as OpenELEC has a free Linux build with XBMC already tailored for Brazos Fusion chips. I'm sure it'd run just fine on Hondo as well but with E350s going with really nice HTPC cases for $125 on NewEgg and Amazon I'd stick with it until Hondo has been out awhile. If anyone wants to know how it runs? Not bad actually, nice UI, supports most remotes, sold a couple of them and the customers love the hell out of 'em.
But whose fault is that? Its YOUR fault if you went and bought Apple, that's who. Look at the lines like tickets to a rock concert for any iDevice and you'll see why other corps are looking at walled gardens, because Apple showed that most would rather have status symbols and fashion than an open device.
At least with Windows, even Win 8, I can rip out Metro for ClassicShell or Start8 or if I spend a whole $30 I can even have a KDE or GNOME desktop thanks to AstonShell, I can install any damned thing I want, from any media i want, be it flash or DVD or net without needing to jailbreak, and if I want I can just wipe the thing and put any other OS I want from Win 7 to BSD.
Lets be honest folks, wanna know why WinRT is gonna be locked down? Because Ballmer is about to shit another billion down the toilet by selling an iPad specc'd device for Kindle money. Ballmer knows between Android and iOS he hasn't got a shot unless he practically gives the thing away and the LAST thing the sweaty monkey wants is a bazillion YouTube videos on "How to load ICS on that cheap Surface pad so you can have a $199 Asus Transformer woo hoo!" so no shit he's locking it down. And I have to say...who cares? either it sells...and he loses an assload of money, or it don't...and he loses an assload of money.
In the end as long as we can do whatever we want with X86 let them crap money all they want. I'll pick up a couple of copies of Win 8 pro at launch and with Start8 have Win 7 pro for $40. MSFT's loss is my gain, just the way i like it.
Hey I'll be the first to admit that is probably old data, thank the FSM I was able to get both my boys into PC gaming when the AM3 socket chips were dirt cheap so I don't have to deal with the damned consoles anymore.
We now have two hexacores and a quad for the youngest, we all have HD4850 GPUs, and thanks to Steam all I have to do is pop up a window and say "Hey want to jump in?" and we are blasting some Saints Row 3 or TF2 and in a few days we'll be pounding through some dungeon goodness in Torchlight II, woo hoo!
But if you ask my opinion the PS3 was Sony's Saturn, they went too complex with the design which meant they couldn't save money down the line designing it cheaper and using less chips like MSFT could and it was a royal PITA to program for. if the rumors are true ironically the PS4 will simply be a midrange AMD PC running a custom OS so it'll be Sony's turn to go COTS just like MSFT did with XBox 1.
How in the hell was 7 "dumbed down" dude? jumplists, breadcrumbs, sensible (thank fucking God!) memory management, an explorer than finally defaults to two pane, where in the hell is this "dumbing down" on which you speak?
Dumbing down is XP with Fisher price blue and than damned search puppy, Win 7 was the first MS OS since Win2K pro where I could point and say "THAT is an improvement!" especially for business desktops and workstations which are anything BUT dumbed down.
Now Win 8? Sucks big hairy balls (and yes I've run DP, CP and RP so I know of which I speak) and its Metrosexual crap UI looks like low res shit on anything above 1366x768 but thank the FSM we don't have to put up with that, all you have to do is type "How to kill Metro" into Google and you find ClassicShell and Start8, both free, that kills metro like Raid kills bugs.
This is why, despite how much i hate metrosexual, I'm gonna buy a couple of copies at release, why would I do that? simple because with Start8 I have Windows 7 Pro for $40, and you sure as hell can't beat THAT price. Hell that is cheaper than I paid for Win 7 Home by $10, at a price that low there isn't even a point in Windows piracy anymore, just grab Win 8 and use Start8 to have Win 7 pro for $40.
Oh please! Can we finally stop listing this BS as truth? Thank the FSM that Ballmer was too damned busy squirting with his Zune to care about Win 7 which thanks to the Office guys is NOTHING like Vista. From the kernel on up it was improved, got rid of the "senior moments" that Vista was notorious for, hell go look at the Wiki article where it has a "features new to Win 7" list that is more extensive than I care to type.
Comparing Vista to 7 is like saying XP was just WinME with a better kernel, its horseshit. Vista was a rush job because Ballmer let things get totally out of control and had to do a reset in the middle of development. For those that haven't heard of this look up Longhorn and you'll see they had to toss the whole damned thing and start over. With Win 7 they let the engineers clean out all the stupid ass moves, clean up the code, and again left them alone because Ballmer had moved on to squirting.
If you want to see what the difference between Ballmer paying attention and Ballmer leaving the smart people alone is, simply look at Vista and Win 8, THAT is what you get when Ballmer pays attention. Remember the episode where Homer designs a car?
but if you don't believe there was a SERIOUS difference between Vista and 7 I have some magic beans you might be interested in. By SP2 it was usable, not great but usable, and it didn't have jack shit to do with drivers, it had everything due to bad design. Hell my system at the time had ONLY Microsoft drivers and it STILL managed to kill a new HDD thanks to all the thrashing, would "forget" network shares and wouldn't find them until I rebooted the damned system, and playing a song while doing shit would drag the system to a crawl. And this was on a 3.6GHz P4 with HT, 3Gb of RAM, this was no slouch back then and Vista pimp slapped the living hell out of that system, it was truly painful.
Dude...its FUD, not only is it FUD, its FUD by Intel, who went with the PowerVR chip on their new Atom and thus has ZERO Linux support possible!
All AMD said is they haven't got ANDROID support out of the gate...WTF does ANDROID have to do with Linux support? AMD opened their specs ages ago, the new chip is based on Brazos which has been supported for quite awhile now.
So don't buy the FUD, they simply said they don't have Android drivers because nobody has asked to put out an Android version of this particular chip...DUH! Android sells biggest on ARM NOT X86, so WTF? Why would you care? Its not like Ubuntu or any other X86 Linux won't run just fine on this.
So for those that want the truth here it is: Intel went with PowerVR, PowerVR made it VERY clear they don't give a rat's ass about opening shit or supporting Linux anything, several articles pointed out Intel marketing drones saying as much and when it starts to cause a stink Intel tries to spin by going "But but but..they hate Linux too see?" except they don't NEED to "support Linux" as the specs are already open and the drivers already out there.
As for as Win 8? Its a bomb, you know this I know this, hell I bet half of MSFT knows this but Steve "God damned it I want to be Apple!" Ballmer and snickerdouche Sinofsky is gonna ram this turkey home whether anybody wants the damned thing or not. Final verdict? win 8 will "sell" on tablets because Ballmer will shit another billion by selling ipad specs at kindle prices, on the desktop it'll make Vista look like XP, most will say "Meh" and not care, the world keeps spinning.
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I'm sorry but that is like comparing a luxury car to a go-cart, no offense. You can manage your entire business with a single QB girl (and they are ALWAYS a girl for some reason, you'd think they had a union or something) and in the home space it'll take care of everything from depreciation to budgeting, there really is no comparison.
Hell if you are gonna use Gnu-Cash you might as well just use a spreadsheet, its really not any more friendly or feature rich, sorry. financial software is just not a niche FOSS devs seem to have much interest in.
Cameras and camcorders dude. In case you haven't noticed cameras and camcorders are dirt cheap, and between that and the 5MP+ ones being built into the smartphones I find customers just chewing through space. An SSD is fine for a mobile as long as you don't have any cams involved, but if they want to take and edit photos? Get a hybrid or plane Jane HDD, they'll need the space.
Because AMD has ONLY said they don't have Android support, nothing at ALL about Linux, whereas Intel used a PowerVR chip which as is common knowledge has exactly jack shit for support and frankly never will because the company that makes them has made it clear they DO NOT CARE and won't be sharing or making shit, no drivers, no specs, if you can reverse engineer you MIGHT be in luck, otherwise? too damned bad.
Meanwhile you want to run Linux on Hondo? you can run Ubuntu or any Debian derivative, Fedora or Red hat, hell if you want the 10 foot UI you can run OpenELEC which is built for HTPCs and has a prebuilt Fusion version just for the Brazos line.
You see unixisc this is the difference between open and closed specs. AMD has opened their specs, even hired driver devs to help the open driver team so frankly there is NO need for them personally to release Linux drivers (which BTW the article ONLY mentions Android, while Intel say very clearly Linux is a no go) because it is ALREADY supporting their chips by giving everything to the community. this is exactly what the kernel devs have asked for for years, no binary blobs, no obfuscation, they have full specs, docs, and working code to use.
On the Atom? You are just fucked, powerVR has made it quite clear they aren't gonna open shit and they haven't opened shit so it really doesn't matter what Intel says, you're fucked because even they don't get to release the code. If you go to any Linux forum and look up PowerVR you'll see you'll be lucky to get VESA as its all having to be reverse engineered from scratch, nothing to work with or docs to look at. that makes a BIG difference when it comes to support. If someone wanted to run Android on Hondo they can take the open Linux driver and recompile for Android, no driver exists for Atom. See the difference?
Uhhh...what does ANY of that have to do with Just Cause II? What you just described already exists, its called Team Fortress 2 and has jack squat to do with the game we are speaking about.
All of that crap might be fine (already done to death, but whatever) on some theoretical future game, but with a mod you have to follow the laws already hard coded into the game engine. And anybody who has played JCII knows that the amount of weaponry in that game is totally batshit. It is the ONLY game that i know of where you can literally be at 30k feet, jump out of a plane, hijack ANOTHER plane while freefalling, use that plane to attack a base and then when the plane is shot all to hell ride the thing like a surfboard right into a base and hop off at the last second and not only survive but actually kick major ass!
Now do you honestly think a game with THAT amount of snooker loopy batshit nuts shitting going on in SP is gonna be better by putting a couple of thousand people loose in the thing? And again we are talking about a game that can pimpslap a decent machine just playing SP, when I had a quad and 2 HD4850s in CF it would STILL drop to damned near 30FPS with the pretty turned up and a lot of explosions. Now that I'm only running a single HD4850 and a hexacore medium high is the best I can go for, can you imagine what having a couple of thousand guys setting off DirectX 10 fireballs every 2 seconds all over the huge cities is gonna do for framerates? If you spend less than $2k on GPUs I seriously doubt you'll get anything but a sideshow in the major cities!
Final verdict, sure it looks cool to watch on YouTube but I want to see actual performance on actual machines with actual people, not beta testers. I have a feeling that any GPU that costs less than a grand will look like a slideshow. Remember we are talking a DX10 game with full physics modeling being given to 2000 guys ALL carrying insane amounts of firepower.
Well from the bottom of my heart please walk off the nearest bridge. You expect us to put up with your shit, beheading people on national TV, acting like its 1399, burning our flag and then give a flying fuck because YOU'RE offended? Really? For offensive lets look at some quotes from your "great book" shall we?
Quran 4:89: They (infidels) desire that you should disbelieve as they have disbelieved, so that you might be (all) alike; therefore take not from among them friends until they fly (their homes) in Allah's way; but if they turn back, then seize them and kill them wherever you find them, and take not from among them a friend or a helper.
Quran 8:12: Instill terror into the hearts of the unbelievers;
Quran 2:191: kill the disbelievers wherever we find them
Quran 22:19-22: for them (the unbelievers) garments of fire shall be cut and there shall be poured over their heads boiling water whereby whatever is in their bowels and skin shall be dissolved and they will be punished with hooked iron rods.
Quran 8:12: Your Lord inspired the angels with the message: I will terrorize the unbelievers. Therefore smite them on their necks and every joint and incapacitate them. Strike off their heads and cut off each of their fingers and toes.
Quran 8:7: Allah wished to confirm the truth by His words: Wipe the infidels out to the last.
Quran 8:59: The infidels should not think that they can get away from us. Prepare against them whatever arms and weaponry you can muster so that you may terrorize them. They are your enemy and Allah's enemy.
Quran 8:60: Prepare against them whatever arms and cavalry you can muster that you may strike terror in the enemies of Allah, and others besides them not known to you.
Quran 9.29 Fight those who do not believe in Allah, nor in the latter day, nor do they prohibit what Allah and His Apostle have prohibited, nor follow the religion of truth, out of those who have been given the Book, until they pay the tax in acknowledgment of superiority and they are in a state of subjection.
Quran 47:4: Strike off the heads of the disbelieversâ and, after making a âoewide slaughter among them, carefully tie up the remaining captives.
Yeah nice book you have there...I put it along with Mao's "Little red book" and Mein Kampf in the "shit the world would be better off without" column. Is it true or is it not your "prophet" took a NINE YEAR OLD GIRL as a bride? Is not every. single. quote. I took from your book correct? does it not say you are allowed to decieve and cheat anyone who doesn't believe? And care to explain the word "Dhimmi" to our audience (hint its similar to cattle, what they think of you).
Many here may be PC and not have the balls but I call it as I see it and your "religion" is a totalitarian POLITICAL movement pretending to be a religion. It has more in common with cults like Heaven's gate than it does with Buddhists or any other mainstream religion. And before anybody wastes their damned breath Yes the Christians had similar shit...900 fucking years ago, but they GREW THE FUCK UP which is apparently more than the Muslims will ever do, instead they will follow a religion that tells them which hand to wipe their ass with and which positions to fuck their wives in...if that ain't a fucking cult I'm Sammy Davis Jr.
I'll get hate for saying this but fuck it, get Quickbooks. They now have a free version and its butt simple to use. If you were formerly using MS Money you should have no problem with QB, its even easier to set up and use and there are a bazillion tutorials on the web if you need to do anything fancy. Its quickly becoming my "go to" for customers that ask about money management and they couldn't be happier, not had a single complaint.
That is like saying "You getting bad gas mileage in your truck isn't correct, because my bass boat gets GREAT mileage" as the Linux variant has VERY little in common with the Windows version, which considering that Windows still have over 85% of the market while Linux has 1.05%? NOT a good thing, not good at all.
But as I said see for yourself, take ANY version of Windows (I tried it on WinXP and 7) and place any of the free taskbar CPU meters in the system and watch. if its a system with a bunch of course simply set affinity to 1 core which will, while not giving you a perfect simulation, will get you closer to a low power system, which are still singles and duals, not hexas and octos.
I've tried this little experiment, in no particular order, simply listing what's in the shop I've tried it on, socket 754 Sempron and Athlon, Socket 775 P4 and Celeron, Brazos C50 and E350 APUs, and AMD Phenom I and Phenom II multicores and in every single one Firefox sucked MORE CPU than Chrome or Opera.
BTW friend if you are on Arch, mind a little advice? Try QTWeb which not only has nice features and frankly stomps FF when it comes to CPU usage but is also 100% cross platform, hell its even portable. Runs on all flavors of Windows, BSD, OSX, and Linux.
Wow, you really WANT a fresh bitchslapping, don't you? Challenge accepted!
Lets see...you have Electronic Arts using DRM, we have Ubisoft still requiring online activation if not always on, and of course the current Linux darling Valve which is you'll stop slurping the GNUoolaid from RMS then you'd know that Steam is THE BIGGEST DRM SYSTEM ON THE PLANET DUMBASS that makes its own secure executable which is LOCKED TO A PLAYER...hmm...locked to a player so nobody can share that, what is it? Sounds familiar, could it be...DRM? Dum dum DUMBASS.
But of course all YOU can do is scream NIGGER which in FOSSie language is called PaidMicrosoftShill, but hey, if your kind didn't act like religious zealots then we couldn't enjoy laughing at you, which we do Alex, we ALL laugh at you, at how you can't even see reality when it is cockslapping you in the face, how no matter how broken a mess the devs hand you you say "Oh please good sir, may I have another?" that's what makes it so damned funny!
Oh wow Alex being a FOSSie and throwing insults, surprise surprise. Hey here is a video of RMS you'll find enlightening and as a public service allow me to post some facts (with links, which of course you can NEVER provide) to give those that aren't sucking GNUoolaid some information about the product you keep championing blindly like a Moonie following his master.
How about a nice kernel exploit? Or how about the guy that wrote EEEBuntu saying Ubuntu sucks? which considering they are the current savior of Linux kinda tells you something.
How sad was it that even when a bug was spreading through OSX there were writers pointing out that's no reason to torture yourself with Linux , after all even a virus ridden OSX actually runs which is more than most distros LOL! But hey, you can always tell them they can fix it otherwise they don't need that right? LOL! And I noticed you just couldn't fricking resist screaming "Nigger!" which in FOSSie is done by screaming PaidMicrosoftShill, hey you think you could throw in one more FOSSie cliche please? Then I'll have a FOSSie Flush ROFL!
But if you didn't have cliches and your pathetic attempts at insults why then you might have to have an independent thought and realize what everybody knows that even when MSFT put out a universally reviled OS you STILL got curb stomped, does that give you ANY clues? or all they all brainwashed by those black choppers that have been following you? Hell when the Chinese were given the choice of your "free OS" or pirating Windows they chose the latter even if it meant staying on XP and using IE fricking 6, LOL! Does that ring ANY bells? A smart person would say "what are we doing wrong the other guy is doing right?" but a FOSSie who is just like a Moonie in that they blindly follow, instead says "Its all a conspiracy! They are all shills keeping the masses from true salvation!" and then you wonder why we all laugh at you because you DON'T Listen, you DON'T learn, and Torvalds could take a big steaming dump and hand it to you and you'd thank him for his generous gift. So enjoy that fresh bitchslapping loony, enjoy the fact that the world really doesn't care...but I do, I enjoy slapping you, it makes me feel all warm and fuzzy.
But I DO hope you agree that this is FUD on the part of Intel. Intel used the PowerVR GPU which we know doesn't support shit on Linux whereas the Hondo is simply Brazos II, an AMD CPU bolted to a Radeon GPU and AMD has already released the specs to Brazos so any bog standard Linux that supports Brazos will support Hondo, its really not that different, simply more careful gating to control power usage.
As someone who has actually used Brazos to build dirt cheap HTPCs running Linux I urge anybody that would love a nice HTPC for practically nothing to take a look at AMD. The OpenELEC Fusion build works great, has the XBMC 10 foot UI with a nice theme and great support for remotes, and you can get the barebone with a nice HTPC case and PSU for $125 on NewEgg or Amazon. Hit the sales and you can have a fully loaded HTPC with a Tb of space for $250, you just can't bat that for a remote controlled HTPC that looks sharp in your den.
I'm picking up my mom a new TV for XMas but her BDay is after that and I can tell you she'll be getting one of those OpenELEC systems, its a really nice OS paired with Brazos and will be just perfect for her to surf from her TV and watch her movies on.
Not to mention phones are treated as worthless disposable devices that are given "free' or at lost cost thanks to the contracts skewing the actual cost.
Look can we all get together and tell these "journalists" to kindly go screw their uninformed clickbait...please? As someone who has been in the trenches since the 386 its REALLY simple, once the MHz wars ended and multicores became cheap PCs went from being "good enough" to insanely overpowered for a good 90% of the planet so like their washer and dryer they don't toss until they break, whereas the cell phone gets flushed by the kiddies, it gets coke spilled on it, its treated as the disposable crap that it is so NO SHIT you're gonna have more of them shipping, because people take better care of their PCs and laptops than they do their "worthless" cell phones.
Here is the perfect example, look at what i was selling on the low end over five years ago: A Phenom I X3 or X4 with 4Gb of DDR 2 and a 300Gb+ HDD. Now is there anything your average user does that isn't gonna be just curbstomped by a multicore like that? FB? Surfing? Office? Quickbooks? Hell I have a customer running the latest Solidworks on a Phenom I X3 and he is happy as a clam with the performance and sees no reason to upgrade. Even gaming can't slam these chips, my youngest is blasting through giant MMOs on a 925 Deneb quad, that is a 4+ year old CPU and most games can't even hit more than two cores and even then don't hit 100%.
We are at the start of a worldwide recession (I would argue depression, but whatever) where even China and India are seeing growth stall and people have less disposable income thanks to inflation and rising gas prices. Whereas before they might have been willing to just throw away a perfectly working system just to have a new shiny now there really isn't the extra $$$ lying around and people are deciding if it isn't broke why fix it?
But other than the iDevices I think we are gonna see the same thing happen in mobile. What is the biggest area growing here in the USA? The pre-paids. Instead of getting raped on 2 year contracts people are finding out they can go to Walmart and get an Android smartphone at prices from $79-$200 and pay $50 a month for unlimited everything. As more and more get tired of the screwing they get from the plans you'll see more and more buying their phones (which I understand is already big in Europe) and when they pay for the thing out of pocket instead of getting it "free"? They'll be more likely to take care of it.
Dude you can break out the ruler and their "creation' is pixel perfect, so much so that you could mix and match furniture between the two games and nobody would ever notice!
And look at the characters, their look, their animations, there isn't a damned original ANYTHING! Not a single thing! Don't you think that that goes above and beyond a simple idea?
Nobody is saying "you can't make a FPS" or "You can't make a tower defense game" but what I'm saying is you at LEAST have to do SOMETHING, anything, that isn't an exact copy of the other guy. Hell you could take guys from different FPS and put them in together and they wouldn't look out of place but they sure as hell wouldn't be exact clones, down to the shading on their pockets. Even the WWII games you could take screencaps of the different characters and there are SOME differences, if nothing else the particular shades they used for the various uniforms. Even Warhol used size, shading, and composition to change the default soup can to give his interpretation.
so nobody is saying you can't use the gameplay mechanics and rough ideas, hell if they did there wouldn't be any FPS games since 90%+ of them is "Generic American Soldier in action movie" but you at least have to do your own take on the idea, put a teeny tiny bit of thought, what Zynga did was "Shrubs VS The Undead" with every single enemy and unit pixel perfect. Hell even the Mockbusters use different characters and storylines and those are MEANT to be ripoffs!
But the big elephant in the room, the one nobody wants to talk about is.....DRM.
Whether everyone likes it or not the game publishers will NOT accept putting games on Linux without DRM you can go look at the numbers on TPB to see why. I personally don't mind Steam DRM as its really pretty benign, easy enough to crack (if for some reason you needed to) and they give you plenty of pluses such as matchmaking, one click shopping and gifting, and chat along with the crazy sales which makes many games honestly cheaper to buy than deal with all the bandwidth sucked running BT.
But we know there is a VERY vocal group, whether minority or majority i honestly don't think anyone knows, that believe the four freedoms are sacrosanct and that ANY DRM is not to be tolerated. We have even seen on previous Steam posts users saying "As long as they don't put it in the repos" and frankly i wouldn't be surprised if some of the devs have similar feeling and wouldn't work to make things break, if for no other reason than to say "See? if you opened up you wouldn't have that problem".
But you simply aren't gonna get mainstream users if they have to jump through flaming hoops and the games that worked yesterday don't work today because they thought updating on Linux was safe. Like it or not games on Windows don't break when you apply updates and that is what the users are gonna expect. Canonical can "say" they are gonna support it but its not like they have the funds to fork the entire distro, since Shuttleworth has already said he's not gonna sink more millions into Canonical who knows if they'll even be here this time next year.
So will you accept DRM, or will you refuse and stay out of the mainstream? that's pretty much your choice in a nutshell, can't have your cake and eat it too, as the publishers will simply never jump on the GPL bandwagon. hell you can count the number of big game houses that have been Linux friendly on one hand with fingers left over.
Personally i think either way its gonna be a hell of an interesting fight, the pragmatists that want Linux to be a contender VS the true believers that don't care if nobody uses it as long as it remains pure.
So I take it you believe OSX is just BSD with a pretty on top?
Its actually quite simple friend, and kinda sad.
You see once upon a time we had this thing in X86 called "the MHz War" and for Intel, MSFT, and to a smaller extent AMD it was a good time. It meant that both home users and businesses were chunking their systems every 3 years so they were getting LOTS of business, and they became spoiled to the crazy amount of units they were selling.
But then a funny thing happened. Both Intel and AMD hit a thermal wall close to 4GHz and realized that leaping each other in MHz wasn't gonna continue, so first AMD and then Intel started adding cores instead of raw speed. Now for the consumer this was truly wonderful, no more having a program stall and drag down the system, and you could run as much stuff as you wanted. But then AMD and Intel went from "good enough" to "insanely overpowered' and suddenly you were picking up triples and quads in $300 systems so the users simply didn't HAVE to buy new machines, why their 4 and 5 and even 6 year old machines ran everything they wanted with plenty of cycles left over!
And THAT is why MSFT and Intel and AMD are all trying to get a chunk of the tablet market, its because the average user can take any Phenom I Quad or Core quad and run the thing and be happy for a decade, possibly more. I know I have several customers on Phenom I triples that are still quite happy with their performance and see no reason to buy new systems, and with a little TLC than Turion or Core duo laptop will likewise do anything they want to do.
The ironic part is that Intel and AMD and MSFT are gonna be getting in to what I truly believe is the tail end of the boom. ARM is already talking about "dark silicon" because they are already making chips where you can't run all the transistors without killing the battery and with quad core ARM units already out there, where else is there to go? I predict the wave will last another 2 years, maybe 3, simply because there are many that haven't picked up a tablet yet that might want one. After that it'll be X86 all over again and nobody will toss until the previous one breaks...well except for Apple users, but being caught with last year's iPad is just as unhip as wearing last year's Air Jordans but those three companies i named will never be fashionable like Apple.
The simple fact is unless we come up with some new battery tech along with some way for programmers to use an assload of cores there really isn't anywhere to go, hell even gaming which traditionally spurred sales hasn't been slamming CPUs in awhile, and not because of the consoles either, but because its really fricking hard to split that stuff up into 4 or more threads. And for everything else? what does an average user do that would even stress a Phenom I triple? YouTube? FB? playing MP3s? we just don't have any "killer apps" that can really stress these monsters, even older monsters like Core Quads and Phenom Triples.
Citation please? Because I've not seen anything about "OS detection" in TFA, simply that they aren't gonna be doing support, IE drivers. Nothing stopping you from using the already open drivers and if AMD does as they've done for years the latest Linux drivers will probably have support for this one too.
The only place I've heard of any actual lock down is on WinRT, which is no different than what Apple does with iOS. Surprise surprise, Ballmer copying Apple again, but these aren't ARM they are X86 which means no locks.
And as far as how much support actually costs you might want to ask that question of Nvidia. How many drivers have they had to put out for the same chips on Linux over and over and over again because the devs keep futzing with the internals? like it or not a single Windows driver lasts 10 years, Linux drivers? Maybe a year if you're lucky.
What is a shame, and I'll get hate for saying so but fuck it, truth is truth, is how the Linux community royally fucked over AMD.
What did the community say? What were their words? "If you'll open up your specs we'll support you!" and foolishly AMD not only listened and opened up their specs but actually hired devs to help the open drivers team get their code up to speed quicker. Yet what do we see on every. damned. article. that has anything to do with graphics or Linux? A bazillion posts that say "Buy Nvidia and Intel if you use Linux" which of course gave equipment manufacturers all over the world yet another reason NOT to support Linux.
I swear that after that shit, where the community stabbed AMD in the back to support Intel, whose using PowerVR chips in their Atoms, and Nvidia who won't give you shit but binary blobs and piss off the devs bad enough linus gave them the finger, that the default icon for Linux community ought to be trollface.
Its just a damned shame because if the community would have actually kept their word and AMD sales went up? the hardware manufacturers would have had concrete numbers showing that supporting Linux is smart. Now if AMD makes Windows only APUs I wouldn't blame them a damned bit, after all they did what the community asked only to see them welch on their end.
But the problem is gonna be, as we saw in the video, that while it LOOKS cool as hell this thing is gonna end up being a griefer's paradise.
Show of hands, how many here have played JCII? Well I own and love this game and I can tell you picture being Spiderman with access to the most INSANE amount of firepower you can possibly imagine. We are talking Mach 2+ combat aircraft, choppers, tanks, the amount of pure firepower in this game goes beyond crazy and gets into complete batshit.
But JCII as a massively MP game? With as much fricking firepower that you have on hand unless the mod put you in some random place FAR away from people your ass is gonna be blown up before you get 20 feet thanks to all the rockets flying and bombs going on. And has anybody listed what the system reqs is for this thing? Because I can tell you that the SP game can pimp slap the shit out of your CPU and GPU thanks to all the explosions, and that's the ones YOU are causing! With this there will probably a hundred explosions per second in any even slightly populated area, just because huge weapons are so plentiful. hell you can get a truk truk with a fricking tank gun mounted on it from the black market dropped at your feet!
So while this looks fun as hell in theory in real life I wanna see how this thing does with actual players instead of beta testers and see how bad the lag is with all that shit blowing up constantly. that said if you haven't picked it up yet BUY THIS GAME as its the most fun I've had in years in a game, it makes every action movie look like Driving Miss Daisy by comparison.
It Intel FUD because they went PowerVR friend. As we all know PowerVR chips are notorious for not working worth a shit on Linux and the company that makes the chips and licenses the IP have already made it clear they don't care.
If you read TFA you'll see ALL that is says is the Hondo chips "Won't have Android drivers OOTB"...so what? Android is used on ARM, not X86. If you want to run ANY bog standard X86-64 Linux on this its not gonna be a problem, if it supports Brazos it'll support Hondo as Hondo is just Brazos 2.0. last I checked most linux builds have had Brazos APU support out of the box for at least a couple of releases now and if yours supports Brazos? Its all good.
So don't believe the BS, its all FUD and flamebait because Intel has been catching shit over using PowerVR in their new chip and needed to try to point a finger. Sure Hondo will have Win 8 supported OOTB because that is what the OEMs wanted but since when has Linux required OEMs? You'll have the specs to Hondo, no different than how they've been handing out specs to their other chips, and since Brazos works and Hondo is a variant of Brazos I doubt seriously any major work will need to be done to have it run any Linux you want.
TLDR: Non issue, specs open, should already run OOTB.
Well please keep it up, I know I'd much rather have differing viewpoints instead of mindless groupthink and insults.
As for TFA its total FUD, AMD has already released the specs for Brazos and Hondo is just Brazos 2, they aren't supporting Android because no OEM has asked to use this chip in an Android device so wasting time making drivers that nobody is asking for is just stupid. You'll be able to use any bog standard Linux on this, be it Ubuntu or Debian or whatever, since AMD opened their specs on Brazos ages ago.
Oh and just a little FYI but if anybody wants to use one of those cheap Brazos boards for a killer HTPC? Then you're in luck as OpenELEC has a free Linux build with XBMC already tailored for Brazos Fusion chips. I'm sure it'd run just fine on Hondo as well but with E350s going with really nice HTPC cases for $125 on NewEgg and Amazon I'd stick with it until Hondo has been out awhile. If anyone wants to know how it runs? Not bad actually, nice UI, supports most remotes, sold a couple of them and the customers love the hell out of 'em.
But whose fault is that? Its YOUR fault if you went and bought Apple, that's who. Look at the lines like tickets to a rock concert for any iDevice and you'll see why other corps are looking at walled gardens, because Apple showed that most would rather have status symbols and fashion than an open device.
At least with Windows, even Win 8, I can rip out Metro for ClassicShell or Start8 or if I spend a whole $30 I can even have a KDE or GNOME desktop thanks to AstonShell, I can install any damned thing I want, from any media i want, be it flash or DVD or net without needing to jailbreak, and if I want I can just wipe the thing and put any other OS I want from Win 7 to BSD.
Lets be honest folks, wanna know why WinRT is gonna be locked down? Because Ballmer is about to shit another billion down the toilet by selling an iPad specc'd device for Kindle money. Ballmer knows between Android and iOS he hasn't got a shot unless he practically gives the thing away and the LAST thing the sweaty monkey wants is a bazillion YouTube videos on "How to load ICS on that cheap Surface pad so you can have a $199 Asus Transformer woo hoo!" so no shit he's locking it down. And I have to say...who cares? either it sells...and he loses an assload of money, or it don't...and he loses an assload of money.
In the end as long as we can do whatever we want with X86 let them crap money all they want. I'll pick up a couple of copies of Win 8 pro at launch and with Start8 have Win 7 pro for $40. MSFT's loss is my gain, just the way i like it.
Hey I'll be the first to admit that is probably old data, thank the FSM I was able to get both my boys into PC gaming when the AM3 socket chips were dirt cheap so I don't have to deal with the damned consoles anymore.
We now have two hexacores and a quad for the youngest, we all have HD4850 GPUs, and thanks to Steam all I have to do is pop up a window and say "Hey want to jump in?" and we are blasting some Saints Row 3 or TF2 and in a few days we'll be pounding through some dungeon goodness in Torchlight II, woo hoo!
But if you ask my opinion the PS3 was Sony's Saturn, they went too complex with the design which meant they couldn't save money down the line designing it cheaper and using less chips like MSFT could and it was a royal PITA to program for. if the rumors are true ironically the PS4 will simply be a midrange AMD PC running a custom OS so it'll be Sony's turn to go COTS just like MSFT did with XBox 1.
How in the hell was 7 "dumbed down" dude? jumplists, breadcrumbs, sensible (thank fucking God!) memory management, an explorer than finally defaults to two pane, where in the hell is this "dumbing down" on which you speak?
Dumbing down is XP with Fisher price blue and than damned search puppy, Win 7 was the first MS OS since Win2K pro where I could point and say "THAT is an improvement!" especially for business desktops and workstations which are anything BUT dumbed down.
Now Win 8? Sucks big hairy balls (and yes I've run DP, CP and RP so I know of which I speak) and its Metrosexual crap UI looks like low res shit on anything above 1366x768 but thank the FSM we don't have to put up with that, all you have to do is type "How to kill Metro" into Google and you find ClassicShell and Start8, both free, that kills metro like Raid kills bugs.
This is why, despite how much i hate metrosexual, I'm gonna buy a couple of copies at release, why would I do that? simple because with Start8 I have Windows 7 Pro for $40, and you sure as hell can't beat THAT price. Hell that is cheaper than I paid for Win 7 Home by $10, at a price that low there isn't even a point in Windows piracy anymore, just grab Win 8 and use Start8 to have Win 7 pro for $40.
Oh please! Can we finally stop listing this BS as truth? Thank the FSM that Ballmer was too damned busy squirting with his Zune to care about Win 7 which thanks to the Office guys is NOTHING like Vista. From the kernel on up it was improved, got rid of the "senior moments" that Vista was notorious for, hell go look at the Wiki article where it has a "features new to Win 7" list that is more extensive than I care to type.
Comparing Vista to 7 is like saying XP was just WinME with a better kernel, its horseshit. Vista was a rush job because Ballmer let things get totally out of control and had to do a reset in the middle of development. For those that haven't heard of this look up Longhorn and you'll see they had to toss the whole damned thing and start over. With Win 7 they let the engineers clean out all the stupid ass moves, clean up the code, and again left them alone because Ballmer had moved on to squirting.
If you want to see what the difference between Ballmer paying attention and Ballmer leaving the smart people alone is, simply look at Vista and Win 8, THAT is what you get when Ballmer pays attention. Remember the episode where Homer designs a car?
but if you don't believe there was a SERIOUS difference between Vista and 7 I have some magic beans you might be interested in. By SP2 it was usable, not great but usable, and it didn't have jack shit to do with drivers, it had everything due to bad design. Hell my system at the time had ONLY Microsoft drivers and it STILL managed to kill a new HDD thanks to all the thrashing, would "forget" network shares and wouldn't find them until I rebooted the damned system, and playing a song while doing shit would drag the system to a crawl. And this was on a 3.6GHz P4 with HT, 3Gb of RAM, this was no slouch back then and Vista pimp slapped the living hell out of that system, it was truly painful.
Dude...its FUD, not only is it FUD, its FUD by Intel, who went with the PowerVR chip on their new Atom and thus has ZERO Linux support possible!
All AMD said is they haven't got ANDROID support out of the gate...WTF does ANDROID have to do with Linux support? AMD opened their specs ages ago, the new chip is based on Brazos which has been supported for quite awhile now.
So don't buy the FUD, they simply said they don't have Android drivers because nobody has asked to put out an Android version of this particular chip...DUH! Android sells biggest on ARM NOT X86, so WTF? Why would you care? Its not like Ubuntu or any other X86 Linux won't run just fine on this.
So for those that want the truth here it is: Intel went with PowerVR, PowerVR made it VERY clear they don't give a rat's ass about opening shit or supporting Linux anything, several articles pointed out Intel marketing drones saying as much and when it starts to cause a stink Intel tries to spin by going "But but but..they hate Linux too see?" except they don't NEED to "support Linux" as the specs are already open and the drivers already out there.
As for as Win 8? Its a bomb, you know this I know this, hell I bet half of MSFT knows this but Steve "God damned it I want to be Apple!" Ballmer and snickerdouche Sinofsky is gonna ram this turkey home whether anybody wants the damned thing or not. Final verdict? win 8 will "sell" on tablets because Ballmer will shit another billion by selling ipad specs at kindle prices, on the desktop it'll make Vista look like XP, most will say "Meh" and not care, the world keeps spinning.