The thing I don't get is...why would you still WANT to use XP? I've put Win 7 Home and pro on systems as weak as socket 754 semprons and Athlons and late model P4s and Pentium Ds and you know what? It runs great, better than XP in fact because we just slapped little cheap ass 2Gb thumbdrives in the back for Readyboost and that gave load times a serious kick in the pants.
Out of all my customers I had ONE, just one, where we had to set up a dual boot and that was because he was running a seriously ancient version of Quickbooks (which was tied to fricking Flash 7, talk about a security nightmare) and a scanner from 1997 that would barely run in XP but nothing else. Within a year he had upgraded to QB 09 and had tossed that ancient scanner for a nice all in one and now that XP sits there unused.
So I don't know why anyone would keep hanging onto XP, its not only old and creaky, not only is its security piss poor, but frankly side by side Win 7 gives a better end user experience with all the work related improvements like the memory manager, readyboost, jumplists and breadcrumbs, its just a better system. Now every time I'm forced to work on an XP system I feel like I'm stuck on a Win 95 box, its just awful.
Dude, look up "Zynga rips off indie" in the search engine of your choice and be ready to shit brick, because as another poster put it "Its like painting a mustache on the Mona Lisa and calling it an original artwork". Look up "The Farm" I believe it was called and compare it to farmville, hell pick ANY game they have and look up its name and "ripoff" and you'll find that some little indie had put out a game one to two years before and once it started gaining a few users? here comes Zynga and a pile of their Chinese coders to bold face rip it off!
Hell look up the EA court papers man, they have in it side by side photos, they fucking stole EVERYTHING. The characters, their animations, the thought bubble, the UI, the sound, they might as well have just took EA's code and stuck their name on it, it's THAT blatant.
Look, I got NO problem with taking a basic idea and making your own take, look at how we have a bazillion tower defense games, Good God half the FPS games out there are so generic war themed you could place them side by side and it looks like "Generic action movie #47" but that is NOT what we have here, they did NOT put out their own take, what they did is more like taking tracing paper and just ripping it off frame by frame!
Please look it up for yourself Bob, I know how you feel. When I first heard of this I thought "So they both have Sims style games, so what?" but holy shit, they didn't even fricking pretend to have an original thought, it was a pixel to pixel copy. I'm not shitting you either, one of the EA guys actually took measurements and more than 3/4th of the artwork is even pixel by pixel sized so damned identically you could mix and match between the two games and nobody would notice! I'm sure after you see the pics, especially of the little indie guys that could afford to fight back, that Zynga deserves to die and EA deserves to win, this is just pure theft, no bones about it.
That would be fine...if we were talking about Cupertino, but we are talking Redmond.
The problem is, and whether Ballmer really would rather be working at Cupertino is irrelevant for this, that MSFT whether they like it or not gets a LOT of their money from the small business and enterprise markets and they haven't bothered to actually listen and see what is going on.
As someone who works in the trenches I'll pretend you're from Redmond and tell you what EXACTLY is going on: The MHz wars are over, the 3 year upgrade cycle is dead and rotting on the dustbin of history, and PCs years ago went from being good enough to insanely overpowered and so the OSes that run on those PCs need to reflect that reality.
I mean look at the systems I was selling FIVE years ago, we are talking Phenom I X3 and X4 with 3-4Gb of RAM and 300Gb+ HDDs. Is there ANYTHING you average office runs that won't be smoking fast on that? Hell I have businesses running Solidworks on Phenom I X3s and they are happy as clams, I simply slapped in a 1gb GPU to offload some of the load on rotation and its smooth as butter.
So office aren't gonna toss every three years and they don't turn on a dime, it takes testing and tweaking and limited rollouts...its a fucking hard job man. Even sticking with small businesses like I do I can tell you that an OS change is about as fun as getting your nuts hit with a hammer, you are talking thousands to tens of thousands of dollars in software that has to be tested. Try getting an older version of QB Enterprise to run on Win 7...yeah...good luck with that pal!
Which brings me to my point which is MSFT desperately NEEDS users on IE, because it gives them a way to promote their products as well as get users for related services like Live Mail and Bing. If they wanted to make a "light" version that would be fine, but fragmenting a fricking platform that you control is beyond retarded and right into the middle of snooker loopy. what did it gain them? Did it speed Win 7 adoption? Nope all it did was hand all those users to Chrome and FF on a silver platter, how fucking stupid can you get?
Which is why I've said before and I'll say again Ballmer and Sinofsky have GOT to go. They need to bring back someone like Ozzie or Allchin, someone who actually thinks they work at Redmond instead of Cupertino, and right the ship. Because all they are doing now is flushing millions down the shitter by giving their customers every reason NOT to use their products!
Those numbers are from the same bunch that says more software is pirated than the GDP of the planet times ten or so, really wouldn't put much stock in them. And does Sweden have Steam? if so you are in luck, I've not paid more than $20 for a game in years, most less than $15. hell i just got Crysis collection for a dirt cheap $17, that's four games for less than take out around here, can't beat that.
The problem with Nintendo is, and lets be honest here folks, other than a SMALL handful of Nintendo made titles their software is shovelware city. My youngest insisted on getting a Wii and i tried to warn him but he talked his grandma into getting him one...its in the closet next to his DS and PSP while he spends all his time on PC playing his MMOs. Why is it gathering dust? Simple because once he had the handful of decent titles there really wasn't anything to get that wasn't "rampant stick waggling crap" as Yahtzee put it on ZP.
As we have seen making money on the consoles only goes so far and if you can't get people to buy the software that goes with the consoles the money just dries up. Last figures I saw had the X360 having a sell through of 8 games per console, the PS3 4 and the Wii was something like 2, really pathetic. Hell I know several people that bought one Mario or Zelda and the pack in title and that's it, they got bored and just set the thing in the closet.
So while I'm all for competition there hasn't been anything announced so far that really "wowed" me about the Wii U. Sure the hardware looks cool but like the Wii and PSPs if you don't have anything cool to play on it who cares if the locked down hardware is cool? Hell maybe Nintendo ought to open the thing up to modding and homebrew, i know I bought for the original XBox long after it quit being mainstream because it also made a kick ass media tank, maybe the modders could find enough cool things to do with the hardware to make it worth $300.
All I know is looking at the lame launch lineup I'm glad i got my kids on the PC, last thing I need is another console gathering dust in the closet.
I gotta agree, kinda hard to see what audience they are aiming for with the frankly bizarre line ups they have been having of late. And Bayonetta 2 as a launch title? Since when does softcore porn fit into the casual player demographic? yeah I can really see the soccer moms sitting down to play Bayonetta 2.
For a funnier take on the Wii U everyone ought to watch Francis the fanboy's take on the subject, although by the end you have to wonder if they needed to call an ambulance for his ass, dude really needs to lay off the cheeseburgers.
It all comes down to the market, and Ubuntu is for HOME users, remember the "Linux for humans" advertising? So how many home users are remoting into their desktops using X Server? My guess is you could count that number on 2 hands and still have fingers left over, remote control of desktops is just something that most home users don't even think about, much less do.
And the simple fact is for non enterprise uses X is fricking terrible, just piss awful. I could post Thom's epic rant from OS News how simply switching from a video to his chat causes the whole damned desktop to crash, or how Mozilla won't support hardware acceleration on Linux because of X being buggy and crash prone, by why bother? This isn't exactly a secret and daring to go against group think just gets modded down anyway.
If you want more mainstream users you are gonna have to give them a nicer experience and X is about as nice as a kick to the groin. Sure it works great in the enterprise but 1.-The enterprise isn't running full GUIs, watching videos, popping up chat windows and all the other things that home users do and 2.-Because enterprise pays people to work on the problems they encounter enterprise bugs are usually fixed pretty quickly. Again this isn't the case for home users.
So Canonical sees a problem and is trying to route around the damage.,..isn't that how things are supposed to work in FOSS land? you can always fork away if you don't agree with a direction?
Won't happen because there is too many places where Internet is hit or miss and when they are paying you big piles of money? As another below you wrote they DO have to listen on occasion.
They also don't have a monopoly, the new Corel products are actually quite nice and have nearly as many plugin as PS without having near the cost so Adobe is probably scared of giving their clients an excuse to pick up a few Corel licenses and give it a real spin, afraid they may find that they don't really need PS.
I know I've already seen that with a couple of my clients, they didn't like the way Adobe was going with PS so they picked up Corel and found it really wasn't hard to switch.
Try the Comodo spinoffs, Comodo Dragon (for Chrome) and IceDragon (for Firefox) as they are really nice. There really isn't too much they can do with FF as its the Gecko engine that is really the root of the problem but their Chrome version has no phone home and I've gone from V5-V21 and NO UI changes,other than they moved the little Dragon eye from the right to the left side to give more room for the bar, big deal.
So give it a spin, like you I was getting irritated at the way browsers were going so I just spent a week trying every damned thing under the sun, even the more offbeat like SWIron and QTWeb (which is great if you need cross platform support, as it works on everything) and after trying a good dozen different browsers i finally settled on the Dragon and couldn't be happier.
Oh and if you ever have a problem? just pop on to their forums, their devs actually lurk there and are happy to fix any problems VERY quickly. I ran into a weird little bug with the last release where it didn't want to load my startup page, they spent about 10 minutes talking to me and then posted a workaround while saying they would be sure to have that weird little bug fixed for the next version. Really nice guys and 10 minutes from listing problem to workaround? Can't beat that.
Firefox is a piggie, not so much in memory as that HAS gotten better but in CPU spiking it royally sucks ass. I have an AMD E350 netbook and I can gain an hour of surfing time by NOT using Firefox, that ought to tell you something. I have a 1.8GHz Sempron in the shop I use as a nettop because it uses less than 40w under load. With Dragon or Chrome? Great web surfing, can even play 720p videos no problem, Firefox? Just launching will slam the CPU to 100% and make the entire machine unresponsive for 40 seconds to a minute and every action you do in Firefox will suck CPU cycles like a drunk at a free bar. Simply going through my bookmarks can hit 80% CPU...really? Just to look at the bookmarks? And Firefox suffers from what I call "senior moments" where the entire system will just hang, sometimes for up to a minute. The chrome variants? Just don't do that.
Don't take my word for it, take ANY software that lets you have a CPU gauge in the taskbar AnVir Task Manager is a good one but there are a ton to choose from, and then watch the gauge as you do various tasks in both FF and any Chrome variant. You'll find that FF pimp slaps the living hell out of the CPU, I don't care which extensions you have, while Chrome simply don't. In my own little tests I've found anything short of a 3.2GHz P4 with HT is simply unusable on FF 15, its senior moments (which is it slamming the CPU to 100%) simply make the entire experience painful.
Its a fricking browser, you shouldn't need a high powered multicore just to run the damned thing. If anyone doubts I'll be more than happy to post screencaps, it'll just take a bit as I'll have to blank out my bookmarks, or reinstall without my bookmarks installed.
Sweet! I never understood the hatred and snobbery some folks get for the lower end stuff, some of it is great. I paid a grand total of $350 for my EEE netbook and that was WITH an 8Gb of faster RAM upgrade AND a carrying case and with that AMD E350 dual core the thing does 1080p over HDMI and gets 7 hours web surfing. Hell I've even played games like L4D, Crazy Taxi, GTA;VC (probably would play the others but I don't have them) and it all works just fine. Why would I pay more for an ultrabook when this does everything I need a portable to do? Just to show I have money?
But now you see why I don't get what market they are going for. I have seen Android 2.x on $69 phones and $89 tablets and as another poster wrote by this time next year feature phones probably won't exist simply because the chips they use will be more expensive than the chips in those $69 phones. So instead you'll see the $10 Tracphones with the same or more power than that $69 Android and it'll run the Appstore and do everything you'd want a basic smartphone to do just fine.
So where does that leave them? A market that won't even exist next year? Moore's Law means that feature phones are doomed, there simply won't be a point in making chips that weak anymore than there would be a point for Intel to make the Pentium II today, it would cost just as much if not more to make the shitty chip as it would the good chip so why make the shitty one? So if they would have come out with this 4 years ago? Yep could have seen what they are going for. But today the ODMs already know Android, its got hundreds of thousands of apps, and it is already absorbing the low end where JavaME and Symbian used to have a niche, so what is left? Where can they go?
Wow the IE fans must be out today, seeing as I got modded down for daring to point out IE is fragmented all to hell.
The way I look at it is VERY simple: Is the product still under support? If yes then your flagship products should still run on it, especially when you consider that businesses don't change their entire systems in a day and therefor there is gonna have to be transition times.
I mean if I'm a corp with XP and 7 boxes in the middle of a switchover, why would I want to use IE when I can't even use one version? Answer I probably wouldn't, I'd just use Chrome or Firefox or one of the variants like Dragon. I can tell you its a HELL of a lot easier to support users when you have them all on the same page, as you don't have to deal with which quirks are browser A and which are browser B, if they are all on the same page that is eliminated. With Dragon or IceDragon it doesn't matter whether my users are XP/Vista/7/8 it is the same browser system wide, which is one less hassle for me.
I still can't figure out WTF they were thinking on this one, its like they think its still 2003 and they can do whatever because IE has no competition instead of being 2012 where there is over a dozen mainstream browsers and more websites are coded to work for them than IE. Just one more stupid move from Ballmer and CO, why am I not surprised.
You gotta give Zynga credit though, it takes some VERY large brass balls to basically say "We stole your product and now we are gonna sue you....because you won't let us steal more of your products."
Which is why I can't see how ANYBODY can defend Zynga in this case. Is EA run by douchebags? Yes it is, and thanks to their douchebaggy ways EA is now up for sale, showing that refusing to buy from companies that treat you like shit works, even if it takes awhile.
But with Zynga the ONLY reason you haven't heard of this before is they were stealing from the little devs that couldn't fight back. Look up any of their games, going back to the very first ones like Farmville and you'll find an indie dev that had put out the EXACT SAME GAME one to two years before, and I mean the EXACT same game, Zynga doesn't bother to change shit but the name!
We don't let ANY other artform do this, I can't put out my own version of "Lord Of The Rings" with every character and word of dialog and simply rename it "Lord Of The Bracelets" and not get my ass sued off, I can't hire studio musicians to knock off the songs on the top 10 and simply change the title and put out my own top ten mega mix albums, so why in the fuck should Zynga be allowed to steal every damned thing, from the characters to the art style to the fricking UIs, slap a new name on it and then sell it?
If you can't see how this is seriously bad for indies then you are blind. if Zynga gets away with this why should I buy "Plants VS Zombies" when some corp will hire a bunch of Chinese coders and I can have "Shrubs VS The Undead" next week for free on FB? Why buy Minecraft when I can have MineBuilder for free? One of the great things that has come along is the way the Internet allows small artists to compete and sell their wares no different than the big guys, but if this kind of shit isn't stopped when it comes to games they won't have a prayer, either they work for the megacorps who have enough money to sue, or everything they do will be taken from them. That is frankly a shitty choice and as much as I don't care for EA they are 100% in the right on this one and I hope they crush Zynga like the bugs that they are, go EA!
The ones I feel sorry for are the Vista users, they get no love at all even though their OS is supported until 2017. All the ones I've seen that have killed XP support seem to go from XP straight to 7, no Vista support at all. Poor Vista users, first you get a crappy OS then everyone ignores you.
Actually Win 7 is the first one since Win2K Pro (great OS that one was) where I can point to real honest to God improvements and say "THAT, that right there, that's worth upgrading for", such as MUCH better memory management where Windows will actually use available memory for caching instead of slamming the page file when you still have memory free, jumplists and breadcrumbs make it butt simple to get back to where you were working the day before, readyboost can give a real kick in the pants to older systems by moving small I/Os onto a spare flash stick, its simply a much better OS all around.
So if you are keeping your users on XP you really are doing them a disservice, it was alright back in the day but its over a decade old now and the tech has made it obsolete, time to move on. Heck I've got several customers running it on a midrange (2.2GHz-3.2GHz) P4 with 2Gb of RAM so it isn't like you even have to toss the boxes. Just let it go man, let it go.
You ran Win 7 on a Pentium 2? Why man good God why? Did you lose a bet or something?
While frankly nobody should be using something THAT old as a day to day system i can say that I've thrown Win 7 on several systems that are more likely what you are gonna find in the wild, socket 754 Semprons and socket 478 P4s and it runs just fine and is pleasant to use on those 7+ year old systems. No Aero of course but its not like you need Aero for anything.
But the fact that you have to run a non MSFT browser on products that are still under support just shows why IE is doomed, they have really shot themselves in the foot by fragmenting the hell out of the userbase. Hell I can't even keep up with what runs on where, is it 7 is the last XP version or 8? And isn't IE 10 supposedly to be for 7 and 8, thus screwing over the Vista users?
IE is just too much of a fragmented mess anymore and I'm just glad I've gotten my customers off the damned thing. Now I give them Comodo Dragon and Firefox (although recently I've started using IceDragon, I like the layout a little better than standard FF) and tell them if they insist on using IE just don't expect any support for it, with Dragon it doesn't matter which OS they are on its just one browser, but IE is just too much of a mess. If you have to support IE? I pity you, I really do.
Hey don't knock it if you haven't tried it, one of my friends got tired of being assraped on his contract so went and got this $79 Android prepaid and after he let me play with it for a half an hour?
Its...really not a bad phone actually. It plays music nicely, surfs just fine, videos looked decent, as decent as one can expect on a screen that small, overall I had to say i would have NO problem using that as my day to day smartphone. Hell he even slapped a 32gb Micro-SD into it and he uses it now as his PMP as well as a smartphone, its really not a bad little unit.
Which is why I just don't see what market Firefox is going for, I mean what are they gonna put it on? $10 Tracphones? I've used those things as throwaway phones for vacation so I don't have to give a crap about something happening to it and they REALLY suck when it comes to the CPU, we are talking seriously weak and laggy. Any FF put on something THAT weak is gonna be painful and make FF look bad, and as you and I have both seen anything more expensive Android has covered and already has 200,000+ apps for the 2.x line which is what most of these cheapies run.
Thanks for the tablet link though, I'm gonna have to take a spin over to Wally World and see if they have one in stock. I mean at $50 who cares if you kill it? This looks like a perfect new playtoy.
He's a fricking geek dude, if you wanna grab a fricking geek it ain't fricking rocket science!
Grab him while he's at work, grab him when he is walking to his car, five will get you ten that like most people on this planet he is predictable as all hell.
And I'm sorry but your "scenario" is beyond batshit. Show me ONE, just one mind you, arrest the FBI has EVER made where anybody did anything that completely batshit. I have a friend that works at the state crime lab, the guys they nab are looking at 60+ years, more than this little nerd would EVER look at and the worst thing they've had to deal with is encrypted DVDs.
No exploding hard drives, no nailguns,this is just as retarded as yanking on the diaper of that 98 year old by the TSA because "Maybe granny hid a bomb in her pissy diapers"...yeah horseshit. Its designed for ONE thing and that is intimidation, they want to make sure YOU read about this and are afraid to speak against them.
The simple fact is, whether anybody likes it or not, is that we simply haven't found ANY tech that can replace oil when it comes to the amount of energy per unit. Last I checked oil gives you a return of something like 30 to 1, most of the other techs are around 3-5 to 1. that isn't even close folks.
Then there is the problem of the NIMBYs, that frankly have a living shitfit if you do ANYTHING anywhere near them. Look at China, they are gonna have a good 25 nuclear reactors online in the time it takes the USA to get ONE through the 560 levels of paperwork and NIMBY bullshit. The smart way to go would be a combination of nuclear, molten salt and solar panels, wind and tide power generation cutting the living hell out of fossil fuel usage so pretty much the only thing we'd need it for is vehicles, but that will never happen here thanks to NIMBY.
Frankly I truly believe we could solve our energy problems within the next 15 years but sadly the whole damned thing has gotten too political. Instead of doing what will be best for the country you have lobbyists pushing blank checks for pointless programs like cap&trade, you've got NIMBYs having a shitfit if you build ANYTHING and the greenies are nearly as bad only they'll claim your new plant is gonna kill a frog or something. The whole damned thing here is so fucked up.
Look at the Walmart straight talk Android phone, its popular as hell here and after playing with one I can see why. The phone is $130 (A Galaxy something, you'd have to look it up but it surfs nice) and the service is $50 a month unlimited everything and no contract. You can even get it cheaper if you buy in 3 month or 6 month instead of monthly.
I figured at that price it would really suck but...it was nice actually. The phone was responsive, battery life was decent, it surfed and played music nicely, really couldn't find anything wrong with it other than no SIM support. If all you want is a smartphone with no contract crap you should check one out.
I take it you haven't used Firefox lately? Man I really wish they'd spin these research projects off and keep the browser devs focused on the damned browser. Used to be every release it got better, sure it had bugs but you could see real progress being made, each release was better than the last...not anymore, now it gets prettier but NOT better and on anything low power it gets curbstomped by any of the Chromium variants.
As for TFA...where is the market? Third world maybe? Hell Walmart is selling $130 no contract Android phones now and the price is dropping all the time, i really wouldn't be surprised to see a $60 Android phone this time next year. So I really don't see what market they are gonna target with this thing, maybe if it would have come out 3 or 4 years ago but now all the ODMs and devs know Android and its really not hard to get the 2.x branch to run on any damned thing, look at all the sub $80 tablets out there. Hell the other day I saw a $100 tablet running 4.0, so how cheap can FF go and still have a market worth pursuing?
Oh horseshit, have you been watching CSI or something? Short of sticking explosive to the things ANY software based tool is gonna take a SERIOUSLY long time to even do a single pass and simply pulling the plug would kill that shit quick.
Now one could argue that MAYBE, just maybe, he had something like truecrypt on the drive but if that was the case simply popping the power switch with his foot would be enough to unmount the drive so kicking in the door wouldn't help shit anyway and a better strategy would be to simply grab this guy on the way to his car where he don't know shit is going on or bug his PC when he isn't at home.
Nope the whole point of shit like this is INTIMIDATION, its to make YOU scared to speak up against them. Look at this nice little Jewish girl that gets to be hassled and intimidated every time she flies anywhere by being put on the watchlist, her crime? Speaking about your constitutional rights.
I'm sorry but LEOs aren't the good guys anymore, they are pitbulls used by the state to keep the peasants scared of speaking up or talking back.
Then in that case there shouldn't be a fricking no knock take down huh? lets face it if someone yell police while blasting down your door either with their feet or a fricking ram do you REALLY think you are gonna hear them over the exploding door?
If you REALLY want to see what the problem is at its core watch "The largest gang in America" on YouTube, No bullshit, nothing made up, just actual footage of cops acting NO DIFFERENT than your average gang bangers. Bashing people's heads who haven't done shit, starting trouble just so they can pound on someone, its completely disgusting and even more so when you realize that the vast majority of cops on that video are STILL ON THE FORCE thus condoning that kind of behavior.
But you are comparing with devices I bet you haven't even tried...have you even tried one of the new Atom or Bobcat units? I have an AMD E350 in my EEE and its fricking great, it gets nearly 7 hours surfing time on a device that weighs less than 2 and a half pounds, does full 1080P over HDMI, even plays L4D and GTA:VC (it would probably play the others in the series, I just don't have them) and it does so without ever getting more than slightly warm to the touch, never uncomfortable on my lap.
And that is just today's chips friend, Bobcat II is gonna have sub 6w dual cores WITH that 6w also including a nice AMD Radeon GPU, the quads are shooting for a sub 9w, and of course since Intel is ahead on the shrinks they are talking sub 3w Atom duals that will do full 1080p and both will run ALL your X86 software no problem.
So again we are seeing as AMD and Intel actually begin to care about TDP that its simply easier to scale down X86 while still curbstomping ARM when it comes to IPC. That doesn't mean ARM doesn't have a place, I seriously doubt anything will replace ARM in embedded and PMPs, but its easy to see a future where you can grab a sub $300 tablet that will let you run Windows, Linux, or BSD in full X86 while still getting good battery life and more importantly actually being enjoyable to use. Try loading a flash page on an ARM Android unit and it feels like you are running a P2 on the modern web, whereas I watch videos all day long on my Bobcat with full hardware acceleration and its smooth and still gives me room to multitask.
Sorry friend but I have TF Classic and TF 2 and they are NOT the same thing, not even close. In TF Classic for example the server host can set up his own MP3s for in game events which can be fricking hilarious. When I got hit 3 times in a row by a turrent gun I got to jear a clip from the AC/DC song "Big Gun" "Big Gun #1, Big Gun kick the hell out of you" which made me damned near fall out of my chair laughing. Also the different traps and grenades make it a VERY different experience, you can fly low but if you don't CYA all it takes is walking around the corner into a trap and BAM! That's your ass Mr Postman...which BTW I heard that clip when I got popped by a trap, again much laughter.
So for those that think TF2 is the same as TF Classic with better graphics I urge you to buy TF Classic on Steam, its cheap, the servers are full of people 24/7, and its a fricking blast and a half. Personally I don't care for TF2 at all, but TF Classic is just a hoot.
You just hit the nail on the head, blatant bribery has turned the judicial system into a kangaroo court.
Once upon a time we had this notion called "conflict of interest" where if the judge didn't recuse themselves the superior courts would toss the case and give the judge a good ass chewing to boot. Now it doesn't matter how blatantly the judge is involved with one side, nobody will say squat and the corps know this. Frankly the whole thing is just sickening..
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The thing I don't get is...why would you still WANT to use XP? I've put Win 7 Home and pro on systems as weak as socket 754 semprons and Athlons and late model P4s and Pentium Ds and you know what? It runs great, better than XP in fact because we just slapped little cheap ass 2Gb thumbdrives in the back for Readyboost and that gave load times a serious kick in the pants.
Out of all my customers I had ONE, just one, where we had to set up a dual boot and that was because he was running a seriously ancient version of Quickbooks (which was tied to fricking Flash 7, talk about a security nightmare) and a scanner from 1997 that would barely run in XP but nothing else. Within a year he had upgraded to QB 09 and had tossed that ancient scanner for a nice all in one and now that XP sits there unused.
So I don't know why anyone would keep hanging onto XP, its not only old and creaky, not only is its security piss poor, but frankly side by side Win 7 gives a better end user experience with all the work related improvements like the memory manager, readyboost, jumplists and breadcrumbs, its just a better system. Now every time I'm forced to work on an XP system I feel like I'm stuck on a Win 95 box, its just awful.
Dude, look up "Zynga rips off indie" in the search engine of your choice and be ready to shit brick, because as another poster put it "Its like painting a mustache on the Mona Lisa and calling it an original artwork". Look up "The Farm" I believe it was called and compare it to farmville, hell pick ANY game they have and look up its name and "ripoff" and you'll find that some little indie had put out a game one to two years before and once it started gaining a few users? here comes Zynga and a pile of their Chinese coders to bold face rip it off!
Hell look up the EA court papers man, they have in it side by side photos, they fucking stole EVERYTHING. The characters, their animations, the thought bubble, the UI, the sound, they might as well have just took EA's code and stuck their name on it, it's THAT blatant.
Look, I got NO problem with taking a basic idea and making your own take, look at how we have a bazillion tower defense games, Good God half the FPS games out there are so generic war themed you could place them side by side and it looks like "Generic action movie #47" but that is NOT what we have here, they did NOT put out their own take, what they did is more like taking tracing paper and just ripping it off frame by frame!
Please look it up for yourself Bob, I know how you feel. When I first heard of this I thought "So they both have Sims style games, so what?" but holy shit, they didn't even fricking pretend to have an original thought, it was a pixel to pixel copy. I'm not shitting you either, one of the EA guys actually took measurements and more than 3/4th of the artwork is even pixel by pixel sized so damned identically you could mix and match between the two games and nobody would notice! I'm sure after you see the pics, especially of the little indie guys that could afford to fight back, that Zynga deserves to die and EA deserves to win, this is just pure theft, no bones about it.
That would be fine...if we were talking about Cupertino, but we are talking Redmond.
The problem is, and whether Ballmer really would rather be working at Cupertino is irrelevant for this, that MSFT whether they like it or not gets a LOT of their money from the small business and enterprise markets and they haven't bothered to actually listen and see what is going on.
As someone who works in the trenches I'll pretend you're from Redmond and tell you what EXACTLY is going on: The MHz wars are over, the 3 year upgrade cycle is dead and rotting on the dustbin of history, and PCs years ago went from being good enough to insanely overpowered and so the OSes that run on those PCs need to reflect that reality.
I mean look at the systems I was selling FIVE years ago, we are talking Phenom I X3 and X4 with 3-4Gb of RAM and 300Gb+ HDDs. Is there ANYTHING you average office runs that won't be smoking fast on that? Hell I have businesses running Solidworks on Phenom I X3s and they are happy as clams, I simply slapped in a 1gb GPU to offload some of the load on rotation and its smooth as butter.
So office aren't gonna toss every three years and they don't turn on a dime, it takes testing and tweaking and limited rollouts...its a fucking hard job man. Even sticking with small businesses like I do I can tell you that an OS change is about as fun as getting your nuts hit with a hammer, you are talking thousands to tens of thousands of dollars in software that has to be tested. Try getting an older version of QB Enterprise to run on Win 7...yeah...good luck with that pal!
Which brings me to my point which is MSFT desperately NEEDS users on IE, because it gives them a way to promote their products as well as get users for related services like Live Mail and Bing. If they wanted to make a "light" version that would be fine, but fragmenting a fricking platform that you control is beyond retarded and right into the middle of snooker loopy. what did it gain them? Did it speed Win 7 adoption? Nope all it did was hand all those users to Chrome and FF on a silver platter, how fucking stupid can you get?
Which is why I've said before and I'll say again Ballmer and Sinofsky have GOT to go. They need to bring back someone like Ozzie or Allchin, someone who actually thinks they work at Redmond instead of Cupertino, and right the ship. Because all they are doing now is flushing millions down the shitter by giving their customers every reason NOT to use their products!
Those numbers are from the same bunch that says more software is pirated than the GDP of the planet times ten or so, really wouldn't put much stock in them. And does Sweden have Steam? if so you are in luck, I've not paid more than $20 for a game in years, most less than $15. hell i just got Crysis collection for a dirt cheap $17, that's four games for less than take out around here, can't beat that.
The problem with Nintendo is, and lets be honest here folks, other than a SMALL handful of Nintendo made titles their software is shovelware city. My youngest insisted on getting a Wii and i tried to warn him but he talked his grandma into getting him one...its in the closet next to his DS and PSP while he spends all his time on PC playing his MMOs. Why is it gathering dust? Simple because once he had the handful of decent titles there really wasn't anything to get that wasn't "rampant stick waggling crap" as Yahtzee put it on ZP.
As we have seen making money on the consoles only goes so far and if you can't get people to buy the software that goes with the consoles the money just dries up. Last figures I saw had the X360 having a sell through of 8 games per console, the PS3 4 and the Wii was something like 2, really pathetic. Hell I know several people that bought one Mario or Zelda and the pack in title and that's it, they got bored and just set the thing in the closet.
So while I'm all for competition there hasn't been anything announced so far that really "wowed" me about the Wii U. Sure the hardware looks cool but like the Wii and PSPs if you don't have anything cool to play on it who cares if the locked down hardware is cool? Hell maybe Nintendo ought to open the thing up to modding and homebrew, i know I bought for the original XBox long after it quit being mainstream because it also made a kick ass media tank, maybe the modders could find enough cool things to do with the hardware to make it worth $300.
All I know is looking at the lame launch lineup I'm glad i got my kids on the PC, last thing I need is another console gathering dust in the closet.
I gotta agree, kinda hard to see what audience they are aiming for with the frankly bizarre line ups they have been having of late. And Bayonetta 2 as a launch title? Since when does softcore porn fit into the casual player demographic? yeah I can really see the soccer moms sitting down to play Bayonetta 2.
For a funnier take on the Wii U everyone ought to watch Francis the fanboy's take on the subject, although by the end you have to wonder if they needed to call an ambulance for his ass, dude really needs to lay off the cheeseburgers.
It all comes down to the market, and Ubuntu is for HOME users, remember the "Linux for humans" advertising? So how many home users are remoting into their desktops using X Server? My guess is you could count that number on 2 hands and still have fingers left over, remote control of desktops is just something that most home users don't even think about, much less do.
And the simple fact is for non enterprise uses X is fricking terrible, just piss awful. I could post Thom's epic rant from OS News how simply switching from a video to his chat causes the whole damned desktop to crash, or how Mozilla won't support hardware acceleration on Linux because of X being buggy and crash prone, by why bother? This isn't exactly a secret and daring to go against group think just gets modded down anyway.
If you want more mainstream users you are gonna have to give them a nicer experience and X is about as nice as a kick to the groin. Sure it works great in the enterprise but 1.-The enterprise isn't running full GUIs, watching videos, popping up chat windows and all the other things that home users do and 2.-Because enterprise pays people to work on the problems they encounter enterprise bugs are usually fixed pretty quickly. Again this isn't the case for home users.
So Canonical sees a problem and is trying to route around the damage.,..isn't that how things are supposed to work in FOSS land? you can always fork away if you don't agree with a direction?
Won't happen because there is too many places where Internet is hit or miss and when they are paying you big piles of money? As another below you wrote they DO have to listen on occasion.
They also don't have a monopoly, the new Corel products are actually quite nice and have nearly as many plugin as PS without having near the cost so Adobe is probably scared of giving their clients an excuse to pick up a few Corel licenses and give it a real spin, afraid they may find that they don't really need PS.
I know I've already seen that with a couple of my clients, they didn't like the way Adobe was going with PS so they picked up Corel and found it really wasn't hard to switch.
Try the Comodo spinoffs, Comodo Dragon (for Chrome) and IceDragon (for Firefox) as they are really nice. There really isn't too much they can do with FF as its the Gecko engine that is really the root of the problem but their Chrome version has no phone home and I've gone from V5-V21 and NO UI changes,other than they moved the little Dragon eye from the right to the left side to give more room for the bar, big deal.
So give it a spin, like you I was getting irritated at the way browsers were going so I just spent a week trying every damned thing under the sun, even the more offbeat like SWIron and QTWeb (which is great if you need cross platform support, as it works on everything) and after trying a good dozen different browsers i finally settled on the Dragon and couldn't be happier.
Oh and if you ever have a problem? just pop on to their forums, their devs actually lurk there and are happy to fix any problems VERY quickly. I ran into a weird little bug with the last release where it didn't want to load my startup page, they spent about 10 minutes talking to me and then posted a workaround while saying they would be sure to have that weird little bug fixed for the next version. Really nice guys and 10 minutes from listing problem to workaround? Can't beat that.
I'll be happy to elaborate.
Firefox is a piggie, not so much in memory as that HAS gotten better but in CPU spiking it royally sucks ass. I have an AMD E350 netbook and I can gain an hour of surfing time by NOT using Firefox, that ought to tell you something. I have a 1.8GHz Sempron in the shop I use as a nettop because it uses less than 40w under load. With Dragon or Chrome? Great web surfing, can even play 720p videos no problem, Firefox? Just launching will slam the CPU to 100% and make the entire machine unresponsive for 40 seconds to a minute and every action you do in Firefox will suck CPU cycles like a drunk at a free bar. Simply going through my bookmarks can hit 80% CPU...really? Just to look at the bookmarks? And Firefox suffers from what I call "senior moments" where the entire system will just hang, sometimes for up to a minute. The chrome variants? Just don't do that.
Don't take my word for it, take ANY software that lets you have a CPU gauge in the taskbar AnVir Task Manager is a good one but there are a ton to choose from, and then watch the gauge as you do various tasks in both FF and any Chrome variant. You'll find that FF pimp slaps the living hell out of the CPU, I don't care which extensions you have, while Chrome simply don't. In my own little tests I've found anything short of a 3.2GHz P4 with HT is simply unusable on FF 15, its senior moments (which is it slamming the CPU to 100%) simply make the entire experience painful.
Its a fricking browser, you shouldn't need a high powered multicore just to run the damned thing. If anyone doubts I'll be more than happy to post screencaps, it'll just take a bit as I'll have to blank out my bookmarks, or reinstall without my bookmarks installed.
Sweet! I never understood the hatred and snobbery some folks get for the lower end stuff, some of it is great. I paid a grand total of $350 for my EEE netbook and that was WITH an 8Gb of faster RAM upgrade AND a carrying case and with that AMD E350 dual core the thing does 1080p over HDMI and gets 7 hours web surfing. Hell I've even played games like L4D, Crazy Taxi, GTA;VC (probably would play the others but I don't have them) and it all works just fine. Why would I pay more for an ultrabook when this does everything I need a portable to do? Just to show I have money?
But now you see why I don't get what market they are going for. I have seen Android 2.x on $69 phones and $89 tablets and as another poster wrote by this time next year feature phones probably won't exist simply because the chips they use will be more expensive than the chips in those $69 phones. So instead you'll see the $10 Tracphones with the same or more power than that $69 Android and it'll run the Appstore and do everything you'd want a basic smartphone to do just fine.
So where does that leave them? A market that won't even exist next year? Moore's Law means that feature phones are doomed, there simply won't be a point in making chips that weak anymore than there would be a point for Intel to make the Pentium II today, it would cost just as much if not more to make the shitty chip as it would the good chip so why make the shitty one? So if they would have come out with this 4 years ago? Yep could have seen what they are going for. But today the ODMs already know Android, its got hundreds of thousands of apps, and it is already absorbing the low end where JavaME and Symbian used to have a niche, so what is left? Where can they go?
Wow the IE fans must be out today, seeing as I got modded down for daring to point out IE is fragmented all to hell.
The way I look at it is VERY simple: Is the product still under support? If yes then your flagship products should still run on it, especially when you consider that businesses don't change their entire systems in a day and therefor there is gonna have to be transition times.
I mean if I'm a corp with XP and 7 boxes in the middle of a switchover, why would I want to use IE when I can't even use one version? Answer I probably wouldn't, I'd just use Chrome or Firefox or one of the variants like Dragon. I can tell you its a HELL of a lot easier to support users when you have them all on the same page, as you don't have to deal with which quirks are browser A and which are browser B, if they are all on the same page that is eliminated. With Dragon or IceDragon it doesn't matter whether my users are XP/Vista/7/8 it is the same browser system wide, which is one less hassle for me.
I still can't figure out WTF they were thinking on this one, its like they think its still 2003 and they can do whatever because IE has no competition instead of being 2012 where there is over a dozen mainstream browsers and more websites are coded to work for them than IE. Just one more stupid move from Ballmer and CO, why am I not surprised.
You gotta give Zynga credit though, it takes some VERY large brass balls to basically say "We stole your product and now we are gonna sue you....because you won't let us steal more of your products."
Which is why I can't see how ANYBODY can defend Zynga in this case. Is EA run by douchebags? Yes it is, and thanks to their douchebaggy ways EA is now up for sale, showing that refusing to buy from companies that treat you like shit works, even if it takes awhile.
But with Zynga the ONLY reason you haven't heard of this before is they were stealing from the little devs that couldn't fight back. Look up any of their games, going back to the very first ones like Farmville and you'll find an indie dev that had put out the EXACT SAME GAME one to two years before, and I mean the EXACT same game, Zynga doesn't bother to change shit but the name!
We don't let ANY other artform do this, I can't put out my own version of "Lord Of The Rings" with every character and word of dialog and simply rename it "Lord Of The Bracelets" and not get my ass sued off, I can't hire studio musicians to knock off the songs on the top 10 and simply change the title and put out my own top ten mega mix albums, so why in the fuck should Zynga be allowed to steal every damned thing, from the characters to the art style to the fricking UIs, slap a new name on it and then sell it?
If you can't see how this is seriously bad for indies then you are blind. if Zynga gets away with this why should I buy "Plants VS Zombies" when some corp will hire a bunch of Chinese coders and I can have "Shrubs VS The Undead" next week for free on FB? Why buy Minecraft when I can have MineBuilder for free? One of the great things that has come along is the way the Internet allows small artists to compete and sell their wares no different than the big guys, but if this kind of shit isn't stopped when it comes to games they won't have a prayer, either they work for the megacorps who have enough money to sue, or everything they do will be taken from them. That is frankly a shitty choice and as much as I don't care for EA they are 100% in the right on this one and I hope they crush Zynga like the bugs that they are, go EA!
Well if this doesn't help XP finally be put to rest maybe the announcement that the next photoshop won't run on XP will finally do it.
The ones I feel sorry for are the Vista users, they get no love at all even though their OS is supported until 2017. All the ones I've seen that have killed XP support seem to go from XP straight to 7, no Vista support at all. Poor Vista users, first you get a crappy OS then everyone ignores you.
Actually Win 7 is the first one since Win2K Pro (great OS that one was) where I can point to real honest to God improvements and say "THAT, that right there, that's worth upgrading for", such as MUCH better memory management where Windows will actually use available memory for caching instead of slamming the page file when you still have memory free, jumplists and breadcrumbs make it butt simple to get back to where you were working the day before, readyboost can give a real kick in the pants to older systems by moving small I/Os onto a spare flash stick, its simply a much better OS all around.
So if you are keeping your users on XP you really are doing them a disservice, it was alright back in the day but its over a decade old now and the tech has made it obsolete, time to move on. Heck I've got several customers running it on a midrange (2.2GHz-3.2GHz) P4 with 2Gb of RAM so it isn't like you even have to toss the boxes. Just let it go man, let it go.
You ran Win 7 on a Pentium 2? Why man good God why? Did you lose a bet or something?
While frankly nobody should be using something THAT old as a day to day system i can say that I've thrown Win 7 on several systems that are more likely what you are gonna find in the wild, socket 754 Semprons and socket 478 P4s and it runs just fine and is pleasant to use on those 7+ year old systems. No Aero of course but its not like you need Aero for anything.
But the fact that you have to run a non MSFT browser on products that are still under support just shows why IE is doomed, they have really shot themselves in the foot by fragmenting the hell out of the userbase. Hell I can't even keep up with what runs on where, is it 7 is the last XP version or 8? And isn't IE 10 supposedly to be for 7 and 8, thus screwing over the Vista users?
IE is just too much of a fragmented mess anymore and I'm just glad I've gotten my customers off the damned thing. Now I give them Comodo Dragon and Firefox (although recently I've started using IceDragon, I like the layout a little better than standard FF) and tell them if they insist on using IE just don't expect any support for it, with Dragon it doesn't matter which OS they are on its just one browser, but IE is just too much of a mess. If you have to support IE? I pity you, I really do.
Hey don't knock it if you haven't tried it, one of my friends got tired of being assraped on his contract so went and got this $79 Android prepaid and after he let me play with it for a half an hour?
Its...really not a bad phone actually. It plays music nicely, surfs just fine, videos looked decent, as decent as one can expect on a screen that small, overall I had to say i would have NO problem using that as my day to day smartphone. Hell he even slapped a 32gb Micro-SD into it and he uses it now as his PMP as well as a smartphone, its really not a bad little unit.
Which is why I just don't see what market Firefox is going for, I mean what are they gonna put it on? $10 Tracphones? I've used those things as throwaway phones for vacation so I don't have to give a crap about something happening to it and they REALLY suck when it comes to the CPU, we are talking seriously weak and laggy. Any FF put on something THAT weak is gonna be painful and make FF look bad, and as you and I have both seen anything more expensive Android has covered and already has 200,000+ apps for the 2.x line which is what most of these cheapies run.
Thanks for the tablet link though, I'm gonna have to take a spin over to Wally World and see if they have one in stock. I mean at $50 who cares if you kill it? This looks like a perfect new playtoy.
He's a fricking geek dude, if you wanna grab a fricking geek it ain't fricking rocket science!
Grab him while he's at work, grab him when he is walking to his car, five will get you ten that like most people on this planet he is predictable as all hell.
And I'm sorry but your "scenario" is beyond batshit. Show me ONE, just one mind you, arrest the FBI has EVER made where anybody did anything that completely batshit. I have a friend that works at the state crime lab, the guys they nab are looking at 60+ years, more than this little nerd would EVER look at and the worst thing they've had to deal with is encrypted DVDs.
No exploding hard drives, no nailguns,this is just as retarded as yanking on the diaper of that 98 year old by the TSA because "Maybe granny hid a bomb in her pissy diapers"...yeah horseshit. Its designed for ONE thing and that is intimidation, they want to make sure YOU read about this and are afraid to speak against them.
The simple fact is, whether anybody likes it or not, is that we simply haven't found ANY tech that can replace oil when it comes to the amount of energy per unit. Last I checked oil gives you a return of something like 30 to 1, most of the other techs are around 3-5 to 1. that isn't even close folks.
Then there is the problem of the NIMBYs, that frankly have a living shitfit if you do ANYTHING anywhere near them. Look at China, they are gonna have a good 25 nuclear reactors online in the time it takes the USA to get ONE through the 560 levels of paperwork and NIMBY bullshit. The smart way to go would be a combination of nuclear, molten salt and solar panels, wind and tide power generation cutting the living hell out of fossil fuel usage so pretty much the only thing we'd need it for is vehicles, but that will never happen here thanks to NIMBY.
Frankly I truly believe we could solve our energy problems within the next 15 years but sadly the whole damned thing has gotten too political. Instead of doing what will be best for the country you have lobbyists pushing blank checks for pointless programs like cap&trade, you've got NIMBYs having a shitfit if you build ANYTHING and the greenies are nearly as bad only they'll claim your new plant is gonna kill a frog or something. The whole damned thing here is so fucked up.
Look at the Walmart straight talk Android phone, its popular as hell here and after playing with one I can see why. The phone is $130 (A Galaxy something, you'd have to look it up but it surfs nice) and the service is $50 a month unlimited everything and no contract. You can even get it cheaper if you buy in 3 month or 6 month instead of monthly.
I figured at that price it would really suck but...it was nice actually. The phone was responsive, battery life was decent, it surfed and played music nicely, really couldn't find anything wrong with it other than no SIM support. If all you want is a smartphone with no contract crap you should check one out.
I take it you haven't used Firefox lately? Man I really wish they'd spin these research projects off and keep the browser devs focused on the damned browser. Used to be every release it got better, sure it had bugs but you could see real progress being made, each release was better than the last...not anymore, now it gets prettier but NOT better and on anything low power it gets curbstomped by any of the Chromium variants.
As for TFA...where is the market? Third world maybe? Hell Walmart is selling $130 no contract Android phones now and the price is dropping all the time, i really wouldn't be surprised to see a $60 Android phone this time next year. So I really don't see what market they are gonna target with this thing, maybe if it would have come out 3 or 4 years ago but now all the ODMs and devs know Android and its really not hard to get the 2.x branch to run on any damned thing, look at all the sub $80 tablets out there. Hell the other day I saw a $100 tablet running 4.0, so how cheap can FF go and still have a market worth pursuing?
Oh horseshit, have you been watching CSI or something? Short of sticking explosive to the things ANY software based tool is gonna take a SERIOUSLY long time to even do a single pass and simply pulling the plug would kill that shit quick.
Now one could argue that MAYBE, just maybe, he had something like truecrypt on the drive but if that was the case simply popping the power switch with his foot would be enough to unmount the drive so kicking in the door wouldn't help shit anyway and a better strategy would be to simply grab this guy on the way to his car where he don't know shit is going on or bug his PC when he isn't at home.
Nope the whole point of shit like this is INTIMIDATION, its to make YOU scared to speak up against them. Look at this nice little Jewish girl that gets to be hassled and intimidated every time she flies anywhere by being put on the watchlist, her crime? Speaking about your constitutional rights.
I'm sorry but LEOs aren't the good guys anymore, they are pitbulls used by the state to keep the peasants scared of speaking up or talking back.
Then in that case there shouldn't be a fricking no knock take down huh? lets face it if someone yell police while blasting down your door either with their feet or a fricking ram do you REALLY think you are gonna hear them over the exploding door?
If you REALLY want to see what the problem is at its core watch "The largest gang in America" on YouTube, No bullshit, nothing made up, just actual footage of cops acting NO DIFFERENT than your average gang bangers. Bashing people's heads who haven't done shit, starting trouble just so they can pound on someone, its completely disgusting and even more so when you realize that the vast majority of cops on that video are STILL ON THE FORCE thus condoning that kind of behavior.
But you are comparing with devices I bet you haven't even tried...have you even tried one of the new Atom or Bobcat units? I have an AMD E350 in my EEE and its fricking great, it gets nearly 7 hours surfing time on a device that weighs less than 2 and a half pounds, does full 1080P over HDMI, even plays L4D and GTA:VC (it would probably play the others in the series, I just don't have them) and it does so without ever getting more than slightly warm to the touch, never uncomfortable on my lap.
And that is just today's chips friend, Bobcat II is gonna have sub 6w dual cores WITH that 6w also including a nice AMD Radeon GPU, the quads are shooting for a sub 9w, and of course since Intel is ahead on the shrinks they are talking sub 3w Atom duals that will do full 1080p and both will run ALL your X86 software no problem.
So again we are seeing as AMD and Intel actually begin to care about TDP that its simply easier to scale down X86 while still curbstomping ARM when it comes to IPC. That doesn't mean ARM doesn't have a place, I seriously doubt anything will replace ARM in embedded and PMPs, but its easy to see a future where you can grab a sub $300 tablet that will let you run Windows, Linux, or BSD in full X86 while still getting good battery life and more importantly actually being enjoyable to use. Try loading a flash page on an ARM Android unit and it feels like you are running a P2 on the modern web, whereas I watch videos all day long on my Bobcat with full hardware acceleration and its smooth and still gives me room to multitask.
Sorry friend but I have TF Classic and TF 2 and they are NOT the same thing, not even close. In TF Classic for example the server host can set up his own MP3s for in game events which can be fricking hilarious. When I got hit 3 times in a row by a turrent gun I got to jear a clip from the AC/DC song "Big Gun" "Big Gun #1, Big Gun kick the hell out of you" which made me damned near fall out of my chair laughing. Also the different traps and grenades make it a VERY different experience, you can fly low but if you don't CYA all it takes is walking around the corner into a trap and BAM! That's your ass Mr Postman...which BTW I heard that clip when I got popped by a trap, again much laughter.
So for those that think TF2 is the same as TF Classic with better graphics I urge you to buy TF Classic on Steam, its cheap, the servers are full of people 24/7, and its a fricking blast and a half. Personally I don't care for TF2 at all, but TF Classic is just a hoot.
You just hit the nail on the head, blatant bribery has turned the judicial system into a kangaroo court.
Once upon a time we had this notion called "conflict of interest" where if the judge didn't recuse themselves the superior courts would toss the case and give the judge a good ass chewing to boot. Now it doesn't matter how blatantly the judge is involved with one side, nobody will say squat and the corps know this. Frankly the whole thing is just sickening..