Cars. With this tech you could have the car covered in micro-sensors that would send info that would allow the car to constantly adjust everything from how much air is in the tires to how tight the shocks are, all to give the car maximum mileage and safety.
I doubt it because grow lights cycle, which means one look at their power bill, which they can get via court order, will show a start/stop cycle that sticks out like a sore thumb.
These monsters on the other hand will be blowing through power like a drunk hitting a minibar so it'll be pretty obvious whatever they are running isn't grow lights.
As far as running it at home? Maybe if you were an "At Home" nut and wanted to get the top spot on the leaderboards but most guys I know have been going the opposite way, with high electricity its often better to use low power AMD and Intel chips whenever possible. Hell that's why I use an old 754 Sempron in the shop as a downloader and nettop, the thing sucks practically nothing while still giving me enough computing power to do everyday tasks. I've had a lot of customers have me build them E350 units for the same reason, make a great downloader and office box while generating almost no heat and sucking less than 16w under load.
BTW if you haven't tried one of the E350/450 units you really should Crosshair, those things are sweet! You can get the boards for less than $80 on sale, they take almost no power, can easily be dropped into an HTPC style SFF case, no heat, and still have enough power that they make pretty nice HTPCs or office boxes. The trick with 'em is to give them the 1333MHz or better memory since the APU uses system memory for the GPU but for the price they make really great low cost/low power systems.
Not to mention Intel knows what many here refuse to accept...ARM doesn't scale well.
Sorry but its true, to get an ARM chip that does the IPC of even a first gen Core Duo you end up blowing the power envelope all to hell. It would be like taking a Yugo and getting it to go 120MPH. Sure its possible, but the gas mileage that the car was built for goes right down the shitter.
As we've seen on the Intel side with Atom and the CULVs and the AMD side with Bobcat its simply easier to scale down X86 and still get great IPC than it is to scale up ARM and not blow the power budget. And Intel knows that given the choice of crazy battery life but slow as XMas VS crazy speed with not as great battery life? People tend to pick the speed and who can blame them?
Very wise words, oh and nice rides, I miss my scooter but frankly this is SUV city here and I am getting too old to dodge soccer moms fiddling with smartphones while doing 80+ MPH.
The problem is just as you said, when what needs to be done is they need to be targeting users like my GF. Frankly I met her because she had broken her PC and needed it fixed, she has ZERO clue about how any of it works and the ONLY thing she uses is the Internet.
You would think she'd be a perfect Linux user but the system devs constantly futzing with low level guts screw up too many drivers and frankly the skillz required to fix those messes is beyond her. I can stick in a simple GUI based snapshot tool like Comodo Time Machine and if she breaks something? She can be back up in 15 minutes without even requiring me to be there. In Linux if the devs crap on something you are just SOL if you don't have the ability to find the forum, know the make/model/rev of tha hardware they broke, find a fix, tweak said fix because its always gonna need tweaking, and apply said fix without typing something wrong and possibly screwing the system. Hmmm...all of that VS hitting the home key on boot and picking a snapshot from a GUI? Yeah...no contest.
So I agree your analogy nails it, I always used my old 73 Dodge as an example but the same thing, I'd spend weekends under the hood but I enjoyed spending weekends under the hood, if I'd have had to rely on that for work? It would have been sold that very day. Folks need "it just works" and frankly since the end of XP its really easy to keep Vista and 7 running, Linux? Not so much.
What it is is a server tech from the late 70s being slammed into a place it doesn't belong. Frankly the guys using it are all greybeards or have an assload of already built scripts because I have taken hardcore Unix heads and even they admit the Powershell way of adding expressions and OOP is the way that you would want to go with a programming interface on an OS.
But the problem is that CLI is fiddly and obtuse and non-discoverable, exactly the LAST thing one would want in an age of the iPhone and Android. The last MSFT OS that had any reliance on CLI was over 14 years ago, Apple moved away from CLI with OSX over 12 years ago, consumers simply haven't been exposed to CLI and moreover they don't want it! They don't want to learn piles of CLI gobbledygook to fix frankly what should be GUI only problems. Hell I can't even remember the last time I used CLI in Windows and I work on broken systems 6 days a week. Oh I COULD use CLI, but honestly there are 20 GUI tools that will do every job out there, from batch processing to low level work like system file replacement and symlinking, BETTER than the CLI so I just don't bother.
So if they would simply give us a *BSD that could have the CLI removed and never be hamstringed? Again it'd curbstomp Linux tomorrow, I could easily see everyone from Walmart to guys like me slapping it on systems for those that only use the net, of which there are many. What's sad is BSD at least has an example in OSX, when was the last time you heard a "open up and type" from an OSX user? Oh its still there, it simply isn't required to do anything on the OS. But that is the problem with the free OSes in a nutshell, while CLI is a completely optional addition to OSX and Windows it is 100% required on the free OSes, and that is just gonna keep the masses away.
Sorry AC but gaming is a red herring. As much as we PC gamers like to think different its a VERY small niche. Oh its a niche that spends a LOT of money, billions in fact, but the same can be said of yacht racing or Ferrari manufacture and nobody would claim either of those is mainstream.
No the problem is that for every gamer (who just FYI doesn't have any problems with Windows so isn't a good market to target anyway) there are easily 10,000 like my GF who uses ONLY the Internet. When she gets on the PC I built her she doesn't use a single thing other than the browser and media player, that's it. Everything else is email and FB and Yahoo and 40 other websites she goes to often...so why doesn't Linux work for her?
Simple because as that list I provided soundly demonstrates even if something works in distro foo when foo+1 comes out there is a VERY good chance one of the low level internals will be futzed with by some dev who had an itch and it'll be broken. Before anybody screams "But it works on servers!" I would point out that 1.-Servers rarely even have DEs, they don't care about sound or WiFi, they aren't using browsers, there is simply less surface area for the devs to attack and 2.-They are all controlled by highly trained well educated server admins who get paid the big bucks to deal with breakage, nobody is gonna hand out free server admins with each desktop sold.
Until someone can fork the ENTIRE SYSTEM away from the devs, who have made it clear from Torvalds down that they WILL NOT STOP FUTZING no matter how much headaches it causes then it simply won't get better.
I have said many times I am ready to issue a pepsi challenge to those that believe in Linux, none will take me up on it. We'll take ANY regular distro, not LTS because we have seen that stands for "don't backport shit", that was released the same quarter as Vista, the most hated and supposedly "buggy" MSFT OS. Pick Ubuntu, PCLOS, frankly I don't care which one you pick I'll still win the challenge. We will then install it beside Vista on identical boxes, hell we'll make it a dual boot if you are worried about ANY deviation in the chips, we'll make sure both systems have 100% working drivers (which I'll allow you to CLI all you want on this part, since you are the builder not the user at this point) and then we'll simulate what will happen to the user by upgrading both to current.
I know I will win this challenge because I've done it before and have seen what happens. The Vista system? Runs perfectly, ALL the drivers and software that was running on LTS WILL be running after the last patch, the Linux system? BROKEN, HORRIBLY BROKEN. Sound will be wasted, the WiFi will be gone, hell you'll be lucky if the GPU drivers are working at all, and I don't care which chip you pick because the devs fuck Intel as bad as they do AMD and Nvidia so it'll still be fucked, it'll all fall down like a house of cards.
So if you want to know what it'll take to have a "year of the Linux desktop" it is this: When I can take ANY release from 3 versions ago and upgrade to current and have a 100% functional system? Then and ONLY then will it be ready. But I've tried over a dozen distros so far and not one, not the rolling releases like arch nor the traditional releases like PCLOS and Ubuntu have passed the mustard, not one.
Have you seen the giant pile of money trucks Cook is sitting on? If this company turned out to be a threat he could just buy the damned company and add their patents to their already scary patent warchest, or keep them a separate company and simply point them at Apple's rivals.
You see that is the problem when it comes to these companies becoming supermegacorps, there really isn't any way for them to truly lose, they can buy their way out of damned near anything. Hell look at MSFT, Ballmer makes Uncle Fester look like a genius and even a decade of him flushing money for one harebrained scheme after another hasn't even made a dent. He could probably go another 20 years shooting his company in the face before their cash flow actually becomes a problem, scary but true, and Cook has a hell of a lot more $$$ to burn than Ballmer.
Uhh..haven't looked at the new AMD monster racks designed to function as a single unit thanks to the tech they got from the SeaMicro purchase. We are talking 2048 cores and 16Tb of RAM in a single rack, with THAT much space if you got the cash you should be able to fit your large dataset into RAM and run it from there.
Man I don't want to even think about what the electric bill for something THAT powerful would be though.
Its 11 years old next month, source. My timeline was off because I was running the beta long before release, just FYI but I went back to Win2K and skipped XP entirely, I went from 2K to Win XP X64 (really Server 2k3 Workstation) and then went from that to Win 7.
And the reasons servers run Linux is two fold, 1.-The companies pay millions of dollars for highly educated Linux admins to negate some of those disadvantages as well as hiring many of the devs to fix their own messes, nice racket if you can get it. 2.-MSFT has given a HUGE chunk of the server market away by being purposely obtuse on their licensing and frankly charging too much. The stupid idea of user CALs is a perfect example. I blame this on Ballmer, who cares more about stock price than actual share, and will actually feel sorry for the Linux server guys when Ballmer is finally fired because if they bring in someone like Allchin or Ozzie that actually knows the business market? You'll see $500 server licenses with no user CALs and Linux will drop like a rock as it'll be cheaper to buy Windows than deal with the bullshit.
And the difference with Windows bugs VS Linux bugs? Its shows the "all eyes" horseshit is exactly that, horseshit. These aren't some bugs nobody has tripped over, these are well documented bugs that have existed for YEARS because the devs would rather put out something "New!" than fix their own damned messes.
In the end Linux simply can't escape the busted shitter problem. What is the busted shitter problem? Simple, ask someone to paint you a picture or write you a song for free? you'll get several offers and while most won't be top 10 quality many will actually be passable. Ask someone to come by and fixed your busted shitter for free? I hope you like pissing in the sink.
What the community refuses to accept, and instead deals with workarounds and CLI "fixes" and other crap than accept, is the reason those bug trackers are filled with several year old bugs is that fixing bugs, doing regression testing, QC and QA is long boring and tedious and you simply won't get enough volunteers to do long boring and tedious jobs EVAR, it just won't happen.
So every year Linux gets prettier, because making pretty things is a part of human nature but better? Nope, it just doesn't get any better. Why does De Icaza have to give up on sound in 2012 on Linux? Because the whole sound subsystem needs to be trashed along with X Server but replacing those is long, boring, and thankless work so it just isn't getting done.
In the end I say to any Linux user that is ready step up and take the pepsi challenge I have previously listed. Since all camcorders today have the ability to timestamp it'll be easy to see if you try to cheat and if I'm wrong this will give you the chance to show me up in front of the world...but they won't, because they can't. you simply can't take any mainstream distro from 5 years ago and upgrade to current without at least one, usually multiple, drivers shitting all over themselves. And until a single Linux can pass the challenge there really isn't anything to discuss, the entire system is broken so who cares.
But the problem with the *BSDs is just what you pointed out, they use CLI as a crutch.
God what I wouldn't give to be given just ONE DAY, just one single day, with the head devs from BSD and Linux, because I would point them out the simple fact that consumers won't put up with CLI and frankly they should NOT have too! Its a SERVER tech, it belongs on SERVERS, where scripting and repeat-ability are valuable and useful. This is completely the opposite of the consumer space, where they ain't scripting shit and aren't doing anything in batches so all it is is an irritation that turns people off!
Little known fact: Some time in late 04-late 05 several batches of AMD Compaq units left the factory with Windows XP and ZERO access to CMD, none at all. Somebody had removed ALL GUI access to it, you couldn't even get to it by using run, you had to know where in the file system it resided. I know this because i have come across these systems several times over the years (they were often sold at Staples and Office Max and were quite popular) and the simple fact was nobody ever noticed it was gone and I wouldn't be surprised if even Compaq doesn't know about this little gaffe, simply because Windows doesn't really need CLI.
If the BSD guys would just give us that, give us a BSD that CLI could be removed from without causing a single problem? They could curbstomp Linux tomorrow. But as long as the devs treat treat desktop and server as two sides of the same coin instead of completely different animals then its just never gonna go anywhere.
No one is gonna call the article a troll or shill for pointing out a serious problem? I'm shocked! In the end the problem with Linux is NOT the UIs, or any of the pretty on top, in fact in many ways they have surpassed Windows and OSX in those areas.
Nope, the same damned problem that plagued Linux 10 years ago STILL plagues it to this very day, and it all comes down to drivers and kernel devs constantly futzing with low level internals with nary a thought to QA, QC, or backwards compatibility. Whether anyone likes it or not SOME backwards compatibility IS required, because most software companies and ODMs aren't gonna pay a team of devs to constantly rebuild their products because some kernel dev got an itch.
For proof I direct you to this page of over 100 show stopping bugs which just FYI but every. single. bug. has links showing that yes this IS a problem and its not just one person's opinion or experience and damned near every. single. problem. on that list can be traced by to devs fucking with internals and breaking shit. Now compare that page to the same page from 3 years ago and see how much has NOT been fixed in over 3 years.
All the DE wars, Gnome 2 VS Gnome Shell and KDE 3 VS KDE 4? That's all turd polishing because if the guts are constantly breaking nobody will care about the pretty and as long as the devs are given carte blanche to fiddle with anything without a thought about what its doing to the stability of the overall ecosystem things just won't get better.
That is why I had such high hopes for Ubuntu, I had hope that Shuttleworth would do like Google did with Android and just fork the thing away from the devs so that real stability and central management could be brought to bare instead of the cat herding we have now, but it was not to be.
Linux has beautiful UIs, and tons of software, but retailers like myself won't ever touch your product if we install it on a system and 6 months later its broken its own drivers because some dev got a bee in his butt to futz with some low level system files and trashed my customer's WiFi or sound...ohh God sound, WTF were they thinking with Pulse?
That's great...for a server or specialized workstation. For your bog standard PC tower you are talking 3 to 5 slots which can be pretty much anything and could need anything from practically no power to assloads of power. You can have onboard or discrete sound, hell you can put in 3 graphics card with each being fed a ton of power, there is simply too many different things to have it all fed by a passively cooled power brick.
Personally I LIKE the current design, because that means I can quite easily design the system with the correct PSU for that system. My GF, who only has an Athlon X3 with an HD5450 and a single hard drive and DVD burner? A 450w with 85% efficiency is just perfect for that system whereas mine with 3 HDDs, the possibility to go crossfire, power hungry GPU and 6 core CPU and dual burners? A 750w is a better fit and gives me more headroom to add more later.
And best of all it doesn't cost an insane amount of money and is even possible because it isn't a bunch of proprietary crap like we had back in those days. I don't know how many machines I had to shitcan when all they need was some minor upgrade because either the proprietary PSU in a more powerful form cost more than the system or it didn't exist at all.
So maybe if you could make it bog standard so anybody could replace that brick with any other brick? It would probably be fine but sadly as we've seen time and time again what we end up with is more lock in and proprietary crap. hell I'd argue that is why so many damned laptops end up straight in the dump, everything about laptops are so proprietary if its anything other than just needing RAM or a HDD then its just not worth fixing.
If your work gave you an XP laptop frankly you are working at a shitty place and I'd tell them to take it back, especially after that guy spent nearly 3 years trying to clear his name thanks to a badly configured XP laptop handed him at work that turned out to have a backdoor that some scumbags were using to run CP through the thing.
But again you wanna compare to a 12 year old OS then dig out a 12 year old Linux distro, because otherwise you are purposely trying to rig any comparison. You are talking about an OS that has been legacy for over 5 years, that no longer gets ANY updates but security, and which hasn't been sold for half a decade so fair is fair, compare it to a 7 year old Linux.
At the end of the day that doesn't change the fact that Linux internals are deep fried ass and I'd be happy to take the pepsi challenge to prove it. funny that I have yet to see a single person try to take up the challenge either, probably because they know Linux will die hard.
The challenge is incredibly simple, we will take ANY distro that was released the same quarter as Vista, and I will give Linux the advantage by taking not only one of the most hated OSes but by giving them only HALF the amount of updates XP has had, we'll install it on two identical systems, make sure all the drivers are working, and update BOTH systems to current.
And I can tell you because I have done it that the Linux unit will be totally fucked by the end of the updates. The sound won't work, the DE is more than likely to be glitching if the graphics drivers are even functional, and the WiFi won't have a snowball's chance in hell, I don't care which chip you choose. that is just FIVE years mind you, barely half the time you get with Windows.
I'm sorry but as a wise man said "Linux is free..if your time is worthless" and no truer words have been spoken. Take a modern version of Windows like 7 and you can slap it on ANY laptop made in the last half a decade and upgrade from RTM to the last patches from patch Tuesday and it will ALL work, every. single. driver. will be functional, including wireless and printers. Try that with Linux? You get a broken mess, why? because Torvalds and the other devs frankly don't give a damned if YOU have problems, all they care about is scratching THEIR itches.
Since the FOSS koolaid drinkers modded it down you might not have seen it so I urge you to take a look at this list filled with show stopping bugs (with links) and compare it to to the same list from three years ago and see how many haven't been fixed after THREE years. Hell go to the Ubuntu bug tracker, they have bugs SIX years old. Maybe you'd like a Linux dev's thoughts on the subject so here is a RH dev and he says the desktop is "suckage" and while his take is different than a retailer it all comes down to basically the same thing, devs biting off more than they can chew and designs that worked 20 years ago but don't work now being hung on to.
So we retailers have a DAMNED GOOD reason why we won't touch Linux with a 50 foot pole, and I have a reason to be kinda pissy about it, because I'm tired of being lied right to my face with total bullshit about how "Linux is ready for the desktop!" yet when I point out obvious problems, documented up the ass I might add, I get the same parroted "use distro X!" "Works for me!" and "You must be an M$ Shill" retarded garbage. Frankly if Linux wasn't free it would be deader than BeOS right now, and rightly so. The devs engage in Mickey Mouse Amateur hour shit when it comes to the internals, NO stability, NO ABIs, NO QA or QC, yet because its "Free as in freedum!" the community will happily take their crap and bitch at anyone who points out emperor RMS is running around bare assed. Well if it actually worked why is ALL the B
It was for some show where they tried to cook up a "dream rig" of absolute cutting edge and they had a bunch of Hollywood SFX guys helping out. The thing used some sort of belt system that was able to switch direction, don't ask me to explain the thing but I can tell you they did have a small harness to keep him from going too far on the system and taking a header. They had rigged up this lightgun M16 that would work in game and track his fire so he could just blast, along with a set of infrared lasers that allowed him to duck and lean.
It was wicked cool to watch but afterwards the guy using it said he felt like he was gonna have a coronary when bad guys came flying out from around a corner and that the tracking did leave him with a sick at his stomach feeling so while it might be cool in small doses i kinda doubt its something you'd want to have a marathon CoD session with. Still looked cool as hell to watch.
Actually I'd say its even worse than that, its a combo of kickbacks and CYA because they can now say "See we are doing something!" even if that "something" doesn't actually fucking work or make anything except some defense contractors better off.
Sadly we see this time and time again, where the government trips all over itself to do "something" without the slightest thought to whether the something is effective, functional, or if it even makes things worse. All that matters to the politicians is they can point at the black box and say "But we did something!" and the corps of course don't give a rat's ass if the politicians point fingers or not, not as long as the checks clear.
In the end its classic security theater, it gives the politicians a way to bring home the bacon and/or get some more kickbacks, it lets them say "We did something!" as a CYA move if the excrement hits the bladed cooling device down the line, and it gives them another bullet point to show the public how they are "keeping them all safe" which is never questioned. And since it isn't the politician's money anyway as far as they are concerned? No downsides.
THANK YOU!!! Its nice to see that SOMEONE gets it!!! As a system builder and retailer its after sales support that gives us the value in VAR but Linux becomes a time sink from hell very quickly, because not only do the updates and upgrades come at a breakneck pace but there is so little QA and QC that often drivers that work perfectly fine will be totally destroyed on update or upgrade.
Hell look at the article by De Icaza not two weeks ago where he gave up having something as fundamental as sound on his PC because he was wasting more and more time trying to get the damned thing working after each upgrade! do you REALLY think Suzy the checkout girl or Jerry the plumber are gonna have a PC that fricking SOUND doesn't work?
The ONLY way to sell Linux systems is online so you don't have to support the thing, once it leaves the place its gone forever, all sales final. that may be fine for some people but I like having happy customers, I LIKE knowing the PCs I built are running quietly in their homes years later, I LIKE that my PCs are so well thought of i'll often see them back in the shop for an upgrade after passing through a dozen family members. And you just can't do any of that with Linux, the internals are just too much of a mess as your link demonstrates.
OMFG...did you just compare Steve Jobs, one of the best salesmen and visionaries of the past century....to Steve Ballmer? Hell I haven't owned shit from Apple and even I wouldn't ever make THAT comparison!
In the case of MSFT the old guard IS the jackass, because he doesn't have the amount of vision in his whole damned body that Gates had in his pinkie toe. And I would remind you that at the time what Jobs wanted to do? would cost over $10,000 a machine, ala the Lisa which the company took a bath over.
The problem Jobs had was he was TOO FAR ahead of his time, look at his designs from his NeXT days, it took 20 years for the kind of powerful chips required to build what the man saw in his head to become feasible for the masses. As much as Apple fans will hate hearing this if Jobs would have stayed the company probably would have went under, because Jobs saw what the future of computing needed to be, simple, easy to use, accessible by anyone,networking as simple as plug and play, but the tech simply didn't exist to make that a reality and rather than accept it he wanted to throw money at it and make it so.
So there is really NO comparison, and this is again from someone who doesn't use Apple products or even own an iPod, but with Jobs you had someone so far ahead it took 2 decades of silicon advancement to catch up, whereas Ballmer is an MBA used car salesman whose answer to everything is "Me too! ohh ohh me toooo!"
Remember Linux kernel 1.0? Wow Linux sucks ass, what with it having no GUI and all!
Give me a damned break, you drag up a fucking 12 year old OS for comparison? Fine ONLY compare it to 12 year old Linux distros, otherwise your entire statement? pointless. MSFT hasn't even allow OEMs to sell XP in over 5 years and are ONLY giving it updates as legacy status, which means security ONLY. NO new features, NO fixes for anything security related. Show me ONE Linux, just one mind you, where I can get even security fixes on a 12 year old install without jumping on the upgrade deathmarch, you can't, it doesn't exist.
So either compare apples and apples or quit with the "works for me" and pointless talk about how a 12 year old OS, made when a FAST machine was a 600MHz P3 with 128Mb of RAM, gave you problems. Well no shit I'd love to see the first release of Linux find jack shit myself, since obviously to make that comparison you must be running a 12 year old install of Linux.
Its called "stop using ancient ass OSes" because surprise surprise things have gotten a LOT better...at least in Windows. Linux has gotten prettier but NOT better, as that link to over 200 show stopping bugs I posted showed. WTF is the community gonna do when XP goes EOL? Are they gonna talk about how unstable FAT is and how people had to use VXD drivers in Win9X? Hell look at the numbers, even legacy installs of XP are nosediving as even lazy business users are tossing it, its old, its no longer used by anyone with any sense, yet sadly I'll still take the pepsi challenge against ANY Linux released at the same time and when we update both to current? XP WILL still have working drivers, Linux? will crap all over itself.
Sorry but that is a fact. Hell i ought to put up a damned YouTube video showing the first release of Ubuntu VS Vista to showing how Linux craps on drivers but then I'd get told "use distro X!" and that I MUST have rigged the camera...God save us from FOSSies.
Why am I not surprised with a UID like "KinkyKing" you are posting "more baby more"?
As for TFA, who in the hell is gonna have a room so perfectly uncluttered and whose walls are all bare enough to make this worth using? I think a more workable idea was that one I saw awhile back where they had the VR helmet and a little treadmill like thing that allowed 360 degree movement. At least with that the player could stand in one little spot and not have to worry about having perfectly clear walls to project their games onto.
Frankly though with all the patents that all the big corps are getting nowadays it seems to me more like they are just throwing shit at a wall and hoping that something sticks. Since patents last for 20 years and the USPTO lets you be vague as hell when it comes to them I wouldn't be surprised if anything involving games and projection for the next 20 odd years will be getting a phone call from a MSFT lawyer with their hand out. We really need a "use it or lose it" clause where if you don't actually use the patent to make some product, at a reasonable price and offered at a reasonable number of locations to keep them from just making a one off and asking a million bucks for it, then you lose the patent, simple as that. That would help get rid of all the patent trolling and might even keep companies from spamming the USPTO by making them think about having to actually make a product of some kind out of what they are filing for.
You want an example? Would over 200 examples of broken guts, nearly all of which can be tied directly or indirectly to devs futzing with the internals be good enough? Would you like to compare it to the page from 3 years ago so you can see how much of it hasn't been fixed in three God damned years?
But of course you won't respond to this, nor the fact that the ONLY way Dell, one of the largest OEMs on the God damned planet BTW, can get Linux to fucking run even when dealing with a severely limited subselection of their offerings is to hire a team to run their own damned repo because otherwise the devs constantly shitting on internals leaves you with a device with NON WORKING DRIVERS...gee, where did I hear that? Why I believe it was me, pointing out that very same thing!
And frankly I have every right to be pissed, the community lies its fucking ass off and when caught in those lies what do we get? An apology maybe, or even some pressure brought to bare on the devs constantly breaking shit? Nope we get the standard "Works for me!" followed by a "U must be teh M$ Shill! U no suck teh koolaid!" horseshit. Quick what does MSI, Asus, Walmart, Best Buy, and me ALL have in common? Every one has offered your OS only to find its a broken mess with shit constantly breaking and now won't put your OS on shit for all the money in the world. Gee, wonder why that is? Could it be the after sales support thanks to devs crapping on the internals constantly makes it a money sucking pit? Nope, must be that invisible money truck Ballmer backs up to our door. yep, that's the ticket...dumbasses.
Are you being this fucking obtuse on PURPOSE, or do you SERIOUSLY not see that having software so God damned tied to internals it can't run without kernel foo, lib bar is a completely fucking RETARDED way to design a system? There are literally tens of thousands of programs from the Win9X era you can run right now, this very minute, on Win 7 X64...do you think you'd have a snowball's chance in hell of running even 5 year old software on Linux? No because the stupid ass practice of depending too damned much on specific versions of crap makes that impossible!
You DO know your competition solved that fucking problem years ago yes? Ironically enough they solved it by taking one of your own ideas and fucking doing it BETTER than you! Look up Windows SXS or side by side, where a program can need any damned version of lib what the fuck ever and it doesn't matter, because Windows creates symlinks to the different versions and has them in SXS so that shit doesn't get broken if you need version foo for program A and version bar for program B. I know, shit not breaking, well where's the "fun" in that?
Its not magic, its not a conspiracy, and it sure as fuck isn't because MSFT is a great company that you are getting your asses kicked on the desktop, its because devs hang onto stupid fucking ideas that haven't made sense in over a damned decade. the depending on libraries crap made sense...in 1994, when hard drives were tiny and bandwidth tight as hell, but we ain't in 1994 anymore though are we? Kinda sad the ONLY success Linux has seen in the mobile space was when Google bitchslapped the devs and simply took their toys away from them with Android. BTW what is Android? Why its a no CLI, all GUI OS where shit actually "just works" and tends to "just work" for quite a while with zero futzing...gee, kinda sounds like what retailers like me have been saying for damned near a decade we need for consumer desktops doesn't it?
Yes and this can be a good thing or a fucking terrible thing. Remember Steve Ballmer, the cause of MSFT pissing away a monopoly and blowing billions on one shitty idea after the other? Can't get rid of him because between him and his BFF Bill they control 60% of the stock.
Just because you had a good idea that made a great company does NOT mean you are gonna be able to keep coming up with good ideas that let the company move forward, Yang at Yahoo should have taught everyone THAT lesson. Sometimes outside voices is exactly what you need as they aren't enamored of past successes and can give you an objective outlook. Hell did they even sit down and do some serious discussions with coders trying to make apps with HTML V5? Or did they just jump on the buzzword bandwagon?
Uhhh...built my dad a quad from kit, didn't have time to go out there until the weekend, so he got a bee in his behind and installed Win 7 himself. he's 73 BTW and short of sticking a disc in a drive knows jack and shit about PCs. What did I find when i got there? A total virus infected broken mess?
What I found was a perfectly working system, even had free AV installed. Windows downloaded and installed all the drivers, patched itself, and even popped up a window that said 'You don't have an antivirus. Would you like us to send you to a page where you can choose one?" and gave him a list of free and pay antivirus programs. It even detected his printer and USB hard drive, set up the printer and asked if he'd like to use the USB drive for backups which when he said yes it set a backup schedule. In fact the ONLY thing I had to do when i got there was show him where to get Firefox from, he wasn't sure on how to get it with adblock.
What we need is a Linux THAT easy and more importantly one that STAYS that easy and doesn't crap on the drivers. Did everybody miss the De Icaza article not a week ago where he gave up on having something as fundamental as sound because Pulse crapped every. single. time. he updated his system?
Everyone here thinks i hate FOSS because I won't drink the Koolaid but nothing could be further from the truth, every Windows system I sell or repair I load it up with FOSS from Chromium with ABP to LO. The problem is the OS is ca ca, and that even if you get it working on modern hardware the first update and SOMETHING is gonna die. Either the wireless, or the sound, or the graphics driver or something, but you can be assured the devs will crap on some driver you need. And that costs me money, money Windows doesn't cost me.
So that is why I don't sell Linux and furthermore why you see NO B&M stores selling Linux, the ONLY places you see sell Linux boxes is online, why? because they don't have to support a machine you sell online, that's why.
And isn't it funny how every single post other than yours is simply a "works for me!" followed by "U must be a shill!" Wow, really?
Linux drivers sucking balls is God damned legendary, even long time Linux admins admit the wireless is deep fried ass and didn't De Icaza have an article here not even a damned week ago talking about how he had fucking gave up on sound because of Pulse? Is the community THAT filled with religious zealotry that even pointing out the damned obvious is impossible?
Do all those that bitched want a list? How about a list of over 200 show stoppers damned near all of them in part or whole dealing with shitty drivers and updates crapping on said drivers? Here is the same list from three years ago so they can all see how many HAVE NOT BEEN FIXED IN THREE YEARS...but of course that can't be true! Why it works perfectly because RMS waves his magic pixie wand! Why having devs constantly crapping all over internals can't be a BAD thing, because they are just being free!
So its a hell of a lot more than "If it works OOTB then you're okay" because what works OOTB this week may be completely wiped out next week because some dev decided he thought some critical system file would be better if he changed some crucial element, fuck it if they can't take a joke.
The ONLY reason that Linux works in servers is companies spend millions of dollars on full time admins and fixes dealing with the broken shit and that is as completely opposite from the desktop market as one could possibly get! Because whether they like it or not we will NOT hire a team of full time devs to sit around maintaining our own repos because the devs can't quit breaking shit, which just FYI is the only way Dell can get Linux to work and we will NOT give away free lifetime support contracts or give away days of our time every 6 damned months when the devs have their annual crapping on the system.
If you think its perfectly fine to waste your time fixing what they break every 6 months, or are one of the VERY few who are using some system old enough nobody is futzing up the drivers? Well I'm glad, some people collect stamps, everyone needs a hobby. We do this FOR A LIVING and every time you crap all over the system it COSTS US MONEY, money that frankly works out to MORE than WIndows costs.
Quit taking crap sandwiches from the devs, bring some real stability and at least 7 years of ACTUAL support, not that crap like Ubuntu LTS which stands for "don't backport shit" (which just FYI but having software so damned tied to the system that it won't fucking run unless you have kernel foo is totally shitty coding, okay?) and we'll be happy to sell and support your product. But quit living on fantasy island where we have nothing better to do with our weekends than fix fucked up drivers and deal with angry users because some of us? Actually have lives.
Why bother with all that and have the extra load of running a VM on top of the system when you can just slap Comodo Time Machine set to take snapshots at startup and just call it a day?
Its the perfect cure for the clueless users that break their machines, just have them hit the home key on boot, or pick the little clock icon if its running, send it back to a snapshot before they borked it and voila! Hell you can even lock a clean and loaded snapshot so its like having your own factory restore for any machine you want. Its free, its simple, what more could you want?
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Cars. With this tech you could have the car covered in micro-sensors that would send info that would allow the car to constantly adjust everything from how much air is in the tires to how tight the shocks are, all to give the car maximum mileage and safety.
I doubt it because grow lights cycle, which means one look at their power bill, which they can get via court order, will show a start/stop cycle that sticks out like a sore thumb.
These monsters on the other hand will be blowing through power like a drunk hitting a minibar so it'll be pretty obvious whatever they are running isn't grow lights.
As far as running it at home? Maybe if you were an "At Home" nut and wanted to get the top spot on the leaderboards but most guys I know have been going the opposite way, with high electricity its often better to use low power AMD and Intel chips whenever possible. Hell that's why I use an old 754 Sempron in the shop as a downloader and nettop, the thing sucks practically nothing while still giving me enough computing power to do everyday tasks. I've had a lot of customers have me build them E350 units for the same reason, make a great downloader and office box while generating almost no heat and sucking less than 16w under load.
BTW if you haven't tried one of the E350/450 units you really should Crosshair, those things are sweet! You can get the boards for less than $80 on sale, they take almost no power, can easily be dropped into an HTPC style SFF case, no heat, and still have enough power that they make pretty nice HTPCs or office boxes. The trick with 'em is to give them the 1333MHz or better memory since the APU uses system memory for the GPU but for the price they make really great low cost/low power systems.
Not to mention Intel knows what many here refuse to accept...ARM doesn't scale well.
Sorry but its true, to get an ARM chip that does the IPC of even a first gen Core Duo you end up blowing the power envelope all to hell. It would be like taking a Yugo and getting it to go 120MPH. Sure its possible, but the gas mileage that the car was built for goes right down the shitter.
As we've seen on the Intel side with Atom and the CULVs and the AMD side with Bobcat its simply easier to scale down X86 and still get great IPC than it is to scale up ARM and not blow the power budget. And Intel knows that given the choice of crazy battery life but slow as XMas VS crazy speed with not as great battery life? People tend to pick the speed and who can blame them?
Very wise words, oh and nice rides, I miss my scooter but frankly this is SUV city here and I am getting too old to dodge soccer moms fiddling with smartphones while doing 80+ MPH.
The problem is just as you said, when what needs to be done is they need to be targeting users like my GF. Frankly I met her because she had broken her PC and needed it fixed, she has ZERO clue about how any of it works and the ONLY thing she uses is the Internet.
You would think she'd be a perfect Linux user but the system devs constantly futzing with low level guts screw up too many drivers and frankly the skillz required to fix those messes is beyond her. I can stick in a simple GUI based snapshot tool like Comodo Time Machine and if she breaks something? She can be back up in 15 minutes without even requiring me to be there. In Linux if the devs crap on something you are just SOL if you don't have the ability to find the forum, know the make/model/rev of tha hardware they broke, find a fix, tweak said fix because its always gonna need tweaking, and apply said fix without typing something wrong and possibly screwing the system. Hmmm...all of that VS hitting the home key on boot and picking a snapshot from a GUI? Yeah...no contest.
So I agree your analogy nails it, I always used my old 73 Dodge as an example but the same thing, I'd spend weekends under the hood but I enjoyed spending weekends under the hood, if I'd have had to rely on that for work? It would have been sold that very day. Folks need "it just works" and frankly since the end of XP its really easy to keep Vista and 7 running, Linux? Not so much.
What it is is a server tech from the late 70s being slammed into a place it doesn't belong. Frankly the guys using it are all greybeards or have an assload of already built scripts because I have taken hardcore Unix heads and even they admit the Powershell way of adding expressions and OOP is the way that you would want to go with a programming interface on an OS.
But the problem is that CLI is fiddly and obtuse and non-discoverable, exactly the LAST thing one would want in an age of the iPhone and Android. The last MSFT OS that had any reliance on CLI was over 14 years ago, Apple moved away from CLI with OSX over 12 years ago, consumers simply haven't been exposed to CLI and moreover they don't want it! They don't want to learn piles of CLI gobbledygook to fix frankly what should be GUI only problems. Hell I can't even remember the last time I used CLI in Windows and I work on broken systems 6 days a week. Oh I COULD use CLI, but honestly there are 20 GUI tools that will do every job out there, from batch processing to low level work like system file replacement and symlinking, BETTER than the CLI so I just don't bother.
So if they would simply give us a *BSD that could have the CLI removed and never be hamstringed? Again it'd curbstomp Linux tomorrow, I could easily see everyone from Walmart to guys like me slapping it on systems for those that only use the net, of which there are many. What's sad is BSD at least has an example in OSX, when was the last time you heard a "open up and type" from an OSX user? Oh its still there, it simply isn't required to do anything on the OS. But that is the problem with the free OSes in a nutshell, while CLI is a completely optional addition to OSX and Windows it is 100% required on the free OSes, and that is just gonna keep the masses away.
Sorry AC but gaming is a red herring. As much as we PC gamers like to think different its a VERY small niche. Oh its a niche that spends a LOT of money, billions in fact, but the same can be said of yacht racing or Ferrari manufacture and nobody would claim either of those is mainstream.
No the problem is that for every gamer (who just FYI doesn't have any problems with Windows so isn't a good market to target anyway) there are easily 10,000 like my GF who uses ONLY the Internet. When she gets on the PC I built her she doesn't use a single thing other than the browser and media player, that's it. Everything else is email and FB and Yahoo and 40 other websites she goes to often...so why doesn't Linux work for her?
Simple because as that list I provided soundly demonstrates even if something works in distro foo when foo+1 comes out there is a VERY good chance one of the low level internals will be futzed with by some dev who had an itch and it'll be broken. Before anybody screams "But it works on servers!" I would point out that 1.-Servers rarely even have DEs, they don't care about sound or WiFi, they aren't using browsers, there is simply less surface area for the devs to attack and 2.-They are all controlled by highly trained well educated server admins who get paid the big bucks to deal with breakage, nobody is gonna hand out free server admins with each desktop sold.
Until someone can fork the ENTIRE SYSTEM away from the devs, who have made it clear from Torvalds down that they WILL NOT STOP FUTZING no matter how much headaches it causes then it simply won't get better.
I have said many times I am ready to issue a pepsi challenge to those that believe in Linux, none will take me up on it. We'll take ANY regular distro, not LTS because we have seen that stands for "don't backport shit", that was released the same quarter as Vista, the most hated and supposedly "buggy" MSFT OS. Pick Ubuntu, PCLOS, frankly I don't care which one you pick I'll still win the challenge. We will then install it beside Vista on identical boxes, hell we'll make it a dual boot if you are worried about ANY deviation in the chips, we'll make sure both systems have 100% working drivers (which I'll allow you to CLI all you want on this part, since you are the builder not the user at this point) and then we'll simulate what will happen to the user by upgrading both to current.
I know I will win this challenge because I've done it before and have seen what happens. The Vista system? Runs perfectly, ALL the drivers and software that was running on LTS WILL be running after the last patch, the Linux system? BROKEN, HORRIBLY BROKEN. Sound will be wasted, the WiFi will be gone, hell you'll be lucky if the GPU drivers are working at all, and I don't care which chip you pick because the devs fuck Intel as bad as they do AMD and Nvidia so it'll still be fucked, it'll all fall down like a house of cards.
So if you want to know what it'll take to have a "year of the Linux desktop" it is this: When I can take ANY release from 3 versions ago and upgrade to current and have a 100% functional system? Then and ONLY then will it be ready. But I've tried over a dozen distros so far and not one, not the rolling releases like arch nor the traditional releases like PCLOS and Ubuntu have passed the mustard, not one.
Have you seen the giant pile of money trucks Cook is sitting on? If this company turned out to be a threat he could just buy the damned company and add their patents to their already scary patent warchest, or keep them a separate company and simply point them at Apple's rivals.
You see that is the problem when it comes to these companies becoming supermegacorps, there really isn't any way for them to truly lose, they can buy their way out of damned near anything. Hell look at MSFT, Ballmer makes Uncle Fester look like a genius and even a decade of him flushing money for one harebrained scheme after another hasn't even made a dent. He could probably go another 20 years shooting his company in the face before their cash flow actually becomes a problem, scary but true, and Cook has a hell of a lot more $$$ to burn than Ballmer.
Uhh..haven't looked at the new AMD monster racks designed to function as a single unit thanks to the tech they got from the SeaMicro purchase. We are talking 2048 cores and 16Tb of RAM in a single rack, with THAT much space if you got the cash you should be able to fit your large dataset into RAM and run it from there.
Man I don't want to even think about what the electric bill for something THAT powerful would be though.
Its 11 years old next month, source. My timeline was off because I was running the beta long before release, just FYI but I went back to Win2K and skipped XP entirely, I went from 2K to Win XP X64 (really Server 2k3 Workstation) and then went from that to Win 7.
And the reasons servers run Linux is two fold, 1.-The companies pay millions of dollars for highly educated Linux admins to negate some of those disadvantages as well as hiring many of the devs to fix their own messes, nice racket if you can get it. 2.-MSFT has given a HUGE chunk of the server market away by being purposely obtuse on their licensing and frankly charging too much. The stupid idea of user CALs is a perfect example. I blame this on Ballmer, who cares more about stock price than actual share, and will actually feel sorry for the Linux server guys when Ballmer is finally fired because if they bring in someone like Allchin or Ozzie that actually knows the business market? You'll see $500 server licenses with no user CALs and Linux will drop like a rock as it'll be cheaper to buy Windows than deal with the bullshit.
And the difference with Windows bugs VS Linux bugs? Its shows the "all eyes" horseshit is exactly that, horseshit. These aren't some bugs nobody has tripped over, these are well documented bugs that have existed for YEARS because the devs would rather put out something "New!" than fix their own damned messes.
In the end Linux simply can't escape the busted shitter problem. What is the busted shitter problem? Simple, ask someone to paint you a picture or write you a song for free? you'll get several offers and while most won't be top 10 quality many will actually be passable. Ask someone to come by and fixed your busted shitter for free? I hope you like pissing in the sink.
What the community refuses to accept, and instead deals with workarounds and CLI "fixes" and other crap than accept, is the reason those bug trackers are filled with several year old bugs is that fixing bugs, doing regression testing, QC and QA is long boring and tedious and you simply won't get enough volunteers to do long boring and tedious jobs EVAR, it just won't happen.
So every year Linux gets prettier, because making pretty things is a part of human nature but better? Nope, it just doesn't get any better. Why does De Icaza have to give up on sound in 2012 on Linux? Because the whole sound subsystem needs to be trashed along with X Server but replacing those is long, boring, and thankless work so it just isn't getting done.
In the end I say to any Linux user that is ready step up and take the pepsi challenge I have previously listed. Since all camcorders today have the ability to timestamp it'll be easy to see if you try to cheat and if I'm wrong this will give you the chance to show me up in front of the world...but they won't, because they can't. you simply can't take any mainstream distro from 5 years ago and upgrade to current without at least one, usually multiple, drivers shitting all over themselves. And until a single Linux can pass the challenge there really isn't anything to discuss, the entire system is broken so who cares.
But the problem with the *BSDs is just what you pointed out, they use CLI as a crutch.
God what I wouldn't give to be given just ONE DAY, just one single day, with the head devs from BSD and Linux, because I would point them out the simple fact that consumers won't put up with CLI and frankly they should NOT have too! Its a SERVER tech, it belongs on SERVERS, where scripting and repeat-ability are valuable and useful. This is completely the opposite of the consumer space, where they ain't scripting shit and aren't doing anything in batches so all it is is an irritation that turns people off!
Little known fact: Some time in late 04-late 05 several batches of AMD Compaq units left the factory with Windows XP and ZERO access to CMD, none at all. Somebody had removed ALL GUI access to it, you couldn't even get to it by using run, you had to know where in the file system it resided. I know this because i have come across these systems several times over the years (they were often sold at Staples and Office Max and were quite popular) and the simple fact was nobody ever noticed it was gone and I wouldn't be surprised if even Compaq doesn't know about this little gaffe, simply because Windows doesn't really need CLI.
If the BSD guys would just give us that, give us a BSD that CLI could be removed from without causing a single problem? They could curbstomp Linux tomorrow. But as long as the devs treat treat desktop and server as two sides of the same coin instead of completely different animals then its just never gonna go anywhere.
No one is gonna call the article a troll or shill for pointing out a serious problem? I'm shocked! In the end the problem with Linux is NOT the UIs, or any of the pretty on top, in fact in many ways they have surpassed Windows and OSX in those areas.
Nope, the same damned problem that plagued Linux 10 years ago STILL plagues it to this very day, and it all comes down to drivers and kernel devs constantly futzing with low level internals with nary a thought to QA, QC, or backwards compatibility. Whether anyone likes it or not SOME backwards compatibility IS required, because most software companies and ODMs aren't gonna pay a team of devs to constantly rebuild their products because some kernel dev got an itch.
For proof I direct you to this page of over 100 show stopping bugs which just FYI but every. single. bug. has links showing that yes this IS a problem and its not just one person's opinion or experience and damned near every. single. problem. on that list can be traced by to devs fucking with internals and breaking shit. Now compare that page to the same page from 3 years ago and see how much has NOT been fixed in over 3 years.
All the DE wars, Gnome 2 VS Gnome Shell and KDE 3 VS KDE 4? That's all turd polishing because if the guts are constantly breaking nobody will care about the pretty and as long as the devs are given carte blanche to fiddle with anything without a thought about what its doing to the stability of the overall ecosystem things just won't get better.
That is why I had such high hopes for Ubuntu, I had hope that Shuttleworth would do like Google did with Android and just fork the thing away from the devs so that real stability and central management could be brought to bare instead of the cat herding we have now, but it was not to be.
Linux has beautiful UIs, and tons of software, but retailers like myself won't ever touch your product if we install it on a system and 6 months later its broken its own drivers because some dev got a bee in his butt to futz with some low level system files and trashed my customer's WiFi or sound...ohh God sound, WTF were they thinking with Pulse?
That's great...for a server or specialized workstation. For your bog standard PC tower you are talking 3 to 5 slots which can be pretty much anything and could need anything from practically no power to assloads of power. You can have onboard or discrete sound, hell you can put in 3 graphics card with each being fed a ton of power, there is simply too many different things to have it all fed by a passively cooled power brick.
Personally I LIKE the current design, because that means I can quite easily design the system with the correct PSU for that system. My GF, who only has an Athlon X3 with an HD5450 and a single hard drive and DVD burner? A 450w with 85% efficiency is just perfect for that system whereas mine with 3 HDDs, the possibility to go crossfire, power hungry GPU and 6 core CPU and dual burners? A 750w is a better fit and gives me more headroom to add more later.
And best of all it doesn't cost an insane amount of money and is even possible because it isn't a bunch of proprietary crap like we had back in those days. I don't know how many machines I had to shitcan when all they need was some minor upgrade because either the proprietary PSU in a more powerful form cost more than the system or it didn't exist at all.
So maybe if you could make it bog standard so anybody could replace that brick with any other brick? It would probably be fine but sadly as we've seen time and time again what we end up with is more lock in and proprietary crap. hell I'd argue that is why so many damned laptops end up straight in the dump, everything about laptops are so proprietary if its anything other than just needing RAM or a HDD then its just not worth fixing.
If your work gave you an XP laptop frankly you are working at a shitty place and I'd tell them to take it back, especially after that guy spent nearly 3 years trying to clear his name thanks to a badly configured XP laptop handed him at work that turned out to have a backdoor that some scumbags were using to run CP through the thing.
But again you wanna compare to a 12 year old OS then dig out a 12 year old Linux distro, because otherwise you are purposely trying to rig any comparison. You are talking about an OS that has been legacy for over 5 years, that no longer gets ANY updates but security, and which hasn't been sold for half a decade so fair is fair, compare it to a 7 year old Linux.
At the end of the day that doesn't change the fact that Linux internals are deep fried ass and I'd be happy to take the pepsi challenge to prove it. funny that I have yet to see a single person try to take up the challenge either, probably because they know Linux will die hard.
The challenge is incredibly simple, we will take ANY distro that was released the same quarter as Vista, and I will give Linux the advantage by taking not only one of the most hated OSes but by giving them only HALF the amount of updates XP has had, we'll install it on two identical systems, make sure all the drivers are working, and update BOTH systems to current.
And I can tell you because I have done it that the Linux unit will be totally fucked by the end of the updates. The sound won't work, the DE is more than likely to be glitching if the graphics drivers are even functional, and the WiFi won't have a snowball's chance in hell, I don't care which chip you choose. that is just FIVE years mind you, barely half the time you get with Windows.
I'm sorry but as a wise man said "Linux is free..if your time is worthless" and no truer words have been spoken. Take a modern version of Windows like 7 and you can slap it on ANY laptop made in the last half a decade and upgrade from RTM to the last patches from patch Tuesday and it will ALL work, every. single. driver. will be functional, including wireless and printers. Try that with Linux? You get a broken mess, why? because Torvalds and the other devs frankly don't give a damned if YOU have problems, all they care about is scratching THEIR itches.
Since the FOSS koolaid drinkers modded it down you might not have seen it so I urge you to take a look at this list filled with show stopping bugs (with links) and compare it to to the same list from three years ago and see how many haven't been fixed after THREE years. Hell go to the Ubuntu bug tracker, they have bugs SIX years old. Maybe you'd like a Linux dev's thoughts on the subject so here is a RH dev and he says the desktop is "suckage" and while his take is different than a retailer it all comes down to basically the same thing, devs biting off more than they can chew and designs that worked 20 years ago but don't work now being hung on to.
So we retailers have a DAMNED GOOD reason why we won't touch Linux with a 50 foot pole, and I have a reason to be kinda pissy about it, because I'm tired of being lied right to my face with total bullshit about how "Linux is ready for the desktop!" yet when I point out obvious problems, documented up the ass I might add, I get the same parroted "use distro X!" "Works for me!" and "You must be an M$ Shill" retarded garbage. Frankly if Linux wasn't free it would be deader than BeOS right now, and rightly so. The devs engage in Mickey Mouse Amateur hour shit when it comes to the internals, NO stability, NO ABIs, NO QA or QC, yet because its "Free as in freedum!" the community will happily take their crap and bitch at anyone who points out emperor RMS is running around bare assed. Well if it actually worked why is ALL the B
It was for some show where they tried to cook up a "dream rig" of absolute cutting edge and they had a bunch of Hollywood SFX guys helping out. The thing used some sort of belt system that was able to switch direction, don't ask me to explain the thing but I can tell you they did have a small harness to keep him from going too far on the system and taking a header. They had rigged up this lightgun M16 that would work in game and track his fire so he could just blast, along with a set of infrared lasers that allowed him to duck and lean.
It was wicked cool to watch but afterwards the guy using it said he felt like he was gonna have a coronary when bad guys came flying out from around a corner and that the tracking did leave him with a sick at his stomach feeling so while it might be cool in small doses i kinda doubt its something you'd want to have a marathon CoD session with. Still looked cool as hell to watch.
Actually I'd say its even worse than that, its a combo of kickbacks and CYA because they can now say "See we are doing something!" even if that "something" doesn't actually fucking work or make anything except some defense contractors better off.
Sadly we see this time and time again, where the government trips all over itself to do "something" without the slightest thought to whether the something is effective, functional, or if it even makes things worse. All that matters to the politicians is they can point at the black box and say "But we did something!" and the corps of course don't give a rat's ass if the politicians point fingers or not, not as long as the checks clear.
In the end its classic security theater, it gives the politicians a way to bring home the bacon and/or get some more kickbacks, it lets them say "We did something!" as a CYA move if the excrement hits the bladed cooling device down the line, and it gives them another bullet point to show the public how they are "keeping them all safe" which is never questioned. And since it isn't the politician's money anyway as far as they are concerned? No downsides.
THANK YOU!!! Its nice to see that SOMEONE gets it!!! As a system builder and retailer its after sales support that gives us the value in VAR but Linux becomes a time sink from hell very quickly, because not only do the updates and upgrades come at a breakneck pace but there is so little QA and QC that often drivers that work perfectly fine will be totally destroyed on update or upgrade.
Hell look at the article by De Icaza not two weeks ago where he gave up having something as fundamental as sound on his PC because he was wasting more and more time trying to get the damned thing working after each upgrade! do you REALLY think Suzy the checkout girl or Jerry the plumber are gonna have a PC that fricking SOUND doesn't work?
The ONLY way to sell Linux systems is online so you don't have to support the thing, once it leaves the place its gone forever, all sales final. that may be fine for some people but I like having happy customers, I LIKE knowing the PCs I built are running quietly in their homes years later, I LIKE that my PCs are so well thought of i'll often see them back in the shop for an upgrade after passing through a dozen family members. And you just can't do any of that with Linux, the internals are just too much of a mess as your link demonstrates.
OMFG...did you just compare Steve Jobs, one of the best salesmen and visionaries of the past century....to Steve Ballmer? Hell I haven't owned shit from Apple and even I wouldn't ever make THAT comparison!
In the case of MSFT the old guard IS the jackass, because he doesn't have the amount of vision in his whole damned body that Gates had in his pinkie toe. And I would remind you that at the time what Jobs wanted to do? would cost over $10,000 a machine, ala the Lisa which the company took a bath over.
The problem Jobs had was he was TOO FAR ahead of his time, look at his designs from his NeXT days, it took 20 years for the kind of powerful chips required to build what the man saw in his head to become feasible for the masses. As much as Apple fans will hate hearing this if Jobs would have stayed the company probably would have went under, because Jobs saw what the future of computing needed to be, simple, easy to use, accessible by anyone,networking as simple as plug and play, but the tech simply didn't exist to make that a reality and rather than accept it he wanted to throw money at it and make it so.
So there is really NO comparison, and this is again from someone who doesn't use Apple products or even own an iPod, but with Jobs you had someone so far ahead it took 2 decades of silicon advancement to catch up, whereas Ballmer is an MBA used car salesman whose answer to everything is "Me too! ohh ohh me toooo!"
Remember Linux kernel 1.0? Wow Linux sucks ass, what with it having no GUI and all!
Give me a damned break, you drag up a fucking 12 year old OS for comparison? Fine ONLY compare it to 12 year old Linux distros, otherwise your entire statement? pointless. MSFT hasn't even allow OEMs to sell XP in over 5 years and are ONLY giving it updates as legacy status, which means security ONLY. NO new features, NO fixes for anything security related. Show me ONE Linux, just one mind you, where I can get even security fixes on a 12 year old install without jumping on the upgrade deathmarch, you can't, it doesn't exist.
So either compare apples and apples or quit with the "works for me" and pointless talk about how a 12 year old OS, made when a FAST machine was a 600MHz P3 with 128Mb of RAM, gave you problems. Well no shit I'd love to see the first release of Linux find jack shit myself, since obviously to make that comparison you must be running a 12 year old install of Linux.
Its called "stop using ancient ass OSes" because surprise surprise things have gotten a LOT better...at least in Windows. Linux has gotten prettier but NOT better, as that link to over 200 show stopping bugs I posted showed. WTF is the community gonna do when XP goes EOL? Are they gonna talk about how unstable FAT is and how people had to use VXD drivers in Win9X? Hell look at the numbers, even legacy installs of XP are nosediving as even lazy business users are tossing it, its old, its no longer used by anyone with any sense, yet sadly I'll still take the pepsi challenge against ANY Linux released at the same time and when we update both to current? XP WILL still have working drivers, Linux? will crap all over itself.
Sorry but that is a fact. Hell i ought to put up a damned YouTube video showing the first release of Ubuntu VS Vista to showing how Linux craps on drivers but then I'd get told "use distro X!" and that I MUST have rigged the camera...God save us from FOSSies.
Why am I not surprised with a UID like "KinkyKing" you are posting "more baby more"?
As for TFA, who in the hell is gonna have a room so perfectly uncluttered and whose walls are all bare enough to make this worth using? I think a more workable idea was that one I saw awhile back where they had the VR helmet and a little treadmill like thing that allowed 360 degree movement. At least with that the player could stand in one little spot and not have to worry about having perfectly clear walls to project their games onto.
Frankly though with all the patents that all the big corps are getting nowadays it seems to me more like they are just throwing shit at a wall and hoping that something sticks. Since patents last for 20 years and the USPTO lets you be vague as hell when it comes to them I wouldn't be surprised if anything involving games and projection for the next 20 odd years will be getting a phone call from a MSFT lawyer with their hand out. We really need a "use it or lose it" clause where if you don't actually use the patent to make some product, at a reasonable price and offered at a reasonable number of locations to keep them from just making a one off and asking a million bucks for it, then you lose the patent, simple as that. That would help get rid of all the patent trolling and might even keep companies from spamming the USPTO by making them think about having to actually make a product of some kind out of what they are filing for.
You want an example? Would over 200 examples of broken guts, nearly all of which can be tied directly or indirectly to devs futzing with the internals be good enough? Would you like to compare it to the page from 3 years ago so you can see how much of it hasn't been fixed in three God damned years?
But of course you won't respond to this, nor the fact that the ONLY way Dell, one of the largest OEMs on the God damned planet BTW, can get Linux to fucking run even when dealing with a severely limited subselection of their offerings is to hire a team to run their own damned repo because otherwise the devs constantly shitting on internals leaves you with a device with NON WORKING DRIVERS...gee, where did I hear that? Why I believe it was me, pointing out that very same thing!
And frankly I have every right to be pissed, the community lies its fucking ass off and when caught in those lies what do we get? An apology maybe, or even some pressure brought to bare on the devs constantly breaking shit? Nope we get the standard "Works for me!" followed by a "U must be teh M$ Shill! U no suck teh koolaid!" horseshit. Quick what does MSI, Asus, Walmart, Best Buy, and me ALL have in common? Every one has offered your OS only to find its a broken mess with shit constantly breaking and now won't put your OS on shit for all the money in the world. Gee, wonder why that is? Could it be the after sales support thanks to devs crapping on the internals constantly makes it a money sucking pit? Nope, must be that invisible money truck Ballmer backs up to our door. yep, that's the ticket...dumbasses.
Arrrrgh!
Are you being this fucking obtuse on PURPOSE, or do you SERIOUSLY not see that having software so God damned tied to internals it can't run without kernel foo, lib bar is a completely fucking RETARDED way to design a system? There are literally tens of thousands of programs from the Win9X era you can run right now, this very minute, on Win 7 X64...do you think you'd have a snowball's chance in hell of running even 5 year old software on Linux? No because the stupid ass practice of depending too damned much on specific versions of crap makes that impossible!
You DO know your competition solved that fucking problem years ago yes? Ironically enough they solved it by taking one of your own ideas and fucking doing it BETTER than you! Look up Windows SXS or side by side, where a program can need any damned version of lib what the fuck ever and it doesn't matter, because Windows creates symlinks to the different versions and has them in SXS so that shit doesn't get broken if you need version foo for program A and version bar for program B. I know, shit not breaking, well where's the "fun" in that?
Its not magic, its not a conspiracy, and it sure as fuck isn't because MSFT is a great company that you are getting your asses kicked on the desktop, its because devs hang onto stupid fucking ideas that haven't made sense in over a damned decade. the depending on libraries crap made sense...in 1994, when hard drives were tiny and bandwidth tight as hell, but we ain't in 1994 anymore though are we? Kinda sad the ONLY success Linux has seen in the mobile space was when Google bitchslapped the devs and simply took their toys away from them with Android. BTW what is Android? Why its a no CLI, all GUI OS where shit actually "just works" and tends to "just work" for quite a while with zero futzing...gee, kinda sounds like what retailers like me have been saying for damned near a decade we need for consumer desktops doesn't it?
Yes and this can be a good thing or a fucking terrible thing. Remember Steve Ballmer, the cause of MSFT pissing away a monopoly and blowing billions on one shitty idea after the other? Can't get rid of him because between him and his BFF Bill they control 60% of the stock.
Just because you had a good idea that made a great company does NOT mean you are gonna be able to keep coming up with good ideas that let the company move forward, Yang at Yahoo should have taught everyone THAT lesson. Sometimes outside voices is exactly what you need as they aren't enamored of past successes and can give you an objective outlook. Hell did they even sit down and do some serious discussions with coders trying to make apps with HTML V5? Or did they just jump on the buzzword bandwagon?
Uhhh...built my dad a quad from kit, didn't have time to go out there until the weekend, so he got a bee in his behind and installed Win 7 himself. he's 73 BTW and short of sticking a disc in a drive knows jack and shit about PCs. What did I find when i got there? A total virus infected broken mess?
What I found was a perfectly working system, even had free AV installed. Windows downloaded and installed all the drivers, patched itself, and even popped up a window that said 'You don't have an antivirus. Would you like us to send you to a page where you can choose one?" and gave him a list of free and pay antivirus programs. It even detected his printer and USB hard drive, set up the printer and asked if he'd like to use the USB drive for backups which when he said yes it set a backup schedule. In fact the ONLY thing I had to do when i got there was show him where to get Firefox from, he wasn't sure on how to get it with adblock.
What we need is a Linux THAT easy and more importantly one that STAYS that easy and doesn't crap on the drivers. Did everybody miss the De Icaza article not a week ago where he gave up on having something as fundamental as sound because Pulse crapped every. single. time. he updated his system?
Everyone here thinks i hate FOSS because I won't drink the Koolaid but nothing could be further from the truth, every Windows system I sell or repair I load it up with FOSS from Chromium with ABP to LO. The problem is the OS is ca ca, and that even if you get it working on modern hardware the first update and SOMETHING is gonna die. Either the wireless, or the sound, or the graphics driver or something, but you can be assured the devs will crap on some driver you need. And that costs me money, money Windows doesn't cost me.
So that is why I don't sell Linux and furthermore why you see NO B&M stores selling Linux, the ONLY places you see sell Linux boxes is online, why? because they don't have to support a machine you sell online, that's why.
And isn't it funny how every single post other than yours is simply a "works for me!" followed by "U must be a shill!" Wow, really?
Linux drivers sucking balls is God damned legendary, even long time Linux admins admit the wireless is deep fried ass and didn't De Icaza have an article here not even a damned week ago talking about how he had fucking gave up on sound because of Pulse? Is the community THAT filled with religious zealotry that even pointing out the damned obvious is impossible?
Do all those that bitched want a list? How about a list of over 200 show stoppers damned near all of them in part or whole dealing with shitty drivers and updates crapping on said drivers? Here is the same list from three years ago so they can all see how many HAVE NOT BEEN FIXED IN THREE YEARS...but of course that can't be true! Why it works perfectly because RMS waves his magic pixie wand! Why having devs constantly crapping all over internals can't be a BAD thing, because they are just being free!
So its a hell of a lot more than "If it works OOTB then you're okay" because what works OOTB this week may be completely wiped out next week because some dev decided he thought some critical system file would be better if he changed some crucial element, fuck it if they can't take a joke.
The ONLY reason that Linux works in servers is companies spend millions of dollars on full time admins and fixes dealing with the broken shit and that is as completely opposite from the desktop market as one could possibly get! Because whether they like it or not we will NOT hire a team of full time devs to sit around maintaining our own repos because the devs can't quit breaking shit, which just FYI is the only way Dell can get Linux to work and we will NOT give away free lifetime support contracts or give away days of our time every 6 damned months when the devs have their annual crapping on the system.
If you think its perfectly fine to waste your time fixing what they break every 6 months, or are one of the VERY few who are using some system old enough nobody is futzing up the drivers? Well I'm glad, some people collect stamps, everyone needs a hobby. We do this FOR A LIVING and every time you crap all over the system it COSTS US MONEY, money that frankly works out to MORE than WIndows costs.
Quit taking crap sandwiches from the devs, bring some real stability and at least 7 years of ACTUAL support, not that crap like Ubuntu LTS which stands for "don't backport shit" (which just FYI but having software so damned tied to the system that it won't fucking run unless you have kernel foo is totally shitty coding, okay?) and we'll be happy to sell and support your product. But quit living on fantasy island where we have nothing better to do with our weekends than fix fucked up drivers and deal with angry users because some of us? Actually have lives.
Why bother with all that and have the extra load of running a VM on top of the system when you can just slap Comodo Time Machine set to take snapshots at startup and just call it a day?
Its the perfect cure for the clueless users that break their machines, just have them hit the home key on boot, or pick the little clock icon if its running, send it back to a snapshot before they borked it and voila! Hell you can even lock a clean and loaded snapshot so its like having your own factory restore for any machine you want. Its free, its simple, what more could you want?