Well I simply hated playing devils advocate here because I think copyrights have been made a disgusting land grab thanks to Disney and the mouse, but I question everything.
Its not the listing of ingredients that I question, I get that because you may have an allergy to rose hips or whatever, its the "forcing to list in order of amount" that I question. After all if you WERE allergic to rose hips then it really doesn't matter if you have 10% or 25% does it? You'll avoid that product.
But by forcing them to list the amounts from greatest to least (look at a TV dinner sometime, they even make them list from most to least on every component like breading on the chicken) anybody can just sit there with a few minutes and a piece of paper and figure out exactly what you made it of and by what amount. I don't have a problem with listing what its made of, its the amount part which makes no damned sense to me.
Uhhh...way to not read TFA or even TFS friend. They are NOT suing because they left, they are suing because they forked Wikitravel which they want to keep as a spammy park page until you give them "what its worth" which I guarantee you is some insane amount that nobody in their right mind would ever give.
Sadly I got to see the same kind of douchebag behavior when I tried contacting the companies that put out the old shareware discs for putting out a shareware emulator on a stick. I wasn't gonna make a dime, the companies that made the shareware was gonna split every cent, and the actual game devs liked the idea of their old games being played again, it was the douchebag companies that had bought up the rights when the original companies went out of business that wouldn't settle for less than assraping. We are talking titles that wouldn't have made it up to even Codename:Tenka on name recognition and companies wanting $75,000+ AND the rights to all our stuff just to have their "precious IP".
Which is of course why we need a "use it or lose it" clause because otherwise you get shit like this, where a company has no desire or intention to ever do a damned thing with a property but won't let anybody else do a damned thing either without giving them 50 times what they paid for it. Total horseshit and I hope the volunteers win.
Ahhh the ever classic and ever useless "Works for me!" and it gets modded insightful, surprise. Well I have an old G3 running OSX and an AMD 6 core that runs Win 7, both "work for me!" so all operating systems must be perfect huh?
The sad part is Linux could be fixed easily, but not as long as Torvalds and his gang of old schoolers are at the helm. Fire Torvalds, lock down a solid API and ABI where breakage is not allowed for...lets say 7 years, that gives you a nice middle ground between OSX's 5 and Windows 10, get rid of X-Server for....frankly anything because its fine for enterprise but a client/server model on a single user desktop is just retarded, and lock down all system required code, DEs, sound, wireless, for a period of 6 years so that devs can't just keep cranking foo+1 without fixing foo, basically bring some stability and a set timetable to Linux. Oh and don't bring up LTS because as we've seen with Ubuntu LTS is a code word for "won't port shit" which simply the fact that you have to port fricking programs to make them work is a failwhale right there.
But hell if you won't listen to me how about one of the RH devs that has plenty of not nice things to say about the Linux desktop, or how about fixing this list of major Linux problems which if I were to put the original list up here and let you compare them you'd see about half of these are 3+ year old bugs...gentleman that is not acceptable.
If anyone wants Linux to give us a "third way" its me, MSFT gouging on licenses costs me around 40% of each sale and makes me keep prices higher than I'd like to cover the licenses. Hell I'd be happy to pay $25 a pop for Linux licenses to a desktop OS that actually worked and continued to work for a decade like Windows, but it just doesn't exist. You update and things break, they break because Torvalds and Co. treat the entire guts of Linux as their personal pet project. Well it ain't 1992 anymore Linus, time for you to quit screwing shit up because you feel like it. You have people depending on Linux now, its not supposed to be your hobby toy, time to grow up.
And if it turns out that autism as a whole is effected by diet, is anyone here REALLY gonna be surprised? i mean you can test newborns and find plastic in their blood, everything we eat is artificial, pumped full of hormones and preservatives and wrapped in leaking plastic, is it any wonder we have so many problems?
Every time I see an article like this all I can do is think of my great grandma, who lived to 102 while eating everything cooked in pure lard and who made her sweet tea so strong you could see two teaspoons of sugar in the bottom of the thing. But everything she ate was fresh, the pigs and chickens were grown by her, so were the vegetables, and what beef she ate came from a local farmer who would swap her part of a cow for some pork. I seriously doubt that woman had even a teaspoonful of artificial anything in her entire life!
And while I know anecdotes are just that, I can't help but compare that little town where I grew up to the way things are now, now everyone I know has allergies, everyone I know is fighting off a bug here and a bug there, and damned near everyone is on meds. Then I didn't know of anybody that was taking more than an aspirin for a headache and if somebody got sick enough to need the doc it was the talk of the town because that almost never happened.
So I have to wonder like how in the 50s they had "radiation is your friend" if people 50 years from now are gonna look back and go "WTF were they thinking?" when it comes to us and what we put in our bodies.
I hate to play devil's advocate, because I think copyrights are fucked up beyond measure thanks to Disney hitting the snooze alarm, but if we are gonna force the creators to list the ingredients in order of amount (thus pretty much forcing them to include the recipe) shouldn't they get something for that?
After all we give limited protections in the form of patents to the others that we force to give us the info, but food and drink we force to give the info without anything in return.
But it would cost them some of their profits ZOMFG! More likely that as the Chinese get tired of sucking carcinogens and breathing with masks they'll just move to Malaysia, we are already seeing the low tech stuff like garbage pails and cheap toys being made there now, just as they did with us in the USA.
This is why I truly believe that capitalism is just as doomed as communism, because just as communism had the flaw that those at the top lived like kings and allowed corruption spread while conditions for the workers went to shit so too does capitalism have a fatal flaw and that is pure greed.
Never forget the words of the great Thomas Jefferson: "Merchants have no country. The mere spot they stand on does not constitute so strong an attachment as that from which they draw their gains." This is why Halliburton is incorporated in Dubai, and MSFT in Ireland, and why Apple really couldn't give a fuck if their iDevices are made by slave children, because in the end loyalty to country and even basic human fucking decency is destroyed by the ever growing and never satisfied greed.
Oh don't get me wrong, I have NO problem with trade per se, its the lie that is called "free trade", where you give MFN to slave labor using dictatorships, that I have a problem with!
Free trade is you walking into a ring bare handed against a guy with a bat and brass knuckles, and the bat swinger has paid the ref to look the other way. Countries like China, India, and Vietnam are allowed to use slaves, dump toxins in the air and water, have unsafe worker conditions, yet we are supposed to "compete" while following the rules?
All "free trade" has done is left us an indebted nation, with business district filled with abandoned factories, huge numbers of unemployed, and future generation across the planet that will HATE the USA because the cancers and toxins they live with will be from our greedy megacorps.
So while I'm all for fair and even trading, that simply isn't what we have now, anymore than these jury rigged corporatocracy in bed with the government is a free market. The whole thing is nothing but lies, and I have a feeling when the next bubble bursts the lies about free trade will end, as nobody will buy the bullshit when the whole thing comes tumbling down.
Uhhh...comparing a single program to an entire OS, made up of hundreds of programs and millions of lines of code? We are talking about a single program with over 200 vulnerabilities per version here friend, that's not just bad, that is downright criminally shoddy!
This is why I no longer include Java in my default install base, its security is like a really bad joke. For all the remarks about Flash at least they have gotten better, look at Securina and you'll see Java has been shitty from the start and continues to be absolutely abysmal when it comes to security!
That list isn't very extensive, for example they don't have the Ford Ranger and they were made in St. Paul, Minnesota until they canceled the line in 2011, which was stupid IMHO because if they would have gave the Ranger the attention they gave their Explorer instead of only updating it once a decade it would have sold better.
But if you want a good light truck that gets decent gas mileage I highly recommend the Ranger, the 4 cyl one is especially good on gas. I went for the Vulcan V6 which I'll admit is a little gas piggie but its built like a fricking tank and when you have to drive up a mountain a couple of times a month built like a tank is more important than gas mileage. Comfortable as hell too, and the XLT gives me plenty of room behind the seats for carrying my gear.
I personally don't see any innovation myself, its all WIMP just switched around a little. Where are the truly new designs? How about something truly different, maybe something that uses the scroll wheel as a true control?
Like say instead of dropping icons on a desktop you would use the scroll wheel click and a series of wheels would appear, like on a slot machine. You would have a wheel for Internet, Games, System Tools, etc and would simply use the scroll wheel to quickly spin between them or drag and drop your most used to the favorites wheel.
There has simply got to be a better way than either a classic desktop metaphor or another damned cell phone ripoff. Cell phones became that way because of limitations in screen resolution and size, not because it was a truly better UI from a usability standpoint. what we need is someone willing to throw out the entire history of WIMP and start fresh with new ideas. Some may work, some flop, but at least we'd be making real progress.
Uhh..that same argument works for blood diamonds or any other thing brought here by atrocity ya know. After all its not OUR fault if those African warlords slaughter peasants, as long as we get the stones right?
Sorry but this is just one more reason we should kill the lie that is free trade. We give MFN to China while they use slaves and prisoners, yet we're shocked! Shocked I tell you! That American companies can't compete with China. Hey I hear there are lots of unemployed in the big cities, maybe we should make it legal to have slaves here again? We could compete then by God!
Well the problem with AGW in a nutshell is we are given NO options other than do nothing or carbon credits, which considering the ones that came up with credit default swaps or the ones writing the rules on carbon credits and cap & trade? uhhh...I think if that is the only choices i'll choose do nothing, thanks anyway.
The bitch is there are thing we can do WITHOUT using crap and trade that could make a difference, but because people like Al Gore, who just FYI has set himself up to be a a carbon billionaire, can't profit from it? Its never mentioned. for example painting roofs white to reflect more sunlight, last study i saw had that simple thing dropping temps 5 degrees, if you likewise paint the streets white instead of leaving them black IIRC it would take another 15 degrees off, which anybody who has walked across pavement in the summer knows how much energy they absorb from the sun.
In the end the thing that proves to me the current AGW "leaders" are lying leeches is you have NEVER, not even once, seen Al Gore and pals talking about restricting trade with China, even though they are throwing so much pollution into the sky we can detect it in California...why? Because rev Al and pals make crazy monies from cheap Chinese labor, you stupid peasant you!
The current leadership has hijacked AGW and turned it into a massive scam. They want the corps to bail for China (where they can get the benefits of cheap labor and no environmental laws) while they raid what's left in your pocket with carbon taxes, which they will then avoid by going overseas or like Rev Al fucking scam by buying credits from HIS OWN COMPANY and then having the brass balls to say fucking off in a Lear jet is "carbon neutral" because he PAID HIMSELF TO DO IT!!! This would be like you or I moving money from our left to right pocket, calling it "wealth redistribution" and getting a fucking tax break for it!
If you want to cut down the pollution, or use cleaner tech? All for it, right there with ya, we do live in a closed system after all. But don't let the scammers fleece your pockets by saying "We're doing something!" when that something is about as productive as a game of three card monty for the player. in the end crap & trade and carbon credits will do NOTHING to help the environment, it'll simply reward the scammers.
The problem is until we truly understand the quantum levels frankly we don't know shit. All we can really say is "With the data we have now FTL is impossible" but that data could change tomorrow, hell we aren't even sure how many dimensions there are or what the hell is going on when we get to the micro and macro at cosmic scales.
Don't forget Einstein spent the last 20 years of his life trying to disprove quantum because in his words "God doesn't play dice" and now we know that even Einstein could blow it occasionally. Do I think FTL is possible? who knows? Again all I can say with certainty is "With the data we have FTL is impossible" but the wise man knows that his knowledge is woefully limited. Hell if you'd have brought someone from just 2 centuries ago, a blink of an eye in cosmic scale, to today he'd have thought the whole thing was magic. In another 2 centuries who the hell knows what rules we'll have to rewrite, what discovers we'll make, personally I think its exciting as hell.
Sadly its a case of "cargo cult design" where they see what Apple is doing and goes "we should be like that!" without know WHY it works for Apple.
The reason it works for Apple, and boy will the iFanbois have a living shitfit when you point this out, is that Apple is all about branding, like Air Jordans or Prada pumps. Apple can get away with non upgrade-able everything because they know their users will buy the next model before they run out of space on the one they have. Hell look at the video of people waiting in line for the "new" iPad while happily using their barely used iPad. Was there something wrong with the previous one? Did it not do everything they needed it to? Nope but it wasn't the "new" version, hence the waiting in like like it was a rock concert. it reminded me of that guy they found hiding in the trash bin at a mall, literally sitting ass deep in garbage overnight just so he could have the new Air Jordans.
But while I have no problem with people buying because of fashion, if that is what makes you happy? wish you nothing but good health and fortune, please enjoy. The problem is these companies like Nokia are trying to ape Apple fashion but nobody buys their product to be fashionable they buy it to perform a job, just like you do mcgrew. This is why you'll see this phone in 6 months unlocked on Woot! for like $79, because if people are buying for fashion they buy Apple and nobody that buys to do a job is gonna want a phone fashionably crippled out the gate.
Seriously keep an eye on Woot!, Daily Steals, and IceMonkey and you'll see the victims of this aping Apple thinking pretty much every week. They cripple the phone by not having basic features like Mini-SD while trying to get as close as possible to the "iLook" without getting sued and then, gasp!, shock!, they find nobody buys the damned things and they end up piled in a warehouse somewhere.
I can only speak about Gnome 2, since i haven't had a chance to play with any Gnome 3 desktops (been playing with Vector KDE Classic, its nice) but the problem with the whole menubar on top bit is cargo cult usability where you copy the look without understanding WHY it looks like it does. in the case of OSX it is a application oriented desktop, the bar on top is supposed to be universal and changes depending on the app. With Linux you have a window oriented desktop where you have each window with its on controls AND the bar on top. It just makes no sense from a usability standpoint.
Personally I'm hoping we'll see some real innovation, I mean here we are, with systems so insanely powerful they would have been considered supercomputers a decade ago, and what do we get? It either rips off OSX, Windows, or cell phones...ugh. While I can understand where the classic desktop metaphor came from its 2012 folks, surely we can come up with something even better from a usability standpoint. Sadly though as long as iPhone and iPad are racking up the sales I think the only "innovation" is gonna be cell phone ripoff designs, which of course make no damned sense on a 27 inch monitor and is generally worse from a usability standpoint than the standard desktop metaphor.
Because they had their fingers in too many pies instead of keeping to what they did great, which was screens? Time and time again we've seen good companies that made great products get run into the ground by shitty management, hell I'd say that's what happening to MSFT now with their "lost decade" and counting, and they had a fricking monopoly for the love of Pete and the sweaty monkey couldn't capitalize. In the case of Sharp they had everything from mobile phones to microwaves,photocopiers to PDAs. They just spread themselves too damned thin.
Hopefully when they go under the assets will be bought by someone that actually wants to make great products, not like Hitachi and Samsung drive divisions being bought by Seagate and WD...yuck, just yuck.
Well that is what AMD has been doing and at least on the consumer side its pretty much a bust. I have a 3 year old Phenom X6 and frankly leaving everything on, having a half a dozen things in the taskbar and multitasking my ass off the chip just has more cycles than I can cram.
And on the server side how many cores are we up to? Something like 48 for AMD and 24 or 36 for Intel? The problem is those huge numbers of cores are really only good for two niches, datacenters where they are running a shitload of VMs and HPC. while its true there is good money in those fields there isn't enough to keep a company the size of Intel in business, and the regular businesses and even medium corps just don't have enough useful work to max out the chips from 2 years ago, much less monsters like Sandy and Ivy.
The problem that AMD, Intel, and MSFT face is that software simply hasn't kept up. Writing true multithreaded software? HARD. And we haven't had a "killer app" that really slams the chips in day to day use for quite awhile. All three companies got used to the kind of turnover they saw during the MHz wars where entire companies and home users alike were going through systems every 3 years but that just ain't happening anymore. I have quite a few small to medium sized businesses running first gen Core Duos and Phenom X3 and X4 chips and they have no intention of upgrading...I mean why should they? The machines they have now have so many cycles to spare they could double their workloads and still not max out the chips!
So while I agree that there is a niche that will always need higher core/thread counts, hell I gave my X4 to my youngest so I could get an X6 simply for multitrack audio mixing which with effects can use as many cores as you can throw, but those kind of niches simply aren't large enough to sustain a large corp like Intel, especially when you are talking about having to rip out your entire rack system to put in fishtanks just to run the thing.
Dude just stop with the she/he stuff and admit you have a tranny GF, okay? This is/. and we don't shock easily. Live and let live I say, and if that churns your butter more power to ya!
Ya know, I never put much stock into the whole "Elop is a plant" bit, but......defile the fucking phone? Are you shitting me? You couldn't have just put the slot behind the fricking battery?
Totally brain dead dumbass moves like this make me think that Elop WANTS the phones to fail, which if the man actually were a plant would make sense. Who wants to get stuck with just the overpriced storage on the phone? Especially since the whole damned point of a smartphone is the apps, which get more bulky in space daily?
The problem is, and this coming from someone who is NOT a fan of Apple and the walled gardens, is that its well known there are a bazillion "iClones" made in China that frankly you'd be hard pressed to tell if you sat them side by side, or even booted up.
So until we see an actual Apple product from an Apple store in the Apple box with a new connector? We all really need to treat these rumors as just that, rumors.
Uhhh...last I heard Sweden didn't have a giant world reaching film and music industry, so you can be pretty sure it was the *.A.A pulling the strings. That is what happens when wealth becomes too concentrated in the hands of too few, you get these multinational monsters that can slip some money in the right pockets anywhere on the planet and get what they want.
Well it just makes sense if you think about it. Look at how each die shrink has taken longer and longer and both Intel and AMD are having more errata with each shrink. Intel is already down to what? 20nm? We all know that the smaller the gate the more likely it is to have electron leakage and when you are talking servers you can't have a system that occasionally flips a bit and gets the math wrong, its just not acceptable.
Well that only leaves them 3 ways to sell you new chips if the die shrinks start hanging, and that is faster GPUs, faster clocks, or more IPC. The first one is right out when it comes to servers because they have no use for a four socket server that plays HD video, so that leaves MHz and IPC. We haven't seen any indication that Intel has some radical new process to give IPC any major boost, lets face it since Core 2 they have been getting the majority of their gains in shrinks and better GPUs built in.
So with no GPU or IPC angle that only leaves raw MHz and as we've seen time and time again you start cranking the clocks and the heat ramps up VERY quickly. Once you get up around 3.8GHz on either companies chips the heat really starts to crank which is why AMD has been selling liquid cooling for their ultra fast binned chips, too much heat to cool with a conventional fan even with heatpipes.
My guess is next year for the server line Intel is gonna announce over 4.6GHz clocks on their high end, maybe even over 5GHz. Makes sense, faster clocks with a good design like Core means they can get some serious number crunching and especially on the HPC side number crunching is the #1 reason for buying these superchips.
Personally I think AMD, Intel, and MSFT are all gonna realize what we PC builders here in the trenches already know, which is there really isn't any higher they can go. Already in the consumer market i'm not seeing anyone replace before it dies, because what is the point? The machines I was selling FIVE YEARS AGO were Phenom I X4s with 4Gb of RAM, what average consumer needs more than that? I don't work corporate anymore but from hearing from friends that do they are seeing the same thing, the chips that both companies have been putting out the past few years are extreme overkill.
Now Intel wants us to believe the servers of the world are gonna be turned into these giant heavy fishtanks, just so they can crank the clocks higher? Hmmm...don't think so. I think other than IPC most simply won't buy, not when they can buy a traditional 2 or 4 socket and have more power than they know what to do with without changing their entire layout.
Riiiight, that is why Valve is completely broke...oh wait, they are backing money trucks up to GabeN's place so he can fill his swimming pools with $100 bills.
I'd suggest you watch this video by Jim Sterling where he says Sony is practically begging for piracy to go nuts on the Vita, why? Because they refuse to compete with the pirates and instead make actually paying them more of a PITA than just using BT to get the thing.
Valve has shown by using classical business 101 you CAN not only make a damned good living on PC games but even turn some, not all mind you but you'll never get all, of those pirates into actual paying customers. Myself and all of my friends used to pirate like crazy, now none of us have bothered in years...why? Classical business 101, make it simple, make it cheap, make it convenient. Why should I bother hunting down a BT on TPB, risking some malware or zero day infecting my machine, when with Steam I can just whip out my CC and have the game in under 3 minutes WITH all the DLC, WITH the MP, WITH the ability to pop up a chat window and get my friends in the game, and all at dirt cheap prices?
Too many corps have forgotten classical business 101 and instead are trying to anally rape as many dollars as they can get out of each individual and on top of that they wear a spiked condom called DRM. I wish I'd thought to save the page but in an article with Valve one of the guys pointed out when they slapped L4D on there at $2 a pop just to see what kind of sales they would get they made something like 1700% PROFIT on the game, why? Because digital means no shelves or boxes and the cost of shipping bits is very low so they were able to make out like bandits because they found at under $10 games quickly become impulse buys and people that might not even like the genre will pick it up at that price.
So I have to agree with Mr Sterling, don't blame the pirates, blame the retarded companies for refusing to compete. We humans are lazy creatures and will happily pay for products that meet classical business 101 rules, cheap, easy, and convenient, but these companies simply refuse to pull their heads out of their asses to see the kind of money you can make by doing things that make it easy for them to give you their money. Thank the FSM we have Valve so at least ONE company does get it.
This was never about piracy, after all the pirates blew through every DRM schema like crap through a goose. All this kind of crap does is punish the people THAT GIVE YOU MONEY while rewarding the people that rip you off. Imagine two shops side by side selling games. the one selling legit games punches you in the balls with every purchase, while the shop with the "wink wink" copies not only hands you the game for free but gives you a pizza...which would you choose?
For an example of an actual paying customer getting screwed over by DRM crap just watch this video where a brand new retail copy simply won't run because of completely craptastic DRM. Be sure to pay attention to the shelf behind him, you can literally see game boxes piled nearly to the ceiling. this is the kind of guy you WANT as a customer, the kind that buys on release day, buys a ton of games, most businesses would kill for a customer like that but the publishers crap all over them with DRM.
Uhhh what does that have to do with the fact that FC I had excellent AI while the second one was filled with enemies straight off the small bus?
And sadly I haven't seen any recent games with any better AI, not in the FPS genre. It seems like they all blow the budget on the bling and then don't bother to make AI any better than the original DOOM which just kills any long lasting appeal. I mean who wants to play a game that looks pretty but the bad guys are so retarded you can just stand there and mow them down without even getting a scratch?
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Well I simply hated playing devils advocate here because I think copyrights have been made a disgusting land grab thanks to Disney and the mouse, but I question everything.
Its not the listing of ingredients that I question, I get that because you may have an allergy to rose hips or whatever, its the "forcing to list in order of amount" that I question. After all if you WERE allergic to rose hips then it really doesn't matter if you have 10% or 25% does it? You'll avoid that product.
But by forcing them to list the amounts from greatest to least (look at a TV dinner sometime, they even make them list from most to least on every component like breading on the chicken) anybody can just sit there with a few minutes and a piece of paper and figure out exactly what you made it of and by what amount. I don't have a problem with listing what its made of, its the amount part which makes no damned sense to me.
Uhhh...way to not read TFA or even TFS friend. They are NOT suing because they left, they are suing because they forked Wikitravel which they want to keep as a spammy park page until you give them "what its worth" which I guarantee you is some insane amount that nobody in their right mind would ever give.
Sadly I got to see the same kind of douchebag behavior when I tried contacting the companies that put out the old shareware discs for putting out a shareware emulator on a stick. I wasn't gonna make a dime, the companies that made the shareware was gonna split every cent, and the actual game devs liked the idea of their old games being played again, it was the douchebag companies that had bought up the rights when the original companies went out of business that wouldn't settle for less than assraping. We are talking titles that wouldn't have made it up to even Codename:Tenka on name recognition and companies wanting $75,000+ AND the rights to all our stuff just to have their "precious IP".
Which is of course why we need a "use it or lose it" clause because otherwise you get shit like this, where a company has no desire or intention to ever do a damned thing with a property but won't let anybody else do a damned thing either without giving them 50 times what they paid for it. Total horseshit and I hope the volunteers win.
Ahhh the ever classic and ever useless "Works for me!" and it gets modded insightful, surprise. Well I have an old G3 running OSX and an AMD 6 core that runs Win 7, both "work for me!" so all operating systems must be perfect huh?
The sad part is Linux could be fixed easily, but not as long as Torvalds and his gang of old schoolers are at the helm. Fire Torvalds, lock down a solid API and ABI where breakage is not allowed for...lets say 7 years, that gives you a nice middle ground between OSX's 5 and Windows 10, get rid of X-Server for....frankly anything because its fine for enterprise but a client/server model on a single user desktop is just retarded, and lock down all system required code, DEs, sound, wireless, for a period of 6 years so that devs can't just keep cranking foo+1 without fixing foo, basically bring some stability and a set timetable to Linux. Oh and don't bring up LTS because as we've seen with Ubuntu LTS is a code word for "won't port shit" which simply the fact that you have to port fricking programs to make them work is a failwhale right there.
But hell if you won't listen to me how about one of the RH devs that has plenty of not nice things to say about the Linux desktop, or how about fixing this list of major Linux problems which if I were to put the original list up here and let you compare them you'd see about half of these are 3+ year old bugs...gentleman that is not acceptable.
If anyone wants Linux to give us a "third way" its me, MSFT gouging on licenses costs me around 40% of each sale and makes me keep prices higher than I'd like to cover the licenses. Hell I'd be happy to pay $25 a pop for Linux licenses to a desktop OS that actually worked and continued to work for a decade like Windows, but it just doesn't exist. You update and things break, they break because Torvalds and Co. treat the entire guts of Linux as their personal pet project. Well it ain't 1992 anymore Linus, time for you to quit screwing shit up because you feel like it. You have people depending on Linux now, its not supposed to be your hobby toy, time to grow up.
And if it turns out that autism as a whole is effected by diet, is anyone here REALLY gonna be surprised? i mean you can test newborns and find plastic in their blood, everything we eat is artificial, pumped full of hormones and preservatives and wrapped in leaking plastic, is it any wonder we have so many problems?
Every time I see an article like this all I can do is think of my great grandma, who lived to 102 while eating everything cooked in pure lard and who made her sweet tea so strong you could see two teaspoons of sugar in the bottom of the thing. But everything she ate was fresh, the pigs and chickens were grown by her, so were the vegetables, and what beef she ate came from a local farmer who would swap her part of a cow for some pork. I seriously doubt that woman had even a teaspoonful of artificial anything in her entire life!
And while I know anecdotes are just that, I can't help but compare that little town where I grew up to the way things are now, now everyone I know has allergies, everyone I know is fighting off a bug here and a bug there, and damned near everyone is on meds. Then I didn't know of anybody that was taking more than an aspirin for a headache and if somebody got sick enough to need the doc it was the talk of the town because that almost never happened.
So I have to wonder like how in the 50s they had "radiation is your friend" if people 50 years from now are gonna look back and go "WTF were they thinking?" when it comes to us and what we put in our bodies.
I hate to play devil's advocate, because I think copyrights are fucked up beyond measure thanks to Disney hitting the snooze alarm, but if we are gonna force the creators to list the ingredients in order of amount (thus pretty much forcing them to include the recipe) shouldn't they get something for that?
After all we give limited protections in the form of patents to the others that we force to give us the info, but food and drink we force to give the info without anything in return.
But it would cost them some of their profits ZOMFG! More likely that as the Chinese get tired of sucking carcinogens and breathing with masks they'll just move to Malaysia, we are already seeing the low tech stuff like garbage pails and cheap toys being made there now, just as they did with us in the USA.
This is why I truly believe that capitalism is just as doomed as communism, because just as communism had the flaw that those at the top lived like kings and allowed corruption spread while conditions for the workers went to shit so too does capitalism have a fatal flaw and that is pure greed.
Never forget the words of the great Thomas Jefferson: "Merchants have no country. The mere spot they stand on does not constitute so strong an attachment as that from which they draw their gains." This is why Halliburton is incorporated in Dubai, and MSFT in Ireland, and why Apple really couldn't give a fuck if their iDevices are made by slave children, because in the end loyalty to country and even basic human fucking decency is destroyed by the ever growing and never satisfied greed.
Oh don't get me wrong, I have NO problem with trade per se, its the lie that is called "free trade", where you give MFN to slave labor using dictatorships, that I have a problem with!
Free trade is you walking into a ring bare handed against a guy with a bat and brass knuckles, and the bat swinger has paid the ref to look the other way. Countries like China, India, and Vietnam are allowed to use slaves, dump toxins in the air and water, have unsafe worker conditions, yet we are supposed to "compete" while following the rules?
All "free trade" has done is left us an indebted nation, with business district filled with abandoned factories, huge numbers of unemployed, and future generation across the planet that will HATE the USA because the cancers and toxins they live with will be from our greedy megacorps.
So while I'm all for fair and even trading, that simply isn't what we have now, anymore than these jury rigged corporatocracy in bed with the government is a free market. The whole thing is nothing but lies, and I have a feeling when the next bubble bursts the lies about free trade will end, as nobody will buy the bullshit when the whole thing comes tumbling down.
Uhhh...comparing a single program to an entire OS, made up of hundreds of programs and millions of lines of code? We are talking about a single program with over 200 vulnerabilities per version here friend, that's not just bad, that is downright criminally shoddy!
This is why I no longer include Java in my default install base, its security is like a really bad joke. For all the remarks about Flash at least they have gotten better, look at Securina and you'll see Java has been shitty from the start and continues to be absolutely abysmal when it comes to security!
That list isn't very extensive, for example they don't have the Ford Ranger and they were made in St. Paul, Minnesota until they canceled the line in 2011, which was stupid IMHO because if they would have gave the Ranger the attention they gave their Explorer instead of only updating it once a decade it would have sold better.
But if you want a good light truck that gets decent gas mileage I highly recommend the Ranger, the 4 cyl one is especially good on gas. I went for the Vulcan V6 which I'll admit is a little gas piggie but its built like a fricking tank and when you have to drive up a mountain a couple of times a month built like a tank is more important than gas mileage. Comfortable as hell too, and the XLT gives me plenty of room behind the seats for carrying my gear.
I personally don't see any innovation myself, its all WIMP just switched around a little. Where are the truly new designs? How about something truly different, maybe something that uses the scroll wheel as a true control?
Like say instead of dropping icons on a desktop you would use the scroll wheel click and a series of wheels would appear, like on a slot machine. You would have a wheel for Internet, Games, System Tools, etc and would simply use the scroll wheel to quickly spin between them or drag and drop your most used to the favorites wheel.
There has simply got to be a better way than either a classic desktop metaphor or another damned cell phone ripoff. Cell phones became that way because of limitations in screen resolution and size, not because it was a truly better UI from a usability standpoint. what we need is someone willing to throw out the entire history of WIMP and start fresh with new ideas. Some may work, some flop, but at least we'd be making real progress.
Uhh..that same argument works for blood diamonds or any other thing brought here by atrocity ya know. After all its not OUR fault if those African warlords slaughter peasants, as long as we get the stones right?
Sorry but this is just one more reason we should kill the lie that is free trade. We give MFN to China while they use slaves and prisoners, yet we're shocked! Shocked I tell you! That American companies can't compete with China. Hey I hear there are lots of unemployed in the big cities, maybe we should make it legal to have slaves here again? We could compete then by God!
Well the problem with AGW in a nutshell is we are given NO options other than do nothing or carbon credits, which considering the ones that came up with credit default swaps or the ones writing the rules on carbon credits and cap & trade? uhhh...I think if that is the only choices i'll choose do nothing, thanks anyway.
The bitch is there are thing we can do WITHOUT using crap and trade that could make a difference, but because people like Al Gore, who just FYI has set himself up to be a a carbon billionaire, can't profit from it? Its never mentioned. for example painting roofs white to reflect more sunlight, last study i saw had that simple thing dropping temps 5 degrees, if you likewise paint the streets white instead of leaving them black IIRC it would take another 15 degrees off, which anybody who has walked across pavement in the summer knows how much energy they absorb from the sun.
In the end the thing that proves to me the current AGW "leaders" are lying leeches is you have NEVER, not even once, seen Al Gore and pals talking about restricting trade with China, even though they are throwing so much pollution into the sky we can detect it in California...why? Because rev Al and pals make crazy monies from cheap Chinese labor, you stupid peasant you!
The current leadership has hijacked AGW and turned it into a massive scam. They want the corps to bail for China (where they can get the benefits of cheap labor and no environmental laws) while they raid what's left in your pocket with carbon taxes, which they will then avoid by going overseas or like Rev Al fucking scam by buying credits from HIS OWN COMPANY and then having the brass balls to say fucking off in a Lear jet is "carbon neutral" because he PAID HIMSELF TO DO IT!!! This would be like you or I moving money from our left to right pocket, calling it "wealth redistribution" and getting a fucking tax break for it!
If you want to cut down the pollution, or use cleaner tech? All for it, right there with ya, we do live in a closed system after all. But don't let the scammers fleece your pockets by saying "We're doing something!" when that something is about as productive as a game of three card monty for the player. in the end crap & trade and carbon credits will do NOTHING to help the environment, it'll simply reward the scammers.
The problem is until we truly understand the quantum levels frankly we don't know shit. All we can really say is "With the data we have now FTL is impossible" but that data could change tomorrow, hell we aren't even sure how many dimensions there are or what the hell is going on when we get to the micro and macro at cosmic scales.
Don't forget Einstein spent the last 20 years of his life trying to disprove quantum because in his words "God doesn't play dice" and now we know that even Einstein could blow it occasionally. Do I think FTL is possible? who knows? Again all I can say with certainty is "With the data we have FTL is impossible" but the wise man knows that his knowledge is woefully limited. Hell if you'd have brought someone from just 2 centuries ago, a blink of an eye in cosmic scale, to today he'd have thought the whole thing was magic. In another 2 centuries who the hell knows what rules we'll have to rewrite, what discovers we'll make, personally I think its exciting as hell.
Sadly its a case of "cargo cult design" where they see what Apple is doing and goes "we should be like that!" without know WHY it works for Apple.
The reason it works for Apple, and boy will the iFanbois have a living shitfit when you point this out, is that Apple is all about branding, like Air Jordans or Prada pumps. Apple can get away with non upgrade-able everything because they know their users will buy the next model before they run out of space on the one they have. Hell look at the video of people waiting in line for the "new" iPad while happily using their barely used iPad. Was there something wrong with the previous one? Did it not do everything they needed it to? Nope but it wasn't the "new" version, hence the waiting in like like it was a rock concert. it reminded me of that guy they found hiding in the trash bin at a mall, literally sitting ass deep in garbage overnight just so he could have the new Air Jordans.
But while I have no problem with people buying because of fashion, if that is what makes you happy? wish you nothing but good health and fortune, please enjoy. The problem is these companies like Nokia are trying to ape Apple fashion but nobody buys their product to be fashionable they buy it to perform a job, just like you do mcgrew. This is why you'll see this phone in 6 months unlocked on Woot! for like $79, because if people are buying for fashion they buy Apple and nobody that buys to do a job is gonna want a phone fashionably crippled out the gate.
Seriously keep an eye on Woot!, Daily Steals, and IceMonkey and you'll see the victims of this aping Apple thinking pretty much every week. They cripple the phone by not having basic features like Mini-SD while trying to get as close as possible to the "iLook" without getting sued and then, gasp!, shock!, they find nobody buys the damned things and they end up piled in a warehouse somewhere.
I don't know, they sure look similar to me.
I can only speak about Gnome 2, since i haven't had a chance to play with any Gnome 3 desktops (been playing with Vector KDE Classic, its nice) but the problem with the whole menubar on top bit is cargo cult usability where you copy the look without understanding WHY it looks like it does. in the case of OSX it is a application oriented desktop, the bar on top is supposed to be universal and changes depending on the app. With Linux you have a window oriented desktop where you have each window with its on controls AND the bar on top. It just makes no sense from a usability standpoint.
Personally I'm hoping we'll see some real innovation, I mean here we are, with systems so insanely powerful they would have been considered supercomputers a decade ago, and what do we get? It either rips off OSX, Windows, or cell phones...ugh. While I can understand where the classic desktop metaphor came from its 2012 folks, surely we can come up with something even better from a usability standpoint. Sadly though as long as iPhone and iPad are racking up the sales I think the only "innovation" is gonna be cell phone ripoff designs, which of course make no damned sense on a 27 inch monitor and is generally worse from a usability standpoint than the standard desktop metaphor.
Because they had their fingers in too many pies instead of keeping to what they did great, which was screens? Time and time again we've seen good companies that made great products get run into the ground by shitty management, hell I'd say that's what happening to MSFT now with their "lost decade" and counting, and they had a fricking monopoly for the love of Pete and the sweaty monkey couldn't capitalize. In the case of Sharp they had everything from mobile phones to microwaves,photocopiers to PDAs. They just spread themselves too damned thin.
Hopefully when they go under the assets will be bought by someone that actually wants to make great products, not like Hitachi and Samsung drive divisions being bought by Seagate and WD...yuck, just yuck.
Well that is what AMD has been doing and at least on the consumer side its pretty much a bust. I have a 3 year old Phenom X6 and frankly leaving everything on, having a half a dozen things in the taskbar and multitasking my ass off the chip just has more cycles than I can cram.
And on the server side how many cores are we up to? Something like 48 for AMD and 24 or 36 for Intel? The problem is those huge numbers of cores are really only good for two niches, datacenters where they are running a shitload of VMs and HPC. while its true there is good money in those fields there isn't enough to keep a company the size of Intel in business, and the regular businesses and even medium corps just don't have enough useful work to max out the chips from 2 years ago, much less monsters like Sandy and Ivy.
The problem that AMD, Intel, and MSFT face is that software simply hasn't kept up. Writing true multithreaded software? HARD. And we haven't had a "killer app" that really slams the chips in day to day use for quite awhile. All three companies got used to the kind of turnover they saw during the MHz wars where entire companies and home users alike were going through systems every 3 years but that just ain't happening anymore. I have quite a few small to medium sized businesses running first gen Core Duos and Phenom X3 and X4 chips and they have no intention of upgrading...I mean why should they? The machines they have now have so many cycles to spare they could double their workloads and still not max out the chips!
So while I agree that there is a niche that will always need higher core/thread counts, hell I gave my X4 to my youngest so I could get an X6 simply for multitrack audio mixing which with effects can use as many cores as you can throw, but those kind of niches simply aren't large enough to sustain a large corp like Intel, especially when you are talking about having to rip out your entire rack system to put in fishtanks just to run the thing.
Dude just stop with the she/he stuff and admit you have a tranny GF, okay? This is /. and we don't shock easily. Live and let live I say, and if that churns your butter more power to ya!
Ya know, I never put much stock into the whole "Elop is a plant" bit, but......defile the fucking phone? Are you shitting me? You couldn't have just put the slot behind the fricking battery?
Totally brain dead dumbass moves like this make me think that Elop WANTS the phones to fail, which if the man actually were a plant would make sense. Who wants to get stuck with just the overpriced storage on the phone? Especially since the whole damned point of a smartphone is the apps, which get more bulky in space daily?
The problem is, and this coming from someone who is NOT a fan of Apple and the walled gardens, is that its well known there are a bazillion "iClones" made in China that frankly you'd be hard pressed to tell if you sat them side by side, or even booted up.
So until we see an actual Apple product from an Apple store in the Apple box with a new connector? We all really need to treat these rumors as just that, rumors.
Uhhh...last I heard Sweden didn't have a giant world reaching film and music industry, so you can be pretty sure it was the *.A.A pulling the strings. That is what happens when wealth becomes too concentrated in the hands of too few, you get these multinational monsters that can slip some money in the right pockets anywhere on the planet and get what they want.
Well it just makes sense if you think about it. Look at how each die shrink has taken longer and longer and both Intel and AMD are having more errata with each shrink. Intel is already down to what? 20nm? We all know that the smaller the gate the more likely it is to have electron leakage and when you are talking servers you can't have a system that occasionally flips a bit and gets the math wrong, its just not acceptable.
Well that only leaves them 3 ways to sell you new chips if the die shrinks start hanging, and that is faster GPUs, faster clocks, or more IPC. The first one is right out when it comes to servers because they have no use for a four socket server that plays HD video, so that leaves MHz and IPC. We haven't seen any indication that Intel has some radical new process to give IPC any major boost, lets face it since Core 2 they have been getting the majority of their gains in shrinks and better GPUs built in.
So with no GPU or IPC angle that only leaves raw MHz and as we've seen time and time again you start cranking the clocks and the heat ramps up VERY quickly. Once you get up around 3.8GHz on either companies chips the heat really starts to crank which is why AMD has been selling liquid cooling for their ultra fast binned chips, too much heat to cool with a conventional fan even with heatpipes.
My guess is next year for the server line Intel is gonna announce over 4.6GHz clocks on their high end, maybe even over 5GHz. Makes sense, faster clocks with a good design like Core means they can get some serious number crunching and especially on the HPC side number crunching is the #1 reason for buying these superchips.
Personally I think AMD, Intel, and MSFT are all gonna realize what we PC builders here in the trenches already know, which is there really isn't any higher they can go. Already in the consumer market i'm not seeing anyone replace before it dies, because what is the point? The machines I was selling FIVE YEARS AGO were Phenom I X4s with 4Gb of RAM, what average consumer needs more than that? I don't work corporate anymore but from hearing from friends that do they are seeing the same thing, the chips that both companies have been putting out the past few years are extreme overkill.
Now Intel wants us to believe the servers of the world are gonna be turned into these giant heavy fishtanks, just so they can crank the clocks higher? Hmmm...don't think so. I think other than IPC most simply won't buy, not when they can buy a traditional 2 or 4 socket and have more power than they know what to do with without changing their entire layout.
Riiiight, that is why Valve is completely broke...oh wait, they are backing money trucks up to GabeN's place so he can fill his swimming pools with $100 bills.
I'd suggest you watch this video by Jim Sterling where he says Sony is practically begging for piracy to go nuts on the Vita, why? Because they refuse to compete with the pirates and instead make actually paying them more of a PITA than just using BT to get the thing.
Valve has shown by using classical business 101 you CAN not only make a damned good living on PC games but even turn some, not all mind you but you'll never get all, of those pirates into actual paying customers. Myself and all of my friends used to pirate like crazy, now none of us have bothered in years...why? Classical business 101, make it simple, make it cheap, make it convenient. Why should I bother hunting down a BT on TPB, risking some malware or zero day infecting my machine, when with Steam I can just whip out my CC and have the game in under 3 minutes WITH all the DLC, WITH the MP, WITH the ability to pop up a chat window and get my friends in the game, and all at dirt cheap prices?
Too many corps have forgotten classical business 101 and instead are trying to anally rape as many dollars as they can get out of each individual and on top of that they wear a spiked condom called DRM. I wish I'd thought to save the page but in an article with Valve one of the guys pointed out when they slapped L4D on there at $2 a pop just to see what kind of sales they would get they made something like 1700% PROFIT on the game, why? Because digital means no shelves or boxes and the cost of shipping bits is very low so they were able to make out like bandits because they found at under $10 games quickly become impulse buys and people that might not even like the genre will pick it up at that price.
So I have to agree with Mr Sterling, don't blame the pirates, blame the retarded companies for refusing to compete. We humans are lazy creatures and will happily pay for products that meet classical business 101 rules, cheap, easy, and convenient, but these companies simply refuse to pull their heads out of their asses to see the kind of money you can make by doing things that make it easy for them to give you their money. Thank the FSM we have Valve so at least ONE company does get it.
This was never about piracy, after all the pirates blew through every DRM schema like crap through a goose. All this kind of crap does is punish the people THAT GIVE YOU MONEY while rewarding the people that rip you off. Imagine two shops side by side selling games. the one selling legit games punches you in the balls with every purchase, while the shop with the "wink wink" copies not only hands you the game for free but gives you a pizza...which would you choose?
For an example of an actual paying customer getting screwed over by DRM crap just watch this video where a brand new retail copy simply won't run because of completely craptastic DRM. Be sure to pay attention to the shelf behind him, you can literally see game boxes piled nearly to the ceiling. this is the kind of guy you WANT as a customer, the kind that buys on release day, buys a ton of games, most businesses would kill for a customer like that but the publishers crap all over them with DRM.
Uhhh what does that have to do with the fact that FC I had excellent AI while the second one was filled with enemies straight off the small bus?
And sadly I haven't seen any recent games with any better AI, not in the FPS genre. It seems like they all blow the budget on the bling and then don't bother to make AI any better than the original DOOM which just kills any long lasting appeal. I mean who wants to play a game that looks pretty but the bad guys are so retarded you can just stand there and mow them down without even getting a scratch?