Oh Lord its Twitter! Long time man, WTF you been up to? I can't believe you made a knockoff of my user ID, hell you made knock offs of Macthorpe and all the other old timers so I was starting to feel left out there, nice to see I'm well regarded enough to rip off, thanks.
As for TFA that's why i give my customers Comodo Dragon, based on Chromium but without all the Google phone home bits. the new IE may be secure but frankly who gives a rat's ass, when the refused to backport it to their STILL UNDER SUPPORT operating systems like XP (and isn't the next version only gonna work on 7 & 8?) it became completely useless as far as I'm concerned.
With Dragon you can run any Windows from XP-8 and have the same browser synced so it all "just works" which is nice and as a bonus you have any problems their devs are constantly on their forums and are quick to get back to you with help.
Sorry, didn't make myself clear but it's been a long day trying to help this guy. when I said "reset password" I meant the ROUTER, the system I automatically wrote off as wasted and had him do a full format and reinstall. And no its not RTM, I had him use WSUS offline on a friend's PC to get the service pack and patches and have them all installed BEFORE he gets on, no dice.
As for the guy that asked if it was his software? nope the stuff he needs to run is on millions of PCs and doesn't have Internet access, i even went so far as to have him completely block his software on his firewall just in case we were talking zero day, the punk was back in under 30 minutes.
And no point in scanning anything now, the little shit "punished" him by nuking all his data, his pics, movies, all gone so he can clean install without risk of anything being on the drives. i even had him use Ultimate Boot CD and wipe the partitions in case it was a MBR bug, again no dice.
And those are the usual suspects I already went through, SMB, RDC, remote registry, have all those blocked and the system fully patched before he gets online, no joy. I told him to trash the router, just stick it in a corner somewhere to mess with another day and pick up a trendnet or zonenet, just a cheapie bog standard wired router and to go in and make sure that remote admin is disabled.
It'll probably be a day or two on account of the holiday until he gets time to do another shot but if this don't work maybe I'll put it in my journal and see if the guys here want to take a crack at it because its a puzzler. Whatever he is doing isn't like anything I've had to deal with before because this bozo can even pop up CMD and taunt the guy, whatever he is doing is giving him complete and total control of the system less than 30 minutes after he gets online, no matter where he goes on what he does. This last time he was on before my friend could even install his software so that ain't it either.
What has me worried is TFA states, and I quote "This will include our re-envisioning of Half-Life all the way up to Lambda Core."...uhhh...that's nice, except that is NOT where HL 1 ends, there's four more levels after that, Xen, Gonarch's Lair, Interloper, and Nihalinth.
So they've spent all these years and its just gonna end before it gets to the climax? What good is that?
What post? You mean you "Loook inside man, look iiiinside!".../sounds of bong being hit/
If you think primal screaming or having a Stuart Smalley daily minute of affirmation makes the world a better place, keep right on toking dude. you just pretend that when people don't bother to change anything that millions DON'T die, like they did and are doing right now in the countries we are currently occupying, whatever floats your boat. Just pretend that the PTBs aren't running the fascist playbook right here in the USA, complete with a POTUS claiming the right to execute Americans without trial, they just need to "loook iiiinside" right?
Thanks for this and all the other advice, any more suggestions keep 'em comin and I'll pass them along, because this little shit is a mean little fucker, in his latest email (he is sending them from his phone to keep the little shit from reading them) the punk "punished" him for trying to lock him out by wiping ALL his data, pictures, docs, you name it.
So far no matter how vicious the little bastard is i gotta give 'em credit, he's good at his foo. So far I've had him reset the router and lock it from remote admin, used third party firewalls on the PCs, made sure all the usual suspects like remote registry and RDC aren't running, had him wipe the system and patch to current before reconnecting the network, and nothing seems to slow the little punk down more than 20 minutes before he is right back into the system. Hell he even went out and got a new system so it isn't the BIOS, the little shit was in it in less than 40 minutes from unboxing. Like I said, the punk is damned good.
Well to be fair they are basically releasing the original HL 1 in completely new HD format, so I imagine they had to get a greenlight from Valve before doing any releases. This isn't like some mod where you take the engine and cook up your own stuff, this is HL 1 scene by scene perfectly copied.
Personally as someone who owns the HL series I hope Valve snatches this up and just adds it to the HL goodness, from what I've seen it certainly looks better than Valve's own HL Source.
The problem with this is that your ISP, not any kind of neutral authority, gets to decide what is "infected" and what isn't. I had to finally threaten to sue to get my money back from a local WISP because they kept screaming "U r teh infected!" and turning me off, so finally a marched down there, threw my Xandros business laptop on the table and said "okay smartass show me this infection" and what did they do? Try to install Norton on Linux! Basically to them anyone who didn't match the usage pattern of your average grandma surfing with IE MUST be infected...after all they are different!/facepalm/
Now that that is said this next part is OT but I know we got a lot of security guys here and this one is a stumper. I got contacted last week by a former customer who has been repeatedly hacked, they were using his email and FB for spam, the usual. So I did the usual recommmendations, change passwords, scan PC, yada yada yada...only as the email wore on I found this wasn't your ordinary hack. So far the guy has changed his router password, wiped all three of his machines, no remote admin on the router yet somehow within minutes of plugging in the modem somebody is getting remote access to the system. They've gotten so brazen they even popped up a CLI with a message saying "Nice try bitch, the network is mine now".
Frankly I don't know what else to tell him, his ISP is pretty much "wow that's too bad" and the cops in that area don't give a shit about anything but dope, and frankly I've run out of ideas. I can't figure out for the life of me how this clown keeps getting remote access through both a cisco router and a clean install of Win 7 in less than 20 minutes flat, but he seems to be able to do so consistently. There isn't any WiFi, no RDC running nor remote registry, yet this guy just blows through the system like shit through a goose. this is a nice older guy so i hate to tell him "tough shit" but I'm out of ideas, any suggestions? Oh and please don't say "just use Linux" because he has software he needs to run, if you are gonna say that you may as well just tell him to buy an iPad.
You mean like AMD did only to get "LOL use Nvidia" on every forum because writing FOSS drivers that actually work on such powerful VLIW stream processors is incredibly fricking hard?
That entire argument, if you only took a second to think about it, is totally retarded. its like saying "Just give us your A&P diagrams and we'll do our own open heart surgery!" because low level device drivers are HARD TO MAKE and nothing, I repeat NOTHING like writing your average software. Maybe 2% of the programmers on the planet are truly qualified to write low level system drivers and those guys? Usually have their dance cards full so they ain't volunteering.
You're an older guy aren't you? Not trying to insult, I'm an old greybeard system builder and repair guy myself but you see we older guys have this thing called 'pride in our work" that frankly is being wiped out in the young. Maybe its because they can turn in great work and be outsourced tomorrow, maybe its the schools being run like sausage factories, hell maybe video games give them a short attention span...who knows.
What I DO know is that for every one of you and me that consider a solid job to be a point of pride there are 10,000 that will walk away the second they become bored or find the work getting hard which is why I say FOSS will never ever go anywhere on the desktop. Look at how many posted here after the first poster with obvious bugs, the compiz bugs, Ubuntu icons disappearing and Unity freezing, hell Thom at OSNews wrote an epic rant on how he was watching a video and went to switch to a message app and the whole desktop crashed.
If you are gonna get the masses to use your OS that kind of amateur hour shit just won't fly, no googling for fixes, no using CLI piles of gobbledygook as a crutch, obvious bugs like those need to be so damned rare people automatically start asking if you are having hardware problems if you find one. Whether the guys here accept it or not OSX and Windows have been that way for awhile now, sure you may get a bad driver but the OSes are pretty solid and more importantly consistent.
To get that level of rock solid consistency you are gonna have to get all those young devs to do QA, regression testing, and bug fixes, as well as get them to take real pride in their work so that when they hear about a bug like GP was having they drop working on Foo+4 and start immediately working to fix it. So far the ONLY way I've seen to get the new devs that act as you describe to do what needs to be done is cold hard cash, otherwise they start working on their "next new thing" and they frankly won't give a rat's ass about how well their last thing runs or does not run in this case.
You nailed it, I read the original and there was no "struggling" anywhere in the article, in fact the only bone of contention was they had 2 different sources that said 7 beat XP at different times (one last year, the other recently) so they simply gave both dates.
As for TFA, why in the hell would anyone care if OSX beat Vista, which just FYI I made a ton off of removing like it was a Bonzi Buddy infection, when I seriously doubt even Cook at Apple gives a rat's ass about OSX numbers in the big picture. Their ARM based devices are making them truly insane amounts of money and they control the entire pipe, from the chips to the design, whereas with OSX they are stuck at the mercy of Intel and have no control over their releases. Honestly I wouldn't be surprised if this next refresh is the last one for the pro line after what they've done with server and FCP, they could just keep the Air and the iMac and make a lot more money with less refreshes.
As for 7 I have a feeling you'll see it continue to climb after release because after running CP in the shop and letting everyone from teens to LOL play with the unit I've found most people can't fricking stand that Metro UI, might work great on a cell phone or tablet but its low res apps and badly done hybrid design with many of the low level system stuff and even MS Office 2K13 not being really touch friendly it just sucks on a desktop.
Sigh...I have a feeling its gonna be another year and a half of "Get that damned thing off my computer!" when it comes to Win 8 just like it was with Vista. At least it'll be easier this time, everything has 7 drivers while there was a while there where it was a real PITA finding XP drivers for some of those Vista laptops.
Seriously though devs, this place is full of opinionated greybeards, no need for the obvious flamebait headlines...okay? Hell you don't need to throw zingers at Apple fans anyway, they'll be happy to prattle on about how they are expensive but well worth it, like a girl talking about her Prada pumps.;-)
You DO realize that every time someone like you screams "Shill!" when someone points out a legitimate beef you make the community look like this guy right?
As for why basic usability features don't get done, its simply human nature or as i like to call it "the busted shitter problem". It has been said time and time again its the last 20% that takes 80% of the work but with FOSS you have the busted shitter problem in that releasing NEW software is FUN, while spending years doing bug fixes, regression testing, and QC? Is about as fun as getting a root canal at the DMV. To hunt down that bug and fix it will probably take a good year of hard work that is gonna suck balls, so why in the hell should somebody do a lousy job like that for free?
And THAT is the problem in a nutshell. Apple and MSFT pay millions of dollars to developers to do all those truly shit jobs so those bugs don't end up affecting the end user, whereas the devs for a lot of the stuff in Linux are doing the work gratis so the truly shit jobs aren't done.
Maybe a combination carrot and stick approach is required? Have a bounty for the worst bugs, were people donate to get them fixed, and at the same time have a set schedule, say 5 years, per software release when it comes to things that the system counts on. That way the devs can't just keep putting out new versions willy nilly because the distros won't add them to the repo and would have an incentive to actually work on what they have instead of through the baby out with the bathwater like they did with the DEs and sound subsystem.
Because there are plenty of guys like me that would be happy to put your product on new systems and give you a support network like Apple has with the Apple stores but obvious major bugs like that being released in supposed "ready for the user" software just makes the whole system look second rate and it makes after market support a nightmare and too costly for the little guys.
The problem is the patents and copyrights make Win9X a minefield #1, and #2 to get actual support you are gonna end up needing at least some Win9X system files, again then you are back in the minefield.
But as far as demand you couldn't be more wrong. You don't think guys like GOG or Steam would love to have all the classic Win9X games? Don't you think the current owners of those games would like to be able to bundle and sell them? You are talking about a TON of big name games, Twisted Metal 1&2, Resident Evil 1&2, the first 3 Tomb Raiders, the complete Mechwarrior series, tons of killer flying sims, there were just tons of really great games that would be frankly butt simple to bundle and make money with even today.
But there is simply no damned way to make Win9X work on a modern OS with even basic hardware acceleration much less dealing with all the hacks that the devs used back then. Remember it was trivial to pretty much control the entire machine then thanks to it being a 16/32bit hybrid with DOS underneath. That led to a bunch of ugly hacks that simply won't work on a modern memory protected OS., at least not without some sort of VM.
Hell I keep a little 1.5GHz Win9X box on the KVM at the shop, its got a soundblaster and a Geforce MX in it, simply because its damned near impossible to get many of the classics to run on a modern OS or modern hardware anymore. I can run DOS games all day with DOSBox but win9X? Not a chance.
Try ANY of the games I listed, they don't work in Wine and frankly never will. they used too many deep level system hacks, for example the in game events being timed in MW3 and i76 by the CPU clock which means even while throwing something like mo-slo on it'll just not work.
Wine is frankly ONLY good with a VERY small subset of Dx8 and Dx9 games, good luck getting Dx7, or any of the myriad of games that called low level stuff in Win9X or used the unique way that Win9X dealt with memory, it'll never work friend, not in a million years.
Well you can have an "Arab spring" but as we've seen those tend to be rather bloody and you end up with just another dictator taking the slot, would you prefer that?
Personally I don't think it is gonna matter WHAT you or I think, a full blown collapse and world war is inevitable. The entire fiat money system is a house of cards, a giant ponzi scheme that requires the governments of the world to throw ever more money in to keep the financial men enjoying their inflated salaries until one day like Zimbabwe the whole thing comes crashing down and the only thing a hundred dollar bill will be good for is wiping your ass.
Look at the graphs in this video and it couldn't be more obvious. look at where the market was in 29, 120% of GDP. That collapse brought about nearly 30 years (29-54) of global worldwide depression and helped a madman take over most of Europe and kill hundreds and millions worldwide in the ensuing war. Now look at where it is now, its at 430% GDP and climbing which means when this bubble bursts it'll make the great depression look like a bad weekend. You are talking a planetwide Zimbabwe situation, no banks, money, credit, loans, the whole thing will come crumbling down.
You do realize you just used the classic "works for me" completely worthless answer, yes? Well I have a B&W G3 and an AMD 6 core running Win 7 so OSX and Windows "works for me" so that means that ALL OSes must be just great, yes?
The problem is, and Torvalds can get pissy if he wants but it doesn't change reality, that with everything from the kernel on up constantly in a state of flux maintaining software and drivers for Linux costs waaay more money than it does for Windows and OSX so many simply won't bother. I mean how many drivers does Nvidia have to put up just to keep their GPUs running in Linux? Yet a WinXP driver written by them in 04 will run on XP now, their RTM Win 7 driver runs on 7 now, no need for Nvidia to futz with it.
If you would like some further reading I'd suggest this article by one of the RH devs that says the desktop is "suckage" and that Linux is paying for "mistakes made 10-20 years ago"...kinda like...well kinda exactly like what de Icaza said. Oh and if you'd like to see what is broken here is a list of over 200 problems with both software and drivers. Please note that this is the 2012 edition, I can provide a link to the original list and you can compare and see how many of those problems are over 3 years old now.
The sad part is you actually stop and talk to those in the tar paper shacks and its the classic "crabs in a bucket" where they will happily vote to hurt themselves if that vote also hurts some race they don't like, usually black or latinos.
Kinda sad that the "southern strategy" still works nearly 50 years later and still keeps pretty much the entire south voting party line no matter what the party does.
What we desperately need is multiple parties, but the MSM are so bought and paid for that they'll make even the idea of having multiple parties look like the talking of crazies, meanwhile the same two corrupt entities just switch back and forth while the guys on the top laugh and laugh.
If you are not using hybrid sleep on your desktop then "ur doin it wrong" as we are talking less than 5 second wakeups and less than 5w power draw. I've been using it on Win 7 since the beta and frankly there really isn't any point in shutdown anymore.
Explain the tar paper shacks all across the south with Romney signs in their front yard. Name a single thing the republicans have done that have helped those so poor they live in tar paper shacks. These are the people most likely to be on aid, to be using free or low cost medical care, yet they are also most likely to vote against the very programs that keep them alive. If that isn't voting against your own interests i don't know what is.
And that would be....? The same lobbyists hand out the checks year after year, the usual suspects are at the top of the check writing lists year after year, hell the closest you can come to a difference is which corporate booty they like to kiss more, the Ds love the taste of big media booty, the rs love the taste of defense contractor booty, and both have permanent kneepads sewn on for blowing Wall Street.
Or as the late great Bill Hicks said more than 25 years ago "I believe the puppet on the left shares MY beliefs, well i believe the puppet on the right has MY interests at heart....hey wait a minute, there's one guy working both puppets!" and sadly the man's words are even more true now than when he uttered them a quarter century ago.
Hell anything Star Wars without Jar Jar or Anakin/Padame "acting" in it should be commended. I haven't got to watch this yet and can already say its better than the prequels, at least the thought of watching it isn't making my stomach roll. How anybody could ever argue about canon in Star Wars after Lucas took such a massive dump on the franchise I'll never know.
Of course after watching some of the behind the scenes Lucas stuff on the Plinkett videos I have begun to wonder if Lucas wasn't always a complete retard that was only saved from his own dumb ideas by good collaborators that told him to STFU and tone it down some. I mean setting Indiana Jones 3 in a haunted house? I swear that's what Lucas wanted, Indy VS a haunted house...sheesh.
I can take Vista apps AND drivers and run them on 7 and 8 without any muss or fuss, that gives you support until 2017/2020/2022 depending on which version you decide to settle upon and from the looks of things its gonna be 7 for most which means 2020. That's 8 years of no hassles, or googling for fixes, no broken software or driver issues.
So sorry to rain on your parade, but just as 2K/XP were compatible with each other Vista/7/8 are the same. Oh sure they may keep some version of IE to try to get people to adopt but the numbers for IE have been dropping like a stone so who cares? All anybody really cares about is the third party software and drivers and those all "just work" and do so year after year. While they may change the pretty on top MSFT has always been VERY conservative with the driver model and as in TFA that is what counts.
Because without an ABI and libraries that are in constant flux there just isn't anything stable to build on, its a house built on shifting sand for software devs and without those devs porting your OS isn't getting used by the majority.
Its trollbait, it won't benefit Windows any more than it would BSD, Linux, or OSX. I mean who even shuts down anymore, when you have hybrid sleep? The amount of power used is negligible and if the battery gets low Windows automatically switches to hibernate.
It seems to me the ones that would gain the most from this wouldn't be Windows but iOS and Android as it'd be great for cell phones. Just have the main OS shut down to this new RAM and have a tiny OS that simply listens for calls and SMS and wakes the larger OS if you have incoming communications. Hell with something like that we might actually have smartphones whose batteries last like the old dumbphones did, wouldn't that be nice?
But who's fault is that? How many times have companies tried to do as the community asked only to find out all their extra work to support FOSS equaled jack and shit for sales? if the face of Anon is the Guy mask then the Face of the FOSS community should be trollface with a "U Mad Bro?" under it!
Lets take the latest example of companies crapped on by FOSS users...AMD. What did the community demand? What were your words? Why it was "give us your docs and specs and we'll support you!" so not only did AMD do exactly what it was told by the community it actually went one better, by shelling out from their own pockets to hire more devs for the FOSS drivers!
So what happened? Did AMD sales of CPUs and GPUs and APUs go up, so that other companies could see that sharing was the way to go? Nope, instead on every. single. article. about graphics you see post after post after post saying "Use Intel and Nvidia on Linux!" and again right after that sentence should be a trollface for AMD, who was dumb enough to listen to you.
If you want companies to support you then you have to support them its as simple as that. Then their increased numbers would show others that Linux and FOSS is a viable strategy to build on. Hell you even fuck the little guys, how many articles have we seen on "getting your Windows tax back" while little guys like System76 struggle to survive while offering you actual honest to God fully supported OOTB Linux systems?
If there is anything that these and other cases prove its that unless you are making some cheap hacker toy like the Pi, or are targeting the enterprise niche, you should stay away from FOSS like the clap. Because in the end you bust your ass and get nothing but a LOL Trollface for your effort.
Uhhh...MSFT got rid of that problem years ago with side by side, or SXS. Shared libraries were a good idea....in 1993 when the average HDD was 40-80Mb. Now? Not so much.
You DO realize you just gave the "shit sandwich" excuse, yes? And you wonder why nobody is taking your product? The shit sandwich excuse is when someone says "hey want a free sandwich?" and when you say yes hands you a POS between two slices of bread and says "here you go!".
To use a/. car analogy your excuse is like someone going to a car lot and you say "Hey I'll give you a free car, just give me your address!" and they wake up in the morning to find a bunch of raw steel and a picture of a car with a note that says "What do you want me to do ALL the work? build it yourself!"
The majority of the planet? NOT CS grads with low level programming experience under their belts. They can no more fix the half baked code you drop in their lap than you could make that raw steel into a Caddy, and for the vast majority the cost of paying you to actually make your product not be half baked would cost them more than the competition costs, hence why they don't take your code.
After all if that "free car" I give you is an 85 Citation with the sides rusted out, the motor blown and transmission seized, and the interior gutted, have I actually done you ANY favors at all?
Slashdot Mirror
Oh Lord its Twitter! Long time man, WTF you been up to? I can't believe you made a knockoff of my user ID, hell you made knock offs of Macthorpe and all the other old timers so I was starting to feel left out there, nice to see I'm well regarded enough to rip off, thanks.
As for TFA that's why i give my customers Comodo Dragon, based on Chromium but without all the Google phone home bits. the new IE may be secure but frankly who gives a rat's ass, when the refused to backport it to their STILL UNDER SUPPORT operating systems like XP (and isn't the next version only gonna work on 7 & 8?) it became completely useless as far as I'm concerned.
With Dragon you can run any Windows from XP-8 and have the same browser synced so it all "just works" which is nice and as a bonus you have any problems their devs are constantly on their forums and are quick to get back to you with help.
Sorry, didn't make myself clear but it's been a long day trying to help this guy. when I said "reset password" I meant the ROUTER, the system I automatically wrote off as wasted and had him do a full format and reinstall. And no its not RTM, I had him use WSUS offline on a friend's PC to get the service pack and patches and have them all installed BEFORE he gets on, no dice.
As for the guy that asked if it was his software? nope the stuff he needs to run is on millions of PCs and doesn't have Internet access, i even went so far as to have him completely block his software on his firewall just in case we were talking zero day, the punk was back in under 30 minutes.
And no point in scanning anything now, the little shit "punished" him by nuking all his data, his pics, movies, all gone so he can clean install without risk of anything being on the drives. i even had him use Ultimate Boot CD and wipe the partitions in case it was a MBR bug, again no dice.
And those are the usual suspects I already went through, SMB, RDC, remote registry, have all those blocked and the system fully patched before he gets online, no joy. I told him to trash the router, just stick it in a corner somewhere to mess with another day and pick up a trendnet or zonenet, just a cheapie bog standard wired router and to go in and make sure that remote admin is disabled.
It'll probably be a day or two on account of the holiday until he gets time to do another shot but if this don't work maybe I'll put it in my journal and see if the guys here want to take a crack at it because its a puzzler. Whatever he is doing isn't like anything I've had to deal with before because this bozo can even pop up CMD and taunt the guy, whatever he is doing is giving him complete and total control of the system less than 30 minutes after he gets online, no matter where he goes on what he does. This last time he was on before my friend could even install his software so that ain't it either.
What has me worried is TFA states, and I quote "This will include our re-envisioning of Half-Life all the way up to Lambda Core."...uhhh...that's nice, except that is NOT where HL 1 ends, there's four more levels after that, Xen, Gonarch's Lair, Interloper, and Nihalinth.
So they've spent all these years and its just gonna end before it gets to the climax? What good is that?
What post? You mean you "Loook inside man, look iiiinside!" .../sounds of bong being hit/
If you think primal screaming or having a Stuart Smalley daily minute of affirmation makes the world a better place, keep right on toking dude. you just pretend that when people don't bother to change anything that millions DON'T die, like they did and are doing right now in the countries we are currently occupying, whatever floats your boat. Just pretend that the PTBs aren't running the fascist playbook right here in the USA, complete with a POTUS claiming the right to execute Americans without trial, they just need to "loook iiiinside" right?
Thanks for this and all the other advice, any more suggestions keep 'em comin and I'll pass them along, because this little shit is a mean little fucker, in his latest email (he is sending them from his phone to keep the little shit from reading them) the punk "punished" him for trying to lock him out by wiping ALL his data, pictures, docs, you name it.
So far no matter how vicious the little bastard is i gotta give 'em credit, he's good at his foo. So far I've had him reset the router and lock it from remote admin, used third party firewalls on the PCs, made sure all the usual suspects like remote registry and RDC aren't running, had him wipe the system and patch to current before reconnecting the network, and nothing seems to slow the little punk down more than 20 minutes before he is right back into the system. Hell he even went out and got a new system so it isn't the BIOS, the little shit was in it in less than 40 minutes from unboxing. Like I said, the punk is damned good.
Well to be fair they are basically releasing the original HL 1 in completely new HD format, so I imagine they had to get a greenlight from Valve before doing any releases. This isn't like some mod where you take the engine and cook up your own stuff, this is HL 1 scene by scene perfectly copied.
Personally as someone who owns the HL series I hope Valve snatches this up and just adds it to the HL goodness, from what I've seen it certainly looks better than Valve's own HL Source.
The problem with this is that your ISP, not any kind of neutral authority, gets to decide what is "infected" and what isn't. I had to finally threaten to sue to get my money back from a local WISP because they kept screaming "U r teh infected!" and turning me off, so finally a marched down there, threw my Xandros business laptop on the table and said "okay smartass show me this infection" and what did they do? Try to install Norton on Linux! Basically to them anyone who didn't match the usage pattern of your average grandma surfing with IE MUST be infected...after all they are different! /facepalm/
Now that that is said this next part is OT but I know we got a lot of security guys here and this one is a stumper. I got contacted last week by a former customer who has been repeatedly hacked, they were using his email and FB for spam, the usual. So I did the usual recommmendations, change passwords, scan PC, yada yada yada...only as the email wore on I found this wasn't your ordinary hack. So far the guy has changed his router password, wiped all three of his machines, no remote admin on the router yet somehow within minutes of plugging in the modem somebody is getting remote access to the system. They've gotten so brazen they even popped up a CLI with a message saying "Nice try bitch, the network is mine now".
Frankly I don't know what else to tell him, his ISP is pretty much "wow that's too bad" and the cops in that area don't give a shit about anything but dope, and frankly I've run out of ideas. I can't figure out for the life of me how this clown keeps getting remote access through both a cisco router and a clean install of Win 7 in less than 20 minutes flat, but he seems to be able to do so consistently. There isn't any WiFi, no RDC running nor remote registry, yet this guy just blows through the system like shit through a goose. this is a nice older guy so i hate to tell him "tough shit" but I'm out of ideas, any suggestions? Oh and please don't say "just use Linux" because he has software he needs to run, if you are gonna say that you may as well just tell him to buy an iPad.
You mean like AMD did only to get "LOL use Nvidia" on every forum because writing FOSS drivers that actually work on such powerful VLIW stream processors is incredibly fricking hard?
That entire argument, if you only took a second to think about it, is totally retarded. its like saying "Just give us your A&P diagrams and we'll do our own open heart surgery!" because low level device drivers are HARD TO MAKE and nothing, I repeat NOTHING like writing your average software. Maybe 2% of the programmers on the planet are truly qualified to write low level system drivers and those guys? Usually have their dance cards full so they ain't volunteering.
You're an older guy aren't you? Not trying to insult, I'm an old greybeard system builder and repair guy myself but you see we older guys have this thing called 'pride in our work" that frankly is being wiped out in the young. Maybe its because they can turn in great work and be outsourced tomorrow, maybe its the schools being run like sausage factories, hell maybe video games give them a short attention span...who knows.
What I DO know is that for every one of you and me that consider a solid job to be a point of pride there are 10,000 that will walk away the second they become bored or find the work getting hard which is why I say FOSS will never ever go anywhere on the desktop. Look at how many posted here after the first poster with obvious bugs, the compiz bugs, Ubuntu icons disappearing and Unity freezing, hell Thom at OSNews wrote an epic rant on how he was watching a video and went to switch to a message app and the whole desktop crashed.
If you are gonna get the masses to use your OS that kind of amateur hour shit just won't fly, no googling for fixes, no using CLI piles of gobbledygook as a crutch, obvious bugs like those need to be so damned rare people automatically start asking if you are having hardware problems if you find one. Whether the guys here accept it or not OSX and Windows have been that way for awhile now, sure you may get a bad driver but the OSes are pretty solid and more importantly consistent.
To get that level of rock solid consistency you are gonna have to get all those young devs to do QA, regression testing, and bug fixes, as well as get them to take real pride in their work so that when they hear about a bug like GP was having they drop working on Foo+4 and start immediately working to fix it. So far the ONLY way I've seen to get the new devs that act as you describe to do what needs to be done is cold hard cash, otherwise they start working on their "next new thing" and they frankly won't give a rat's ass about how well their last thing runs or does not run in this case.
You nailed it, I read the original and there was no "struggling" anywhere in the article, in fact the only bone of contention was they had 2 different sources that said 7 beat XP at different times (one last year, the other recently) so they simply gave both dates.
As for TFA, why in the hell would anyone care if OSX beat Vista, which just FYI I made a ton off of removing like it was a Bonzi Buddy infection, when I seriously doubt even Cook at Apple gives a rat's ass about OSX numbers in the big picture. Their ARM based devices are making them truly insane amounts of money and they control the entire pipe, from the chips to the design, whereas with OSX they are stuck at the mercy of Intel and have no control over their releases. Honestly I wouldn't be surprised if this next refresh is the last one for the pro line after what they've done with server and FCP, they could just keep the Air and the iMac and make a lot more money with less refreshes.
As for 7 I have a feeling you'll see it continue to climb after release because after running CP in the shop and letting everyone from teens to LOL play with the unit I've found most people can't fricking stand that Metro UI, might work great on a cell phone or tablet but its low res apps and badly done hybrid design with many of the low level system stuff and even MS Office 2K13 not being really touch friendly it just sucks on a desktop.
Sigh...I have a feeling its gonna be another year and a half of "Get that damned thing off my computer!" when it comes to Win 8 just like it was with Vista. At least it'll be easier this time, everything has 7 drivers while there was a while there where it was a real PITA finding XP drivers for some of those Vista laptops.
Seriously though devs, this place is full of opinionated greybeards, no need for the obvious flamebait headlines...okay? Hell you don't need to throw zingers at Apple fans anyway, they'll be happy to prattle on about how they are expensive but well worth it, like a girl talking about her Prada pumps. ;-)
You DO realize that every time someone like you screams "Shill!" when someone points out a legitimate beef you make the community look like this guy right?
As for why basic usability features don't get done, its simply human nature or as i like to call it "the busted shitter problem". It has been said time and time again its the last 20% that takes 80% of the work but with FOSS you have the busted shitter problem in that releasing NEW software is FUN, while spending years doing bug fixes, regression testing, and QC? Is about as fun as getting a root canal at the DMV. To hunt down that bug and fix it will probably take a good year of hard work that is gonna suck balls, so why in the hell should somebody do a lousy job like that for free?
And THAT is the problem in a nutshell. Apple and MSFT pay millions of dollars to developers to do all those truly shit jobs so those bugs don't end up affecting the end user, whereas the devs for a lot of the stuff in Linux are doing the work gratis so the truly shit jobs aren't done.
Maybe a combination carrot and stick approach is required? Have a bounty for the worst bugs, were people donate to get them fixed, and at the same time have a set schedule, say 5 years, per software release when it comes to things that the system counts on. That way the devs can't just keep putting out new versions willy nilly because the distros won't add them to the repo and would have an incentive to actually work on what they have instead of through the baby out with the bathwater like they did with the DEs and sound subsystem.
Because there are plenty of guys like me that would be happy to put your product on new systems and give you a support network like Apple has with the Apple stores but obvious major bugs like that being released in supposed "ready for the user" software just makes the whole system look second rate and it makes after market support a nightmare and too costly for the little guys.
The problem is the patents and copyrights make Win9X a minefield #1, and #2 to get actual support you are gonna end up needing at least some Win9X system files, again then you are back in the minefield.
But as far as demand you couldn't be more wrong. You don't think guys like GOG or Steam would love to have all the classic Win9X games? Don't you think the current owners of those games would like to be able to bundle and sell them? You are talking about a TON of big name games, Twisted Metal 1&2, Resident Evil 1&2, the first 3 Tomb Raiders, the complete Mechwarrior series, tons of killer flying sims, there were just tons of really great games that would be frankly butt simple to bundle and make money with even today.
But there is simply no damned way to make Win9X work on a modern OS with even basic hardware acceleration much less dealing with all the hacks that the devs used back then. Remember it was trivial to pretty much control the entire machine then thanks to it being a 16/32bit hybrid with DOS underneath. That led to a bunch of ugly hacks that simply won't work on a modern memory protected OS., at least not without some sort of VM.
Hell I keep a little 1.5GHz Win9X box on the KVM at the shop, its got a soundblaster and a Geforce MX in it, simply because its damned near impossible to get many of the classics to run on a modern OS or modern hardware anymore. I can run DOS games all day with DOSBox but win9X? Not a chance.
Try ANY of the games I listed, they don't work in Wine and frankly never will. they used too many deep level system hacks, for example the in game events being timed in MW3 and i76 by the CPU clock which means even while throwing something like mo-slo on it'll just not work.
Wine is frankly ONLY good with a VERY small subset of Dx8 and Dx9 games, good luck getting Dx7, or any of the myriad of games that called low level stuff in Win9X or used the unique way that Win9X dealt with memory, it'll never work friend, not in a million years.
Well you can have an "Arab spring" but as we've seen those tend to be rather bloody and you end up with just another dictator taking the slot, would you prefer that?
Personally I don't think it is gonna matter WHAT you or I think, a full blown collapse and world war is inevitable. The entire fiat money system is a house of cards, a giant ponzi scheme that requires the governments of the world to throw ever more money in to keep the financial men enjoying their inflated salaries until one day like Zimbabwe the whole thing comes crashing down and the only thing a hundred dollar bill will be good for is wiping your ass.
Look at the graphs in this video and it couldn't be more obvious. look at where the market was in 29, 120% of GDP. That collapse brought about nearly 30 years (29-54) of global worldwide depression and helped a madman take over most of Europe and kill hundreds and millions worldwide in the ensuing war. Now look at where it is now, its at 430% GDP and climbing which means when this bubble bursts it'll make the great depression look like a bad weekend. You are talking a planetwide Zimbabwe situation, no banks, money, credit, loans, the whole thing will come crumbling down.
You do realize you just used the classic "works for me" completely worthless answer, yes? Well I have a B&W G3 and an AMD 6 core running Win 7 so OSX and Windows "works for me" so that means that ALL OSes must be just great, yes?
The problem is, and Torvalds can get pissy if he wants but it doesn't change reality, that with everything from the kernel on up constantly in a state of flux maintaining software and drivers for Linux costs waaay more money than it does for Windows and OSX so many simply won't bother. I mean how many drivers does Nvidia have to put up just to keep their GPUs running in Linux? Yet a WinXP driver written by them in 04 will run on XP now, their RTM Win 7 driver runs on 7 now, no need for Nvidia to futz with it.
If you would like some further reading I'd suggest this article by one of the RH devs that says the desktop is "suckage" and that Linux is paying for "mistakes made 10-20 years ago"...kinda like...well kinda exactly like what de Icaza said. Oh and if you'd like to see what is broken here is a list of over 200 problems with both software and drivers. Please note that this is the 2012 edition, I can provide a link to the original list and you can compare and see how many of those problems are over 3 years old now.
The sad part is you actually stop and talk to those in the tar paper shacks and its the classic "crabs in a bucket" where they will happily vote to hurt themselves if that vote also hurts some race they don't like, usually black or latinos. Kinda sad that the "southern strategy" still works nearly 50 years later and still keeps pretty much the entire south voting party line no matter what the party does.
What we desperately need is multiple parties, but the MSM are so bought and paid for that they'll make even the idea of having multiple parties look like the talking of crazies, meanwhile the same two corrupt entities just switch back and forth while the guys on the top laugh and laugh.
If you are not using hybrid sleep on your desktop then "ur doin it wrong" as we are talking less than 5 second wakeups and less than 5w power draw. I've been using it on Win 7 since the beta and frankly there really isn't any point in shutdown anymore.
Explain the tar paper shacks all across the south with Romney signs in their front yard. Name a single thing the republicans have done that have helped those so poor they live in tar paper shacks. These are the people most likely to be on aid, to be using free or low cost medical care, yet they are also most likely to vote against the very programs that keep them alive. If that isn't voting against your own interests i don't know what is.
And that would be....? The same lobbyists hand out the checks year after year, the usual suspects are at the top of the check writing lists year after year, hell the closest you can come to a difference is which corporate booty they like to kiss more, the Ds love the taste of big media booty, the rs love the taste of defense contractor booty, and both have permanent kneepads sewn on for blowing Wall Street.
Or as the late great Bill Hicks said more than 25 years ago "I believe the puppet on the left shares MY beliefs, well i believe the puppet on the right has MY interests at heart....hey wait a minute, there's one guy working both puppets!" and sadly the man's words are even more true now than when he uttered them a quarter century ago.
Hell anything Star Wars without Jar Jar or Anakin/Padame "acting" in it should be commended. I haven't got to watch this yet and can already say its better than the prequels, at least the thought of watching it isn't making my stomach roll. How anybody could ever argue about canon in Star Wars after Lucas took such a massive dump on the franchise I'll never know.
Of course after watching some of the behind the scenes Lucas stuff on the Plinkett videos I have begun to wonder if Lucas wasn't always a complete retard that was only saved from his own dumb ideas by good collaborators that told him to STFU and tone it down some. I mean setting Indiana Jones 3 in a haunted house? I swear that's what Lucas wanted, Indy VS a haunted house...sheesh.
I can take Vista apps AND drivers and run them on 7 and 8 without any muss or fuss, that gives you support until 2017/2020/2022 depending on which version you decide to settle upon and from the looks of things its gonna be 7 for most which means 2020. That's 8 years of no hassles, or googling for fixes, no broken software or driver issues.
So sorry to rain on your parade, but just as 2K/XP were compatible with each other Vista/7/8 are the same. Oh sure they may keep some version of IE to try to get people to adopt but the numbers for IE have been dropping like a stone so who cares? All anybody really cares about is the third party software and drivers and those all "just work" and do so year after year. While they may change the pretty on top MSFT has always been VERY conservative with the driver model and as in TFA that is what counts.
Because without an ABI and libraries that are in constant flux there just isn't anything stable to build on, its a house built on shifting sand for software devs and without those devs porting your OS isn't getting used by the majority.
Its trollbait, it won't benefit Windows any more than it would BSD, Linux, or OSX. I mean who even shuts down anymore, when you have hybrid sleep? The amount of power used is negligible and if the battery gets low Windows automatically switches to hibernate.
It seems to me the ones that would gain the most from this wouldn't be Windows but iOS and Android as it'd be great for cell phones. Just have the main OS shut down to this new RAM and have a tiny OS that simply listens for calls and SMS and wakes the larger OS if you have incoming communications. Hell with something like that we might actually have smartphones whose batteries last like the old dumbphones did, wouldn't that be nice?
But who's fault is that? How many times have companies tried to do as the community asked only to find out all their extra work to support FOSS equaled jack and shit for sales? if the face of Anon is the Guy mask then the Face of the FOSS community should be trollface with a "U Mad Bro?" under it!
Lets take the latest example of companies crapped on by FOSS users...AMD. What did the community demand? What were your words? Why it was "give us your docs and specs and we'll support you!" so not only did AMD do exactly what it was told by the community it actually went one better, by shelling out from their own pockets to hire more devs for the FOSS drivers!
So what happened? Did AMD sales of CPUs and GPUs and APUs go up, so that other companies could see that sharing was the way to go? Nope, instead on every. single. article. about graphics you see post after post after post saying "Use Intel and Nvidia on Linux!" and again right after that sentence should be a trollface for AMD, who was dumb enough to listen to you.
If you want companies to support you then you have to support them its as simple as that. Then their increased numbers would show others that Linux and FOSS is a viable strategy to build on. Hell you even fuck the little guys, how many articles have we seen on "getting your Windows tax back" while little guys like System76 struggle to survive while offering you actual honest to God fully supported OOTB Linux systems?
If there is anything that these and other cases prove its that unless you are making some cheap hacker toy like the Pi, or are targeting the enterprise niche, you should stay away from FOSS like the clap. Because in the end you bust your ass and get nothing but a LOL Trollface for your effort.
Uhhh...MSFT got rid of that problem years ago with side by side, or SXS. Shared libraries were a good idea....in 1993 when the average HDD was 40-80Mb. Now? Not so much.
You DO realize you just gave the "shit sandwich" excuse, yes? And you wonder why nobody is taking your product? The shit sandwich excuse is when someone says "hey want a free sandwich?" and when you say yes hands you a POS between two slices of bread and says "here you go!".
To use a /. car analogy your excuse is like someone going to a car lot and you say "Hey I'll give you a free car, just give me your address!" and they wake up in the morning to find a bunch of raw steel and a picture of a car with a note that says "What do you want me to do ALL the work? build it yourself!"
The majority of the planet? NOT CS grads with low level programming experience under their belts. They can no more fix the half baked code you drop in their lap than you could make that raw steel into a Caddy, and for the vast majority the cost of paying you to actually make your product not be half baked would cost them more than the competition costs, hence why they don't take your code.
After all if that "free car" I give you is an 85 Citation with the sides rusted out, the motor blown and transmission seized, and the interior gutted, have I actually done you ANY favors at all?