Damn you had it right and then you had to go and throw in the ribbon LOL!
You are right about win 7 as I've had my business customers on it since 2010 and it took me on average 20 minutes to show them the new features and then they were off to the races. the improvements over XP are so many when I'm forced to work on an XP machine it feels like going back to Win95, its just painful. You have 64bit with great driver support so you can have the machines loaded with memory, superfetch actually puts that memory to use by having their programs preloaded into RAM and ready to go, breadcrumbs and jumplists make getting back to where you were the day before a breeze, its just a better OS.
Now you are wrong about the ribbon, only because you are not taking into account office jocks have been using office for over a decade and know it like the back of their hand. The ribbon blows muscle memory all to shit and I've watched as people that could fly on 2K3 were brought to a screeching halt thanks to the ribbon. Sure its great if you've never used office before, but that isn't their biggest demographic is it? IMHO they should have had a switch at install that let the user choose which layout to have along with a GPO so it could be deployed across the network in whichever config the IT dept wanted.
As for TFA, everyone is worried about this...why exactly? Its win 8, aka "LOL I iz a cell phone LOL" OS, this thing is gonna go over about as well as Michael Richards at an NAACP luncheon. if you don't want Secureboot in X86 its a simple switch away, and nobody is gonna buy WOA unless they find it on Woot! at 80% off. Just look at the numbers or lack thereof for WinPhone 7, If they crack higher than 6% on ARM I'll frankly be shocked. Finally let us not forget the EU doesn't like MSFT anyway so if they try to lock X86 they are gonna get hit with so many fines they won't know what hit them.
Exactly, its sound and fury signifying nothing, and before anybody brings up ARM I'd point out MSFT has been flushing billions down the crapper trying to get into ARM and has exactly jack and squat for numbers, so what are you worried about? That Woot! will have WinPads in a year at touchpad prices and you won't be able to run Android on them? well duh just don't buy it then!
A much better question is this...why in the fuck is anybody listening to SJVN anyway? He is to Linux what Thurott is to Windows, a MASSIVE troll. He writes everything with as much flamebait as he can get away with, every headline is something along the lines of "Is this the death of (insert target)" and he doesn't care if he's spreading FUD or outright bullshit as long as it brings up his pageviews.
Seriously folks if you want to talk about this there are a bazillion articles out there about secureboot so lets not feed the troll, mmkay?
Uh ohhh...according to that they hired the guys in charge of making Sims Social before the rollout to get the jump on their copy. I'd say that alone when added to the fact they look like perfect clones is gonna fuck 'em.
Riiiight, and when the lotto goes up people don't buy more tickets using your logic? Either you are being purposely obtuse or are trolling, I can't tell which.
Maybe a final example will get you to understand...one of the last CEOs of Westinghouse before it went under was brought in to "right the ship" and was given generous stock as well as his huge CEO check, what did he do? he did a total slash and burn, anything that was making a cent, any building he could get a dime for, patents, he sold it all.
Now if this would have been before wall Street became Las Vegas the investor would have taken one look at what they had left on the books and said 'Holy shit, they have nothing left but a shell of a company!" and they would have stayed the fuck away from it! But because speculators have almost ZERO knowledge of what is actually going on they saw short terms gains were up and the stock shot through the roof!
So what happened? CEO cashes out and walks away with a pile of money, those that don't sell their stock in time become penniless, insiders get rich, people lose their jobs. Every damned bit of that is due to SPECULATORS, okay? Because they are gonna flip that stock in a day if not an hour they don't give a rat's ass if the company burns as long as there is some short term movement in the stock. its nothing but the housing bubble all over again, where everyone was flipping and flipping until the morons that can't flip it at the end of the bubble lose everything while those at the top of the Ponzi get the cash.
Believe what you want, doesn't matter anyway because by 2020 it'll be all over. They have allowed this bubble to grow so damned big that any normal downturn becomes catastrophic because the speculators run like sheep at the slightest movement. They have already had to bail out once, Greece is gonna go under along with the rest of the PIIGS and frankly there isn't enough money in all of EU to take care of that debt, and the end its because its ALL in the market, every damned cent. Its this speculator BS that made Apple lose value every time Jobs sneezed, that has cost Zuckerberg half a billion this past month, its because nobody looks at what the company actually makes or sells, its about the stock and not the company, get it?
Because there is so much money in the system a little pump and dump and you could have "international cornholers" shooting up the charts, what do they make? Who the fuck knows? who the fuck cares the stock is going up! And THAT is it, that is the problem...got it?
Bah! You want to show they are evil you pet the kitty. Haven't you ever played Evil genius?
Lets face it folks, Zynga has been royally buttfucking indie games devs for a loooong while now, and it looks like its time they got screwed back. Zynga doesn't just borrow ideas, they make the most blatant rips they can, copying the characters, icons, I mean we don't allow this in other media as far as i know, you can't take the movie almost word for word and just change the name to "Florist Frump" so why should you be allowed to do that to a game? Hell even the "Mockbusters" only make a sound alike title while changing the characters and situations enough its not the same movie!
Now don't get me wrong, i think most copyrights ARE bullshit, and there are certain situations where you just can't help it. For example if a game has marines in it? Well everyone knows what marines look like so if you have those characters in your game they are gonna look like just about every other marine in a game because you are basing it on a real life subject. But with these games they aren't just ripping off the gameplay, they are ripping off the characters, the artwork, hell I've seen ROM hacks that are less off a ripoff of the source material than a Zynga game!
If Zynga wins i could see this seriously hurting indie devs, because who in the hell is gonna want to buy your new iPhone game if the next week Zynga or some other social group has spammed out a copy from the cheap Chinese coder factory? Why should i pay for "Plants VS Zombies" when i can play "Flowers against the undead" for free and it looks and plays the same? Why should I pay for Angry Birds when I can play "ticked off turkeys" for free and side by side shots can't tell the difference between the two?
Ultimately this doesn't hurt the big guys, who can spam the networks and radio with ads and get people to buy, it hurts the little guys who hope to get enough from their little game to keep their doors open and make the next one, because it is those guys that Zynga has been ripping off hard. The only difference between then and now is Zynga got ballsy and decided to steal from someone that can fight back.
Glad you enjoyed it, with those little tricks you can take the hassle out of an install and more importantly make it a HELL of a lot harder for them to break it. Another nice trick with Time machine is you can "lock" a snapshot, so once you get the PC exactly how you like it, with all the programs you or the customer wants, you can then lock it and no matter how much time passes you'll have your own 'factory fresh" option just a single click away.
Heck I walked a former customer over the phone in another state on how to restore the system using the Time Machine I had installed, took her less than 15 minutes to go from a machine her niece had hosed so bad she couldn't even get a desktop to a perfectly running system, you just can't beat that kind of ease of use friend.
Thanks, and personally i thought it was obvious. i mean hello? Steve Jobs? Total veggie health food nut, no smoking, no red meat, had the money to eat only organically grown pesticide free foods...and died of cancer at 56.
I bet if you look into his birth family? History of cancer and dying in their 60s. Its all about the DNA folks, and all the health food and exercise simply can't rewrite your DNA. Until we get to the point we actually can go in there and flip the switches while eating right and exercise will certainly make you feel better it sure as hell isn't gonna buy you a single second on this earth if your DNA is craptastic.
Glad to help, just a little shop owner in BF nowhere that tries to make things easier, both for the common folk and the fellow fixit guys. WSUS was a little buggy the first year or so but now they have it down to a science, just pick whatever updates you want and let it package them however you'd like. I have mine set to once a month download all the updates from XP to Win 7 X64 and that way i can have all the updates and service packs on a single shared drive which cuts out a HELL of a lot of work.
Now with Time machine there is ONE little catch, but I usually don't mention it because its such a rare condition most don't run into it. if you try to install TM into a system that has both WinXP and Win 7 in a dual boot? it won't work. don't screw anything up, just won't work. That is because Win 7 changes the drive letter so no matter where you install it it looks like C: to the OS and with 2 C: drives TM doesn't know how to handle it. It hasn't be updated in awhile but it works great on XP- Win 7 and while I haven't personally tried it i'm told Win 8 works great as well, and the nicest thing is your grandma can run this. Just tell her to click the home key at boot or pick the clock from Windows, pick how far back she wants to go, and that's it. You can even run it and system restore if you'd like, but TM runs so much better frankly it makes SR pointless. also unlike SR I've found malware don't know how to infect TM so its an easy way to get rid of nasties if they refuse to listen and click on the "free porn/iPad/movies' and get a bug.
Finally be sure to give Ninite a spin, I've been using them for a couple of years now and they really take the work out of a clean install. Browsers, codecs, media players, flash, Libre office, you can pick as many as you like and with one button it all installs unattended with NO toolbars or other crap. Another nice feature most don't know about is you can use Ninte to update any software that is already on the system, simply check the boxes and ninite will skip anything that is already current.
So glad you enjoyed Adolf, with WSUS and Time Machine frankly it takes no time to set a system up and more importantly with TM its a hell of a lot harder for them to break it and ruin all the work you've done. Just be sure to tell it to lock the clean install, where you have everything set up just right, and no matter how many years pass you can send it right back to your own version of "factory fresh" with a single click.
Preach brother! Now that my dad is getting older he would LOVE to hire some gophers to lighten the load so his trained electricians can just worry about the wiring while the gophers do the fetch and tote, but he can't, why? Regulations they passed say only certified workers allowed on the job or his insurance goes through the roof!
So that is 3 to 5 workers he simply won't hire because it'd cost him a good 6 months to a year and thousands out of his pocket to get them trained and certified when all he wants them to do is haul wire and fetch loads from the garage. of course once they've gone through all the training and bullshit to be certified they want to do over things than being a gopher so he's right back where he started!
The sad part? there is NO PARTY that is for smaller government, none. the Rs pass just as much nasty regs as the Ds, it is simply rewarding different check writers, that's all. Both sides want bigger government, more power to the government, less power to the people. i agree that sooner or later we'll have another depression (if we haven't already started which I'd argue we have) and maybe when the whole thing collapses we'll see REAL hope and change, but we sure as fuck ain't seeing it now from Ds or Rs.
Because speculation does NOT reward long term thinking, which is required for real growth, but "get rich quick" schemes that often hurt the company long term, such as "slash and burn" which is practically a death knell for a company but it'll cause the speculators to jump on the short rise before the fall which gives CEOs a chance to cash out. End result? dead corp, tons of workers out of a job, those that didn't dump the stock quick enough fucked, rich CEO and insiders.
But that is the problem in a nutshell, the stock market was designed for investors not speculators and by throwing all this money into the system you might as well call it "Las Vegas East" and call it a day, because frankly what they are doing is no different than gambling. With investing you actually LOOK at the company, what their plans are, what their market for their product or service looks like, what plans they have for the future. this is based on actual VALUE, what the company actually makes or what services they sell.
With speculation its just throwing darts on a board, or worse looking for ever shorter term gains no matter the cost since the holder of the stock may not even hold onto it for more than a few minutes. In the end speculators would reward you for burning the company down for the insurance, since after all you're not paying for employees and electricity this very moment are you? and THAT is the problem, it rewards moment by moment thinking while punishing those that actually try to grow their company because growth requires capital investment, which was what stocks were supposed to be for, gathering capital to grow your business!
Uhhh..considering that this is the average reaction my customers are having to win 8, that it even made my sweet little mom curse like a sailor (man I wish I'd have thought to turn on the webcam, too funny!) frankly they could call it "free titties and beer" and I doubt it'd help.
For a company that always used focus groups it still blows my mind who in the hell let this thing even got out of alpha stage, its not intuitive, sure as hell not easily discoverable, doesn't really follow either cell phone or desktop UI conventions, no wizards or tutorials to walk folks through WTF is going on, its just a mess is what it is.
Which is why you shouldn't tie any accounts together that you absolutely positively don't have to. I don't trust, in no particular order or level of evil, Apple, Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Facebook, or any other corp for that matter to do anything but max profits and fuck you over at the first convenience.
Lets face it folks if ANY of these corps could have their stocks go up by 15% by throwing you in a cage with an enraged horny silverback you'd be getting some gorilla loving before sundown and the only question that would be asked at the corp HQ was how they could further monetize the event.
So the best thing you can do is NOT tie everything together, make sure you have at least one alternative for every service you use and try not to become too dependent on any one service. Because even if you don't consider them evil they are these huge hulking bureaucratic messes, where the left doesn't know where the right is much less WTF its doing, with all kinds of PHBs and BOFHs and little nobodys that get even a teeny tiny taste of power and go apeshit.
Just remember, as long as you can say "well fuck you corp, i don't need your ass" and walk away then you are in good shape.
I don't think it would have helped friend, RIM made the classic tech mistake of sitting on ass for too long with their designs while everyone passed them by. We saw the same thing at Palm where they sat on the older designs long after they had been made to look like dinosaurs and by the time they decided to come out with something that was really new nobody cared.
At one time as you pointed out RIM was THE business phone but while the stupid security moves hurt it ultimately I think its the simple fact their designs have been behind the curve for too long. Lets face it, for a long while a blackberry was a blackberry, just nothing new or exciting there.
There is an easier and more effective way to point out the stupidity of the whole "glibtard/republicunt" wingers and that is with some words of wisdom for the late Bill Hicks..
"Well 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 controlling both puppets!"
Every time the elections roll around all I can think is how much we could use him right now..
Yes it IS bad, because by distorting the market you change it from investment to speculation, which rewards short term thinking above all. As i said you see it over and over, get new CEO, CEO does slash and burn that will destroy the company long term but in the short it raises revenue so stocks go up, CEO cashes out and walks away, company folds.
And no throwing social security into the mix would just make it that much worse. What is the government gonna do when the stocks take a nosedive? print ever more money? Pouring all that cash into the market just turns it into a giant Ponzi scheme because the government IS on the line for those payments which have to go out every month or people end up on the streets.
Watch the video i linked to in its entirety and he'll explain why this is bad, he explains it better than I ever could. only about 10 minutes long and I bet you'll change your tune after watching it, basically like the housing bubble it WILL pop, just a question of how truly nasty its gonna be.
Not to mention there is something nobody seems to mention and that is Windows 7 and 8 uses hardware acceleration for a lot of the desktop and last I checked Linux doesn't do that. Naturally if your GPU is doing other things its gonna take some away from gaming.
Again this is surprising...why exactly? Valve has ALWAYS been more OpenGL focused, going back to HL1 where you would get better visuals and framerate if you chose OpenGL over D3D so why is it surprising that a game made by them runs better on OpenGL than DirectX?
This is like saying "Sony games run better on the PS3 than the PC" which of course would get a bug DUH! from everyone because it should be obvious, same here. Valve and ID have always been more OpenGL than DirectX, been that way since the beginning, doubt its gonna change barring OpenGL going the way of Glide. I'm sure the Valve guys know OpenGL like the back of their hands, know all the tricks to squeeze performance out of it, so not a shock when that is what we see in the FPS.
Let old Hairy show you how to seriously cut the time down on a boot and nuke there friend. First go to WSUS Offline and have it download the patches and/or service packs for whatever version of Windows it is, you can then put 'em on a thumbdrive or DVD and have them ready to go once the OS is installed. Once the patches are all installed just go to Ninite on the now clean machine and check the boxes for any third party software you need, AV, flash, media players, codecs, etc.
And then finally once you have it just the way you like it slap in Comodo Time Machine and have it set to make a snapshot on boot. personally depending on how stupid the user is I have CTM take up 10%-20% of the drive, this way next time they do something stupid you can walk them through restoring the system in about 15 minutes. Nice thing is even if they hose the machine so badly it won't boot you can tell them to just hit the Home key on boot and run Time Machine from there. With these little tricks you are talking maybe an hour and a half, maybe six clicks all told, and once set up it'll be damned hard for them to pwn it again. Personally if it were me I'd use Comodo Internet Security for the AV as its not only free it plays nice with time machine, although I've also used Avast and its played nice too.
As for TFA its not like there aren't a bazillion and one warez sites out there, i'm sure if Demonoid goes tits up another will take its place by the end of the week. You'd think they'd learn its like whack a mole with those things but if the *.A.As want to pay some Media Pretender to play whack a site? their money to blow I guess.
That's because the entire system is bullshit and if it weren't for the government throwing MASSIVE amounts into the market most of those "experts" would be in the bread lines with the peons. Take a look at the charts, how we went from an average of 20% GDP in the market for over a century to over 400% GDP in the market in the last 30 years. That's the government throwing money into the market both directly with the bailouts and with tax laws like 401b.
Sooner or later the bubble is gonna burst though, they can't magically print more money forever and as it is now unless you are an insider its all a shell game. You simply can't tell what a company's true value is because so much money has been thrown into the market chasing so few stocks it distorts the whole system, it also rewards the short term only thinking that has trashed so many companies. Get a new CEO, have them do a slash and burn, stock goes up, CEO cashes out and moves on, company is SOL.
Watch the video, its quite enlightening and has the numbers to back it up.
Actually if you paid attention they DID have money in the Star Trek universe, it was just "credit slips" or in the case of Voyager they used replicator rations, which Paris always had a betting pool going with those as currency. If things were to progress like Star Trek most likely just as in ST it would be the things you can't replicate that are valued, such as latinum was prized over gold and diamonds precisely because you could replicate gold and diamonds but not latinum.
As for 3D printed objects I'd go with copyrights. After all you can print your own Star Trek shirts and DVDs now but you'll still get busted for piracy if you hawk them on a street corner and get a visit from a copyright troll if you try to download the vids. Most likely when this stuff gets cheap enough Joe Average can afford it and simple enough he can actually use it you'll get a DMCA style law passed along with plenty of DRM for the patterns that will have to be respected and recognized by the printer, no different than Blu Ray DRM, and just like any other DRM I'm sure you'll have pirates and copyright trolls no different than we have now.
Why? Do you think the countless hours and piles of money they sank into developing this came from the tooth fairy?
if you don't like this you are welcome to put together a team, come up with a product, put it on kickstarter, and see if you can get enough people interested to get it made. It has never been easier for those with a new idea to get that idea turned into reality in our entire history, but just because you want to give away your time and money doesn't mean other people have the same opinion.
Yeah...one little problem? Its THAT attitude that killed MySpace. That's the problem all these net firms, FB, Google,Twtter, have in a nutshell in that people can just decide its not worth the bullshit and suddenly there's a new company doing it better and you're the next GeoCities ghosttown. Remember when yahoo was all that and a bag of chips?
They have to walk a damned fine line here because there is zero loyalty on the net, MySpace found that out quick.
Yeah ya know, every time I hear someone say "Oh Gabe is doing this because the Windows appstore is a threat" I just have to ask...has Gabe never TRIED GFWL? Its fucking horrible! The damned thing can't even show you WINDOWS games when you are on Games for WINDOWS Live, nope those are at the bottom of the page under a dozen Xbox games! Its crash prone, slow as hell to log in, matchmaking sucks hairy balls, its a total POS!
The only "threat" the MS Appstore holds to Valve is the Cut The Rope, Angry Birds type of "gamers" that frankly wouldn't know WTF Steam was or that they even HAD those popcap style games in the first place! Mark my words, a year and a half from now old Gabe will still be laughing all the way to the bank while the MS Appstore will be added to Zune Market and GFWL in the "WTF were they thinking?" list.
If ya ask me I'd say its pretty fricking obvious what old Gabe is doing...he is thinking "Steambox" with COTS parts similar to XBox 1 and a stripped down Linux with Steam for all the apps. Makes sense, have a combo game/media center where the console devs can sell to PC and console users with a single port, the only catch I see is getting the blood sucking publishers like EA and Activision to go along. Lets face it, those corps never met a customer they didn't want to assrape and the second they see its for the living room they are gonna be rubbing their hands together and thinking about how hard they are gonna hit that wallet. One of the big selling points of Steam is how many good games you can buy there cheap, its literally "push button to get game" with prices lower than going out for pizza.
Personally I hope he pulls it off, I'd love a console where I can play my Steam games and just log into my account to have all my PC games right there to play with the boys, but i bet other than valve games the other publishers will screw the whole thing with their greed. Hey Valve, if you wanna do the whole Steambox, know what would be a GREAT launch title? How about Episode 3 huh? Just make sure we PC gamers can have it too okay?
Frankly it shouldn't be surprising, as OpenGL frankly isn't the focus on Windows so why should the Windows team optimize it? It doesn't gain anything for MS to have OpenGL work any better, DirectX works great and most cards frankly have a lot better DirectX than OpenGL support, and Windows is going to GPU accelerated everything while Linux can be stripped down like Win98 used to be so you can rebuild it and make a hell of a "bare metal" system for a specialized task...say gaming? Even if you don't strip it Linux distros don't usually have a bunch of GPU acceleration, nothing like Aero or Win 8 where every frame is GPU accelerated. Naturally using the GPU for more tasks is gonna lose a few frames for gaming especially when Joe Average don't know how to turn that stuff off.
So I don't know why anyone should be surprised at this, Linux has always been OpenGL, Windows DirectX, so having Linux do OpenGL better isn't surprising, anymore than Windows doing DirectX, its just what the platform is made for is all.
Or we could all just be in Tommy Westphall's head. That is the problem when you start bring things other than science into the discussion as you pointed out, frankly anything is possible. Personally I like George Carlin's "Great Electron Theory" myself, it doesn't hear you, see you, or care, its just....well a really great big electron.
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Damn you had it right and then you had to go and throw in the ribbon LOL!
You are right about win 7 as I've had my business customers on it since 2010 and it took me on average 20 minutes to show them the new features and then they were off to the races. the improvements over XP are so many when I'm forced to work on an XP machine it feels like going back to Win95, its just painful. You have 64bit with great driver support so you can have the machines loaded with memory, superfetch actually puts that memory to use by having their programs preloaded into RAM and ready to go, breadcrumbs and jumplists make getting back to where you were the day before a breeze, its just a better OS.
Now you are wrong about the ribbon, only because you are not taking into account office jocks have been using office for over a decade and know it like the back of their hand. The ribbon blows muscle memory all to shit and I've watched as people that could fly on 2K3 were brought to a screeching halt thanks to the ribbon. Sure its great if you've never used office before, but that isn't their biggest demographic is it? IMHO they should have had a switch at install that let the user choose which layout to have along with a GPO so it could be deployed across the network in whichever config the IT dept wanted.
As for TFA, everyone is worried about this...why exactly? Its win 8, aka "LOL I iz a cell phone LOL" OS, this thing is gonna go over about as well as Michael Richards at an NAACP luncheon. if you don't want Secureboot in X86 its a simple switch away, and nobody is gonna buy WOA unless they find it on Woot! at 80% off. Just look at the numbers or lack thereof for WinPhone 7, If they crack higher than 6% on ARM I'll frankly be shocked. Finally let us not forget the EU doesn't like MSFT anyway so if they try to lock X86 they are gonna get hit with so many fines they won't know what hit them.
Exactly, its sound and fury signifying nothing, and before anybody brings up ARM I'd point out MSFT has been flushing billions down the crapper trying to get into ARM and has exactly jack and squat for numbers, so what are you worried about? That Woot! will have WinPads in a year at touchpad prices and you won't be able to run Android on them? well duh just don't buy it then!
A much better question is this...why in the fuck is anybody listening to SJVN anyway? He is to Linux what Thurott is to Windows, a MASSIVE troll. He writes everything with as much flamebait as he can get away with, every headline is something along the lines of "Is this the death of (insert target)" and he doesn't care if he's spreading FUD or outright bullshit as long as it brings up his pageviews.
Seriously folks if you want to talk about this there are a bazillion articles out there about secureboot so lets not feed the troll, mmkay?
Uh ohhh...according to that they hired the guys in charge of making Sims Social before the rollout to get the jump on their copy. I'd say that alone when added to the fact they look like perfect clones is gonna fuck 'em.
Riiiight, and when the lotto goes up people don't buy more tickets using your logic? Either you are being purposely obtuse or are trolling, I can't tell which.
Maybe a final example will get you to understand...one of the last CEOs of Westinghouse before it went under was brought in to "right the ship" and was given generous stock as well as his huge CEO check, what did he do? he did a total slash and burn, anything that was making a cent, any building he could get a dime for, patents, he sold it all.
Now if this would have been before wall Street became Las Vegas the investor would have taken one look at what they had left on the books and said 'Holy shit, they have nothing left but a shell of a company!" and they would have stayed the fuck away from it! But because speculators have almost ZERO knowledge of what is actually going on they saw short terms gains were up and the stock shot through the roof!
So what happened? CEO cashes out and walks away with a pile of money, those that don't sell their stock in time become penniless, insiders get rich, people lose their jobs. Every damned bit of that is due to SPECULATORS, okay? Because they are gonna flip that stock in a day if not an hour they don't give a rat's ass if the company burns as long as there is some short term movement in the stock. its nothing but the housing bubble all over again, where everyone was flipping and flipping until the morons that can't flip it at the end of the bubble lose everything while those at the top of the Ponzi get the cash.
Believe what you want, doesn't matter anyway because by 2020 it'll be all over. They have allowed this bubble to grow so damned big that any normal downturn becomes catastrophic because the speculators run like sheep at the slightest movement. They have already had to bail out once, Greece is gonna go under along with the rest of the PIIGS and frankly there isn't enough money in all of EU to take care of that debt, and the end its because its ALL in the market, every damned cent. Its this speculator BS that made Apple lose value every time Jobs sneezed, that has cost Zuckerberg half a billion this past month, its because nobody looks at what the company actually makes or sells, its about the stock and not the company, get it?
Because there is so much money in the system a little pump and dump and you could have "international cornholers" shooting up the charts, what do they make? Who the fuck knows? who the fuck cares the stock is going up! And THAT is it, that is the problem...got it?
Bah! You want to show they are evil you pet the kitty. Haven't you ever played Evil genius?
Lets face it folks, Zynga has been royally buttfucking indie games devs for a loooong while now, and it looks like its time they got screwed back. Zynga doesn't just borrow ideas, they make the most blatant rips they can, copying the characters, icons, I mean we don't allow this in other media as far as i know, you can't take the movie almost word for word and just change the name to "Florist Frump" so why should you be allowed to do that to a game? Hell even the "Mockbusters" only make a sound alike title while changing the characters and situations enough its not the same movie!
Now don't get me wrong, i think most copyrights ARE bullshit, and there are certain situations where you just can't help it. For example if a game has marines in it? Well everyone knows what marines look like so if you have those characters in your game they are gonna look like just about every other marine in a game because you are basing it on a real life subject. But with these games they aren't just ripping off the gameplay, they are ripping off the characters, the artwork, hell I've seen ROM hacks that are less off a ripoff of the source material than a Zynga game!
If Zynga wins i could see this seriously hurting indie devs, because who in the hell is gonna want to buy your new iPhone game if the next week Zynga or some other social group has spammed out a copy from the cheap Chinese coder factory? Why should i pay for "Plants VS Zombies" when i can play "Flowers against the undead" for free and it looks and plays the same? Why should I pay for Angry Birds when I can play "ticked off turkeys" for free and side by side shots can't tell the difference between the two?
Ultimately this doesn't hurt the big guys, who can spam the networks and radio with ads and get people to buy, it hurts the little guys who hope to get enough from their little game to keep their doors open and make the next one, because it is those guys that Zynga has been ripping off hard. The only difference between then and now is Zynga got ballsy and decided to steal from someone that can fight back.
Glad you enjoyed it, with those little tricks you can take the hassle out of an install and more importantly make it a HELL of a lot harder for them to break it. Another nice trick with Time machine is you can "lock" a snapshot, so once you get the PC exactly how you like it, with all the programs you or the customer wants, you can then lock it and no matter how much time passes you'll have your own 'factory fresh" option just a single click away.
Heck I walked a former customer over the phone in another state on how to restore the system using the Time Machine I had installed, took her less than 15 minutes to go from a machine her niece had hosed so bad she couldn't even get a desktop to a perfectly running system, you just can't beat that kind of ease of use friend.
Thanks, and personally i thought it was obvious. i mean hello? Steve Jobs? Total veggie health food nut, no smoking, no red meat, had the money to eat only organically grown pesticide free foods...and died of cancer at 56.
I bet if you look into his birth family? History of cancer and dying in their 60s. Its all about the DNA folks, and all the health food and exercise simply can't rewrite your DNA. Until we get to the point we actually can go in there and flip the switches while eating right and exercise will certainly make you feel better it sure as hell isn't gonna buy you a single second on this earth if your DNA is craptastic.
Glad to help, just a little shop owner in BF nowhere that tries to make things easier, both for the common folk and the fellow fixit guys. WSUS was a little buggy the first year or so but now they have it down to a science, just pick whatever updates you want and let it package them however you'd like. I have mine set to once a month download all the updates from XP to Win 7 X64 and that way i can have all the updates and service packs on a single shared drive which cuts out a HELL of a lot of work.
Now with Time machine there is ONE little catch, but I usually don't mention it because its such a rare condition most don't run into it. if you try to install TM into a system that has both WinXP and Win 7 in a dual boot? it won't work. don't screw anything up, just won't work. That is because Win 7 changes the drive letter so no matter where you install it it looks like C: to the OS and with 2 C: drives TM doesn't know how to handle it. It hasn't be updated in awhile but it works great on XP- Win 7 and while I haven't personally tried it i'm told Win 8 works great as well, and the nicest thing is your grandma can run this. Just tell her to click the home key at boot or pick the clock from Windows, pick how far back she wants to go, and that's it. You can even run it and system restore if you'd like, but TM runs so much better frankly it makes SR pointless. also unlike SR I've found malware don't know how to infect TM so its an easy way to get rid of nasties if they refuse to listen and click on the "free porn/iPad/movies' and get a bug.
Finally be sure to give Ninite a spin, I've been using them for a couple of years now and they really take the work out of a clean install. Browsers, codecs, media players, flash, Libre office, you can pick as many as you like and with one button it all installs unattended with NO toolbars or other crap. Another nice feature most don't know about is you can use Ninte to update any software that is already on the system, simply check the boxes and ninite will skip anything that is already current.
So glad you enjoyed Adolf, with WSUS and Time Machine frankly it takes no time to set a system up and more importantly with TM its a hell of a lot harder for them to break it and ruin all the work you've done. Just be sure to tell it to lock the clean install, where you have everything set up just right, and no matter how many years pass you can send it right back to your own version of "factory fresh" with a single click.
Preach brother! Now that my dad is getting older he would LOVE to hire some gophers to lighten the load so his trained electricians can just worry about the wiring while the gophers do the fetch and tote, but he can't, why? Regulations they passed say only certified workers allowed on the job or his insurance goes through the roof!
So that is 3 to 5 workers he simply won't hire because it'd cost him a good 6 months to a year and thousands out of his pocket to get them trained and certified when all he wants them to do is haul wire and fetch loads from the garage. of course once they've gone through all the training and bullshit to be certified they want to do over things than being a gopher so he's right back where he started!
The sad part? there is NO PARTY that is for smaller government, none. the Rs pass just as much nasty regs as the Ds, it is simply rewarding different check writers, that's all. Both sides want bigger government, more power to the government, less power to the people. i agree that sooner or later we'll have another depression (if we haven't already started which I'd argue we have) and maybe when the whole thing collapses we'll see REAL hope and change, but we sure as fuck ain't seeing it now from Ds or Rs.
Because speculation does NOT reward long term thinking, which is required for real growth, but "get rich quick" schemes that often hurt the company long term, such as "slash and burn" which is practically a death knell for a company but it'll cause the speculators to jump on the short rise before the fall which gives CEOs a chance to cash out. End result? dead corp, tons of workers out of a job, those that didn't dump the stock quick enough fucked, rich CEO and insiders.
But that is the problem in a nutshell, the stock market was designed for investors not speculators and by throwing all this money into the system you might as well call it "Las Vegas East" and call it a day, because frankly what they are doing is no different than gambling. With investing you actually LOOK at the company, what their plans are, what their market for their product or service looks like, what plans they have for the future. this is based on actual VALUE, what the company actually makes or what services they sell.
With speculation its just throwing darts on a board, or worse looking for ever shorter term gains no matter the cost since the holder of the stock may not even hold onto it for more than a few minutes. In the end speculators would reward you for burning the company down for the insurance, since after all you're not paying for employees and electricity this very moment are you? and THAT is the problem, it rewards moment by moment thinking while punishing those that actually try to grow their company because growth requires capital investment, which was what stocks were supposed to be for, gathering capital to grow your business!
Uhhh..considering that this is the average reaction my customers are having to win 8, that it even made my sweet little mom curse like a sailor (man I wish I'd have thought to turn on the webcam, too funny!) frankly they could call it "free titties and beer" and I doubt it'd help.
For a company that always used focus groups it still blows my mind who in the hell let this thing even got out of alpha stage, its not intuitive, sure as hell not easily discoverable, doesn't really follow either cell phone or desktop UI conventions, no wizards or tutorials to walk folks through WTF is going on, its just a mess is what it is.
Which is why you shouldn't tie any accounts together that you absolutely positively don't have to. I don't trust, in no particular order or level of evil, Apple, Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Facebook, or any other corp for that matter to do anything but max profits and fuck you over at the first convenience.
Lets face it folks if ANY of these corps could have their stocks go up by 15% by throwing you in a cage with an enraged horny silverback you'd be getting some gorilla loving before sundown and the only question that would be asked at the corp HQ was how they could further monetize the event.
So the best thing you can do is NOT tie everything together, make sure you have at least one alternative for every service you use and try not to become too dependent on any one service. Because even if you don't consider them evil they are these huge hulking bureaucratic messes, where the left doesn't know where the right is much less WTF its doing, with all kinds of PHBs and BOFHs and little nobodys that get even a teeny tiny taste of power and go apeshit.
Just remember, as long as you can say "well fuck you corp, i don't need your ass" and walk away then you are in good shape.
I don't think it would have helped friend, RIM made the classic tech mistake of sitting on ass for too long with their designs while everyone passed them by. We saw the same thing at Palm where they sat on the older designs long after they had been made to look like dinosaurs and by the time they decided to come out with something that was really new nobody cared.
At one time as you pointed out RIM was THE business phone but while the stupid security moves hurt it ultimately I think its the simple fact their designs have been behind the curve for too long. Lets face it, for a long while a blackberry was a blackberry, just nothing new or exciting there.
There is an easier and more effective way to point out the stupidity of the whole "glibtard/republicunt" wingers and that is with some words of wisdom for the late Bill Hicks..
"Well 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 controlling both puppets!"
Every time the elections roll around all I can think is how much we could use him right now..
Yes it IS bad, because by distorting the market you change it from investment to speculation, which rewards short term thinking above all. As i said you see it over and over, get new CEO, CEO does slash and burn that will destroy the company long term but in the short it raises revenue so stocks go up, CEO cashes out and walks away, company folds.
And no throwing social security into the mix would just make it that much worse. What is the government gonna do when the stocks take a nosedive? print ever more money? Pouring all that cash into the market just turns it into a giant Ponzi scheme because the government IS on the line for those payments which have to go out every month or people end up on the streets.
Watch the video i linked to in its entirety and he'll explain why this is bad, he explains it better than I ever could. only about 10 minutes long and I bet you'll change your tune after watching it, basically like the housing bubble it WILL pop, just a question of how truly nasty its gonna be.
Not to mention there is something nobody seems to mention and that is Windows 7 and 8 uses hardware acceleration for a lot of the desktop and last I checked Linux doesn't do that. Naturally if your GPU is doing other things its gonna take some away from gaming.
Again this is surprising...why exactly? Valve has ALWAYS been more OpenGL focused, going back to HL1 where you would get better visuals and framerate if you chose OpenGL over D3D so why is it surprising that a game made by them runs better on OpenGL than DirectX?
This is like saying "Sony games run better on the PS3 than the PC" which of course would get a bug DUH! from everyone because it should be obvious, same here. Valve and ID have always been more OpenGL than DirectX, been that way since the beginning, doubt its gonna change barring OpenGL going the way of Glide. I'm sure the Valve guys know OpenGL like the back of their hands, know all the tricks to squeeze performance out of it, so not a shock when that is what we see in the FPS.
Let old Hairy show you how to seriously cut the time down on a boot and nuke there friend. First go to WSUS Offline and have it download the patches and/or service packs for whatever version of Windows it is, you can then put 'em on a thumbdrive or DVD and have them ready to go once the OS is installed. Once the patches are all installed just go to Ninite on the now clean machine and check the boxes for any third party software you need, AV, flash, media players, codecs, etc.
And then finally once you have it just the way you like it slap in Comodo Time Machine and have it set to make a snapshot on boot. personally depending on how stupid the user is I have CTM take up 10%-20% of the drive, this way next time they do something stupid you can walk them through restoring the system in about 15 minutes. Nice thing is even if they hose the machine so badly it won't boot you can tell them to just hit the Home key on boot and run Time Machine from there. With these little tricks you are talking maybe an hour and a half, maybe six clicks all told, and once set up it'll be damned hard for them to pwn it again. Personally if it were me I'd use Comodo Internet Security for the AV as its not only free it plays nice with time machine, although I've also used Avast and its played nice too.
As for TFA its not like there aren't a bazillion and one warez sites out there, i'm sure if Demonoid goes tits up another will take its place by the end of the week. You'd think they'd learn its like whack a mole with those things but if the *.A.As want to pay some Media Pretender to play whack a site? their money to blow I guess.
That's because the entire system is bullshit and if it weren't for the government throwing MASSIVE amounts into the market most of those "experts" would be in the bread lines with the peons. Take a look at the charts, how we went from an average of 20% GDP in the market for over a century to over 400% GDP in the market in the last 30 years. That's the government throwing money into the market both directly with the bailouts and with tax laws like 401b.
Sooner or later the bubble is gonna burst though, they can't magically print more money forever and as it is now unless you are an insider its all a shell game. You simply can't tell what a company's true value is because so much money has been thrown into the market chasing so few stocks it distorts the whole system, it also rewards the short term only thinking that has trashed so many companies. Get a new CEO, have them do a slash and burn, stock goes up, CEO cashes out and moves on, company is SOL.
Watch the video, its quite enlightening and has the numbers to back it up.
Actually if you paid attention they DID have money in the Star Trek universe, it was just "credit slips" or in the case of Voyager they used replicator rations, which Paris always had a betting pool going with those as currency. If things were to progress like Star Trek most likely just as in ST it would be the things you can't replicate that are valued, such as latinum was prized over gold and diamonds precisely because you could replicate gold and diamonds but not latinum.
As for 3D printed objects I'd go with copyrights. After all you can print your own Star Trek shirts and DVDs now but you'll still get busted for piracy if you hawk them on a street corner and get a visit from a copyright troll if you try to download the vids. Most likely when this stuff gets cheap enough Joe Average can afford it and simple enough he can actually use it you'll get a DMCA style law passed along with plenty of DRM for the patterns that will have to be respected and recognized by the printer, no different than Blu Ray DRM, and just like any other DRM I'm sure you'll have pirates and copyright trolls no different than we have now.
Why? Do you think the countless hours and piles of money they sank into developing this came from the tooth fairy?
if you don't like this you are welcome to put together a team, come up with a product, put it on kickstarter, and see if you can get enough people interested to get it made. It has never been easier for those with a new idea to get that idea turned into reality in our entire history, but just because you want to give away your time and money doesn't mean other people have the same opinion.
Yeah...one little problem? Its THAT attitude that killed MySpace. That's the problem all these net firms, FB, Google,Twtter, have in a nutshell in that people can just decide its not worth the bullshit and suddenly there's a new company doing it better and you're the next GeoCities ghosttown. Remember when yahoo was all that and a bag of chips?
They have to walk a damned fine line here because there is zero loyalty on the net, MySpace found that out quick.
Yeah ya know, every time I hear someone say "Oh Gabe is doing this because the Windows appstore is a threat" I just have to ask...has Gabe never TRIED GFWL? Its fucking horrible! The damned thing can't even show you WINDOWS games when you are on Games for WINDOWS Live, nope those are at the bottom of the page under a dozen Xbox games! Its crash prone, slow as hell to log in, matchmaking sucks hairy balls, its a total POS!
The only "threat" the MS Appstore holds to Valve is the Cut The Rope, Angry Birds type of "gamers" that frankly wouldn't know WTF Steam was or that they even HAD those popcap style games in the first place! Mark my words, a year and a half from now old Gabe will still be laughing all the way to the bank while the MS Appstore will be added to Zune Market and GFWL in the "WTF were they thinking?" list.
If ya ask me I'd say its pretty fricking obvious what old Gabe is doing...he is thinking "Steambox" with COTS parts similar to XBox 1 and a stripped down Linux with Steam for all the apps. Makes sense, have a combo game/media center where the console devs can sell to PC and console users with a single port, the only catch I see is getting the blood sucking publishers like EA and Activision to go along. Lets face it, those corps never met a customer they didn't want to assrape and the second they see its for the living room they are gonna be rubbing their hands together and thinking about how hard they are gonna hit that wallet. One of the big selling points of Steam is how many good games you can buy there cheap, its literally "push button to get game" with prices lower than going out for pizza.
Personally I hope he pulls it off, I'd love a console where I can play my Steam games and just log into my account to have all my PC games right there to play with the boys, but i bet other than valve games the other publishers will screw the whole thing with their greed. Hey Valve, if you wanna do the whole Steambox, know what would be a GREAT launch title? How about Episode 3 huh? Just make sure we PC gamers can have it too okay?
Frankly it shouldn't be surprising, as OpenGL frankly isn't the focus on Windows so why should the Windows team optimize it? It doesn't gain anything for MS to have OpenGL work any better, DirectX works great and most cards frankly have a lot better DirectX than OpenGL support, and Windows is going to GPU accelerated everything while Linux can be stripped down like Win98 used to be so you can rebuild it and make a hell of a "bare metal" system for a specialized task...say gaming? Even if you don't strip it Linux distros don't usually have a bunch of GPU acceleration, nothing like Aero or Win 8 where every frame is GPU accelerated. Naturally using the GPU for more tasks is gonna lose a few frames for gaming especially when Joe Average don't know how to turn that stuff off.
So I don't know why anyone should be surprised at this, Linux has always been OpenGL, Windows DirectX, so having Linux do OpenGL better isn't surprising, anymore than Windows doing DirectX, its just what the platform is made for is all.
Or we could all just be in Tommy Westphall's head. That is the problem when you start bring things other than science into the discussion as you pointed out, frankly anything is possible. Personally I like George Carlin's "Great Electron Theory" myself, it doesn't hear you, see you, or care, its just....well a really great big electron.