The problem is they care what Wall street thinks and IBM is a good example. IBM still makes a ton selling mainframes but according to Cringely they are literally slitting their own throats and gutting the company trying to get Wall street to treat the stock better which just won't happen. IBM like MSFT was once upon the time ruler of the planet but instead of accepting that time is past and continuing to make money on their core strengths they bow to Wall Street and end up shooting themselves in the face.
I mean on the first page of the article what do you see? A comparison of MSFT stock to Apple stock. Wall street is a popularity contest and we all know that certain stocks get massively overvalued and then one little thing happens and the stock dives. Look at how Apple stock would drop every time any news of Jobs health would hit for example. Did anybody think the company would collapse without Jobs? But the stock still took a hit every. single. time. something bad about his health came out.
MSFT simply needs to accept they are the new IBM, that PCs aren't going away but will never be the hip and cool thing like they were in the Win95 era and accept that while they'll keep making billions its not gonna be iMoney. All they have done by trying to chase Apple into markets where they have no real strengths is flush billions down the toilet while not gaining jack squat in terms of share. How many here think Win 8 will break double digits on phones and tablets? Thought so.
Just because it has a processor does not mean Windows needs to be running on it, and just because Apple can pull something off doesn't mean MSFT can, they sell to two totally different demographics.
Gates was already heading for the exit in 99. He had grown tired of dealing with the press and had more money than God so who could blame him?
No the problem has ALWAYS been Ballmer. Gates was an engineer and thought like one, menu heavy, a little geekier, but that's who he was. Ballmer has been and always will be a marketing exec, that is what he went to school for, that is how he operates, and as we have seen time and time again marketing execs may do fine on Madison Ave but they suck balls at tech.
I mean look at what has happened under purely his watch: Zune, kin, killing playforsure for a half baked Zune market, rushing out the X360 with a 2 billion dollar flaw, the bad purchases, sinking insane amounts of money trying to buy search, pushing out Vista with all of us beta testers screaming about show stopping bugs, getting caught up in the embarrassing "Vista capable" fiasco, the man has been an absolute trainwreck to the company. Hell if the rumors are to be believed the only reason Win 7 didn't end up a disaster is he was too caught up in Bing and WinPhone to give a crap and left the guys working on Win 7 alone.
Lets face it folks, the man has literally flushed billions of dollars right down the crapper, frankly if the final total of the Ballmer flush was less than 30 billion I'd be amazed. You can sum up Ballmer reign in 3 steps: 1.-See what is hot, 2.-Buy or build a half baked poorly thought out copy, 3.-Fail miserably. I bet if you would have took those billions and had a monkey throw poo at the stock page and bought stocks based on which ones got the most shit you'd have had a better ROI than Steve Ballmer has had, and that is with him having a company with not one but TWO monopolies! I swear the man makes the Apple Pepsi guy look like a fricking genius and we haven't even gotten to see how bad "Ballmer's Folly" aka Win 8 does yet.
Count yourself lucky friend, in my apt I can pick up exactly ZERO channels OTA thanks to the pipes in the building working like a faraday cage and my "choices' of Internet being AT&T "if you're lucky and the stars align you'll get 3Mbs" DSL or CableLynx 12Mbs "but your ass better take the bundle or we'll bone you" cable net.
The article ignores the fact that for a huge amount of the USA the duopoly has us by the balls and most of us just can't abandon our families and move away and the duopoly knows this. Hell I'm luckier than most, go 5 miles out of town and its a shitty WISP that is lucky to get 400Kbs if your neighbor isn't watching his porn vids.
So instead I get to bend over and pay $125 a month for the bundle when i don't even watch TV, hell once they switched from analog to digital I never even bothered hooking my cap card back up as I didn't want a bunch of wires running all over the place to hook up their converter just to watch 50 commercials for every 5 minutes of show. But the way they have the bundles set up you're royally screwed if you don't take 'em, they make sure their caps screw you hard any other way. Gotta just love "free markets" huh?
Yeah but I've seen plenty of 8Gb videos made with H.264 that look damned nice, just a beautiful picture and nice 5.1 surround. This is one of the cases where you just have to pay the patent troll because H.264? So far I've seen nothing come close when it comes to HD and size.
So I have to agree if everyone would have gone dual layer with H.264 we probably could have just ignored Blu Ray completely. Of course what we've seen in the market is its gonna take ages for plain old DVD to die as the masses don't really seem to care an awful lot about bitrate, or else netflix wouldn't have been able to take off like it has.
To me the interesting part is NOT that they believe "I am the law!" which frankly that has been the case for decades, its that they are so comfortable with the machines in place that let them hang onto power, propaganda, the courts, the military, that frankly they don't even think they have to pretend anymore.
If you look back at American history you can spot where it all changed, and that was the end of WWII. At the beginning the USA? Had the 39th largest military in the world, we are talking a joke of a military, with WWI era tanks, 25 year old ships, there just wasn't any money there. At the end of WWII all that changed when those megacorps realized their money train was about to end, which is where the massive amount of lobbying we see now came from.
It didn't take the other corps long to see that the military industrial complex was making out like bandits, but some were slower to catch on than others, particularly Hollywood. Think the bundle deals over the theaters or payola would have been broken up if Hollywood would have paid them off? Not a chance in hell. After Betamax they learned though, that's when Jack Valenti and his ilk started seeing how many senators and congressmen they could buy, hell they even own the VP now.
Which is how we get to where we are now. Somebody high up in the DoJ must have promised Dotcom's head on a platter, probably got offered a swwwweeeet cushy corporate lobbying job when he/she gets out and damn it there aren't gonna give that sucker up! The fact that the POTUS isn't saying a damned word nor is anybody else high up just shows you how rotten the whole place is, buying power is a billion dollar business and nobody is gonna risk losing THEIR checks. The worst part? Not a damned thing you can do about it, both parties are bought and paid for, the system is designed to make sure a third party has no chance in hell, so all you can do is wait for the massive corruption to turn us into another Greece or Zimbabwe.
Because when we've gotten to the point the DoJ doesn't even have to pretend to give a shit about the law and nobody cares, the MSM sleeps on, and nobody in power says boo? There is no point in even pretending its a democracy anymore, its strictly justice for those with the most cash and apparently Dotcom don't have enough blank checks to hand out to buy himself any.
Problems with your theory are thus: I can slaughter just about every game out there on a sub $500 PC with many cycles left over. Hell I built THREE gaming PCs for me and my boys and it was just $1400 for the set, that gives you 8Gb of RAM a piece, two AMD hexacores and an AMD quad, 500Gb HDDs and an HD4850 each.
The biggest screen resolutions is 1366x768 and 1600x900 and at those resolutions the PCs I just described will slaughter on WoW or frankly any other game, again with cycles left over as most games are barely hitting duals much less triples or quads. Because of the high cost of AAA development they go out of their way to make sure the games will play on the widest number of systems so other than "must win teh benches!" ePeen types (of which there are few) you simply don't see that big a drive to upgrade anymore. I have no doubt these systems will be playing games in 2020 when Win 7 goes EOL with nothing more than a $100 GPU upgrade each next year.
And don't forget that for every sales of WoW you have a dozen sales of Plants Vs Zombies or Angry Birds which doesn't even stress a 10 year old PC. The hardcore gamers simply don't move enough units to sustain an entire industry and by betting too heavily on the high end gamers you have companies like EA seriously in trouble. the big thing in games now is the indies, who can crank out a minecraft or grimlock in their garage and sell a couple of million units over a "Call Of Honor: Gears Of Killzone" that only needs a single unpopular release to kill the company. Might want to look up what the head of Epic said, he said their iPhone game was the most profitable game they have EVER made by a long shot, simply because it didn't cost 10s of millions to produce.
As a PC gamer while I'm glad their $400 PC will play anything I could want to play I also don't delude myself into thinking I'm the reason all these games come out. There is a good reason why nearly all releases now are console ports, because there simply isn't enough money in PC gaming anymore to make PC exclusives worth the trouble. Finally there is the issue of piracy, where the "must win teh benches!" types are most likely running that $2000+ machine with a pirated version of Windows and more than half their games came from TPB. You just can't count on that type actually buying your product instead of pirating it, so its foolish to bet the farm on them.
AMD is in trouble because they not only ignored the market they ignored their own engineers and shot themselves right in the face with faildozer.
I wish I had bookmarked it as there was a great impromptu interview on one of the gaming forums with one of the guys that had actually built the Athlon64 and according to him all the Athlon64 guys? all the Cyrix guys? all the engineers that made their best chips? GONE, all gone. They went to computer based chip layouts, which adds 20% to the chip size and overhead but can be cranked out by guys with a hell of a lot less skill, and fired everyone that knew WTF they were doing. The engineers had told them faildozer wouldn't work, it was a classic netburst mistake, ignoring heat and power for higher clocks, and they got canned for their trouble.
The sad part was AMD? Had a winning hand. They were selling the Bobcats as fast as they could crank them and making on average 20%+ profit per chip, and the Thubans allowed them to cover an entire market with only a couple of chips while making at worst 15%-30% profit per chip thanks to the fact there was ZERO waste. Chip came out with a bad cache? Boom it was an Athlon, bad core? it was an X4, 2 bad cores? You could make it an X3. According to him they had the plants cranking non stop and could sell 95% off the line which was unprecedented but all the PHBs cared about was winning the benches.
If AMD would have stayed the course you'd have seen $250 Win 7 Starter netbooks that frankly would do anything that your average user would have wanted, surf, video, chat, and sub $400 quad laptops that would have been total overkill for nearly everything, hell they would have played a good 80% of the games in the Steam catalog no problem, and all of this while AMD enjoyed 15%-20% profits per chip. Instead they fired everyone that had a clue, killed the successor to Bobcat which is still one of their biggest sellers despite being over 2 years old, and bet the farm on a "half core" design that frankly cranks out too much heat, uses too much power, and costs a good 40% more per chip than anything they had before it. This is why you can buy a Thuban system for a good 20% less than their triple core faildozer that frankly gets stomped in the benches.
And I agree its gonna be a bloodbath but not because people don't want PCs, its because everyone saw how big a margin Apple was getting and lost their damned minds is why! Apple is an upscale brand, like Gucci and Prada yet you are seeing OEMs trying to compete, it'd be like slapping a $100,000 price on a Mustang and expecting it to outsell Ferrari, its just not gonna happen. the OEMs have to accept that PCs have become like washers and dryers in that they simply won't be replaced until they die or a console refresh comes along and makes the gamers upgrade. Hell if the leaked data is true even a console refresh won't affect the market as the PS4 will be about the same as a $400 PC from last year so current quad core owners won't have any need to upgrade anything but their GPU!
What they need to be doing is looking at cheap but decent PCs, something the OEMs haven't done in years which is why I have been able to carve a niche. Look at the cheap PCs the OEMs make, they cripple the hell out of them by skimping to make sure their higher models are more attractive. I mean you still have OEMs with 2Gb of RAM, WTF? The difference between 2Gb and 4Gb at that scale is less than $5, hell for a guy buying retail like me its often within $7, so WTF?
This is where AMD could have made a mint. Just ignore Intel and let them have the shrinking high end dollar and concentrate on giving the consumers what they want, machines that will do all the basics at rock bottom prices. Imagine triple core bobcat netbooks and laptops for $300? Or quad bobcats for $375? Imagine quad core Liano for $400-$450 depending on the GPU? Imagine a $300 desktop that does 1080P and can even play games? They could have slaughtered by simply ignoring Intel completely and making themselves "The People's Chip" but
I have yet to see anyone pull more than a couple of random words from a disc that has had a single pass wipe. When we ended up with a bunch of used 20Gb-60Gb at the shop we decided to try it ourselves and couldn't get back squat no matter what software we tried. These were all wiped with a single zero pass, nothing fancy, and we couldn't even get back a complete text file.
That said if it were me I'd buy East Tec Eraser and put it on a stick. I've been using it for years to wipe drives from used PCs here at the shop, gives you a frankly insane amount of options for the wipe, 1 pass zeroes, ones, random ones and zeroes, multipass, pretty much anything you can want and it has a nice feature that will also wipe the slack space of existing files. Well worth the $40 IMHO, just buy it and copy it to your stick and you'll be good to go.
But that's the problem in a nutshell, isn't it? After all an intelligent user frankly isn't gonna just install anything they find off the web, have a 4 year old 30 day trial of Norton running as "their antivirus' or fall for any of the bog standard social engineering crap that causes the vast majority of malware to spread in the first place.
I urge you and everyone else to read the dancing bunnies problem and then you'll see frankly it doesn't matter if you are on windows, OSX, or Linux, if the users want the bunny they'll be happy to jump through the hoops, put in the passwords, hell I had a customer that actually removed his antivirus because it wouldn't let him install the malware that he wanted.
In the end all this Mac bug does is prove what we repair guys have been saying for ages, that there is no such thing as a safe OS, not if it allows users any rights at all. Either you lock them down in a sandbox or walled garden where only corporate approved programs are allowed, or you deal with the dancing bunnies, that's it. All the tech in the world won't help if there is a PEBKAC actively fighting your barriers, because the fool will always be trickier than your foolproof design.
Insightful? Really? I bet everyone here blames Intel for the death of SGI too.
Look folks its actually VERY simple, and has happened a bazillion times in tech, hell MSFT are seeing it now in the fact they can't give away WinPhone. A distruptive tech comes along, company has internal problems to begin with, company can't adapt in time, company gets screwed. Its just that simple folks, no different than how SGI had built their company on only high end machines being able to do content creation and then the MHz wars caused them to have to deal with X86 units that were leaping by dozens to hundreds of MHz each rev with PC gaming making the GPUs jump faster than their exotic hardware could, or how MSFT tried to sell itty bitty desktops on smartphones and then the one two punch of Apple and Google combined with a FB living generation to screw them as they had believed X86 would grow forever instead of becoming mature and just another commodity that nobody replaces until it dies like their dryer.
When Elop showed up they had no less than THREE different OSes, all fighting for resources, and as far as i know none were compatible with the others. You had MeeGo which wasn't anywhere near what it needed to be to compete with iPhone, Symbian which was making money but long in the tooth, and the dumb phone Java based OS whatever it was called. They could have gone Android i hear you say? Bullshit, they'd have been curbstomped by HTC and Samsung who frankly do Android better and already had good products in the market. They didn't have enough to buy WebOS from Palm, apple sure as fuck wasn't gonna sell them iOS, so it was either throw every cent they could scrape at MeeGo and hope like hell developers and consumers would give a rat's ass which as we saw with OpenMoko appealing to hackers rarely brings money, or take the big fat check from MSFT and hope to God Redmond knew what they were doing.
Was going with WinPhone a bad call? i think we can all agree that is a yes, but hindsight is always 20/20 and i'm sure if they could do it over again MSFT wouldn't have sat on ass pushing WinCE for years either. The question is "Did he make the best call he could have at the time with the available information?" and I would have to say yes, yes he did. This isn't like HP, where they bought WebOS and then didn't know WTF to do with it, MeeGo simply wasn't ready, didn't have the developers, and certainly wasn't able to compete with iPhone. I'm sorry folks but Elop simply didn't have a choice, his ass was in a sling and they simply didn't have a product ready to sell.
And why should anyone spend more? for what? A bigger ePeen? I built 3 PCs for me and my boys and they cost a grand total of $1400 TOGETHER, that's about what they are asking for a single high end desktop or ultrabook. For that price I got 2 AMD Hexacores and an AMD quad, 8Gb of RAM each, 500Gb HDDs (I put mine up as a spare and kept the 3Tb I already had), DVD burners, and an HD4850 for each PC along with Win 7 HP X64.
So for the price of just ONE of their ultrabooks or high end desktops we ALL got new desktops that play all our games, surf the web, watch movies, do everything me and the boys could want, and they'll easily last until 2020 when win 7 goes EOL barring a lightning strike or some other out of the blue failure because they have solid caps through and through with plenty of ventilation.
I sold my full size laptop last year and bought an E350 based EEE netbook, it cost $350 WITH 8Gb of RAM to max out the system. It does everything I want a mobile device to do except suck power like my last full size. My oldest needed a laptop for college and refused to wait on shipping or buy anything he didn't try hands on so after hitting several stores we found him a nice Phenom II Mobile laptop (its either a triple or a quad, can't remember right off hand) and it with the nice bookbag carrying case was less than $450 tax included. That gives him a 2.2Ghz CPU, nice Radeon GPU, 500Gb HDD so he can carry all his tunes with him, eitrher 6Gb or 8Gb of RAM I can't remember which but he has never came close to running out of RAM so it doesn't matter, and it gets around 4 and a half hours on a 6 cell which with classes having outlets really isn't a problem. Hell it even kicks ass at his favorite TF2, he and some of the other guys will take their laptops to the break room and unwind after a hard day with some frag fests.
So I wouldn't doubt that the high end places WILL end up in trouble, but its because there is simply no point in paying more for the VAST majority of users. Will my games feel ANY faster if I had an Intel 12 core over my AMD 6? Doubtful since most games barely hit dual cores, much less anything higher. Would having a top o' the line Core i7 laptop have ANY effect on my mobile experience over my E350? Nope again, because the only thing that hampers me at all when I'm mobile is Wifi speeds which the faster chip could do nothing about, in fact the i7 would most likely be WORSE as i can get a good 6 and a half to 7 hours watching 720p video and surfing the web which I doubt a monster chip like that could pull off.
There simply isn't a point in an "ultrabook" or uber high end desktop to the vast majority. Sure if you are developing on the road, or doing some ultra heavy content creation you could feel the difference, but how many do that? 4%? 5%? Certainly not enough to justify having a bunch of companies cranking out high end systems. The simple fact is anybody can walk into my shop off the street and I can build them two NICE units that will do anything they want for a good $150-$200 less than the price of a single ultra unit and frankly the only place they'll feel the difference? Is in the wallet.
Why would they need to? What Nokia has now works and as the prices continue to fall it'll only be a matter of time before the dumbphone goes the way of the 8-track. Hell even Wally world has several smartphones for their pay as you go plans for around $130, when that price drops to less than $50 dumb phones will be toast.
So its nice to see Nokia showing a brain for once, nobody is buying dumbphones for OS features anyway, they buy for the price. Just keep cranking out phones using what they've got while working on cheaper smartphones, that's the way to go. Of course eventually they'll have to get away from MSFT because Ballmer is tarded and thinks he works for Apple and can get Apple margins for Windows which just ain't gonna happen. Like it or not its a global recession and with the exception of a few upscale brands like Apple its gonna be X86 all over again, he who can sell for the cheapest price and still make profits win.
Personally I can't wait until phones that are as powerful as the iPhone 3 are less than $50, my family breaks too damned many phones for me to trust them with a smartphone at current prices.
But how many are willing to put up with Steam DRM? Like it or not a BIG faction in Linux is the "free as in freedom!" crowd and they'll take to having Steam on the platform about as well as they would a video of Ballmer teabagging RMS. Hell one could argue that the reason the graphics subsystem doesn't have a working ABI (which everyone else, BSD, Solaris, Windows, OSX, has had for ages) is religious dogma by those devs that hate anything proprietary and now you expect them to welcome DRM? Really?
I have a feeling that unless Valve just "pulls a Google" and forks their own OS away from the Linux community at large the devs will make Valve spend all their time hoop jumping trying to fix the DRM from whatever the devs just so happened to "break' with their latest tweak. Lets face it folks DRM on Linux will be about as welcome as a big steaming turd in the punchbowl.
Because they have auto aim and are only allowed to play against other gamers on the same system? I believe it was Quake where they tried to let the console players play against the PC gamers and frankly it was sad, the console guys were nothing but target practice compared to keyboard and mouse.
Now if you'd have said fighting or sports games? i'd have been right there with you, both of those genres are better with a controller, but FPS? Sorry but it sucks with a controller. The reason those types of games sell on the consoles like they do is a console is easily set up in your average dorm room and those games are good for talking smack, that's all..
Actually I'd say from watching my customers who have had them get me tablets that the reasons tablets have touchscreens? Is that people use 'em as big oversized iPods. Watching my customers they aren't answering their webmail, or writing a doc, or frankly creating squat with their tablet, they are playing music or video or at most Googling something from the couch, like what the name of the actor is in the show they are watching.
Frankly the ONLY ones pushing the whole "post PC" thing is those that stand to gain from tablets. be it by lock down like Apple and MSFT, or eyeballs like Google, or the hardware manufacturers that hope they can have a MHz war with ARM like they did with X86 from the early 90s through mid 00s. But actually interacting with the people buying the things i can tell you they are NOT replacing their PCs, be it desktop or laptop (most have both) for a tablet or smartphone.
In fact, and this will blow the mind of many a geek but the average consumer? Does not look at the phone or the tablet as a computer at all! The phone is a "phone that plays games and does Google" and the tablet is a "touchscreen that lets me watch videos and does games and Google" and that's it. As far as they are concerned it might as well be a washer and dryer because to them its an appliance not a computer!
So it isn't about what is or isn't a good solution or form factor, its simply about accepting the reality of the market. Once PCs went multicore they passed "good enough" and went into "insanely overpowered" for the vast majority. Hell do you think anything Suzy the checkout girl is doing on a PC is gonna stress even a 5 year old Phenom I triple? Of course not, so she doesn't buy a new one until the old one breaks. We are VERY close to seeing that in ARM as well, just look up "ARM dark silicon" to see we are about to hit the wall just like we did with X86 but in this case the wall is power instead of thermal as the batteries simply can't feed the chips. Once that happens and everyone who wants one has one the bottom will drop like with X86, sure people will break a few more of these than computers but it won't be a boom like today.
But you just wrote why you are a hell of a lot more likely to run into what Mike saw than a sensible work environment (hint: OpenID is EXPENSIVE) so instead of coming up with a sensible plan they will instead let the BOFH use what he already has (the ability to be a prick about passwords) which frankly is worse than no security at all.
The scary part is how many systems are wide open thanks to stupid BOFH tricks. I used to do some work on the side for a guy that did a lot of subcontracted work for hospitals, do you have ANY idea how many of those either have the head nurses having ALL the doctor's codes or even more often the nurses teaching how to get around the BOFH passwords? The first time I worked in the hospital I came back with just a look of shock and told my mom (who is a retired charge nurse) what i had seen and she was "Oh yeah, we did that ALL the time! See you just change your password 4 times and then you could go back to the password you had, so I showed that trick to ALL the doctors! Most just use the number off their ID badge or their social you know" and i just stood there shocked.
By using an insane security schema all you do is disable all your security because thanks to the "smart cow situation" all it takes is ONE to figure out how to get around the bullshit and it spreads like wildfire. That is why I have always warned by business customers to NEVER use crazy BOFH security schemes, instead talk to the employees and work out something both they and you can live with. Because otherwise frankly you may as well not have any security at all for all the good it'll do you.
Cap and trade is a scam by the dems friend that lets them hand out YOUR money to THEIR friends, isn't that nice? don't that make you feel happy peasant? How about how they are listening to the AlGore while ignoring that Rev Al has set himself up to become a billionaire off the scam? BTW did you know he has the brass balls to say that farting around in his private Lear jet and fleet of limos is carbon NEUTRAL, because he pays himself carbon credits from his own company? This would be like me moving money from my right to my left pocket, calling it "wealth redistribution" and getting a fucking tax break for it!
This is of course ignoring the facts that Obama has a "jobs czar" that got paid taxpayer money to send jobs to China, over 10,000 in fact, that his VP is a paid shill for the media companies, the 20 billion he passed out to "friends of Obama" using "green energy" as an excuse, that every single petition that has been anything other than "Can you tell us how you are so wonderful?" has gotten a flowerly "LOL fuck off peasant" response, refused to stop illegals and tied the hands of Arizona when they tried to protect Americans which are dying every day. But that's okay, right? after all he's "one of us" so he is "good" and therefor the other must be "bad" right? All go to hell except cave 76!
Maybe you ought to look at your dear leader's record and tell me what EXACTLY would have been different if it had been McSame instead of Nobama? The ONLY difference i can see is instead of giving away your money under the guise of "national defense" he gives it away under "green jobs", yep that makes a big difference friend, handing out money to the top 5% is totally different if it has the word green in it! It has what plants crave!
And it is THAT, that right there, that I don't get. Are you telling me MSFT hasn't run a single focus group? hell I've had over 400 folks that has gone through my shop try it, everyone from teens to little old ladies and down to a person they HATE METRO on a bog standard non touch desktop.
And lets not kid ourselves, the economy is a corpse and both AMD and Intel are reporting sales slumps as it is so do you honestly believe that adding a HIGHER price now by adding touchscreens is gonna do anything but torpedo the figures of anyone stupid enough to try? Hell has nobody in fucking Redmond ever been into a Walmart? Or a Best Buy? Have they ever bothered to ask anyone selling PCs retail WTF is going on? Walk into ANY B&M and what you see sure as fuck ain't "ultrabooks", oh they may have ONE which they'll tell you an't selling for shit, but what do you see? AMD as far as the eye can see, why? Because the "sweet spot" is between $350-$500 with the $400-$450 laptops being the biggest sellers and you just ain't gonna hit that price point with most of the Intel line and you sure as hell ain't gonna hit it by tacking on another $100-$150 a unit for touchscreens that nobody wants because poking your damned laptop or desktop all damned day is uncomfortable!
So that is what I don't understand. I mean surely to God they can see that freightrain of failure rolling down the track full speed ahead, can't they? Can't they see that the desktop and laptop form factor simply doesn't work with a touchscreen? Hell have they even looked at the sales numbers for non tablet touchscreens? I have, last figures I could find had just 4% of the X86 units being sold with touch and BTW that was counting industrial like POS and kiosks. if you remove those? Less than 2% of the world X86 market is being sold with touch.
And before anybody says it, yes i know they are getting the shit stomped out of them in cell phones, but how does torpedoing the only OS business you aren't getting stomped in make ANY sense at all? If they wanted to use a single codebase, with the Metro UI on the tablets and phones and a standard desktop on...well desktops and laptops? Okay, makes sense and saves money by cutting out reinventing the wheel. But what they are doing here is completely batshit, its just the opposite of the "Hey lets make phones teeny tiny desktops!" that they did for a decade with WinCE. Can they not read reviews in Redmond? Can they not see the memes on YouTube where people throw a relative on Win 8 just to watch them be lost and fumble around? How can you not see what a fucking disaster you have about to take a shit all over one of your few remaining profitable divisions MSFT?
But don't forget the flip side of that argument, the BOFHs that make things so much of a PITA either the users are gridlocked and can't get dick done or they actively go out of their way to break the security just so they can work.
I'll never forget an old programmer friend of mine who told me about taking some of the students he was teaching over to check out this big corporate software firm. on and on and on the BOFH giving the tour talked about how incredibly secure his place was, with crazy password rules and just one nasty thing after another until mike said "You give me 15 minutes in this place and I bet you $100 and a steak dinner i CAN get into your systems".
Well sure enough the BOFH took him up on it and let him loose for 15 minutes while he took over the tour. In 10 he was back with a dozen working username/password combos, including one for one of the higher level guys that would have pretty much given him the keys to the kingdom. When the BOFH demanded he show him how he did it, know what he did? he just went and started flipping keyboards and there were the passwords because nobody could keep up with them thanks to his crazy rules.
So its always a balancing act between making a secure system and making an unusable one. After all you could make a corp the most secure system in the world by simply cutting the power to the PCs and locking them in a vault but they wouldn't be doing the workers much good then, will they?
Oh please don't give us the "one party" bullshit as BOTH are crooked as snakes, okay? Who is the one sucking big media and union dicks? that would be the Dems. Who is sucking off the MIC and multinationals? that would be the reps. To quote the late great Bill Hicks "Well i believe the puppet on the left has my interests at heart, well I believe the puppet on the right shares my beliefs...hey wait a minute, there is one guy working both puppets!"
But I agree with you 100% we need to invest now in BOTH nuke AND renewables, but it doesn't have a damned thing to do with "one party" or the other, or have you forgotten the big clusterfuck that was Solyandra? Maybe you should look up "Solynda tip of iceberg" to see how the renewables was used as a payoff for friends of Obama to see that money, over 20 BILLION at last count, was handed out to companies that didn't have a snowball's chance in delivering but hey, guess what? Gave Obama big bux for his campaign, wadda ya know?
We need new nukes NOW, both the new standard as well as several thorium test beds, we need reproccessing NOW, and we need to be investing in molten salt solar as well as new battery tech NOW. if I were in charge I'd pull out of the middle east, cut the budget by 50% to the military, kill the F35 in favor of more F15s and F16s and use the savings to invest in new plants today and new tech for tomorrow.
But instead they'll keep playing the "left and right puppet show" which guys like you buy hook, line, and sinker, and the only thing that changes is the top 5% become even richer no matter WHO is in office.
Actually...I liked the Widgets. But frankly i only used them for ONE task and one task alone, and that was PC monitoring. Check out AllCPUMeter and you'll see why its handy. It integrates with Coretemp, shows memory and usage per core, makes it bog simple for my users to tell when they need an upgrade by simply looking at the gadget and seeing visually how much memory and CPU they are pulling. I have a few users that like the weather gadget but since i have forecastfox in my Comodo dragon i never felt the need for it.
What I find much more telling is that MSFT pulled the plug over a supposed "security problem" that frankly didn't exist. until they killed it everyone I knew got their widgets from the MSFT widgets gallery. Now you telling me MSFT can't even scan their own website? Really? The REAL reason they killed widgets is frankly they competed with metro without all the bullshit. You wanted a tweeting twitting social media crapfest? You could do that in Win 7 and have ONLY the ones you wanted, unlike Metro where you're just screwed.
Otherwise I agree completely, iOS came out and the entire damned industry lost their damned minds and decided that EVERYTHING had to be a smartphone. Laptop? Smartphone with a keyboard. Desktop? Well with Win 8 its a supergigantic smartphone.
The only nice thing I can say about Win 8 is it got a lot of my business customers off the fence, they went ahead and sped up their timetables for killing XP and had me build them new Win 7 office boxes. I did the same with my family, built a hexacore for me and my oldest and moved the youngest to my quad just so we would have more than enough power to completely avoid Win 8 and still be able to game in the future.
To me Win 8 is just further proof that Ballmer is a shitty CEO, you can summarize his "strategy" for MSFT with 3 steps 1.-See what is popular, 2.-Build or buy a half ass, half baked copy of what is popular, 3.-Fail miserably. Zune, Kin, killing playsforsure which actually had made some inroads into multimedia sales for the appstore Zune market failwhale, its just a giant clusterfuck.
What is sad is that honestly Win 7 is the first one they'd gotten right in years. it had excellent memory management, with a precaching that makes even my little netbook zippy because it has all my programs loaded into RAM, jumplists and breadcrumbs made file navigation truly better, and while most of Aero was just stupid bling the "slam windows to one side or the other" trick did make it easy to make file comparisons. They could have made Win 8 an even better Win 7 by focusing on a "it just works" mantra, by for example making it easy peasy for someone like my dad to hook up to his work PC from home using EasyConnect, even better CPU and GPU management along with other under the hood improvements, and then simply spun off mobile as MetroOS and allowed them to innovate.
Instead they crank out the turdfest iOS ripoff while ignoring the most fundamental thing about windows PCs which is you don't run Windows for MSFT programs or looking at the desktop but to be a platform for your third party programs. I honestly see my desktop when I wake up the PC or put it to sleep, that's it, that's all. I sure as hell don't want Metro weighing my PC down like a boat anchor by running 24/7 just so I can see who is playing Farmville right now and after GFWL I wouldn't buy jack shit from the MSFT "appstore" (BTW I fucking HATE the word "app", an app is a teeny fuck off game or program for tablet or phone, NOT a rich desktop program) even if they paid me to use it.
In the end I predict win 8 bombs like MS Bob and I get to spend the next year and a half wiping the damned thing off new machines and putting 7 on. I just hope the OEMs do like last time and just sell "Windows 8 ready" PCs with Win 7 and a Win 8 DVD dropped in the box, because i do NOT want to spend hours dealing with fricking downgrade right
It's not got a damned thing to do with voting...unless you consider NIMBYism as a form of voting that is.
Whether we like it or not folks our need for power is going nowhere but up, rolling blackouts in this heat will frankly leave some folks dead, including elderly and the sickly, and we just don't have any tech that can replace these as of yet. What we need is reliable 24/7/365 power and so far the renewables simply can't give us that so its nuke or coal and NG, take your pick.
Personally i'd prefer it if we were building those thorium reactors that can power an average city and reprocessing the waste but the NIMBYs have a screaming shitfit. But of course if you talk about building a coal or NG plant they have a screaming shitfit too, hell they even had a screaming shitfit about those wind towers off of the east coast remember?
Unless you want to go back to living in mud huts and burying the old and sick from heatstroke by the dozens we simply HAVE to have the power folks. As someone who lives less than 150 miles from a pair of reactors frankly I'm more worried about getting hit by a moron texting on his iPhone than i am a meltdown. I'm glad we have those plants as we haven't had a blackout around here in ages and with this heat I know several elderly relatives that would end up in the hospital or the morgue if it weren't for AC, including my parents.
If you don't want old plants tell the NIMBYs to STFU and build the new designs as fast as we can crank 'em out, simple as that.
Well this is why I sold the Pentium Ds that the boys were using but kept the Sempron tower for a nettop, those old P4s were serious hogs when it came to power. If you can find an Athlon or Sempron from the same time period frankly they weren't bad at all.
As far as the water and power the fabs use making them? Just too tough to find the exact figures so ultimately I tell my customers to look at their own power usage and decide for themselves. I know I've switched out a lot of the old P4 office boxes with CRTs for AMD E series and CULV Phenoms and Athlons with LCDs and frankly the customers rave about how much lower their electric bills were, not to mention the cooling costs which when you are talking about southern summers space heater P4s? Not fun to have around.
Because if it works well for a task you shouldn't have to throw away working hardware? I have a 1.8GHz Sempron desktop I use as a nettop at the shop and frankly it runs the web and serves files just fine and with very low heat and electricity usage. If I ever feel like bothering I can change out the chip for an Athlon Mobile and get even lower power usage but frankly 35w for the system is fine. This machine runs XP just fine and after popping in a second drive to test it Windows 7 ran just fine as well, only Aero was lacking which who cares about Aero.
So with the economy in the crapper frankly you shouldn't have to toss hardware if its working, although i don't know about 400MHz as I usually chunk anything below a 1.5GHz at the shop. But those P4s and Athlons work just fine for basic tasks so there really isn't any sense just tossing them, although the later "space heater" P4s like Cedar Mill and Prescott probably suck more power than they are worth.
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Automobile manufacturers. Out of the 30 or so at the beginning there are only 3 left and 2 of those had to be bailed out by the government to survive.
The problem is they care what Wall street thinks and IBM is a good example. IBM still makes a ton selling mainframes but according to Cringely they are literally slitting their own throats and gutting the company trying to get Wall street to treat the stock better which just won't happen. IBM like MSFT was once upon the time ruler of the planet but instead of accepting that time is past and continuing to make money on their core strengths they bow to Wall Street and end up shooting themselves in the face.
I mean on the first page of the article what do you see? A comparison of MSFT stock to Apple stock. Wall street is a popularity contest and we all know that certain stocks get massively overvalued and then one little thing happens and the stock dives. Look at how Apple stock would drop every time any news of Jobs health would hit for example. Did anybody think the company would collapse without Jobs? But the stock still took a hit every. single. time. something bad about his health came out.
MSFT simply needs to accept they are the new IBM, that PCs aren't going away but will never be the hip and cool thing like they were in the Win95 era and accept that while they'll keep making billions its not gonna be iMoney. All they have done by trying to chase Apple into markets where they have no real strengths is flush billions down the toilet while not gaining jack squat in terms of share. How many here think Win 8 will break double digits on phones and tablets? Thought so.
Just because it has a processor does not mean Windows needs to be running on it, and just because Apple can pull something off doesn't mean MSFT can, they sell to two totally different demographics.
Gates was already heading for the exit in 99. He had grown tired of dealing with the press and had more money than God so who could blame him?
No the problem has ALWAYS been Ballmer. Gates was an engineer and thought like one, menu heavy, a little geekier, but that's who he was. Ballmer has been and always will be a marketing exec, that is what he went to school for, that is how he operates, and as we have seen time and time again marketing execs may do fine on Madison Ave but they suck balls at tech.
I mean look at what has happened under purely his watch: Zune, kin, killing playforsure for a half baked Zune market, rushing out the X360 with a 2 billion dollar flaw, the bad purchases, sinking insane amounts of money trying to buy search, pushing out Vista with all of us beta testers screaming about show stopping bugs, getting caught up in the embarrassing "Vista capable" fiasco, the man has been an absolute trainwreck to the company. Hell if the rumors are to be believed the only reason Win 7 didn't end up a disaster is he was too caught up in Bing and WinPhone to give a crap and left the guys working on Win 7 alone.
Lets face it folks, the man has literally flushed billions of dollars right down the crapper, frankly if the final total of the Ballmer flush was less than 30 billion I'd be amazed. You can sum up Ballmer reign in 3 steps: 1.-See what is hot, 2.-Buy or build a half baked poorly thought out copy, 3.-Fail miserably. I bet if you would have took those billions and had a monkey throw poo at the stock page and bought stocks based on which ones got the most shit you'd have had a better ROI than Steve Ballmer has had, and that is with him having a company with not one but TWO monopolies! I swear the man makes the Apple Pepsi guy look like a fricking genius and we haven't even gotten to see how bad "Ballmer's Folly" aka Win 8 does yet.
Count yourself lucky friend, in my apt I can pick up exactly ZERO channels OTA thanks to the pipes in the building working like a faraday cage and my "choices' of Internet being AT&T "if you're lucky and the stars align you'll get 3Mbs" DSL or CableLynx 12Mbs "but your ass better take the bundle or we'll bone you" cable net.
The article ignores the fact that for a huge amount of the USA the duopoly has us by the balls and most of us just can't abandon our families and move away and the duopoly knows this. Hell I'm luckier than most, go 5 miles out of town and its a shitty WISP that is lucky to get 400Kbs if your neighbor isn't watching his porn vids.
So instead I get to bend over and pay $125 a month for the bundle when i don't even watch TV, hell once they switched from analog to digital I never even bothered hooking my cap card back up as I didn't want a bunch of wires running all over the place to hook up their converter just to watch 50 commercials for every 5 minutes of show. But the way they have the bundles set up you're royally screwed if you don't take 'em, they make sure their caps screw you hard any other way. Gotta just love "free markets" huh?
Yeah but I've seen plenty of 8Gb videos made with H.264 that look damned nice, just a beautiful picture and nice 5.1 surround. This is one of the cases where you just have to pay the patent troll because H.264? So far I've seen nothing come close when it comes to HD and size.
So I have to agree if everyone would have gone dual layer with H.264 we probably could have just ignored Blu Ray completely. Of course what we've seen in the market is its gonna take ages for plain old DVD to die as the masses don't really seem to care an awful lot about bitrate, or else netflix wouldn't have been able to take off like it has.
To me the interesting part is NOT that they believe "I am the law!" which frankly that has been the case for decades, its that they are so comfortable with the machines in place that let them hang onto power, propaganda, the courts, the military, that frankly they don't even think they have to pretend anymore.
If you look back at American history you can spot where it all changed, and that was the end of WWII. At the beginning the USA? Had the 39th largest military in the world, we are talking a joke of a military, with WWI era tanks, 25 year old ships, there just wasn't any money there. At the end of WWII all that changed when those megacorps realized their money train was about to end, which is where the massive amount of lobbying we see now came from.
It didn't take the other corps long to see that the military industrial complex was making out like bandits, but some were slower to catch on than others, particularly Hollywood. Think the bundle deals over the theaters or payola would have been broken up if Hollywood would have paid them off? Not a chance in hell. After Betamax they learned though, that's when Jack Valenti and his ilk started seeing how many senators and congressmen they could buy, hell they even own the VP now.
Which is how we get to where we are now. Somebody high up in the DoJ must have promised Dotcom's head on a platter, probably got offered a swwwweeeet cushy corporate lobbying job when he/she gets out and damn it there aren't gonna give that sucker up! The fact that the POTUS isn't saying a damned word nor is anybody else high up just shows you how rotten the whole place is, buying power is a billion dollar business and nobody is gonna risk losing THEIR checks. The worst part? Not a damned thing you can do about it, both parties are bought and paid for, the system is designed to make sure a third party has no chance in hell, so all you can do is wait for the massive corruption to turn us into another Greece or Zimbabwe.
Because when we've gotten to the point the DoJ doesn't even have to pretend to give a shit about the law and nobody cares, the MSM sleeps on, and nobody in power says boo? There is no point in even pretending its a democracy anymore, its strictly justice for those with the most cash and apparently Dotcom don't have enough blank checks to hand out to buy himself any.
Problems with your theory are thus: I can slaughter just about every game out there on a sub $500 PC with many cycles left over. Hell I built THREE gaming PCs for me and my boys and it was just $1400 for the set, that gives you 8Gb of RAM a piece, two AMD hexacores and an AMD quad, 500Gb HDDs and an HD4850 each.
The biggest screen resolutions is 1366x768 and 1600x900 and at those resolutions the PCs I just described will slaughter on WoW or frankly any other game, again with cycles left over as most games are barely hitting duals much less triples or quads. Because of the high cost of AAA development they go out of their way to make sure the games will play on the widest number of systems so other than "must win teh benches!" ePeen types (of which there are few) you simply don't see that big a drive to upgrade anymore. I have no doubt these systems will be playing games in 2020 when Win 7 goes EOL with nothing more than a $100 GPU upgrade each next year.
And don't forget that for every sales of WoW you have a dozen sales of Plants Vs Zombies or Angry Birds which doesn't even stress a 10 year old PC. The hardcore gamers simply don't move enough units to sustain an entire industry and by betting too heavily on the high end gamers you have companies like EA seriously in trouble. the big thing in games now is the indies, who can crank out a minecraft or grimlock in their garage and sell a couple of million units over a "Call Of Honor: Gears Of Killzone" that only needs a single unpopular release to kill the company. Might want to look up what the head of Epic said, he said their iPhone game was the most profitable game they have EVER made by a long shot, simply because it didn't cost 10s of millions to produce.
As a PC gamer while I'm glad their $400 PC will play anything I could want to play I also don't delude myself into thinking I'm the reason all these games come out. There is a good reason why nearly all releases now are console ports, because there simply isn't enough money in PC gaming anymore to make PC exclusives worth the trouble. Finally there is the issue of piracy, where the "must win teh benches!" types are most likely running that $2000+ machine with a pirated version of Windows and more than half their games came from TPB. You just can't count on that type actually buying your product instead of pirating it, so its foolish to bet the farm on them.
AMD is in trouble because they not only ignored the market they ignored their own engineers and shot themselves right in the face with faildozer.
I wish I had bookmarked it as there was a great impromptu interview on one of the gaming forums with one of the guys that had actually built the Athlon64 and according to him all the Athlon64 guys? all the Cyrix guys? all the engineers that made their best chips? GONE, all gone. They went to computer based chip layouts, which adds 20% to the chip size and overhead but can be cranked out by guys with a hell of a lot less skill, and fired everyone that knew WTF they were doing. The engineers had told them faildozer wouldn't work, it was a classic netburst mistake, ignoring heat and power for higher clocks, and they got canned for their trouble.
The sad part was AMD? Had a winning hand. They were selling the Bobcats as fast as they could crank them and making on average 20%+ profit per chip, and the Thubans allowed them to cover an entire market with only a couple of chips while making at worst 15%-30% profit per chip thanks to the fact there was ZERO waste. Chip came out with a bad cache? Boom it was an Athlon, bad core? it was an X4, 2 bad cores? You could make it an X3. According to him they had the plants cranking non stop and could sell 95% off the line which was unprecedented but all the PHBs cared about was winning the benches.
If AMD would have stayed the course you'd have seen $250 Win 7 Starter netbooks that frankly would do anything that your average user would have wanted, surf, video, chat, and sub $400 quad laptops that would have been total overkill for nearly everything, hell they would have played a good 80% of the games in the Steam catalog no problem, and all of this while AMD enjoyed 15%-20% profits per chip. Instead they fired everyone that had a clue, killed the successor to Bobcat which is still one of their biggest sellers despite being over 2 years old, and bet the farm on a "half core" design that frankly cranks out too much heat, uses too much power, and costs a good 40% more per chip than anything they had before it. This is why you can buy a Thuban system for a good 20% less than their triple core faildozer that frankly gets stomped in the benches.
And I agree its gonna be a bloodbath but not because people don't want PCs, its because everyone saw how big a margin Apple was getting and lost their damned minds is why! Apple is an upscale brand, like Gucci and Prada yet you are seeing OEMs trying to compete, it'd be like slapping a $100,000 price on a Mustang and expecting it to outsell Ferrari, its just not gonna happen. the OEMs have to accept that PCs have become like washers and dryers in that they simply won't be replaced until they die or a console refresh comes along and makes the gamers upgrade. Hell if the leaked data is true even a console refresh won't affect the market as the PS4 will be about the same as a $400 PC from last year so current quad core owners won't have any need to upgrade anything but their GPU!
What they need to be doing is looking at cheap but decent PCs, something the OEMs haven't done in years which is why I have been able to carve a niche. Look at the cheap PCs the OEMs make, they cripple the hell out of them by skimping to make sure their higher models are more attractive. I mean you still have OEMs with 2Gb of RAM, WTF? The difference between 2Gb and 4Gb at that scale is less than $5, hell for a guy buying retail like me its often within $7, so WTF?
This is where AMD could have made a mint. Just ignore Intel and let them have the shrinking high end dollar and concentrate on giving the consumers what they want, machines that will do all the basics at rock bottom prices. Imagine triple core bobcat netbooks and laptops for $300? Or quad bobcats for $375? Imagine quad core Liano for $400-$450 depending on the GPU? Imagine a $300 desktop that does 1080P and can even play games? They could have slaughtered by simply ignoring Intel completely and making themselves "The People's Chip" but
I have yet to see anyone pull more than a couple of random words from a disc that has had a single pass wipe. When we ended up with a bunch of used 20Gb-60Gb at the shop we decided to try it ourselves and couldn't get back squat no matter what software we tried. These were all wiped with a single zero pass, nothing fancy, and we couldn't even get back a complete text file.
That said if it were me I'd buy East Tec Eraser and put it on a stick. I've been using it for years to wipe drives from used PCs here at the shop, gives you a frankly insane amount of options for the wipe, 1 pass zeroes, ones, random ones and zeroes, multipass, pretty much anything you can want and it has a nice feature that will also wipe the slack space of existing files. Well worth the $40 IMHO, just buy it and copy it to your stick and you'll be good to go.
But that's the problem in a nutshell, isn't it? After all an intelligent user frankly isn't gonna just install anything they find off the web, have a 4 year old 30 day trial of Norton running as "their antivirus' or fall for any of the bog standard social engineering crap that causes the vast majority of malware to spread in the first place.
I urge you and everyone else to read the dancing bunnies problem and then you'll see frankly it doesn't matter if you are on windows, OSX, or Linux, if the users want the bunny they'll be happy to jump through the hoops, put in the passwords, hell I had a customer that actually removed his antivirus because it wouldn't let him install the malware that he wanted.
In the end all this Mac bug does is prove what we repair guys have been saying for ages, that there is no such thing as a safe OS, not if it allows users any rights at all. Either you lock them down in a sandbox or walled garden where only corporate approved programs are allowed, or you deal with the dancing bunnies, that's it. All the tech in the world won't help if there is a PEBKAC actively fighting your barriers, because the fool will always be trickier than your foolproof design.
Insightful? Really? I bet everyone here blames Intel for the death of SGI too.
Look folks its actually VERY simple, and has happened a bazillion times in tech, hell MSFT are seeing it now in the fact they can't give away WinPhone. A distruptive tech comes along, company has internal problems to begin with, company can't adapt in time, company gets screwed. Its just that simple folks, no different than how SGI had built their company on only high end machines being able to do content creation and then the MHz wars caused them to have to deal with X86 units that were leaping by dozens to hundreds of MHz each rev with PC gaming making the GPUs jump faster than their exotic hardware could, or how MSFT tried to sell itty bitty desktops on smartphones and then the one two punch of Apple and Google combined with a FB living generation to screw them as they had believed X86 would grow forever instead of becoming mature and just another commodity that nobody replaces until it dies like their dryer.
When Elop showed up they had no less than THREE different OSes, all fighting for resources, and as far as i know none were compatible with the others. You had MeeGo which wasn't anywhere near what it needed to be to compete with iPhone, Symbian which was making money but long in the tooth, and the dumb phone Java based OS whatever it was called. They could have gone Android i hear you say? Bullshit, they'd have been curbstomped by HTC and Samsung who frankly do Android better and already had good products in the market. They didn't have enough to buy WebOS from Palm, apple sure as fuck wasn't gonna sell them iOS, so it was either throw every cent they could scrape at MeeGo and hope like hell developers and consumers would give a rat's ass which as we saw with OpenMoko appealing to hackers rarely brings money, or take the big fat check from MSFT and hope to God Redmond knew what they were doing.
Was going with WinPhone a bad call? i think we can all agree that is a yes, but hindsight is always 20/20 and i'm sure if they could do it over again MSFT wouldn't have sat on ass pushing WinCE for years either. The question is "Did he make the best call he could have at the time with the available information?" and I would have to say yes, yes he did. This isn't like HP, where they bought WebOS and then didn't know WTF to do with it, MeeGo simply wasn't ready, didn't have the developers, and certainly wasn't able to compete with iPhone. I'm sorry folks but Elop simply didn't have a choice, his ass was in a sling and they simply didn't have a product ready to sell.
And why should anyone spend more? for what? A bigger ePeen? I built 3 PCs for me and my boys and they cost a grand total of $1400 TOGETHER, that's about what they are asking for a single high end desktop or ultrabook. For that price I got 2 AMD Hexacores and an AMD quad, 8Gb of RAM each, 500Gb HDDs (I put mine up as a spare and kept the 3Tb I already had), DVD burners, and an HD4850 for each PC along with Win 7 HP X64.
So for the price of just ONE of their ultrabooks or high end desktops we ALL got new desktops that play all our games, surf the web, watch movies, do everything me and the boys could want, and they'll easily last until 2020 when win 7 goes EOL barring a lightning strike or some other out of the blue failure because they have solid caps through and through with plenty of ventilation.
I sold my full size laptop last year and bought an E350 based EEE netbook, it cost $350 WITH 8Gb of RAM to max out the system. It does everything I want a mobile device to do except suck power like my last full size. My oldest needed a laptop for college and refused to wait on shipping or buy anything he didn't try hands on so after hitting several stores we found him a nice Phenom II Mobile laptop (its either a triple or a quad, can't remember right off hand) and it with the nice bookbag carrying case was less than $450 tax included. That gives him a 2.2Ghz CPU, nice Radeon GPU, 500Gb HDD so he can carry all his tunes with him, eitrher 6Gb or 8Gb of RAM I can't remember which but he has never came close to running out of RAM so it doesn't matter, and it gets around 4 and a half hours on a 6 cell which with classes having outlets really isn't a problem. Hell it even kicks ass at his favorite TF2, he and some of the other guys will take their laptops to the break room and unwind after a hard day with some frag fests.
So I wouldn't doubt that the high end places WILL end up in trouble, but its because there is simply no point in paying more for the VAST majority of users. Will my games feel ANY faster if I had an Intel 12 core over my AMD 6? Doubtful since most games barely hit dual cores, much less anything higher. Would having a top o' the line Core i7 laptop have ANY effect on my mobile experience over my E350? Nope again, because the only thing that hampers me at all when I'm mobile is Wifi speeds which the faster chip could do nothing about, in fact the i7 would most likely be WORSE as i can get a good 6 and a half to 7 hours watching 720p video and surfing the web which I doubt a monster chip like that could pull off.
There simply isn't a point in an "ultrabook" or uber high end desktop to the vast majority. Sure if you are developing on the road, or doing some ultra heavy content creation you could feel the difference, but how many do that? 4%? 5%? Certainly not enough to justify having a bunch of companies cranking out high end systems. The simple fact is anybody can walk into my shop off the street and I can build them two NICE units that will do anything they want for a good $150-$200 less than the price of a single ultra unit and frankly the only place they'll feel the difference? Is in the wallet.
Why would they need to? What Nokia has now works and as the prices continue to fall it'll only be a matter of time before the dumbphone goes the way of the 8-track. Hell even Wally world has several smartphones for their pay as you go plans for around $130, when that price drops to less than $50 dumb phones will be toast.
So its nice to see Nokia showing a brain for once, nobody is buying dumbphones for OS features anyway, they buy for the price. Just keep cranking out phones using what they've got while working on cheaper smartphones, that's the way to go. Of course eventually they'll have to get away from MSFT because Ballmer is tarded and thinks he works for Apple and can get Apple margins for Windows which just ain't gonna happen. Like it or not its a global recession and with the exception of a few upscale brands like Apple its gonna be X86 all over again, he who can sell for the cheapest price and still make profits win.
Personally I can't wait until phones that are as powerful as the iPhone 3 are less than $50, my family breaks too damned many phones for me to trust them with a smartphone at current prices.
But how many are willing to put up with Steam DRM? Like it or not a BIG faction in Linux is the "free as in freedom!" crowd and they'll take to having Steam on the platform about as well as they would a video of Ballmer teabagging RMS. Hell one could argue that the reason the graphics subsystem doesn't have a working ABI (which everyone else, BSD, Solaris, Windows, OSX, has had for ages) is religious dogma by those devs that hate anything proprietary and now you expect them to welcome DRM? Really?
I have a feeling that unless Valve just "pulls a Google" and forks their own OS away from the Linux community at large the devs will make Valve spend all their time hoop jumping trying to fix the DRM from whatever the devs just so happened to "break' with their latest tweak. Lets face it folks DRM on Linux will be about as welcome as a big steaming turd in the punchbowl.
Because they have auto aim and are only allowed to play against other gamers on the same system? I believe it was Quake where they tried to let the console players play against the PC gamers and frankly it was sad, the console guys were nothing but target practice compared to keyboard and mouse.
Now if you'd have said fighting or sports games? i'd have been right there with you, both of those genres are better with a controller, but FPS? Sorry but it sucks with a controller. The reason those types of games sell on the consoles like they do is a console is easily set up in your average dorm room and those games are good for talking smack, that's all..
Actually I'd say from watching my customers who have had them get me tablets that the reasons tablets have touchscreens? Is that people use 'em as big oversized iPods. Watching my customers they aren't answering their webmail, or writing a doc, or frankly creating squat with their tablet, they are playing music or video or at most Googling something from the couch, like what the name of the actor is in the show they are watching.
Frankly the ONLY ones pushing the whole "post PC" thing is those that stand to gain from tablets. be it by lock down like Apple and MSFT, or eyeballs like Google, or the hardware manufacturers that hope they can have a MHz war with ARM like they did with X86 from the early 90s through mid 00s. But actually interacting with the people buying the things i can tell you they are NOT replacing their PCs, be it desktop or laptop (most have both) for a tablet or smartphone.
In fact, and this will blow the mind of many a geek but the average consumer? Does not look at the phone or the tablet as a computer at all! The phone is a "phone that plays games and does Google" and the tablet is a "touchscreen that lets me watch videos and does games and Google" and that's it. As far as they are concerned it might as well be a washer and dryer because to them its an appliance not a computer!
So it isn't about what is or isn't a good solution or form factor, its simply about accepting the reality of the market. Once PCs went multicore they passed "good enough" and went into "insanely overpowered" for the vast majority. Hell do you think anything Suzy the checkout girl is doing on a PC is gonna stress even a 5 year old Phenom I triple? Of course not, so she doesn't buy a new one until the old one breaks. We are VERY close to seeing that in ARM as well, just look up "ARM dark silicon" to see we are about to hit the wall just like we did with X86 but in this case the wall is power instead of thermal as the batteries simply can't feed the chips. Once that happens and everyone who wants one has one the bottom will drop like with X86, sure people will break a few more of these than computers but it won't be a boom like today.
But you just wrote why you are a hell of a lot more likely to run into what Mike saw than a sensible work environment (hint: OpenID is EXPENSIVE) so instead of coming up with a sensible plan they will instead let the BOFH use what he already has (the ability to be a prick about passwords) which frankly is worse than no security at all.
The scary part is how many systems are wide open thanks to stupid BOFH tricks. I used to do some work on the side for a guy that did a lot of subcontracted work for hospitals, do you have ANY idea how many of those either have the head nurses having ALL the doctor's codes or even more often the nurses teaching how to get around the BOFH passwords? The first time I worked in the hospital I came back with just a look of shock and told my mom (who is a retired charge nurse) what i had seen and she was "Oh yeah, we did that ALL the time! See you just change your password 4 times and then you could go back to the password you had, so I showed that trick to ALL the doctors! Most just use the number off their ID badge or their social you know" and i just stood there shocked.
By using an insane security schema all you do is disable all your security because thanks to the "smart cow situation" all it takes is ONE to figure out how to get around the bullshit and it spreads like wildfire. That is why I have always warned by business customers to NEVER use crazy BOFH security schemes, instead talk to the employees and work out something both they and you can live with. Because otherwise frankly you may as well not have any security at all for all the good it'll do you.
No, they've just been allowing the same ones who came up with credit default swaps come up with their cap and trade scam, remember those? Nearly wiped out the economy while making insider corps crazy rich?
Cap and trade is a scam by the dems friend that lets them hand out YOUR money to THEIR friends, isn't that nice? don't that make you feel happy peasant? How about how they are listening to the AlGore while ignoring that Rev Al has set himself up to become a billionaire off the scam? BTW did you know he has the brass balls to say that farting around in his private Lear jet and fleet of limos is carbon NEUTRAL, because he pays himself carbon credits from his own company? This would be like me moving money from my right to my left pocket, calling it "wealth redistribution" and getting a fucking tax break for it!
This is of course ignoring the facts that Obama has a "jobs czar" that got paid taxpayer money to send jobs to China, over 10,000 in fact, that his VP is a paid shill for the media companies, the 20 billion he passed out to "friends of Obama" using "green energy" as an excuse, that every single petition that has been anything other than "Can you tell us how you are so wonderful?" has gotten a flowerly "LOL fuck off peasant" response, refused to stop illegals and tied the hands of Arizona when they tried to protect Americans which are dying every day. But that's okay, right? after all he's "one of us" so he is "good" and therefor the other must be "bad" right? All go to hell except cave 76!
Maybe you ought to look at your dear leader's record and tell me what EXACTLY would have been different if it had been McSame instead of Nobama? The ONLY difference i can see is instead of giving away your money under the guise of "national defense" he gives it away under "green jobs", yep that makes a big difference friend, handing out money to the top 5% is totally different if it has the word green in it! It has what plants crave!
And it is THAT, that right there, that I don't get. Are you telling me MSFT hasn't run a single focus group? hell I've had over 400 folks that has gone through my shop try it, everyone from teens to little old ladies and down to a person they HATE METRO on a bog standard non touch desktop.
And lets not kid ourselves, the economy is a corpse and both AMD and Intel are reporting sales slumps as it is so do you honestly believe that adding a HIGHER price now by adding touchscreens is gonna do anything but torpedo the figures of anyone stupid enough to try? Hell has nobody in fucking Redmond ever been into a Walmart? Or a Best Buy? Have they ever bothered to ask anyone selling PCs retail WTF is going on? Walk into ANY B&M and what you see sure as fuck ain't "ultrabooks", oh they may have ONE which they'll tell you an't selling for shit, but what do you see? AMD as far as the eye can see, why? Because the "sweet spot" is between $350-$500 with the $400-$450 laptops being the biggest sellers and you just ain't gonna hit that price point with most of the Intel line and you sure as hell ain't gonna hit it by tacking on another $100-$150 a unit for touchscreens that nobody wants because poking your damned laptop or desktop all damned day is uncomfortable!
So that is what I don't understand. I mean surely to God they can see that freightrain of failure rolling down the track full speed ahead, can't they? Can't they see that the desktop and laptop form factor simply doesn't work with a touchscreen? Hell have they even looked at the sales numbers for non tablet touchscreens? I have, last figures I could find had just 4% of the X86 units being sold with touch and BTW that was counting industrial like POS and kiosks. if you remove those? Less than 2% of the world X86 market is being sold with touch.
And before anybody says it, yes i know they are getting the shit stomped out of them in cell phones, but how does torpedoing the only OS business you aren't getting stomped in make ANY sense at all? If they wanted to use a single codebase, with the Metro UI on the tablets and phones and a standard desktop on...well desktops and laptops? Okay, makes sense and saves money by cutting out reinventing the wheel. But what they are doing here is completely batshit, its just the opposite of the "Hey lets make phones teeny tiny desktops!" that they did for a decade with WinCE. Can they not read reviews in Redmond? Can they not see the memes on YouTube where people throw a relative on Win 8 just to watch them be lost and fumble around? How can you not see what a fucking disaster you have about to take a shit all over one of your few remaining profitable divisions MSFT?
But don't forget the flip side of that argument, the BOFHs that make things so much of a PITA either the users are gridlocked and can't get dick done or they actively go out of their way to break the security just so they can work.
I'll never forget an old programmer friend of mine who told me about taking some of the students he was teaching over to check out this big corporate software firm. on and on and on the BOFH giving the tour talked about how incredibly secure his place was, with crazy password rules and just one nasty thing after another until mike said "You give me 15 minutes in this place and I bet you $100 and a steak dinner i CAN get into your systems".
Well sure enough the BOFH took him up on it and let him loose for 15 minutes while he took over the tour. In 10 he was back with a dozen working username/password combos, including one for one of the higher level guys that would have pretty much given him the keys to the kingdom. When the BOFH demanded he show him how he did it, know what he did? he just went and started flipping keyboards and there were the passwords because nobody could keep up with them thanks to his crazy rules.
So its always a balancing act between making a secure system and making an unusable one. After all you could make a corp the most secure system in the world by simply cutting the power to the PCs and locking them in a vault but they wouldn't be doing the workers much good then, will they?
Oh please don't give us the "one party" bullshit as BOTH are crooked as snakes, okay? Who is the one sucking big media and union dicks? that would be the Dems. Who is sucking off the MIC and multinationals? that would be the reps. To quote the late great Bill Hicks "Well i believe the puppet on the left has my interests at heart, well I believe the puppet on the right shares my beliefs...hey wait a minute, there is one guy working both puppets!"
But I agree with you 100% we need to invest now in BOTH nuke AND renewables, but it doesn't have a damned thing to do with "one party" or the other, or have you forgotten the big clusterfuck that was Solyandra? Maybe you should look up "Solynda tip of iceberg" to see how the renewables was used as a payoff for friends of Obama to see that money, over 20 BILLION at last count, was handed out to companies that didn't have a snowball's chance in delivering but hey, guess what? Gave Obama big bux for his campaign, wadda ya know?
We need new nukes NOW, both the new standard as well as several thorium test beds, we need reproccessing NOW, and we need to be investing in molten salt solar as well as new battery tech NOW. if I were in charge I'd pull out of the middle east, cut the budget by 50% to the military, kill the F35 in favor of more F15s and F16s and use the savings to invest in new plants today and new tech for tomorrow.
But instead they'll keep playing the "left and right puppet show" which guys like you buy hook, line, and sinker, and the only thing that changes is the top 5% become even richer no matter WHO is in office.
Actually...I liked the Widgets. But frankly i only used them for ONE task and one task alone, and that was PC monitoring. Check out AllCPUMeter and you'll see why its handy. It integrates with Coretemp, shows memory and usage per core, makes it bog simple for my users to tell when they need an upgrade by simply looking at the gadget and seeing visually how much memory and CPU they are pulling. I have a few users that like the weather gadget but since i have forecastfox in my Comodo dragon i never felt the need for it.
What I find much more telling is that MSFT pulled the plug over a supposed "security problem" that frankly didn't exist. until they killed it everyone I knew got their widgets from the MSFT widgets gallery. Now you telling me MSFT can't even scan their own website? Really? The REAL reason they killed widgets is frankly they competed with metro without all the bullshit. You wanted a tweeting twitting social media crapfest? You could do that in Win 7 and have ONLY the ones you wanted, unlike Metro where you're just screwed.
Otherwise I agree completely, iOS came out and the entire damned industry lost their damned minds and decided that EVERYTHING had to be a smartphone. Laptop? Smartphone with a keyboard. Desktop? Well with Win 8 its a supergigantic smartphone.
The only nice thing I can say about Win 8 is it got a lot of my business customers off the fence, they went ahead and sped up their timetables for killing XP and had me build them new Win 7 office boxes. I did the same with my family, built a hexacore for me and my oldest and moved the youngest to my quad just so we would have more than enough power to completely avoid Win 8 and still be able to game in the future.
To me Win 8 is just further proof that Ballmer is a shitty CEO, you can summarize his "strategy" for MSFT with 3 steps 1.-See what is popular, 2.-Build or buy a half ass, half baked copy of what is popular, 3.-Fail miserably. Zune, Kin, killing playsforsure which actually had made some inroads into multimedia sales for the appstore Zune market failwhale, its just a giant clusterfuck.
What is sad is that honestly Win 7 is the first one they'd gotten right in years. it had excellent memory management, with a precaching that makes even my little netbook zippy because it has all my programs loaded into RAM, jumplists and breadcrumbs made file navigation truly better, and while most of Aero was just stupid bling the "slam windows to one side or the other" trick did make it easy to make file comparisons. They could have made Win 8 an even better Win 7 by focusing on a "it just works" mantra, by for example making it easy peasy for someone like my dad to hook up to his work PC from home using EasyConnect, even better CPU and GPU management along with other under the hood improvements, and then simply spun off mobile as MetroOS and allowed them to innovate.
Instead they crank out the turdfest iOS ripoff while ignoring the most fundamental thing about windows PCs which is you don't run Windows for MSFT programs or looking at the desktop but to be a platform for your third party programs. I honestly see my desktop when I wake up the PC or put it to sleep, that's it, that's all. I sure as hell don't want Metro weighing my PC down like a boat anchor by running 24/7 just so I can see who is playing Farmville right now and after GFWL I wouldn't buy jack shit from the MSFT "appstore" (BTW I fucking HATE the word "app", an app is a teeny fuck off game or program for tablet or phone, NOT a rich desktop program) even if they paid me to use it.
In the end I predict win 8 bombs like MS Bob and I get to spend the next year and a half wiping the damned thing off new machines and putting 7 on. I just hope the OEMs do like last time and just sell "Windows 8 ready" PCs with Win 7 and a Win 8 DVD dropped in the box, because i do NOT want to spend hours dealing with fricking downgrade right
It's not got a damned thing to do with voting...unless you consider NIMBYism as a form of voting that is.
Whether we like it or not folks our need for power is going nowhere but up, rolling blackouts in this heat will frankly leave some folks dead, including elderly and the sickly, and we just don't have any tech that can replace these as of yet. What we need is reliable 24/7/365 power and so far the renewables simply can't give us that so its nuke or coal and NG, take your pick.
Personally i'd prefer it if we were building those thorium reactors that can power an average city and reprocessing the waste but the NIMBYs have a screaming shitfit. But of course if you talk about building a coal or NG plant they have a screaming shitfit too, hell they even had a screaming shitfit about those wind towers off of the east coast remember?
Unless you want to go back to living in mud huts and burying the old and sick from heatstroke by the dozens we simply HAVE to have the power folks. As someone who lives less than 150 miles from a pair of reactors frankly I'm more worried about getting hit by a moron texting on his iPhone than i am a meltdown. I'm glad we have those plants as we haven't had a blackout around here in ages and with this heat I know several elderly relatives that would end up in the hospital or the morgue if it weren't for AC, including my parents.
If you don't want old plants tell the NIMBYs to STFU and build the new designs as fast as we can crank 'em out, simple as that.
Well this is why I sold the Pentium Ds that the boys were using but kept the Sempron tower for a nettop, those old P4s were serious hogs when it came to power. If you can find an Athlon or Sempron from the same time period frankly they weren't bad at all.
As far as the water and power the fabs use making them? Just too tough to find the exact figures so ultimately I tell my customers to look at their own power usage and decide for themselves. I know I've switched out a lot of the old P4 office boxes with CRTs for AMD E series and CULV Phenoms and Athlons with LCDs and frankly the customers rave about how much lower their electric bills were, not to mention the cooling costs which when you are talking about southern summers space heater P4s? Not fun to have around.
Because if it works well for a task you shouldn't have to throw away working hardware? I have a 1.8GHz Sempron desktop I use as a nettop at the shop and frankly it runs the web and serves files just fine and with very low heat and electricity usage. If I ever feel like bothering I can change out the chip for an Athlon Mobile and get even lower power usage but frankly 35w for the system is fine. This machine runs XP just fine and after popping in a second drive to test it Windows 7 ran just fine as well, only Aero was lacking which who cares about Aero.
So with the economy in the crapper frankly you shouldn't have to toss hardware if its working, although i don't know about 400MHz as I usually chunk anything below a 1.5GHz at the shop. But those P4s and Athlons work just fine for basic tasks so there really isn't any sense just tossing them, although the later "space heater" P4s like Cedar Mill and Prescott probably suck more power than they are worth.