Yes because Linux runs on RMS' smiles and Linus pixie dust and not actual CPU cycles or RAM on anything.
Seriously do you have ANY idea how shitty the average Win95 PC was? If you had a 60MHz frankly you were doing good, and 8Mb of RAM was just kicking unless you were just insanely rich.
The problem i have with this whole idea is this: Whose gonna watch the watchers? Do you have any idea how much sensitive info people have on their PCs nowadays? If you are lucky the malware didn't get everything but I can assure you fixing PCs 6 days a week its damned hard not to expose personal info when fixing a unit. My customers have no problem with this because they know I don't go anywhere near personal files unless they ask me to, but how are you gonna let just anybody do that kind of work without snooping going on?
What about piracy? While I never copied people's files I've known guys who had MP3 and video collections that were insane because they copied everything and went through it later. If you have access enough to fix it you have access enough to transfer a file, otherwise there would be no way to get any malware removers into the system.
Finally let us not forget the average person that does have malware doesn't have a damned clue about how a PC works and if the "helper" asked to take control of the unit they'd hand it over without a thought. I personally do this all the time with customers as I offer a remote in service where I save them a trip by fixing little problems using Remote Assistance but in my case we have a business relationship and they know they can trust me. How would you deal with that kind of trust when it comes to strangers?
Sometimes there is a good reason why someone hasn't tried something before and that is because its a bad idea. if the guy can magically fix all these problems fine and dandy but i sure as hell don't see how he can. you simply have to have seriously low level access to clean modern malware out of a PC.
Well I recently plugged in a desktop that had been sitting abandoned in a warehouse since 1993 and while the CMOS battery was of course toast it certainly didn't damage the unit and it booted right up...Windows 2 was on the machine and I have to say THAT was a trip back in time. You don't realize how much things have changed until you fire one of those old monsters back up, remember how LOUD the hard drives were then? i had gotten so used to silent drives it took me a minute to realize it was that big old clunky HDD making all that noise.
As for something to throw in there I figure space will probably be at a premium so I'd throw in a pad like this along with the power supply and a ton of pics on a microSD card. this way you'll be able to laugh at how primitive the tablets were plus have an easy way to show everyone all the pics you've taken on the MicroSD. You can include a message from everyone to their "future selves' on the MicroSD which will be fun to look back on then as a nice bonus.
Actually if you had simply gone to Phoronix or any other Linux news site they would have told you that they are currently up to the HD5xxx and the work has slowed since they are now also working to support the new APUs since they are putting out a lot of those in laptops, which are naturally more in demand right now than discretes.
Rome wasn't built in a day friend, and frankly if you are wanting to run hardware THAT new WTF are you doing in Linux anyway? Its not like any of the games currently on Linux is gonna benefit from a SI chip, at least not until Valve get Steam out for Linux. Instead I would go over to Geeks and pick up either the HD5450 or if you want more power the HD3870 X2. Both cards are well supported now and from what I've read the FOSS drivers up to the 6xxx series have been running nicely.
Right, so if you ignore all the problems with console gaming then you won't have problem with gaming on the consoles? After all i just listed several, getting screwed on patches, getting screwed with higher prices, hell don't take MY word for it, watch this video by Jim Sterling at the Escapist whose been a lifelong console gamer that says that consoles have picked up all the bad habits of the PCs, but none of the good.
And I'm sure there were some that DID have problems with Deus Ex HR, but I bet if they bought it through Steam it would have been solved very quickly and unlike the consoles it will be patched long after it has been abandoned on the consoles. I also have to wonder how many of those "problems" frankly were caused by underpowered systems or running ancient drivers. One look at the Steam page would tell them what the minimum was as well as offer to update their drivers for them. Considering I'm playing it on a 4 year old graphics card that cost a whole $50 it isn't like there isn't a wide range of dirt cheap hardware they could play it on. Hell I have a friend that does all his gaming on steam and is running a truly ancient Pentium D and an HD4650 GPU and he is rocking out to his WWII flying sims just fine.
In the end unlike the consoles frankly the PC problems are easy to solve, they are beyond easy to solve if you are using Steam. I've known people that ran into a problem with a game the Steam support couldn't solve, they got their money back and a "We're sorry that you had a bad experience" note which is a hell of a lot more than I've heard anyone get on a console. Hell do you have any idea how many times i get asked at the shop each month if I work on X360?
But as I said, I'm sure MSFT appreciates your contributions, so please do enjoy paying more for less. Me I've gotten a ton of games on the Steam sale, 6 games including all the DLC for less than $50 and the kids made out like bandits getting over a dozen a piece, so I'm gonna be quite happy enjoy my free MP and all my AAA gaming goodness.
The problem with that suggestion is this: Depending on the company even if you win...you'll lose.
I had a friend that was running a little ISP that was basically railroaded by one of the bigger carriers. It was obviously an antitrust slam dunk, not to mention they had ignored the contracts they had signed as well as making sure nobody else would deal with his little company. So why isn't my friend sitting on a beach enjoying his victory? Because his lawyer said "Oh there isn't a doubt in my mind you'll win, none at all, but it'll cost you a good million and a half and 10 years of your life to get to the end" so needless to say since my friend didn't have a million and a half nor 10 years of his life he wished to through away in court he walked away.
Look at how long it took to finally end the SCO mess, and that case was so damned obvious Ray Charles could have seen that SCO was full of shit. The reason that many settle is that unless you have nothing better to do with years of your life, not to mention great piles of money to piss away, its simply smarter to make it go away.
Think about it, this guy is just a little developer....how many more games is he NOT gonna put out and NOT gonna get the money from, because he's too tied up in court bullshit to be working on games? Now do i think that is right? Fuck no, I think the system stinks. But what the system IS and what it OUGHT to be are sadly two different things and as it is this guy will in all likelihood lose a ton of money he'll never see again even if he wins. Lets face it friend, if they lose they'll just fold and start up a new firm doing the same shit tomorrow while this guy won't see a cent.
Sadly you nailed it with regards to your second suggestion, which is why most FOSS and Linux in particular won't ever go anywhere. Try hanging on any Linux forum for any length of time and you'll find its been taken over by a large and vocal minority of users and devs that think computers should be the new priesthood, where you should have to "earn" the right to use the tools so they should be as obtuse and fiddly as possible to keep the "noobs" away. Their thinking is that if you aren't willing to invest weeks into a piece of software? Well then you don't "deserve" it.
If you want an example just ask this question and see how quickly they turn on you: Why is there no "find drivers" or "rollback drivers" buttons in Linux? Not only has Windows had those for over a decade now but at least the first one should be easy enough to do, simply have a universal repo for drivers in source code with automated build scripts. The user pushes the button, it checks the repo and if it finds a driver it downloads the code and runs the build script. So why doesn't Linux have this obviously useful feature?
Because it would be easier than doing forum hunts, that's why, and thus might make it easier for normal people. Ultimately this is why I gave up on Linux and FOSS, because talking with the ones that practically rule the community now they make it clear very quickly that if they could go back to computers being as big a PITA as the late 70s PCs they would be just fine with that. The thought that someone like Suzy the checkout girl could actually use the same thing they do just turns their stomach which is why the best tools you'll see for LaTeX will be no better feature wise than Notepad, it would mean users that don't "deserve" to use their precious tools could.
Got two, the oldest is in his second year of premed while the youngest sadly inherited several physical problems that will most likely cripple him for life.
So if it shocks you that there are people out there that have functional families too bad, there are many here that do. Why there are even a few females here, with actual female parts! I know shocking, since the only female you've probably ever seen is in a porno.
And nothing obtuse about anything I wrote, unless you can't read TFS. MSFT charges you for MP with XBL which PCs get for free, origin sucks ass (wow, there is a shocker, the company that makes Activision look like the care bears puts out a shitty service that fucks users? Who would have thought!) and Deus Ex HR is a good game which both me and the oldest didn't have a problem playing. If you want a full review here it is...good graphics, not as long as the original Deus Ex (but what is these days?) but with plenty of ways to solve the missions and load out your character, and the DLC included in the sale was wicked fun.
So hey, you wanna pay MORE money for LESS graphics, features,the right to play MP and the good chance bugs won't be patched? Knock yourself out, I'm sure MSFT will appreciate those donations, what with them posting their first quarterly loss in history and all.
Now if you'll excuse me ever since gifting Saints Row 3 to the boys as well as picking it up myself we've been alternating who is backing up who and its my turn to back up the oldest on his missions. With all the killer bundle deals we made out like bandits so it'll probably be a good month before we even get to try all the new games we got, the youngest piled on the RPGs, the oldest piled on the horror, and I piled on the FPS and sandbox games.
Of course that's yet another nice thing about PC gaming, the crazy sales. Since switching to Steam I've got more games than I ever did before, all fully patched, with MP and DLC, and at truly insane prices. I've been on Steam 3 and a half years now and in ALL that time I've had exactly ONE problem, which Steam support was able to fix in less than an hour. Frankly I was shocked, as it was the middle of the big Xmas sale and I figured it'd be days before I even heard back from them, but they walked me through the problem I was having and even checked back in twice just to make sure my DLC was working correctly. Really can't beat service like that.
Yeah that is what sucks with all these cool little features, it may help to sell a particular brand but it never becomes industry wide. Take Asrock and their XFast tech, I've seen as much as 50% boost to the throughput on my USB 2 flash sticks using XFast USB but you'll not be seeing anybody else with any of the XFast stuff because its exclusive to Asrock.
So while its cool tech you're right, other than a few Asus models it'll not go anywhere.
I'm personally waiting for Hansen to get his throat slit wide open right there on camera. Its only a matter of time before he runs into a Gacy or a Bundy that was coming there to pick up his latest trophy and when they see Mr Smartass will be more than happy to spill his guts all over the floor, cops be damned.
The problem is we on the outside frankly have NO idea what they've actually made or lost, because they can use sales of the two sacred cows to cover for losses in other parts of the company.
For example one could make the case that the X360 hasn't made a dime. oh they SAY it has, said its been in the black for over 2 years, but does that count the 2 billion plus they had to pay to replace RRoD machines? Does it count the R&D? what about the XBox 1, does it include all the money they lost on it?
The simple facts are we don't know and may never know, and the fact they have posted their first losss means they aren't getting enough out of their sacred cows to cover all the dumb moves Ballmer makes anymore. can you tell me how much they lost on Zune? What about the Kin? How much did they lose in license fees when they killed playsforsure? How much have they lost on search? Frankly losing 6.2 billion is probably the tip of the iceberg compared to how much Ballmer has actually blown but without access to the books we'll simply never know.
Can't, no Verizon signal worth a crap here, its AT&T or...well just AT&T. My oldest went Verizon and now has to walk to the end of the driveway no matter the weather just to take a call, otherwise he cuts out mid sentence.
That problem was solved ages ago, its called "don't use origin" since anybody that says anything other than "yes please can i have some more, and can you double the prices?" gets the banhammer on the EA forums. you buy from dicks you deserve to get fucked.
And I don't know what the complaint would be about with HR, bought 2 copies, one for me, one for the oldest, fired it up and away it went, hell it took me longer to set the controls like I liked it than it did to fire up the game.
Hey if you like getting charged 30%+ above the PCs before sales, for shittier graphics and the odds that patches may never come at all if you are on the X360? Knock yourself out. frankly I figured the console owners had lost their damned minds when they agreed to pay just to have MP but if that is what makes you happy I'm sure MSFT appreciates the donations.
Don't forget the PowerVR GPUs they used in several chipsets which last I checked are black box as well.
Lets face it folks, if you care about FOSS drivers you really only have one choice when it comes to GPUs, and that is AMD. they are opening up all their code as fast as their lawyers can sign off, they have gone coreboot over UEFI, it seems since taking over ATI that AMD has gone above and beyond trying to be FOSS friendly, even hiring devs to help the FOSS devs get up to speed quicker on the drivers.
So if the FOSS community wants FOSS drivers they need to put their money where their mouths are and buy AMD across the board. only by showing that supporting FOSS increases sales will you get other corps to sign off on opening up their drivers. The fact that damned near every forum talking about FOSS and GPUs ends up with a bazillion "LOL buy Nvidia" tells me that frankly you might as well accept binary blobs and a hardware API, because obviously the community doesn't care about FOSS over convenience.
It wouldn't matter if you used it frankly, nor what features it has or has not, its the network effect. For shits and giggles i set one up a couple of months ago and found that NOBODY I know is using it, nobody, not a single one. Whereas every single person I've known since fricking HS has a FB account and seems to use it daily, even though I don't hardly mess with mine.
So frankly Google is finding out that just like MSFT just because you have money doesn't mean you can buy your way into the party. MSFT couldn't do it with WinPhone, Google can't do it with Google+. FB was able to take over from MySpace because MySpace took a massive dump on the design and lax security quickly turned it into a spam haven so users got fed up and left. will that happen to FB? Its possible but until they take a big enough shit on the UI and ruin it for enough people G+ hasn't got a prayer.
What I miss is phones that had actual batteries instead of the whole iSliver crap we have now. i don't know about the rest of you but I'd happily take a phone that's a little fatter that gives me 30% more time. I'd just rather not have the "thin is in" if its gonna make me carry around a damned charger all the time that takes up more space than if they'd just put a decent size battery on the damned phone!
At least we still have plenty of choice in that matter in the laptop/netbook arena but I wonder how long that will be the case, I just don't see what is the point of putting these ever more powerful CPU/GPU combos into phones if you are gonna cripple them with teeny tiny iSliver batteries just to rip off the iPhone look.
Haven't looked at PCs in awhile have you? I'm playing on an AMD 6 core and an HD4850 I got for $50 and I have tons of bling and have no problem with the new games like Saints Row 3 or Deus Ex HR. Very few games are doing the old Far Cry I "Our game is useful for benchmarking!" bit because it simply limits your audience too much. I have no doubt my boys and I will be playing on our two hexas and the youngest with his quad come 2020 when the OS goes EOL with nothing but a $50-$100 GPU update in about another year that will take all of 10 minutes and is simple enough my teen boys will change out their own. Oh and as a bonus you can put your old cards on Craigslist and get some of your money back which makes the cards even cheaper.
This is why I'm glad me and the boys have switched almost exclusively to PC gaming, too much BS, too much price gouging, and talking to friends frankly the patches are just as bad and large for the PC only as in TFA you simply may not get them and instead get stuck with a buggy game for your hard earned $$. Thanks to the Steam sale by the time its over on the 22nd me and the boys will have enough games to last us until the big Xmas sale and that's with crazy cheap prices, games automatically patched for free, free MP with matchmaking and chat, its just a nicer experience all around. hell nearly all the games support controllers if that's what you prefer and nearly all the modern cards have HDMI out so you can plug that PC into your widescreen no problem.
For those that prefer consoles you might want to watch this video by Jim Sterling where he points out that all the advantages consoles use to have frankly are rapidly disappearing, with consoles having the same bad attributes as PCs such as long loads and large patches, and the good things are being matched or surpassed by the PC.
Sorry friend but for a good 90%+ of the population Linux is not an option, because 1.-It wears obtuse and fiddly as badges of honor, 2.-Torvalds will never allow an API as long as he has a pulse, so drivers WILL break with every update, 3.-Too many treat FOSS as a religion and WANT the drivers to break because they are "Teh evil binary blobs ZOMG!" when the FOSS drivers break just as much, and 4.-The entire system is doomed because a small group will NEVER be able to properly QA and QC the amount of code in your average distro, much less the repos which are a mess of half baked crap.
You might want to read thesearticles, the first of which is actually written by one of the devs at Red Hat, which shows frankly why Linux hasn't gone anywhere on the desktop and frankly won't. the current design just doesn't work and the egos involved simply won't allow change, nor will the religious zealotry, so things simply stagnate. Its sad, but MSFT could put out lousy OSes for the next 3 versions and people will just stick with the last good one, no matter how creaky it gets, rather than deal with Linux. See how many are running XP rather than take Linux for free as a good example.
May I make a suggestion? Look at Pale Moon for your brother as the LTS won't give you as long as you think, not with the way they've been spinning version numbers like a top, whereas Pale Moon has stopped any UI "enhancements" and version 12 because they too don't care for the direction Mozilla is taking. as a bonus its compiled for newer CPUs with the SSE flags so it actually gives it a nice kick in the pants.
As for what has been going on with OSes lately...sigh. if I wanted a God damned cell phone for a desktop i would have a damned desktop, just a cell phone! Why the fuck do they think everyone wants to have a cell phone UI everywhere? The only thing I have EVER agreed with SJVN on is that the new UIs all suck and nooo, not because we are 'scared of change" or any other bullshit, I've been through plenty of desktop UIs, from Win 3.x and 9x through BBox through KDE and Flux, no its because its all about the bling and aping fricking smartphones instead of actually designing for the fricking form factor. Its just the opposite of the retarded 'Hey lets make phones into teeny tiny desktops!" that MSFT did with WinCE for a damned decade, only now its "Hey lets make desktops into supergigantic smartphones".
Its all just a big giant clusterfuck and I'll be glad when these things bomb big time so they can actually focus on making desktops that work again, instead of feeling like my monitor should be touch and have a slide out keyboard just to deal with the mess.
Bah, its all about what goes with it. RC Cola and Moonpies, Pepsi and peanuts, Coke and cashews. Of course with the Pepsi and Coke you'll need a bottle to pour in the peanuts and cashews respectively but it all comes down to having the right one with the right side.
But does the big blue blanket work? because if not it'd just make me depressed. See i used to get shadowcats royally pissed at me because i'd take an ultra heavy and strip the hell out of that bitch. No missiles, no armor, just the biggest fucking guns all group fired together, like getting hit with the 16 incher off the Missouri.
You see the way the big blue blanket works is you have your battleships as one shot killers, but they are slow and take time to reload and have vulnerable flanks. The destroyers cover the sides and carry enough medium range tonnage that anybody that manages to survive a hit from a battleship is toast and they can inflict damage while the battleships are turning to fire, finally the cruisers are set up as short range cover and warning, able to turn on a dime they stand between the bad guys and the battleships to give the big boys time to turn into position while focusing their fire on one specific area to try to slow the enemy down to make them an easier target for the big guns.
Done right the big blue blanket takes an actual team, not a bunch of hot doggers, but together they are damned near unstoppable. In fact the only times we had trouble with BBB was when the other team would be also doing a BBB, then you'd end up like the battle of Midway, this huge war of attrition where it came down to which team had the best group tactics and more than a little luck.
Dude I'm in my 40s and have been working on computers since the Trash 80 was sold in stores and dealing with Windows since Win 3.x brought the fun of torturing people with Hot Dog Stand. I have always had a single motto, to rip off Tron Legacy "I fight for the users" and I call it like I see it.
Too many here treat software as a religion, like you have to "earn" the right to use a computer and frankly most of them would be tickled pink if computers went back to the days of 70s homebrew and wear obtuse and fiddly like badges of honor and I will ALWAYS stand against that horseshit as its nothing but losers wanting to feel elitist! They can't fucking stand the thought that the same machine they use could actually be of any value at all to Suzy the checkout girl and will go out of their way to make damned sure Suzy can't get any use out of it, and that is just elitist garbage.
Computers should be able to make everyone's life better, to make ALL our lives easier, and while there will always be specialized tools for complex jobs frankly writing a fucking letter shouldn't be placed on the same level as running a cluster at CERN, that's bullshit.
So don't worry about me, i'll always call it how I see it, I'll always fight for the users, and i'll always call out elitist bullshit and let the chips fall where they may.
Nice to see someone else using WSUSOffline and Ninite, its a great one two punch when it comes to quickly whipping a machine back into shape.
And the problem with the authorities doing anything about infected PCs is thus: Already too many fall for the "ZOMG U got teh viruz! Run "Iz_not_Viruz_Iz_Security_Tool to clean ur machine ZOMG!" trick as it is, if the authorities actually DO start popping up helpful tips and cleaning machines remotely it'll just make it that much easier for those using Security tool and AV20XX variants to pwn more systems.
A better answer would be for the ISPs to be able to contact the customers directly about this but even then I'm leery as I've dealt with ISPs in the past that used "You must be infected" as a catch all excuse to weasel out of actually giving you what you paid for as far as bandwidth. The last one of those i dealt with I walked in with my Xandros Business laptop and said "Okay Sparky, show me the virus on this laptop" and the retard actually tried to install Norton from a home burnt disc onto a Linux laptop!
In the end all you can do is try to educate users as best you can and realize that no matter how well you harden your systems, and Win Vista and Win 7 with UAC and a decent AV can actually be pretty damned good, you'll always have the dancing bunnies problem that frankly NO OS can cure.
The problem is I honestly don't think it will help because the same ones deciding what is "good" and "bad" are the same ones that have created the mess in the first place.
What we need is teachers that can really motivate, but sadly those type are usually run out for straying too far from the course material. In junior HS we had a truly wonderful history teacher for about a year and a half. now most would think American history would be just spewing dates, that's how most taught it, but he instead used a "Six degrees of Woodstock" as he had a theory that there wasn't a single thing in American history that couldn't be led back to Woodstock. man we would pour over the books looking for obscure events in American history just trying to find a way to stump him...never did though. But in the end he got run out by complaints from other teachers about how he was straying too far from the material, not to mention a few of the old fuddy duddy types weren't too happy about him showing Woodstock in its entirety the last week of class.
So while I agree we need testing frankly as long as they aren't simply teaching to the test I don't care how they get students motivated to learn as long as they are. To this day I'll see some "this day in history" and start trying to figure out how I could connect it to Woodstock with 6 degrees or less, which of course means you have to actually think about the various events and how they impacted society. He truly was a great teacher.
Here is the wiki friend but from what I've read of it frankly i gotta go with the GOP. This thing smells more like Scientology than the three Rs, with way too much technobabble and it seems designed to make it difficult to measure whether it is working or not.
The problem is religious extremists really need deprogramming not trolling. We are talking about people that will strap a bomb to their chest and die with a smile on their face because of what some goat herder wrote on a piece of sheep's ass a thousand years ago. Now just think about that for a minute, a guy that has been dead for over a thousand years tells you that if you die for the sky bully you'll be pimped out in paradise....and you listen.
I'm sorry but until we can get people to accept those stories for what they were, stories, no different than Homer or Plato, then its seriously doubtful that anything you troll is gonna have any long term effect. we are talking about a religion that tells you how many times to shake your dick after you piss and how to fuck your wife you know, people that desire THAT level of external control in their lives have serious mental problems and need help.
I personally think its because religion takes responsibility completely out of your life, it doesn't matter what happens its "God's will" and you have no reason to think or claim responsibility, just follow this little rule book and don't think and all is well. It completely takes any thought or responsibility out of the person's hands and sadly there are many of our fellow man that would like to spend their entire lives not having to think, just blindly follow.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes because Linux runs on RMS' smiles and Linus pixie dust and not actual CPU cycles or RAM on anything.
Seriously do you have ANY idea how shitty the average Win95 PC was? If you had a 60MHz frankly you were doing good, and 8Mb of RAM was just kicking unless you were just insanely rich.
The problem i have with this whole idea is this: Whose gonna watch the watchers? Do you have any idea how much sensitive info people have on their PCs nowadays? If you are lucky the malware didn't get everything but I can assure you fixing PCs 6 days a week its damned hard not to expose personal info when fixing a unit. My customers have no problem with this because they know I don't go anywhere near personal files unless they ask me to, but how are you gonna let just anybody do that kind of work without snooping going on?
What about piracy? While I never copied people's files I've known guys who had MP3 and video collections that were insane because they copied everything and went through it later. If you have access enough to fix it you have access enough to transfer a file, otherwise there would be no way to get any malware removers into the system.
Finally let us not forget the average person that does have malware doesn't have a damned clue about how a PC works and if the "helper" asked to take control of the unit they'd hand it over without a thought. I personally do this all the time with customers as I offer a remote in service where I save them a trip by fixing little problems using Remote Assistance but in my case we have a business relationship and they know they can trust me. How would you deal with that kind of trust when it comes to strangers?
Sometimes there is a good reason why someone hasn't tried something before and that is because its a bad idea. if the guy can magically fix all these problems fine and dandy but i sure as hell don't see how he can. you simply have to have seriously low level access to clean modern malware out of a PC.
Well I recently plugged in a desktop that had been sitting abandoned in a warehouse since 1993 and while the CMOS battery was of course toast it certainly didn't damage the unit and it booted right up...Windows 2 was on the machine and I have to say THAT was a trip back in time. You don't realize how much things have changed until you fire one of those old monsters back up, remember how LOUD the hard drives were then? i had gotten so used to silent drives it took me a minute to realize it was that big old clunky HDD making all that noise.
As for something to throw in there I figure space will probably be at a premium so I'd throw in a pad like this along with the power supply and a ton of pics on a microSD card. this way you'll be able to laugh at how primitive the tablets were plus have an easy way to show everyone all the pics you've taken on the MicroSD. You can include a message from everyone to their "future selves' on the MicroSD which will be fun to look back on then as a nice bonus.
Actually if you had simply gone to Phoronix or any other Linux news site they would have told you that they are currently up to the HD5xxx and the work has slowed since they are now also working to support the new APUs since they are putting out a lot of those in laptops, which are naturally more in demand right now than discretes.
Rome wasn't built in a day friend, and frankly if you are wanting to run hardware THAT new WTF are you doing in Linux anyway? Its not like any of the games currently on Linux is gonna benefit from a SI chip, at least not until Valve get Steam out for Linux. Instead I would go over to Geeks and pick up either the HD5450 or if you want more power the HD3870 X2. Both cards are well supported now and from what I've read the FOSS drivers up to the 6xxx series have been running nicely.
Right, so if you ignore all the problems with console gaming then you won't have problem with gaming on the consoles? After all i just listed several, getting screwed on patches, getting screwed with higher prices, hell don't take MY word for it, watch this video by Jim Sterling at the Escapist whose been a lifelong console gamer that says that consoles have picked up all the bad habits of the PCs, but none of the good.
And I'm sure there were some that DID have problems with Deus Ex HR, but I bet if they bought it through Steam it would have been solved very quickly and unlike the consoles it will be patched long after it has been abandoned on the consoles. I also have to wonder how many of those "problems" frankly were caused by underpowered systems or running ancient drivers. One look at the Steam page would tell them what the minimum was as well as offer to update their drivers for them. Considering I'm playing it on a 4 year old graphics card that cost a whole $50 it isn't like there isn't a wide range of dirt cheap hardware they could play it on. Hell I have a friend that does all his gaming on steam and is running a truly ancient Pentium D and an HD4650 GPU and he is rocking out to his WWII flying sims just fine.
In the end unlike the consoles frankly the PC problems are easy to solve, they are beyond easy to solve if you are using Steam. I've known people that ran into a problem with a game the Steam support couldn't solve, they got their money back and a "We're sorry that you had a bad experience" note which is a hell of a lot more than I've heard anyone get on a console. Hell do you have any idea how many times i get asked at the shop each month if I work on X360?
But as I said, I'm sure MSFT appreciates your contributions, so please do enjoy paying more for less. Me I've gotten a ton of games on the Steam sale, 6 games including all the DLC for less than $50 and the kids made out like bandits getting over a dozen a piece, so I'm gonna be quite happy enjoy my free MP and all my AAA gaming goodness.
The problem with that suggestion is this: Depending on the company even if you win...you'll lose.
I had a friend that was running a little ISP that was basically railroaded by one of the bigger carriers. It was obviously an antitrust slam dunk, not to mention they had ignored the contracts they had signed as well as making sure nobody else would deal with his little company. So why isn't my friend sitting on a beach enjoying his victory? Because his lawyer said "Oh there isn't a doubt in my mind you'll win, none at all, but it'll cost you a good million and a half and 10 years of your life to get to the end" so needless to say since my friend didn't have a million and a half nor 10 years of his life he wished to through away in court he walked away.
Look at how long it took to finally end the SCO mess, and that case was so damned obvious Ray Charles could have seen that SCO was full of shit. The reason that many settle is that unless you have nothing better to do with years of your life, not to mention great piles of money to piss away, its simply smarter to make it go away.
Think about it, this guy is just a little developer....how many more games is he NOT gonna put out and NOT gonna get the money from, because he's too tied up in court bullshit to be working on games? Now do i think that is right? Fuck no, I think the system stinks. But what the system IS and what it OUGHT to be are sadly two different things and as it is this guy will in all likelihood lose a ton of money he'll never see again even if he wins. Lets face it friend, if they lose they'll just fold and start up a new firm doing the same shit tomorrow while this guy won't see a cent.
Sadly you nailed it with regards to your second suggestion, which is why most FOSS and Linux in particular won't ever go anywhere. Try hanging on any Linux forum for any length of time and you'll find its been taken over by a large and vocal minority of users and devs that think computers should be the new priesthood, where you should have to "earn" the right to use the tools so they should be as obtuse and fiddly as possible to keep the "noobs" away. Their thinking is that if you aren't willing to invest weeks into a piece of software? Well then you don't "deserve" it.
If you want an example just ask this question and see how quickly they turn on you: Why is there no "find drivers" or "rollback drivers" buttons in Linux? Not only has Windows had those for over a decade now but at least the first one should be easy enough to do, simply have a universal repo for drivers in source code with automated build scripts. The user pushes the button, it checks the repo and if it finds a driver it downloads the code and runs the build script. So why doesn't Linux have this obviously useful feature?
Because it would be easier than doing forum hunts, that's why, and thus might make it easier for normal people. Ultimately this is why I gave up on Linux and FOSS, because talking with the ones that practically rule the community now they make it clear very quickly that if they could go back to computers being as big a PITA as the late 70s PCs they would be just fine with that. The thought that someone like Suzy the checkout girl could actually use the same thing they do just turns their stomach which is why the best tools you'll see for LaTeX will be no better feature wise than Notepad, it would mean users that don't "deserve" to use their precious tools could.
Got two, the oldest is in his second year of premed while the youngest sadly inherited several physical problems that will most likely cripple him for life.
So if it shocks you that there are people out there that have functional families too bad, there are many here that do. Why there are even a few females here, with actual female parts! I know shocking, since the only female you've probably ever seen is in a porno.
And nothing obtuse about anything I wrote, unless you can't read TFS. MSFT charges you for MP with XBL which PCs get for free, origin sucks ass (wow, there is a shocker, the company that makes Activision look like the care bears puts out a shitty service that fucks users? Who would have thought!) and Deus Ex HR is a good game which both me and the oldest didn't have a problem playing. If you want a full review here it is...good graphics, not as long as the original Deus Ex (but what is these days?) but with plenty of ways to solve the missions and load out your character, and the DLC included in the sale was wicked fun.
So hey, you wanna pay MORE money for LESS graphics, features,the right to play MP and the good chance bugs won't be patched? Knock yourself out, I'm sure MSFT will appreciate those donations, what with them posting their first quarterly loss in history and all.
Now if you'll excuse me ever since gifting Saints Row 3 to the boys as well as picking it up myself we've been alternating who is backing up who and its my turn to back up the oldest on his missions. With all the killer bundle deals we made out like bandits so it'll probably be a good month before we even get to try all the new games we got, the youngest piled on the RPGs, the oldest piled on the horror, and I piled on the FPS and sandbox games.
Of course that's yet another nice thing about PC gaming, the crazy sales. Since switching to Steam I've got more games than I ever did before, all fully patched, with MP and DLC, and at truly insane prices. I've been on Steam 3 and a half years now and in ALL that time I've had exactly ONE problem, which Steam support was able to fix in less than an hour. Frankly I was shocked, as it was the middle of the big Xmas sale and I figured it'd be days before I even heard back from them, but they walked me through the problem I was having and even checked back in twice just to make sure my DLC was working correctly. Really can't beat service like that.
Yeah that is what sucks with all these cool little features, it may help to sell a particular brand but it never becomes industry wide. Take Asrock and their XFast tech, I've seen as much as 50% boost to the throughput on my USB 2 flash sticks using XFast USB but you'll not be seeing anybody else with any of the XFast stuff because its exclusive to Asrock.
So while its cool tech you're right, other than a few Asus models it'll not go anywhere.
I'm personally waiting for Hansen to get his throat slit wide open right there on camera. Its only a matter of time before he runs into a Gacy or a Bundy that was coming there to pick up his latest trophy and when they see Mr Smartass will be more than happy to spill his guts all over the floor, cops be damned.
The problem is we on the outside frankly have NO idea what they've actually made or lost, because they can use sales of the two sacred cows to cover for losses in other parts of the company.
For example one could make the case that the X360 hasn't made a dime. oh they SAY it has, said its been in the black for over 2 years, but does that count the 2 billion plus they had to pay to replace RRoD machines? Does it count the R&D? what about the XBox 1, does it include all the money they lost on it?
The simple facts are we don't know and may never know, and the fact they have posted their first losss means they aren't getting enough out of their sacred cows to cover all the dumb moves Ballmer makes anymore. can you tell me how much they lost on Zune? What about the Kin? How much did they lose in license fees when they killed playsforsure? How much have they lost on search? Frankly losing 6.2 billion is probably the tip of the iceberg compared to how much Ballmer has actually blown but without access to the books we'll simply never know.
Can't, no Verizon signal worth a crap here, its AT&T or...well just AT&T. My oldest went Verizon and now has to walk to the end of the driveway no matter the weather just to take a call, otherwise he cuts out mid sentence.
That problem was solved ages ago, its called "don't use origin" since anybody that says anything other than "yes please can i have some more, and can you double the prices?" gets the banhammer on the EA forums. you buy from dicks you deserve to get fucked.
And I don't know what the complaint would be about with HR, bought 2 copies, one for me, one for the oldest, fired it up and away it went, hell it took me longer to set the controls like I liked it than it did to fire up the game.
Hey if you like getting charged 30%+ above the PCs before sales, for shittier graphics and the odds that patches may never come at all if you are on the X360? Knock yourself out. frankly I figured the console owners had lost their damned minds when they agreed to pay just to have MP but if that is what makes you happy I'm sure MSFT appreciates the donations.
Don't forget the PowerVR GPUs they used in several chipsets which last I checked are black box as well.
Lets face it folks, if you care about FOSS drivers you really only have one choice when it comes to GPUs, and that is AMD. they are opening up all their code as fast as their lawyers can sign off, they have gone coreboot over UEFI, it seems since taking over ATI that AMD has gone above and beyond trying to be FOSS friendly, even hiring devs to help the FOSS devs get up to speed quicker on the drivers.
So if the FOSS community wants FOSS drivers they need to put their money where their mouths are and buy AMD across the board. only by showing that supporting FOSS increases sales will you get other corps to sign off on opening up their drivers. The fact that damned near every forum talking about FOSS and GPUs ends up with a bazillion "LOL buy Nvidia" tells me that frankly you might as well accept binary blobs and a hardware API, because obviously the community doesn't care about FOSS over convenience.
It wouldn't matter if you used it frankly, nor what features it has or has not, its the network effect. For shits and giggles i set one up a couple of months ago and found that NOBODY I know is using it, nobody, not a single one. Whereas every single person I've known since fricking HS has a FB account and seems to use it daily, even though I don't hardly mess with mine.
So frankly Google is finding out that just like MSFT just because you have money doesn't mean you can buy your way into the party. MSFT couldn't do it with WinPhone, Google can't do it with Google+. FB was able to take over from MySpace because MySpace took a massive dump on the design and lax security quickly turned it into a spam haven so users got fed up and left. will that happen to FB? Its possible but until they take a big enough shit on the UI and ruin it for enough people G+ hasn't got a prayer.
What I miss is phones that had actual batteries instead of the whole iSliver crap we have now. i don't know about the rest of you but I'd happily take a phone that's a little fatter that gives me 30% more time. I'd just rather not have the "thin is in" if its gonna make me carry around a damned charger all the time that takes up more space than if they'd just put a decent size battery on the damned phone!
At least we still have plenty of choice in that matter in the laptop/netbook arena but I wonder how long that will be the case, I just don't see what is the point of putting these ever more powerful CPU/GPU combos into phones if you are gonna cripple them with teeny tiny iSliver batteries just to rip off the iPhone look.
Haven't looked at PCs in awhile have you? I'm playing on an AMD 6 core and an HD4850 I got for $50 and I have tons of bling and have no problem with the new games like Saints Row 3 or Deus Ex HR. Very few games are doing the old Far Cry I "Our game is useful for benchmarking!" bit because it simply limits your audience too much. I have no doubt my boys and I will be playing on our two hexas and the youngest with his quad come 2020 when the OS goes EOL with nothing but a $50-$100 GPU update in about another year that will take all of 10 minutes and is simple enough my teen boys will change out their own. Oh and as a bonus you can put your old cards on Craigslist and get some of your money back which makes the cards even cheaper.
This is why I'm glad me and the boys have switched almost exclusively to PC gaming, too much BS, too much price gouging, and talking to friends frankly the patches are just as bad and large for the PC only as in TFA you simply may not get them and instead get stuck with a buggy game for your hard earned $$. Thanks to the Steam sale by the time its over on the 22nd me and the boys will have enough games to last us until the big Xmas sale and that's with crazy cheap prices, games automatically patched for free, free MP with matchmaking and chat, its just a nicer experience all around. hell nearly all the games support controllers if that's what you prefer and nearly all the modern cards have HDMI out so you can plug that PC into your widescreen no problem.
For those that prefer consoles you might want to watch this video by Jim Sterling where he points out that all the advantages consoles use to have frankly are rapidly disappearing, with consoles having the same bad attributes as PCs such as long loads and large patches, and the good things are being matched or surpassed by the PC.
Sorry friend but for a good 90%+ of the population Linux is not an option, because 1.-It wears obtuse and fiddly as badges of honor, 2.-Torvalds will never allow an API as long as he has a pulse, so drivers WILL break with every update, 3.-Too many treat FOSS as a religion and WANT the drivers to break because they are "Teh evil binary blobs ZOMG!" when the FOSS drivers break just as much, and 4.-The entire system is doomed because a small group will NEVER be able to properly QA and QC the amount of code in your average distro, much less the repos which are a mess of half baked crap.
You might want to read these articles, the first of which is actually written by one of the devs at Red Hat, which shows frankly why Linux hasn't gone anywhere on the desktop and frankly won't. the current design just doesn't work and the egos involved simply won't allow change, nor will the religious zealotry, so things simply stagnate. Its sad, but MSFT could put out lousy OSes for the next 3 versions and people will just stick with the last good one, no matter how creaky it gets, rather than deal with Linux. See how many are running XP rather than take Linux for free as a good example.
May I make a suggestion? Look at Pale Moon for your brother as the LTS won't give you as long as you think, not with the way they've been spinning version numbers like a top, whereas Pale Moon has stopped any UI "enhancements" and version 12 because they too don't care for the direction Mozilla is taking. as a bonus its compiled for newer CPUs with the SSE flags so it actually gives it a nice kick in the pants.
As for what has been going on with OSes lately...sigh. if I wanted a God damned cell phone for a desktop i would have a damned desktop, just a cell phone! Why the fuck do they think everyone wants to have a cell phone UI everywhere? The only thing I have EVER agreed with SJVN on is that the new UIs all suck and nooo, not because we are 'scared of change" or any other bullshit, I've been through plenty of desktop UIs, from Win 3.x and 9x through BBox through KDE and Flux, no its because its all about the bling and aping fricking smartphones instead of actually designing for the fricking form factor. Its just the opposite of the retarded 'Hey lets make phones into teeny tiny desktops!" that MSFT did with WinCE for a damned decade, only now its "Hey lets make desktops into supergigantic smartphones".
Its all just a big giant clusterfuck and I'll be glad when these things bomb big time so they can actually focus on making desktops that work again, instead of feeling like my monitor should be touch and have a slide out keyboard just to deal with the mess.
Bah, its all about what goes with it. RC Cola and Moonpies, Pepsi and peanuts, Coke and cashews. Of course with the Pepsi and Coke you'll need a bottle to pour in the peanuts and cashews respectively but it all comes down to having the right one with the right side.
But does the big blue blanket work? because if not it'd just make me depressed. See i used to get shadowcats royally pissed at me because i'd take an ultra heavy and strip the hell out of that bitch. No missiles, no armor, just the biggest fucking guns all group fired together, like getting hit with the 16 incher off the Missouri.
You see the way the big blue blanket works is you have your battleships as one shot killers, but they are slow and take time to reload and have vulnerable flanks. The destroyers cover the sides and carry enough medium range tonnage that anybody that manages to survive a hit from a battleship is toast and they can inflict damage while the battleships are turning to fire, finally the cruisers are set up as short range cover and warning, able to turn on a dime they stand between the bad guys and the battleships to give the big boys time to turn into position while focusing their fire on one specific area to try to slow the enemy down to make them an easier target for the big guns.
Done right the big blue blanket takes an actual team, not a bunch of hot doggers, but together they are damned near unstoppable. In fact the only times we had trouble with BBB was when the other team would be also doing a BBB, then you'd end up like the battle of Midway, this huge war of attrition where it came down to which team had the best group tactics and more than a little luck.
Dude I'm in my 40s and have been working on computers since the Trash 80 was sold in stores and dealing with Windows since Win 3.x brought the fun of torturing people with Hot Dog Stand. I have always had a single motto, to rip off Tron Legacy "I fight for the users" and I call it like I see it.
Too many here treat software as a religion, like you have to "earn" the right to use a computer and frankly most of them would be tickled pink if computers went back to the days of 70s homebrew and wear obtuse and fiddly like badges of honor and I will ALWAYS stand against that horseshit as its nothing but losers wanting to feel elitist! They can't fucking stand the thought that the same machine they use could actually be of any value at all to Suzy the checkout girl and will go out of their way to make damned sure Suzy can't get any use out of it, and that is just elitist garbage.
Computers should be able to make everyone's life better, to make ALL our lives easier, and while there will always be specialized tools for complex jobs frankly writing a fucking letter shouldn't be placed on the same level as running a cluster at CERN, that's bullshit.
So don't worry about me, i'll always call it how I see it, I'll always fight for the users, and i'll always call out elitist bullshit and let the chips fall where they may.
Nice to see someone else using WSUSOffline and Ninite, its a great one two punch when it comes to quickly whipping a machine back into shape.
And the problem with the authorities doing anything about infected PCs is thus: Already too many fall for the "ZOMG U got teh viruz! Run "Iz_not_Viruz_Iz_Security_Tool to clean ur machine ZOMG!" trick as it is, if the authorities actually DO start popping up helpful tips and cleaning machines remotely it'll just make it that much easier for those using Security tool and AV20XX variants to pwn more systems.
A better answer would be for the ISPs to be able to contact the customers directly about this but even then I'm leery as I've dealt with ISPs in the past that used "You must be infected" as a catch all excuse to weasel out of actually giving you what you paid for as far as bandwidth. The last one of those i dealt with I walked in with my Xandros Business laptop and said "Okay Sparky, show me the virus on this laptop" and the retard actually tried to install Norton from a home burnt disc onto a Linux laptop!
In the end all you can do is try to educate users as best you can and realize that no matter how well you harden your systems, and Win Vista and Win 7 with UAC and a decent AV can actually be pretty damned good, you'll always have the dancing bunnies problem that frankly NO OS can cure.
The problem is I honestly don't think it will help because the same ones deciding what is "good" and "bad" are the same ones that have created the mess in the first place.
What we need is teachers that can really motivate, but sadly those type are usually run out for straying too far from the course material. In junior HS we had a truly wonderful history teacher for about a year and a half. now most would think American history would be just spewing dates, that's how most taught it, but he instead used a "Six degrees of Woodstock" as he had a theory that there wasn't a single thing in American history that couldn't be led back to Woodstock. man we would pour over the books looking for obscure events in American history just trying to find a way to stump him...never did though. But in the end he got run out by complaints from other teachers about how he was straying too far from the material, not to mention a few of the old fuddy duddy types weren't too happy about him showing Woodstock in its entirety the last week of class.
So while I agree we need testing frankly as long as they aren't simply teaching to the test I don't care how they get students motivated to learn as long as they are. To this day I'll see some "this day in history" and start trying to figure out how I could connect it to Woodstock with 6 degrees or less, which of course means you have to actually think about the various events and how they impacted society. He truly was a great teacher.
Here is the wiki friend but from what I've read of it frankly i gotta go with the GOP. This thing smells more like Scientology than the three Rs, with way too much technobabble and it seems designed to make it difficult to measure whether it is working or not.
The problem is religious extremists really need deprogramming not trolling. We are talking about people that will strap a bomb to their chest and die with a smile on their face because of what some goat herder wrote on a piece of sheep's ass a thousand years ago. Now just think about that for a minute, a guy that has been dead for over a thousand years tells you that if you die for the sky bully you'll be pimped out in paradise....and you listen.
I'm sorry but until we can get people to accept those stories for what they were, stories, no different than Homer or Plato, then its seriously doubtful that anything you troll is gonna have any long term effect. we are talking about a religion that tells you how many times to shake your dick after you piss and how to fuck your wife you know, people that desire THAT level of external control in their lives have serious mental problems and need help.
I personally think its because religion takes responsibility completely out of your life, it doesn't matter what happens its "God's will" and you have no reason to think or claim responsibility, just follow this little rule book and don't think and all is well. It completely takes any thought or responsibility out of the person's hands and sadly there are many of our fellow man that would like to spend their entire lives not having to think, just blindly follow.