Out of that list the only thing i might like is Crysis. I tried the original BL and hated it, Far Cry 2 was so terrible, with the so damned predictable spawning and retarded AI, not to mention broken weapon system that I'd be leery of wasting any money on FC3, I can't spend 16 hours a day learning a single character so TF2 is right out, with L4D its too team based and a shitty player fucks up the whole flow, and finally ArmA is too damned realistic, i like a game where I can go more than a foot without crawling and not get sniped, thanks ever so.
Too many of the games are trying to make up for piss poor SP and AI with tacked on MP and I for one can't fucking stand MP most of the time, there is a hell of a big difference between AI that will suppress and flank and a shitload of dudes running around like chickens with their heads cut off blasting everything in sight. One requires strategy and thought, the other is bullet spam.
The last game where I actually gave a shat about MP was MechWarrior 4, where you actually had to work as a team and have a strategy to get very far. my team used the WWII "big blue blanket" approach, with me and another heavy in the center as the slow battleships, the mediums on our sides as destroyer escorts, and the lights front and rear as fast cruisers. With L4D everybody can use every weapon and with TF2 most of the maps I've seen everyone is either a sniper or the pyro.
So while I appreciate the suggestions until some decent AI single player games come out I'll probably just stick with sandbox games, i just picked up Saints Row 3 (great game BTW, crazy fun like Just Cause II) on the Steam sale so that ought to give me plenty to do for awhile. I heard the new Deus Ex is good, i scored the whole series on the Steam sale for $15 so I'll get around to playing that as well, at least if it sucks like Fear 3 I'll still have the original as well as Invisible War to play.
I know all about it, comodo dragon is a spinoff of Chrome and has access to the appstore, but what are the numbers? I've looked and not been able to find any, which tells me the amount they are making off the Chrome Store is probably piddling.
And let us not forget the word of the day is lock in, both Apple and Google have been making out like bandits on their appstores and when it comes right down to it they are certainly not gonna create the tech that is gonna take those markets away. In the end I think both are gonna make HTML V5 just powerful enough to accomplish their goals, killing flash for Apple and speeding up Google docs and Gmail for Google, while making sure that any app that has both HTML V5 and native will always run better native.
Frankly I don't see how HTML anything could compete with native anyway, lets face it JavaScript was never designed to be power conscience and in mobile battery is king. With native they can design the APIs with power usage in mind whereas it really doesn't take much for JavaScript to pound a CPU, not to mention the toolsets for HTML V5 simply aren't very mature and from what I've seen none of them are really designed for creating lightweight mobile friendly code so much as pouring on the bling.
Riiiight, that is like suggesting the replacement for Excel is buying some cluster time at CERN. LaTeX is about the most user UNFRIENDLY software that has ever been designed, a piece of software that wears obtuse and fiddly like badges of honor, so far the ONLY ones I've ever seen use it are those writing their thesis in some tech area like engineering.
If you want to replace Office it has to be user friendly, not a royal PITA with a giant learning curve. This is why geeks don't understand why Linux never goes anywhere on the desktop, they don't mind fiddly ass CLI crap nor spending a weekend learning bash commands and can't understand the average user would rather spend the week at the DMV than deal with that shit. Make LaTeX as user friendly as MS Office and then no problem but as it is? A good 99% of the population will never bother, they have better things to do than spend hours learning that mess, like actually writing what they needed a WYSIWYG word processor for in the first place!
If its like the one I saw they are using some lame ass CPUs in them which means they need extra room to get the heat out through pipes and fans. why hasn't anybody put one of the AMD C or E series chips into a tablet? Those are nice chips, full 1080P video through HDMI thanks to the Radeon GPU and pretty low on battery suckage. I have one of the E350 netbooks and I get around 6 hours playing 720P and more if I'm just surfing and don't need bluetooth. It seems like it'd be perfect for a tablet and would let you run all your X86 programs, add a transformer style keyboard with extra battery and you'd have a tablet that turns into an all day laptop with full X86 compatibility, sounds sweet to me.
As for TFA...damn, can Ballmer and Sinofsky torpedo this company a little more? Why don't they just send a page to the XP and Vista users offering Libre Office or Google docs while they are at it? Between fracturing IE all to hell, followed by keeping many games on DX9 because they refused to backport to XP, to making sure all those Vista users (Yeah i know the number is dropping but there is still millions of them and they ARE supported until 2017 as far as EOL goes) won't buy their Office suite I swear MSFT couldn't be run any worse if the team leads were picked by Cook over at Apple. Its like watching the PHB at Dilbert just bumble a company straight into the ground.
Man, wasn't that nice, to have bad guys that weren't tarded without having to deal with online cursing little shits? While Fear 1&2 were more buttoned up you should try the expansions for Fear 1, they had some nice levels where they could really get behind your ass if you weren't careful. the rooftop was a good example, where the Arma troops had 4 different ways they could go and would lay down fire while one snuck around to cap you in the back, just damned good.
Here is a little title by a little company you've probably never heard of but if you like a challenge, and I don't mean that lame "all grunts take more bullets than the terminator while having perfect aim" crap look up a little game called "Nosferatu: The Wrath Of Malachi" or something like that, I always just called it Nosferatu. Its 1901 and you have to go into a castle to rescue your family from a hoard of vampires.
The cool things about this game is 1.-Forget memorizing jack shit as EVERYTHING is randomized. A room that may have been a ballroom with a servant might be a bedroom with a hellhound the next time, it even randomizes between saves so you might have to reload a time or two if you respawn knee deep in the shit! 2.- How do you think that YOU, a normal human, would do against a real vampire? Welcome to Nosferatu where you are NOT a 6 foot 300 pound linebacker but an ordinary man. with the holy water and the cross or 6 shot you can fight off a minion, it'll be a decent fight but it can be done relatively easy, but you walk into a room and there is some Masters in their coffins? Your ass had better be able to sneak in there, get them lids open, and drive those stakes before they wake up because if not? Its your ass Mr Postman as they are wicked strong and if you drop one awake it'll probably be due to luck and will make you feel like you just won the game because it is HARD to do.
But I know what you mean, without decent AI so many of the games are just terrible, I mean who cares how it looks if the guys all stand in a straight line to be shot? don't buy Fear 3 BTW, the AI is fucking TERRIBLE, I don't know how many times all I had to do was fire a round or two and they would duck behind cover and just sit there while I walked up and knifed them, fricking knifed them, or worse they'd just go back and forth between two different covers while i just stood there right out in the open, they didn't even shoot. After 1&2 it was enough to make me want to fricking scream, just terrible.
Oh and did you read what the guy below you posted as a list of "good shooters" for me? Its online, online, online, online aaaaaannnndddd online. If I wanted to deal with "LOL I play this 16 hours a day noob bitch ass mofo" I'd be playing fricking Halo. ONLINE SUCKS ASS and is NOTHING like having a decent AI, its campers or guys that have no fricking lives so they just learn every trick and memorize every map so that you'll spend all your time respawning...wow, what fun. Big difference between having AI that will try to suppress and flank and some guy that has figured out there is a tiny section of wall that will let him scope a large area of the map without being seen so he can just pick off players and rack up his kills. And I can't believe he suggested TF2, for someone that likes a traditional FPS that thing is TERRIBLE! Its the classic case of spending weeks learning a single character because you can NOT just hop in and play that game and expect to get anywhere at all,and more than half the maps are fricking sniper heavens.
Yeah tell me about it, one of the reasons i chose to stick with Office 2K is that with the compatibility pack it opens all the newer file types without dragging ass on my netbook.
I'm starting to wonder....is Ballmer or Sinofsky secretly working for Apple or Google? Everyone said Elop was a plant but....damn guys, you couldn't torpedo a company any better if you tried. First they royally screwed any chance of IE making a comeback by fracturing the hell out of it by refusing to backport, now here they are telling owners of Vista, which is under support until 2017 BTW, that "Hey we don't want your business, might we suggest Libre Office or Google Docs?"
Seriously guys have you EVER seen a company that has been run THIS badly? It reminds me of AOL when dialup was dying, how they kept trying to tie everything into their shitty dialup service nobody wanted. Now they are gonna try to ram that tweeting twitting mess of a social cell phone OS Win 8 down our damned throats even if they have to torpedo their biggest products to do it!
While the indie games are pretty damned good one thing that bums the hell out of me is how badly they've taken a crap on the FPS genre. Remember when you'd get all these different takes on the FPS, like Redneck Rampage and Blood or No One Lives Forever? Or even Far Cry I with AI that would flank and lush jungles with nasty creatures in it?
Now it seems like everything is Call Of Modern Honor: Gears Of Killzone. hell even the ones I liked are getting crapped on by the Call Of Modern Honor effect, remember Fear? Fear I&2 were nice, dark and gritty with smart bad guys and great weapons, so what happened? Fear 3 is a 2 gun, wall kissing, lousy guns with no damned bullets co-op mess, that's what.
Sadly this is one genre where it is doubtful the indies will save us. there are a hell of a lot of guys like me that would be happy with Far Cry I or even No One Lives Forever II level graphics if you'd just give us a good story, new weapons, tough bad guys, bring back the fun to FPS. But instead every indie FPS I've ever seen is just another Quake III Arena ripoff, like we really need another MP only CTF and DM game...yawn.
That is one of the few nice things about MSFT, as you can just skip the crap releases completely and hope they come to their senses for the next one, or the one after that.
I actually skipped XP for the most part after finding the RTM version crap so i went from Win2K Pro (great OS that was, light and solid) to XP X64 (another great OS, made for an awesome workstation) and then skipped Vista on my main system for Windows 7 which is quite nice, a little more bloat than XP but the features make up for it and its got a hell of a lot better memory management than Vista.
So just skip win 8, hell skip win 9 too if they don't fire that damned Apple wannabe Ballmer and his pet Sinofsky, win 7 is supported until 2020 so either they'll get their collective heads out of their asses before then or they'll bomb hard enough nobody will care for using Windows anymore anyway, no problem. It isn't like Win 7 is gonna suddenly have all the programs dry up, hell most programs still have XP support and that thing is old as dirt so I'm sure you'll still be able to run anything you want (well except for maybe IE, but who gives a crap about IE anymore?) for years to come and can avoid Win 8 like the tweeting twitting FB shitting social mess of an OS it is.
While I agree that I'd LIKE to see something else, hell I'd like it if you had WinPhone AND Android AND iPhone AND WebOS Phone AND MozOS Phone what we end up talking about is a classic variation of the centuries old "is ought problem" where you and I end up talking about what OUGHT to be instead of what IS
Believe me I know all about the is ought problem because as a PC retailer I've stressed for years that what people OUGHT to do is buy or have me build them a nice desktop and then buy a much lower end mobile like a netbook because frankly mobiles will ALWAYS be slower, easier to break and wear out, and you'll always pay more and get less because its designed with batteries instead of mains in mind. What IS reality is people end up having me find them a laptop that then spends a good 90%+ of its life sitting on a desk plugged into mains so that when they DO ever go out the battery has worn down from constant trickle charging. why do they do it? because people like the IDEA of being "always on the go" even when they aren't, no different than how I bet 75%+ of exercise gear sold ends up in a garage never being used.
And while Google and Apple are indeed in a war over HTML V5 it isn't about apps, its about controlling the web. Google wants to make sure HTML V5 does what Google wants it to do, so that Google docs and GMail run fast, whereas Apple wants it to cut out flash which competed with the appstore. In the end I doubt seriously that either will do much as far as HTML V5 apps, especially when it comes to mobile, because they are making a killing on their appstores. It would be like Valve promoting GoG over Steam, they are simply not gonna give up their cut even though it would make things more open and even easier for the buyers.
I've been here since the days of win 3.x friend and i know the desire, I've been waiting for damned near 20 fricking years for a true "write once, run everywhere" format but it won't be HTML V5 because the companies in control of it make more money if HTML V5 isn't as good as native. In the end the companies will do what makes them the most money and gives them the most lock in, and that's native apps. While this sucks for the devs and the users the big two make out like Gods by having centralized control of their markets, and frankly they have the money and the pull to make sure HTML V5 is always an also ran.
I see where the problem is, you think that the OEMs will get that money and you know what? Won't happen and here is why: Apple is X86 too now. the people that spend a $1k+ on a PC, and I do know quite a few, do NOT buy Windows, they buy workstations running Linux or buy Apple, hell I even know a few that went and built Hackentoshes because Apple was being too slow on the Mac pro upgrade and they needed moar power.
Ultimately look at the ultrabooks, look up their numbers...they aren't selling, people don't want them. Again it would be like what dell did when they stuck an Atom in a rotating screen so it was a conversion tablet and tried to sell it for $650...now you can buy those at places like Geeks for less than half that and they STILL don't sell.
I think the problem is you seem to be under the impression that by hanging some nicer curtains you can turn Mickey D's into Olive garden and it just don't work that way, believe me I know. I've been working retail PC sales and repair since the early 90s in 3 different states selling to everyone from the kids of one of our governors to Suzy the checkout girl. I've been through the dotbomb, the thinclient fad, the MHz wars, and I've seen what'll sell and what won't sell and you just can't push enough units at $1k a pop to make up for the volume decrease, you just can't do it.
Lets take the $20 figure, which is probably right about in the center. i personally make from $50-$80 per unit but since i build custom and do the initial setups as well as after the sales service i can get away with more, but $20 is probably typical for an OEM of say Asus size. Now Asus probably sells a good half a million or more of the EEE series, I see those everywhere, the local college kids eat them up like candy, hell i liked them enough i got myself one, they are nice little units. Now if we use the $20 figure (I'd argue there is probably more money in the lower end than we think due to the price of cheap parts, i know that AMD sells the E350 chips at something like $12 and that covers CPU+GPU+NB, so I wouldn't be surprised if they make more than $20 a unit for those EEEs) at a half a million Asus just made $10 million in profits.
Now we switch to the $1K price point, already your cost for parts has gone WAAAY up as the lowest chip you can probably get away with at that price point is the high end i5s which Intel sells at around $400 a pop for a tray of 1000, and of course you are gonna have to have nicer metal cases, touchscreens (average $175 a pop in bulk for resistive, capacitive more, I've checked), SSDs of decent capacity, so that by the time you are done with the much more expensive parts you really aren't making much more profit, lets say $70 a pop. Now from what I've seen the average high end units only sell around 30k units since again you've just made sure that a large portion of the market simply won't buy from you, so by replacing the EEEs at $450 with an i5 at $1000 you've gone from profits of 10 million to 2.1 million, a net LOSS of 8 million bucks.
Now I don't know about you but as a retailer i like having customers, and while bumping the price of my AMD triples to $1k might in THEORY equal more money for less work in reality people simply won't pay $1k for the same parts you'd put in a $450 unit, they just won't. again it'd be like you slapping a $100,000 sticker on the new Mustang, how many do you think you'd sell? 1? 20? Certainly not enough units to keep a factory cranking them out as you'd soon end up with warehouses filled with Mustangs you couldn't move which is coming out of YOUR pocket. Then you figure in how small the market for $100,000 cars is and you'll see it can't sustain even a fourth of the companies currently making cars, hell it probably wouldn't even support 1 twentieth the current market.
In the end the ONLY reason Apple can get away with this is because its a boutique brand, like Prada and Gucci. I know people that have bought iPhones and iPads and don't have a fucking clue what to do with them, in fact they are treated li
Then you just get a steam crack, no different than cracking any retail game. In fact most of the cracked games I see on customer's machines that have P2P are steam cracked, its easier than some of the new nasty DRM.
And I'm sorry about the shitty WISP, as i said I chose not to live rent free simply to keep off our local WISP as the morons have no damned idea how to allocate bandwidth and one jackoff looking at HD porn vids can drag the whole thing to a crawl, at least on cable I'm the only one in the building that has it so i have a big pipe to myself.
The only things I would counter with is 1.-I wasn't bringing up OpenMoko to talk about the device specifically, but to point out that while geeks TALK a good game, when it comes to investing hundreds of their own money they quietly walk away. Look up the buzz around OpenMoko before release and it was HUGE, geeks talking it up like it was an iJesus but when it came out and they saw the price it was "Where did everyone go?" and that was that. 2.-And while the carriers MAY be able to do that there is also the possibility of both they and Moz getting sued if so much as a single line of code in MozOS can be traced back to GPL V3. Why would any carrier take the risk and possible bad publicity when Android is free and already has the devs? And finally 4.-I'm sorry but so far I haven't seen many HTML V5 apps that haven't sucked balls. the toolset simply isn't mature and its more of a PITA. I have noticed that while even an 8 year old desktop can run native apps well that same machine will struggle with HTML V5 and that's plugged into a main, the mobile suck even more. Native apps use less battery and when you are talking about iSliver designs being the hip thing that matters. Oh and 5.-MSFT had a mature toolset and was practically the only game in town around 04-07 and nobody bought them because the UI sucked. There is nothing wrong with the UI on iOS and Android and on both they have a mature toolset and easy to use dev tools which just don't exist for HTML V5.
So while I can see where you are coming from, and I apologize about never figuring out how to make a straight list here, i just don't see it happening. Humans are basically lazy creatures and devs are humans and it'll simply be easier to stick with what they already know and more importantly where they already have an easy way to make native apps. being able to run on different platforms doesn't really matter if the money isn't there and the only markets we see making any money are Android market and the Appstore. You certainly aren't seeing anyone push HTML V5 apps on the desktops, and in fact both Google and Apple have downplayed HTML V5 since setting up their appstores. Again when you have network effects in play the other guy has to do something stupid, like MSFT did when it disbanded the IE team and left IE 6 to rot thus giving Moz a free shot at the desktop but I just don't see that happening here, neither Apple nor Google are gonna make any blatant mistakes any time soon.
And might I say this is one of the reasons I consider RMS to be a disgusting little troll of a man. if you want to talk shit have the fucking balls to do it while they are alive, he kept his big fat mouth shut until the man was dead and THEN talked shit. to me that was cowardice and nobody likes a damned coward. That fact that he waited until Jobs died and THEN talked shit to get some publicity for himself just makes him disgusting in my eyes. To use his own quote "I won't be glad when he's dead, but I will be glad when he is gone".
Every recovery technique I've seen ends up with a "toxic sludge" that is not gonna fly in the west, and frankly shouldn't be flying in the third world except for the fact their officials are even easier to bribe than ours.
As we have seen from our superfund sites once a place is poisoned often that's it, you have to put a fence around it and walk away, its gonna remain toxic as it'll cost trillions to clean up. There is no "profit" here except by walking away and leaving that mess behind which while you can get away with that in China frankly I don't know if you could pull that off very easily in the USA anymore. If you didn't walk the costs of disposing the toxic sludge would far outweigh the piddling amount of metals you'd get from your average cell phone, so the article is full of crap...well maybe Halliburton or Goldman Sachs can pull of that level of nasty and still get away with it, most corps i doubt could pull off creating a superfund site in the USA today.
And Windows 10 will make you grow wings out of your ass, thus killing the airline industry ZOMG! What? My statement right now is just as factually true as yours.
MSFT isn't about to pull that shit because they'd run right back into antritrust which they just got out of. in ARM they are such a teeny tiny player frankly nobody is gonna give a rat's ass what they do, not to mention there are plenty of Android and of course ALL Apple devices that you can't just boot what you want to anyway, but in X86 they would not only give up untold millions from all the companies using older Windows versions through software assurance but Red Hat and several other players would bring it up to the EU and MSFT would be looking at a mess and a PR nightmare.
I'm sorry but you really need to learn your history. The word "PC" comes from "IBM PC compatible" which is X86. Now if you want to say its a personal computer? Fine and dandy, but a PC is an X86 unit, a personal computer is whatever.
Here is some points for you. 1.-Openmoko. geeks may talk a good game, but spending $600+ on unsubsidized smartphones? Not happening. 2.-The carriers sure as hell ain't gonna go "What? A GPL phone where we can't cripple it, lock it down, and then sell features the phone already has at higher prices? Where do we sign up?" so you can give up having these phones offered for anything less than full price. 3.-If they simply wanted to be different they could simply slap WebOS on, but its not the OS, its the apps. 4.-So far what I've seen of HTML V5 sucks the big wet titty. for every one site you seen done right you get 50 done wrong, with video that skips like mad and "apps' that are glitchy messes. i don't see this making anyone want to give up their Android market or Apple appstore, finally 5.- MSFT is spending $450 to sell a $50 phone and still can't catch a break, you think Moz is gonna do better in an already crowded and saturated market?
If this would have came out 5 years ago maybe, but now? Its gonna take Apple or Google doing something seriously stupid to create an opening and with Google sinking a billion a year in Android development and who knows what Apple is sinking into R&D and marketing the odds of this working is about the same as me winning the powerball. Every major shift we've seen in mobile has been because someone seriously fucked up, Palm sat on ass and let their OS and hardware get creaky and by the time they saw the train coming it ran them over, RIM sat on ass and let their designs stagnate and refused to look at other markets until the bus that was consumer markets ran them over, HP as you pointed out didn't know WTF it was doing and after spending a shitload on WebOS had no damned clue what to do with it, and MSFT treated phones as itty bitty desktops for a decade and by the time they realized that UI didn't work on a 3 inch screen they were fucked.
Moz simply doesn't have the luxury of retarded competition, in fact just the opposite because while you can say a lot of things about Apple and Google stupid and lazy they are not. They have carved the market nicely, with Apple taking all the high margin high end while Google takes the low and both have devs lined up to write apps for them. A glorified web page simply isn't gonna replace native apps and certainly isn't gonna net devs the kind of money they are making from the market and the appstores and surprise surprise but devs actually want to get paid. The devs and the apps will stay where they are, a few CCC Chinamart devices may carry this but I doubt you'll see any big names, and it'll go the way of WebOS and OpenMoko.
That is the ironic thing about how it and WebOS and even WinPhone aren't going anywhere, because for all his talk of "developers developers' MSFT missed the boat and they all went to iOS and Android and Moz is even later than both MSFT and HP to the party but with even less money to throw at marketing and R&D.
We've seen time and time again the masses don't care about "free as in freedom' all they care about is the apps and the buzz, and that's all Android and iOS. Finally without the carriers offering cheap phones Moz won't go anywhere as most won't pay $600+ for a smartphone when they can get the phone for $99 on a contract, yet i just don't see the carriers getting all warm and fuzzy for a hacker friendly phone.
Yeah...not gonna happen. I have a feeling if they get any phones they'll end up with the touchpads and winPhones on Woot! or some other wholesaler site for 95% off, its just not gonna be able to build any steam.
Meh they'll end up on Woot! at 85% off and somebody will buy 'em. And where the fuck was RMS when Apple was doing the same to iOS for fricking years? Locking ARM is NO DIFFERENT than what Apple has done with their devices, not a damned bit.
Meh its a tempest in a teacup anyway, nobody is gonna buy WinRT and the reason you see Secureboot on X86 at all is it gives MSFT's pets in the BSAA an easy way to tell if a machine is pirated. if they walk into a shop and find no secureboot but a Windows install? say hello to a hacked copy of Windows, as that's is how both Vista and 7 have been hacked by the crackers. hell last I checked they even had both Vista and 7 passing WGA thanks to the boot hacks. personally i'd have offered HP for $50 and the family and pro packs for $100, but its MSFT's OS to do as it will.
I think Win 8 is gonna be the next MS BOB myself, I'm certainly not gonna worry about an OS that I think will go over about as welcome as a long wet chili fart in an elevator.
That's not the big problem the problem is the batteries. we just haven't had any true battery breakthough in years and lithium batteries just don't take extremes in heat and cold like a lead acid does. The average temp in the south has been over 100F, ever leave a lithium battery in a car in this kind of heat? Say goodbye to more than half your capacity.
Until battery tech can take temp shifts like gas can its gonna be a hard sell, the vast majority that own vehicles don't own temp controlled garages and with the batteries for the things running a minimum of $7500 a piece unless the government wants to eat billions in costs for giving away batteries there simply won't be a used market, nor will those that buy one want to keep the vehicle once the batteries die out of warranty, they'll end up scrapped.
Well if everyone would like a similar topic that is more thought provoking (at least to me, might be to others as well) I'll be happy to give everybody one: Is it better to make things easier, or to make things more difficult? Because that is what i think a LOT of these programmer arguments boil down to.
Allow me to explain. From my little chair here in the shop as an outsider who frankly hasn't been a day to day coder since the days of VB6 it all seems to boil down to being in one of two camps. in the first camp is those that think IDEs and tools should be designed to make the basics as simple as possible, so that the programmer can concentrate on the actual interesting stuff instead of the hum drum. that would be your Visual Studio and other "big tool" users, and on the other side there is the group that seems to think that tools should be made as simple as possible, with little to no help or handholding, because they believe it will teach them to be 'real programmers' or GTFO so that real programmers can do the work. These are the ones using nothing but a CLI and a txt editor to get things done.
Now as an outsider i would think the answer would be obvious, to simply use whichever you preferred, but these two camps really do seem to hate each other. the big tool guys seem to think the txters are a bunch of elitists, trying to use obscurity and obtuseness to hold onto power, while the txters look down on the big tool types as nothing more than glorified script kiddies. You see any article that talks about languages and it always ends up with a bunch of posts from one of these two groups, especially if the language is used in VS because the txters seem to have a seething hatred for VS.
So there you go, making things easy or harder in programming, discuss amongst yourselves.
PopeRatzo have you SEEN the scores coming out of the average US high school? Or the average IQ scores? I've been saying for years that a century from now people will watch Idiocracy like it was Schindler's List, a sad dramatization of what actually befell mankind. The smart have one child or none at all, the stupid? Well look at that guy trying to get his child support on his THIRTY KIDS cut down because he has never worked anything (and most likely never will) but minimum wage fast food jobs.
Sadly you could take every single secret the USA government has and publish it on the web tomorrow and unless it had celebs, sex, or gossip the vast majority would never ever even look at it. Half a century of uncontrolled moron breeding has created entire cities worth of mouth breathers that would be damned lucky if they can count their change much less read a novel or try to grasp complex events. Factual news simply doesn't sell because we are on our second generation now that actually takes PRIDE in not knowing shit and short of a moron plague that only wipes the stupid out I just don't see that changing.
But you are missing the elephant in the room friend which is we are in a depression which means your customers? DO NOT HAVE IT, they just don't. I could raise the price of my AMD triples from $475 to $1000 tomorrow and even if I didn't have competition i doubt I'd sell more than one or two because THEY DO NOT HAVE IT. You look at the Apple demographic, the average Apple user makes $100,000 a year. Now look at the Windows demographic? the average Windows user? $35,000. That is a BIG fucking difference friend, and with food and gas prices being so volatile someone with a $35k a year job simply isn't gonna spend $1k of that on a PC, they just won't. They'll either keep what they have (no sale for X86 OEMs) , buy used (no sale for X86 OEMs because it'll take years before all the cheap duals, triples, and quads are worn out) or look at ARM netbooks and pads (no sale for the X86 OEMs). Now seriously how many of the X86 OEMs are gonna be willing to close their doors so MSFT can pretend to be Apple? Its been reported that dell and HP make between $8 and $35 a sale but when you are talking millions of customers that adds up to some pretty big numbers. think they are gonna give ALL that up? just to make MSFT happy? They gain NOTHING because as we've seen with Intel pushing ultrabooks they just aren't selling.
You still think that by slapping a $100k price sticker on a Mustang you can turn it into a Ferrari and it just can't be done friend, it doesn't work that way. if MSFT wanted to do that they should have spun off metro and made a premium brand but nobody and I MEAN nobody is gonna accept a $1k+ for Windows PCs, at that price they'll just go Apple. You can't change the global economy by simply sticking a higher price tag and pretending its 2006 and that is EXACTLY what MSFT is attempting to do and I'm telling you it WILL fail and fail hard. Know what one of my biggest sellers is ATM? $150 or less Android pads. great for Google, suicide for the X86 OEMs. For your scenario to work about 3/4ths of the companies will just have to close their doors and walk away which would be the complete death of AMD and Intel would probably lose a good 60%+ of its global sales. No more Pentiums, or Celerons, or Atoms, no more AMD anything, it would ALL have to go. All you would have is the i5 and i7 with touchscreens and SSDs and I'm telling you that will be suicide for most of the X86 market.
Hell I'm a PC guy and have been since the days of Win 3.x but the ONLY reason I have a netbook is the fact that I got one that would play 720p video and hold 8Gb of RAM for $350 with the RAM included, just as the only reason i have a gaming desktop is the fact that I could have a hexacore with 8Gb of RAM, 3Tb of HDDs, an HD4850 and Win 7 HP for less than $650 before MIRs. Raise those prices to $1k? i'll just buy a pad and get a console like the PS3. Again great for the pad makers and sony, sucking the end of a shotgun to the X86 OEMs. You can sell PCs for a million dollars each but if you only sell one you simply aren't gonna stay in business and that is what you will see here, massive layoffs and closed businesses in a dead economy.
The only nice thing I could say about such a scenario is rather than close their doors I have a feeling most of the OEMs would simply get together, pick a distro like Debian, and sink money and support into making it as easy peasy as Windows. Its not collusion if they are contributing to a free OS that anyone can help themselves to, hell they could probably get a tax break for giving to a non profit. And with Valve porting Steam that would even take care of the gaming problem. Again great for FOSS, not so much for MSFT. Personally i think the OEMs will revolt and Ballmer will finally get punt kicked like a 30 yard field return and the board will bring back someone like Ozzie or Allchin to right the ship, i seriously doubt they are gonna give away a good 60%+ of the X86 market because Ballmer would rather work for Apple. Oh and if I had no choice but to buy X86? I'll get a Mac, no way I'd spend $1k+ on Windows, never happen.
What is sad is I've seen stories told with NO budget, NO special effects, but because it actually had good stories and good acting was frankly better than 90% of the crap they show in 3D or with CGI anymore.
If you haven't seen it, and sorry if I don't get the name right but you'll know its the right movie if it has the actor that played Phloxx on ENT, look up a movie I believe called "The Man From Earth" which is a damned good thought provoking film that had more than 90% of the story filmed in a single room in a cabin, that's it. But because it had an actual STORY that was good, with great acting and a great premise (the idea is basically "What would you say if you met someone that was truly immortal? What would you do, how would you react, if you found out someone living next to you was really over 50 centuries old?") it was frankly one of the best movies I had seen in ages and I bet they didn't spend $50k on the whole thing.
So I agree 100%, after seeing something like The Man From Earth and then sitting through Resident Evil 4 (ZOMFG that was awful! I'd rather go to the DMV than sit through that again!) you quickly realize that all the CGI and 3D is being used as nothing but a crutch, to try to cover the shitty writing, bad acting, lame story, horrible dialog, its like polishing a turd.
Sadly, despite the delusional nature of many in the FOSS community, if you look up the history of OpenGL it has been crippled for the better part of a decade by mismanagement by the Kronos group and is far FAR behind DirectX, which DX9 is 2 versions behind friend compared to the much better DX10 and DX11.
You see everything that is bad about FOSS? Cranked to 11 by Kronos. You see they get their funding from the CAD companies who HATE change so the base features have been left at DX7 levels (which is where it was when Kronos took over, OpenGL 1.4 I believe) and everything that has been slapped on top has been made by GPU specific "extensions" which is exactly the WRONG way to handle a graphics API. The whole point is if a card supports say DX10.1? Then you know EXACTLY what features it does and does not support, whereas with openGL if it supports OpenGL, say version 3, it MIGHT have all of the features, SOME of the features, or FEW of the features, simply depending on whether its an Nvidia, AMD/ATI, or Intel GPU and since its all done by "extensions" you not only need the correct extensions but you'll need to poll the GPU to see which extensions it does and does not support and whether the community likes it or not that is fucked up.
Sadly it didn't used to be that way, and if you'll look at your gaming history you'll see that up until 2001/2002 OpenGL and DirextX were neck and neck on features and ease of use, but then came Kronos who came along and took a big dump on the whole thing with their focus on compatibility with CAD above all. That is why if you'll look up any history of OpenGL gaming you'll see OpenGL support in AAA gaming takes a nosedive around 04 and never recovers. Now you have ONE version for mobile, ONE version for CAD, and then several partial versions depending on which GPU you've got, its a fucking mess is what it is. But until the community grows a pair and tells Kronos to piss up a rope and takes OpenGL away from them you'll see Windows and DirectX own the market because there simply is no real competition. All you see on OpenGL anymore is Angry Birds popcap style gaming because any heavy 3D game is frankly more work than its worth.
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Out of that list the only thing i might like is Crysis. I tried the original BL and hated it, Far Cry 2 was so terrible, with the so damned predictable spawning and retarded AI, not to mention broken weapon system that I'd be leery of wasting any money on FC3, I can't spend 16 hours a day learning a single character so TF2 is right out, with L4D its too team based and a shitty player fucks up the whole flow, and finally ArmA is too damned realistic, i like a game where I can go more than a foot without crawling and not get sniped, thanks ever so.
Too many of the games are trying to make up for piss poor SP and AI with tacked on MP and I for one can't fucking stand MP most of the time, there is a hell of a big difference between AI that will suppress and flank and a shitload of dudes running around like chickens with their heads cut off blasting everything in sight. One requires strategy and thought, the other is bullet spam.
The last game where I actually gave a shat about MP was MechWarrior 4, where you actually had to work as a team and have a strategy to get very far. my team used the WWII "big blue blanket" approach, with me and another heavy in the center as the slow battleships, the mediums on our sides as destroyer escorts, and the lights front and rear as fast cruisers. With L4D everybody can use every weapon and with TF2 most of the maps I've seen everyone is either a sniper or the pyro.
So while I appreciate the suggestions until some decent AI single player games come out I'll probably just stick with sandbox games, i just picked up Saints Row 3 (great game BTW, crazy fun like Just Cause II) on the Steam sale so that ought to give me plenty to do for awhile. I heard the new Deus Ex is good, i scored the whole series on the Steam sale for $15 so I'll get around to playing that as well, at least if it sucks like Fear 3 I'll still have the original as well as Invisible War to play.
I know all about it, comodo dragon is a spinoff of Chrome and has access to the appstore, but what are the numbers? I've looked and not been able to find any, which tells me the amount they are making off the Chrome Store is probably piddling.
And let us not forget the word of the day is lock in, both Apple and Google have been making out like bandits on their appstores and when it comes right down to it they are certainly not gonna create the tech that is gonna take those markets away. In the end I think both are gonna make HTML V5 just powerful enough to accomplish their goals, killing flash for Apple and speeding up Google docs and Gmail for Google, while making sure that any app that has both HTML V5 and native will always run better native.
Frankly I don't see how HTML anything could compete with native anyway, lets face it JavaScript was never designed to be power conscience and in mobile battery is king. With native they can design the APIs with power usage in mind whereas it really doesn't take much for JavaScript to pound a CPU, not to mention the toolsets for HTML V5 simply aren't very mature and from what I've seen none of them are really designed for creating lightweight mobile friendly code so much as pouring on the bling.
Riiiight, that is like suggesting the replacement for Excel is buying some cluster time at CERN. LaTeX is about the most user UNFRIENDLY software that has ever been designed, a piece of software that wears obtuse and fiddly like badges of honor, so far the ONLY ones I've ever seen use it are those writing their thesis in some tech area like engineering.
If you want to replace Office it has to be user friendly, not a royal PITA with a giant learning curve. This is why geeks don't understand why Linux never goes anywhere on the desktop, they don't mind fiddly ass CLI crap nor spending a weekend learning bash commands and can't understand the average user would rather spend the week at the DMV than deal with that shit. Make LaTeX as user friendly as MS Office and then no problem but as it is? A good 99% of the population will never bother, they have better things to do than spend hours learning that mess, like actually writing what they needed a WYSIWYG word processor for in the first place!
If its like the one I saw they are using some lame ass CPUs in them which means they need extra room to get the heat out through pipes and fans. why hasn't anybody put one of the AMD C or E series chips into a tablet? Those are nice chips, full 1080P video through HDMI thanks to the Radeon GPU and pretty low on battery suckage. I have one of the E350 netbooks and I get around 6 hours playing 720P and more if I'm just surfing and don't need bluetooth. It seems like it'd be perfect for a tablet and would let you run all your X86 programs, add a transformer style keyboard with extra battery and you'd have a tablet that turns into an all day laptop with full X86 compatibility, sounds sweet to me.
As for TFA...damn, can Ballmer and Sinofsky torpedo this company a little more? Why don't they just send a page to the XP and Vista users offering Libre Office or Google docs while they are at it? Between fracturing IE all to hell, followed by keeping many games on DX9 because they refused to backport to XP, to making sure all those Vista users (Yeah i know the number is dropping but there is still millions of them and they ARE supported until 2017 as far as EOL goes) won't buy their Office suite I swear MSFT couldn't be run any worse if the team leads were picked by Cook over at Apple. Its like watching the PHB at Dilbert just bumble a company straight into the ground.
Man, wasn't that nice, to have bad guys that weren't tarded without having to deal with online cursing little shits? While Fear 1&2 were more buttoned up you should try the expansions for Fear 1, they had some nice levels where they could really get behind your ass if you weren't careful. the rooftop was a good example, where the Arma troops had 4 different ways they could go and would lay down fire while one snuck around to cap you in the back, just damned good.
Here is a little title by a little company you've probably never heard of but if you like a challenge, and I don't mean that lame "all grunts take more bullets than the terminator while having perfect aim" crap look up a little game called "Nosferatu: The Wrath Of Malachi" or something like that, I always just called it Nosferatu. Its 1901 and you have to go into a castle to rescue your family from a hoard of vampires.
The cool things about this game is 1.-Forget memorizing jack shit as EVERYTHING is randomized. A room that may have been a ballroom with a servant might be a bedroom with a hellhound the next time, it even randomizes between saves so you might have to reload a time or two if you respawn knee deep in the shit! 2.- How do you think that YOU, a normal human, would do against a real vampire? Welcome to Nosferatu where you are NOT a 6 foot 300 pound linebacker but an ordinary man. with the holy water and the cross or 6 shot you can fight off a minion, it'll be a decent fight but it can be done relatively easy, but you walk into a room and there is some Masters in their coffins? Your ass had better be able to sneak in there, get them lids open, and drive those stakes before they wake up because if not? Its your ass Mr Postman as they are wicked strong and if you drop one awake it'll probably be due to luck and will make you feel like you just won the game because it is HARD to do.
But I know what you mean, without decent AI so many of the games are just terrible, I mean who cares how it looks if the guys all stand in a straight line to be shot? don't buy Fear 3 BTW, the AI is fucking TERRIBLE, I don't know how many times all I had to do was fire a round or two and they would duck behind cover and just sit there while I walked up and knifed them, fricking knifed them, or worse they'd just go back and forth between two different covers while i just stood there right out in the open, they didn't even shoot. After 1&2 it was enough to make me want to fricking scream, just terrible.
Oh and did you read what the guy below you posted as a list of "good shooters" for me? Its online, online, online, online aaaaaannnndddd online. If I wanted to deal with "LOL I play this 16 hours a day noob bitch ass mofo" I'd be playing fricking Halo. ONLINE SUCKS ASS and is NOTHING like having a decent AI, its campers or guys that have no fricking lives so they just learn every trick and memorize every map so that you'll spend all your time respawning...wow, what fun. Big difference between having AI that will try to suppress and flank and some guy that has figured out there is a tiny section of wall that will let him scope a large area of the map without being seen so he can just pick off players and rack up his kills. And I can't believe he suggested TF2, for someone that likes a traditional FPS that thing is TERRIBLE! Its the classic case of spending weeks learning a single character because you can NOT just hop in and play that game and expect to get anywhere at all,and more than half the maps are fricking sniper heavens.
Yeah tell me about it, one of the reasons i chose to stick with Office 2K is that with the compatibility pack it opens all the newer file types without dragging ass on my netbook.
I'm starting to wonder....is Ballmer or Sinofsky secretly working for Apple or Google? Everyone said Elop was a plant but....damn guys, you couldn't torpedo a company any better if you tried. First they royally screwed any chance of IE making a comeback by fracturing the hell out of it by refusing to backport, now here they are telling owners of Vista, which is under support until 2017 BTW, that "Hey we don't want your business, might we suggest Libre Office or Google Docs?"
Seriously guys have you EVER seen a company that has been run THIS badly? It reminds me of AOL when dialup was dying, how they kept trying to tie everything into their shitty dialup service nobody wanted. Now they are gonna try to ram that tweeting twitting mess of a social cell phone OS Win 8 down our damned throats even if they have to torpedo their biggest products to do it!
While the indie games are pretty damned good one thing that bums the hell out of me is how badly they've taken a crap on the FPS genre. Remember when you'd get all these different takes on the FPS, like Redneck Rampage and Blood or No One Lives Forever? Or even Far Cry I with AI that would flank and lush jungles with nasty creatures in it?
Now it seems like everything is Call Of Modern Honor: Gears Of Killzone. hell even the ones I liked are getting crapped on by the Call Of Modern Honor effect, remember Fear? Fear I&2 were nice, dark and gritty with smart bad guys and great weapons, so what happened? Fear 3 is a 2 gun, wall kissing, lousy guns with no damned bullets co-op mess, that's what.
Sadly this is one genre where it is doubtful the indies will save us. there are a hell of a lot of guys like me that would be happy with Far Cry I or even No One Lives Forever II level graphics if you'd just give us a good story, new weapons, tough bad guys, bring back the fun to FPS. But instead every indie FPS I've ever seen is just another Quake III Arena ripoff, like we really need another MP only CTF and DM game...yawn.
That is one of the few nice things about MSFT, as you can just skip the crap releases completely and hope they come to their senses for the next one, or the one after that.
I actually skipped XP for the most part after finding the RTM version crap so i went from Win2K Pro (great OS that was, light and solid) to XP X64 (another great OS, made for an awesome workstation) and then skipped Vista on my main system for Windows 7 which is quite nice, a little more bloat than XP but the features make up for it and its got a hell of a lot better memory management than Vista.
So just skip win 8, hell skip win 9 too if they don't fire that damned Apple wannabe Ballmer and his pet Sinofsky, win 7 is supported until 2020 so either they'll get their collective heads out of their asses before then or they'll bomb hard enough nobody will care for using Windows anymore anyway, no problem. It isn't like Win 7 is gonna suddenly have all the programs dry up, hell most programs still have XP support and that thing is old as dirt so I'm sure you'll still be able to run anything you want (well except for maybe IE, but who gives a crap about IE anymore?) for years to come and can avoid Win 8 like the tweeting twitting FB shitting social mess of an OS it is.
While I agree that I'd LIKE to see something else, hell I'd like it if you had WinPhone AND Android AND iPhone AND WebOS Phone AND MozOS Phone what we end up talking about is a classic variation of the centuries old "is ought problem" where you and I end up talking about what OUGHT to be instead of what IS
Believe me I know all about the is ought problem because as a PC retailer I've stressed for years that what people OUGHT to do is buy or have me build them a nice desktop and then buy a much lower end mobile like a netbook because frankly mobiles will ALWAYS be slower, easier to break and wear out, and you'll always pay more and get less because its designed with batteries instead of mains in mind. What IS reality is people end up having me find them a laptop that then spends a good 90%+ of its life sitting on a desk plugged into mains so that when they DO ever go out the battery has worn down from constant trickle charging. why do they do it? because people like the IDEA of being "always on the go" even when they aren't, no different than how I bet 75%+ of exercise gear sold ends up in a garage never being used.
And while Google and Apple are indeed in a war over HTML V5 it isn't about apps, its about controlling the web. Google wants to make sure HTML V5 does what Google wants it to do, so that Google docs and GMail run fast, whereas Apple wants it to cut out flash which competed with the appstore. In the end I doubt seriously that either will do much as far as HTML V5 apps, especially when it comes to mobile, because they are making a killing on their appstores. It would be like Valve promoting GoG over Steam, they are simply not gonna give up their cut even though it would make things more open and even easier for the buyers.
I've been here since the days of win 3.x friend and i know the desire, I've been waiting for damned near 20 fricking years for a true "write once, run everywhere" format but it won't be HTML V5 because the companies in control of it make more money if HTML V5 isn't as good as native. In the end the companies will do what makes them the most money and gives them the most lock in, and that's native apps. While this sucks for the devs and the users the big two make out like Gods by having centralized control of their markets, and frankly they have the money and the pull to make sure HTML V5 is always an also ran.
I see where the problem is, you think that the OEMs will get that money and you know what? Won't happen and here is why: Apple is X86 too now. the people that spend a $1k+ on a PC, and I do know quite a few, do NOT buy Windows, they buy workstations running Linux or buy Apple, hell I even know a few that went and built Hackentoshes because Apple was being too slow on the Mac pro upgrade and they needed moar power.
Ultimately look at the ultrabooks, look up their numbers...they aren't selling, people don't want them. Again it would be like what dell did when they stuck an Atom in a rotating screen so it was a conversion tablet and tried to sell it for $650...now you can buy those at places like Geeks for less than half that and they STILL don't sell.
I think the problem is you seem to be under the impression that by hanging some nicer curtains you can turn Mickey D's into Olive garden and it just don't work that way, believe me I know. I've been working retail PC sales and repair since the early 90s in 3 different states selling to everyone from the kids of one of our governors to Suzy the checkout girl. I've been through the dotbomb, the thinclient fad, the MHz wars, and I've seen what'll sell and what won't sell and you just can't push enough units at $1k a pop to make up for the volume decrease, you just can't do it.
Lets take the $20 figure, which is probably right about in the center. i personally make from $50-$80 per unit but since i build custom and do the initial setups as well as after the sales service i can get away with more, but $20 is probably typical for an OEM of say Asus size. Now Asus probably sells a good half a million or more of the EEE series, I see those everywhere, the local college kids eat them up like candy, hell i liked them enough i got myself one, they are nice little units. Now if we use the $20 figure (I'd argue there is probably more money in the lower end than we think due to the price of cheap parts, i know that AMD sells the E350 chips at something like $12 and that covers CPU+GPU+NB, so I wouldn't be surprised if they make more than $20 a unit for those EEEs) at a half a million Asus just made $10 million in profits.
Now we switch to the $1K price point, already your cost for parts has gone WAAAY up as the lowest chip you can probably get away with at that price point is the high end i5s which Intel sells at around $400 a pop for a tray of 1000, and of course you are gonna have to have nicer metal cases, touchscreens (average $175 a pop in bulk for resistive, capacitive more, I've checked), SSDs of decent capacity, so that by the time you are done with the much more expensive parts you really aren't making much more profit, lets say $70 a pop. Now from what I've seen the average high end units only sell around 30k units since again you've just made sure that a large portion of the market simply won't buy from you, so by replacing the EEEs at $450 with an i5 at $1000 you've gone from profits of 10 million to 2.1 million, a net LOSS of 8 million bucks.
Now I don't know about you but as a retailer i like having customers, and while bumping the price of my AMD triples to $1k might in THEORY equal more money for less work in reality people simply won't pay $1k for the same parts you'd put in a $450 unit, they just won't. again it'd be like you slapping a $100,000 sticker on the new Mustang, how many do you think you'd sell? 1? 20? Certainly not enough units to keep a factory cranking them out as you'd soon end up with warehouses filled with Mustangs you couldn't move which is coming out of YOUR pocket. Then you figure in how small the market for $100,000 cars is and you'll see it can't sustain even a fourth of the companies currently making cars, hell it probably wouldn't even support 1 twentieth the current market.
In the end the ONLY reason Apple can get away with this is because its a boutique brand, like Prada and Gucci. I know people that have bought iPhones and iPads and don't have a fucking clue what to do with them, in fact they are treated li
Then you just get a steam crack, no different than cracking any retail game. In fact most of the cracked games I see on customer's machines that have P2P are steam cracked, its easier than some of the new nasty DRM.
And I'm sorry about the shitty WISP, as i said I chose not to live rent free simply to keep off our local WISP as the morons have no damned idea how to allocate bandwidth and one jackoff looking at HD porn vids can drag the whole thing to a crawl, at least on cable I'm the only one in the building that has it so i have a big pipe to myself.
The only things I would counter with is 1.-I wasn't bringing up OpenMoko to talk about the device specifically, but to point out that while geeks TALK a good game, when it comes to investing hundreds of their own money they quietly walk away. Look up the buzz around OpenMoko before release and it was HUGE, geeks talking it up like it was an iJesus but when it came out and they saw the price it was "Where did everyone go?" and that was that. 2.-And while the carriers MAY be able to do that there is also the possibility of both they and Moz getting sued if so much as a single line of code in MozOS can be traced back to GPL V3. Why would any carrier take the risk and possible bad publicity when Android is free and already has the devs? And finally 4.-I'm sorry but so far I haven't seen many HTML V5 apps that haven't sucked balls. the toolset simply isn't mature and its more of a PITA. I have noticed that while even an 8 year old desktop can run native apps well that same machine will struggle with HTML V5 and that's plugged into a main, the mobile suck even more. Native apps use less battery and when you are talking about iSliver designs being the hip thing that matters. Oh and 5.-MSFT had a mature toolset and was practically the only game in town around 04-07 and nobody bought them because the UI sucked. There is nothing wrong with the UI on iOS and Android and on both they have a mature toolset and easy to use dev tools which just don't exist for HTML V5.
So while I can see where you are coming from, and I apologize about never figuring out how to make a straight list here, i just don't see it happening. Humans are basically lazy creatures and devs are humans and it'll simply be easier to stick with what they already know and more importantly where they already have an easy way to make native apps. being able to run on different platforms doesn't really matter if the money isn't there and the only markets we see making any money are Android market and the Appstore. You certainly aren't seeing anyone push HTML V5 apps on the desktops, and in fact both Google and Apple have downplayed HTML V5 since setting up their appstores. Again when you have network effects in play the other guy has to do something stupid, like MSFT did when it disbanded the IE team and left IE 6 to rot thus giving Moz a free shot at the desktop but I just don't see that happening here, neither Apple nor Google are gonna make any blatant mistakes any time soon.
And might I say this is one of the reasons I consider RMS to be a disgusting little troll of a man. if you want to talk shit have the fucking balls to do it while they are alive, he kept his big fat mouth shut until the man was dead and THEN talked shit. to me that was cowardice and nobody likes a damned coward. That fact that he waited until Jobs died and THEN talked shit to get some publicity for himself just makes him disgusting in my eyes. To use his own quote "I won't be glad when he's dead, but I will be glad when he is gone".
Every recovery technique I've seen ends up with a "toxic sludge" that is not gonna fly in the west, and frankly shouldn't be flying in the third world except for the fact their officials are even easier to bribe than ours.
As we have seen from our superfund sites once a place is poisoned often that's it, you have to put a fence around it and walk away, its gonna remain toxic as it'll cost trillions to clean up. There is no "profit" here except by walking away and leaving that mess behind which while you can get away with that in China frankly I don't know if you could pull that off very easily in the USA anymore. If you didn't walk the costs of disposing the toxic sludge would far outweigh the piddling amount of metals you'd get from your average cell phone, so the article is full of crap...well maybe Halliburton or Goldman Sachs can pull of that level of nasty and still get away with it, most corps i doubt could pull off creating a superfund site in the USA today.
And Windows 10 will make you grow wings out of your ass, thus killing the airline industry ZOMG! What? My statement right now is just as factually true as yours.
MSFT isn't about to pull that shit because they'd run right back into antritrust which they just got out of. in ARM they are such a teeny tiny player frankly nobody is gonna give a rat's ass what they do, not to mention there are plenty of Android and of course ALL Apple devices that you can't just boot what you want to anyway, but in X86 they would not only give up untold millions from all the companies using older Windows versions through software assurance but Red Hat and several other players would bring it up to the EU and MSFT would be looking at a mess and a PR nightmare.
I'm sorry but you really need to learn your history. The word "PC" comes from "IBM PC compatible" which is X86. Now if you want to say its a personal computer? Fine and dandy, but a PC is an X86 unit, a personal computer is whatever.
Here is some points for you. 1.-Openmoko. geeks may talk a good game, but spending $600+ on unsubsidized smartphones? Not happening. 2.-The carriers sure as hell ain't gonna go "What? A GPL phone where we can't cripple it, lock it down, and then sell features the phone already has at higher prices? Where do we sign up?" so you can give up having these phones offered for anything less than full price. 3.-If they simply wanted to be different they could simply slap WebOS on, but its not the OS, its the apps. 4.-So far what I've seen of HTML V5 sucks the big wet titty. for every one site you seen done right you get 50 done wrong, with video that skips like mad and "apps' that are glitchy messes. i don't see this making anyone want to give up their Android market or Apple appstore, finally 5.- MSFT is spending $450 to sell a $50 phone and still can't catch a break, you think Moz is gonna do better in an already crowded and saturated market?
If this would have came out 5 years ago maybe, but now? Its gonna take Apple or Google doing something seriously stupid to create an opening and with Google sinking a billion a year in Android development and who knows what Apple is sinking into R&D and marketing the odds of this working is about the same as me winning the powerball. Every major shift we've seen in mobile has been because someone seriously fucked up, Palm sat on ass and let their OS and hardware get creaky and by the time they saw the train coming it ran them over, RIM sat on ass and let their designs stagnate and refused to look at other markets until the bus that was consumer markets ran them over, HP as you pointed out didn't know WTF it was doing and after spending a shitload on WebOS had no damned clue what to do with it, and MSFT treated phones as itty bitty desktops for a decade and by the time they realized that UI didn't work on a 3 inch screen they were fucked.
Moz simply doesn't have the luxury of retarded competition, in fact just the opposite because while you can say a lot of things about Apple and Google stupid and lazy they are not. They have carved the market nicely, with Apple taking all the high margin high end while Google takes the low and both have devs lined up to write apps for them. A glorified web page simply isn't gonna replace native apps and certainly isn't gonna net devs the kind of money they are making from the market and the appstores and surprise surprise but devs actually want to get paid. The devs and the apps will stay where they are, a few CCC Chinamart devices may carry this but I doubt you'll see any big names, and it'll go the way of WebOS and OpenMoko.
That is the ironic thing about how it and WebOS and even WinPhone aren't going anywhere, because for all his talk of "developers developers' MSFT missed the boat and they all went to iOS and Android and Moz is even later than both MSFT and HP to the party but with even less money to throw at marketing and R&D.
We've seen time and time again the masses don't care about "free as in freedom' all they care about is the apps and the buzz, and that's all Android and iOS. Finally without the carriers offering cheap phones Moz won't go anywhere as most won't pay $600+ for a smartphone when they can get the phone for $99 on a contract, yet i just don't see the carriers getting all warm and fuzzy for a hacker friendly phone.
Yeah...not gonna happen. I have a feeling if they get any phones they'll end up with the touchpads and winPhones on Woot! or some other wholesaler site for 95% off, its just not gonna be able to build any steam.
Meh they'll end up on Woot! at 85% off and somebody will buy 'em. And where the fuck was RMS when Apple was doing the same to iOS for fricking years? Locking ARM is NO DIFFERENT than what Apple has done with their devices, not a damned bit.
Meh its a tempest in a teacup anyway, nobody is gonna buy WinRT and the reason you see Secureboot on X86 at all is it gives MSFT's pets in the BSAA an easy way to tell if a machine is pirated. if they walk into a shop and find no secureboot but a Windows install? say hello to a hacked copy of Windows, as that's is how both Vista and 7 have been hacked by the crackers. hell last I checked they even had both Vista and 7 passing WGA thanks to the boot hacks. personally i'd have offered HP for $50 and the family and pro packs for $100, but its MSFT's OS to do as it will.
I think Win 8 is gonna be the next MS BOB myself, I'm certainly not gonna worry about an OS that I think will go over about as welcome as a long wet chili fart in an elevator.
That's not the big problem the problem is the batteries. we just haven't had any true battery breakthough in years and lithium batteries just don't take extremes in heat and cold like a lead acid does. The average temp in the south has been over 100F, ever leave a lithium battery in a car in this kind of heat? Say goodbye to more than half your capacity.
Until battery tech can take temp shifts like gas can its gonna be a hard sell, the vast majority that own vehicles don't own temp controlled garages and with the batteries for the things running a minimum of $7500 a piece unless the government wants to eat billions in costs for giving away batteries there simply won't be a used market, nor will those that buy one want to keep the vehicle once the batteries die out of warranty, they'll end up scrapped.
Well if everyone would like a similar topic that is more thought provoking (at least to me, might be to others as well) I'll be happy to give everybody one: Is it better to make things easier, or to make things more difficult? Because that is what i think a LOT of these programmer arguments boil down to.
Allow me to explain. From my little chair here in the shop as an outsider who frankly hasn't been a day to day coder since the days of VB6 it all seems to boil down to being in one of two camps. in the first camp is those that think IDEs and tools should be designed to make the basics as simple as possible, so that the programmer can concentrate on the actual interesting stuff instead of the hum drum. that would be your Visual Studio and other "big tool" users, and on the other side there is the group that seems to think that tools should be made as simple as possible, with little to no help or handholding, because they believe it will teach them to be 'real programmers' or GTFO so that real programmers can do the work. These are the ones using nothing but a CLI and a txt editor to get things done.
Now as an outsider i would think the answer would be obvious, to simply use whichever you preferred, but these two camps really do seem to hate each other. the big tool guys seem to think the txters are a bunch of elitists, trying to use obscurity and obtuseness to hold onto power, while the txters look down on the big tool types as nothing more than glorified script kiddies. You see any article that talks about languages and it always ends up with a bunch of posts from one of these two groups, especially if the language is used in VS because the txters seem to have a seething hatred for VS.
So there you go, making things easy or harder in programming, discuss amongst yourselves.
PopeRatzo have you SEEN the scores coming out of the average US high school? Or the average IQ scores? I've been saying for years that a century from now people will watch Idiocracy like it was Schindler's List, a sad dramatization of what actually befell mankind. The smart have one child or none at all, the stupid? Well look at that guy trying to get his child support on his THIRTY KIDS cut down because he has never worked anything (and most likely never will) but minimum wage fast food jobs.
Sadly you could take every single secret the USA government has and publish it on the web tomorrow and unless it had celebs, sex, or gossip the vast majority would never ever even look at it. Half a century of uncontrolled moron breeding has created entire cities worth of mouth breathers that would be damned lucky if they can count their change much less read a novel or try to grasp complex events. Factual news simply doesn't sell because we are on our second generation now that actually takes PRIDE in not knowing shit and short of a moron plague that only wipes the stupid out I just don't see that changing.
But you are missing the elephant in the room friend which is we are in a depression which means your customers? DO NOT HAVE IT, they just don't. I could raise the price of my AMD triples from $475 to $1000 tomorrow and even if I didn't have competition i doubt I'd sell more than one or two because THEY DO NOT HAVE IT. You look at the Apple demographic, the average Apple user makes $100,000 a year. Now look at the Windows demographic? the average Windows user? $35,000. That is a BIG fucking difference friend, and with food and gas prices being so volatile someone with a $35k a year job simply isn't gonna spend $1k of that on a PC, they just won't. They'll either keep what they have (no sale for X86 OEMs) , buy used (no sale for X86 OEMs because it'll take years before all the cheap duals, triples, and quads are worn out) or look at ARM netbooks and pads (no sale for the X86 OEMs). Now seriously how many of the X86 OEMs are gonna be willing to close their doors so MSFT can pretend to be Apple? Its been reported that dell and HP make between $8 and $35 a sale but when you are talking millions of customers that adds up to some pretty big numbers. think they are gonna give ALL that up? just to make MSFT happy? They gain NOTHING because as we've seen with Intel pushing ultrabooks they just aren't selling.
You still think that by slapping a $100k price sticker on a Mustang you can turn it into a Ferrari and it just can't be done friend, it doesn't work that way. if MSFT wanted to do that they should have spun off metro and made a premium brand but nobody and I MEAN nobody is gonna accept a $1k+ for Windows PCs, at that price they'll just go Apple. You can't change the global economy by simply sticking a higher price tag and pretending its 2006 and that is EXACTLY what MSFT is attempting to do and I'm telling you it WILL fail and fail hard. Know what one of my biggest sellers is ATM? $150 or less Android pads. great for Google, suicide for the X86 OEMs. For your scenario to work about 3/4ths of the companies will just have to close their doors and walk away which would be the complete death of AMD and Intel would probably lose a good 60%+ of its global sales. No more Pentiums, or Celerons, or Atoms, no more AMD anything, it would ALL have to go. All you would have is the i5 and i7 with touchscreens and SSDs and I'm telling you that will be suicide for most of the X86 market.
Hell I'm a PC guy and have been since the days of Win 3.x but the ONLY reason I have a netbook is the fact that I got one that would play 720p video and hold 8Gb of RAM for $350 with the RAM included, just as the only reason i have a gaming desktop is the fact that I could have a hexacore with 8Gb of RAM, 3Tb of HDDs, an HD4850 and Win 7 HP for less than $650 before MIRs. Raise those prices to $1k? i'll just buy a pad and get a console like the PS3. Again great for the pad makers and sony, sucking the end of a shotgun to the X86 OEMs. You can sell PCs for a million dollars each but if you only sell one you simply aren't gonna stay in business and that is what you will see here, massive layoffs and closed businesses in a dead economy.
The only nice thing I could say about such a scenario is rather than close their doors I have a feeling most of the OEMs would simply get together, pick a distro like Debian, and sink money and support into making it as easy peasy as Windows. Its not collusion if they are contributing to a free OS that anyone can help themselves to, hell they could probably get a tax break for giving to a non profit. And with Valve porting Steam that would even take care of the gaming problem. Again great for FOSS, not so much for MSFT. Personally i think the OEMs will revolt and Ballmer will finally get punt kicked like a 30 yard field return and the board will bring back someone like Ozzie or Allchin to right the ship, i seriously doubt they are gonna give away a good 60%+ of the X86 market because Ballmer would rather work for Apple. Oh and if I had no choice but to buy X86? I'll get a Mac, no way I'd spend $1k+ on Windows, never happen.
What is sad is I've seen stories told with NO budget, NO special effects, but because it actually had good stories and good acting was frankly better than 90% of the crap they show in 3D or with CGI anymore.
If you haven't seen it, and sorry if I don't get the name right but you'll know its the right movie if it has the actor that played Phloxx on ENT, look up a movie I believe called "The Man From Earth" which is a damned good thought provoking film that had more than 90% of the story filmed in a single room in a cabin, that's it. But because it had an actual STORY that was good, with great acting and a great premise (the idea is basically "What would you say if you met someone that was truly immortal? What would you do, how would you react, if you found out someone living next to you was really over 50 centuries old?") it was frankly one of the best movies I had seen in ages and I bet they didn't spend $50k on the whole thing.
So I agree 100%, after seeing something like The Man From Earth and then sitting through Resident Evil 4 (ZOMFG that was awful! I'd rather go to the DMV than sit through that again!) you quickly realize that all the CGI and 3D is being used as nothing but a crutch, to try to cover the shitty writing, bad acting, lame story, horrible dialog, its like polishing a turd.
Sadly, despite the delusional nature of many in the FOSS community, if you look up the history of OpenGL it has been crippled for the better part of a decade by mismanagement by the Kronos group and is far FAR behind DirectX, which DX9 is 2 versions behind friend compared to the much better DX10 and DX11.
You see everything that is bad about FOSS? Cranked to 11 by Kronos. You see they get their funding from the CAD companies who HATE change so the base features have been left at DX7 levels (which is where it was when Kronos took over, OpenGL 1.4 I believe) and everything that has been slapped on top has been made by GPU specific "extensions" which is exactly the WRONG way to handle a graphics API. The whole point is if a card supports say DX10.1? Then you know EXACTLY what features it does and does not support, whereas with openGL if it supports OpenGL, say version 3, it MIGHT have all of the features, SOME of the features, or FEW of the features, simply depending on whether its an Nvidia, AMD/ATI, or Intel GPU and since its all done by "extensions" you not only need the correct extensions but you'll need to poll the GPU to see which extensions it does and does not support and whether the community likes it or not that is fucked up.
Sadly it didn't used to be that way, and if you'll look at your gaming history you'll see that up until 2001/2002 OpenGL and DirextX were neck and neck on features and ease of use, but then came Kronos who came along and took a big dump on the whole thing with their focus on compatibility with CAD above all. That is why if you'll look up any history of OpenGL gaming you'll see OpenGL support in AAA gaming takes a nosedive around 04 and never recovers. Now you have ONE version for mobile, ONE version for CAD, and then several partial versions depending on which GPU you've got, its a fucking mess is what it is. But until the community grows a pair and tells Kronos to piss up a rope and takes OpenGL away from them you'll see Windows and DirectX own the market because there simply is no real competition. All you see on OpenGL anymore is Angry Birds popcap style gaming because any heavy 3D game is frankly more work than its worth.