But frankly friend even the bottom o' the line stuff is insanely overpowered. I mean you can get hexa kits for like $335 at tiger, fully loaded prebuilt i3s and i5s for less than $650, its just insane how much power you get nowadays for little money. hell just the other day they were selling AMD quad laptops with dual graphics for less than $450!
Its simply not like during the MHz wars where a 3 year old PC would struggle to do basic tasks, most of the PCs I was building 5 years ago were Phenom I triples and quads. I'm sorry but a triple or quad core PC can do every thing you listed just fine, in fact i have an engineer friend running solidworks on a Phenom i triple with no trouble at all.
So yeah, maybe if you are trying to make the next Gears Of War at home you'd need the bleeding edge, but then again if you were trying to do that you'd be running some workstation into a render farm. On the consumer side the boxes i've been selling for the last 5 plus years can convert DVDs, transcode, hell I'm working on multitrack audio mixing on my bottom o' the line AMD hexa now and I have cycles to spare. There just hasn't been a "killer app" that will force people to upgrade in quite awhile, and most of us aren't willing to spend $1000+ to go more bleeding edge just so we can get our videos converted 7 minutes quicker.
Honestly i don't think very many people will give up their PCs at all, here at the shop those with tablets or smartphones also have laptops or desktops.
No instead what is happening is something we guys in the trenches have been saying for years, and that is computers went past good enough and into insanely overpowered for the average user when multicores became cheap. I mean take my dad for an example, he is probably the perfect use case for the "average PC user" in that he emails, watches videos, uses chat, burns discs, just your bog standard basic stuff. Now a couple of years back when tiger was having one of their "ZOMG $199 quad!" kits I picked him up one. Now this is a 2.1Ghz Phenom I, 4Gb of RAM and a 500Gb HDD, that is about the slowest quad made, know what I found? He has yet to hit above 45% CPU usage! He simply can't come up with enough work to slam even that bottom of the line quad. hell my boys and I are gamers and we are playing on a couple of 2 year old Hexacores and a 3 year old quad and again, just can't slam that many cores for any length of time.
So it isn't that PCs are going away, if anything everyone and their cat and their cat's squeaky toy has one, its simply that everyone has multicores and they don't need to replace every 3 years like during the MHz wars. you'll see the same thing happen to ARM soon enough, there is already talk of "dark silicon" where ARM will have more transistors than power to run them, then we'll see the same thing happen there. hell i have plenty of business customers that are happy with their first gen core duos and Phenom I triples and quads, are they broke? Nope they simply aren't stressing those chips and see no point in buying even more insanely overpowered machines when they aren't using all the cycles they have. Heck I even sold my dual core full size laptop for an E350 netbook, and that is about the weakest dual core you can get above an Atom, because i found when i was mobile even i couldn't come up with enough cycles to stress the E350 out. We just don't need more chips right now, not when the ones we have run well. The machines will get changed out when they break, no different than washers and dryers.
Not unless they are on XP, which if they are still running a 12 year old OS they have worse problems, like how damned many patches on top of patches that XP has had. Most of the gadgets anybody would actually want like the weather are included by default in the Win 7 gadget library, don't know about Vista as i don't have a machine with Vista handy at the shop.
There is one that is excellent that isn't included that I will provide the link for, the most excellent Meter Gadgets which include CPU Meter, which integrates nicely with Coretemp so you can monitor core usage, temps, and RAM all from one little sidebar gadget, the network meter which is great if you have a flaky connection as it has all kinds of useful info and tools such as speedtest and signal quality for WiFi,battery meter which is what it says on the tin, and GPU meter which is nice if you are hot rodding your graphics card.
They have several other gadgets there, everything from worldclocks to control gadgets and now that MSFT has pulled their gadgets page (nice how they use it to hawk Win 8, like we want that crap) it might be a good idea to bookmark it if you actually want some useful gadgets that aren't included with gadget library.
This is something I have been wanting to ask for awhile, seriously, WTF does ANYBODY CARE about these so called "shills" anyway? I mean seriously the real shills are so damned easy to spot they may as well be the PHB on Dilbert, they use the same "buzzword bingo" that the corps just looooove to see in print, like "synergy" and "vertical integration" and "user experience' that nobody IRL uses, and if their point is bullshit? Well its not hard to spot actual bullshit and it gets modded down quick enough.
In the meanwhile all this "ZOMFG It a shill ZOMFG!" creates total paranoia and has the unstable seeing shill EVERYWHERE, I mean anybody that has read my history knows I'm just a little shop owner in the middle of bum fuck nowhere but so far I've been told I'm not actually in a little college town in the middle of AR, nope I'm hidden in a sekret bunker under Redmond, which I actually thought would be a hell of a lot more cool and interesting than my boring shop, oh and I'm also sub contracted to Comodo, AMD, Apple (Still haven't figured THAT one out, I don't even own an iPod), Asus, Gigabyte, and Asrock. I just wish someone would tell me where the sekret Swiss bank account is with all that money from subcontracting as I'd like a new truck, thanks.
As for TFA I smell bullshit. Are you seriously telling me that MSFT can't even keep their own fucking website safe? Seriously? they got all those people working there, they can't even scan the fucking executables put on their own damned website? What are they running it on, a badly done FB page?
Considering the fact I've NEVER seen anyone ever get a gadget at ANY site other than MSFT's, and that when you clicked on "get more gadgets online" it took you straight to their page i have to conclude that they simply want gadgets gone because it offers the same tweeting twitting FB shitting social crap that MSFT is pushing for Win 8. I've said it before and I'll say it again...watch out! I have NO doubt that between now and the release of Win 8 that MSFT will push more "security updates" that will be designed to cripple Win 7, because they are scared to death Win 8 is gonna be WinME the second coming.
So triple check every damned update that comes out between now and then, and be sure to have disc images handy, because Ballmer and Sinofsky isn't gonna do anything that would allow Win 8 to flop and the simple fact is unless you have a touchscreen Win 7 will do anything you want. But if a security update were to...ohh I don't know....say kill 30%+ of performance, or take the decent features away, for 'security reasons" of course, why folks might be more likely to buy Windows 8! The fact that MSFT is offering Win 8 pro upgrades on their website for $40 tells me they are running scared, hell they have NEVER offered pro for anywhere near that cheap, so frankly every single thing they say or do between now and then i would look at as suspect. MSFT is on the ropes, stuck in a niche that is flatline and will never be #1 again, and when backed into a corner as we have seen in the past MSFT can be pretty nasty. Just something to think about.
Not only is it bullshit I'd say its just one more move to try to get people to move over to Win 8. I mean who DIDN'T KNOW that running an executable as admin is a BAD THING, hmm? Are MSFT honestly trying to get us to believe that they don't even have enough common sense to keep malware off their own damned site? if so their security team should be fucking ashamed of themselves!
Most of my users use gadgets and I will be telling them to simply ignore this, because they already have the gadgets they want. But I'm sure MSFT figured out that if you wanted your OS to be a tweeting twitting FB shitting social OS like Win 8 you could just use the gadgets in Win 7 so what do they do? Why lets get rid of the gadgets! Are you HONESTLY telling me you just NOW figured out gadgets run as admin from untrusted sites could be bad MSFT, really? because I find that frankly unbelievable.I know I won't be giving up MY gadgets and I seriously doubt any of my customers will either.
Just one more dick move by MSFT to get functionality that could compete with Win 8 out of Win 7. I have a feeling as the run up to Win 8 gathers steam we'll all have to watch like hawks for more "security updates" that tie a fucking boat anchor to Win 7 to try to make win 8 look better. If you are gonna spout horseshit MSFT, at least TRY to make it believable horseshit,mmmkay?
Jeez, why would you stick with a company that would do that? Seriously dude just get a nice Windows laptop and make a Hackentosh out of it. Then you can have the nicer and cheaper hardware while still enjoying OSX if you want and a free Windows as a bonus, in case you run into something you want that doesn't have a Mac version.
Although I have to wonder, what with the slow updates and the hardware getting farther behind the curve, if Cook isn't gonna end up abandoning the Pro users, if not X86 altogether. It was Jobs that was into "Apple is the machine on which movies are made" whereas Cook just doesn't seem all that jazzed up, not that I can blame him. After all Apple had a damned good thing going with Nvidia that Intel took a giant dump on without even caring what Apple thought and if its one thing Apple likes is control.
So I could easily see Cook keeping just a couple of consumer models, since the consumer units are frankly more powerful than the average user is gonna care about anyway so they don't need refreshes as often, whereas the Pro users need the extra GPU power and more frequent refreshes that the consumers frankly just don't need. Its pretty obvious that Apple is making the majority of its money on consumer electronics so it really wouldn't hurt the bottom line and would probably make more money long term by cutting guys like you loose.
Can it be run in a VM? How hard would it be to make it run in a VM? Because frankly VMs are the "Oh Thank God" when it comes to large projects as you can keep things running even if the company no longer supports it.
So if we are talking 500k plus I'd be wanting to run it in a VM if its at all possible, because that way if MSFT drops support it'll still run. Again while i doubt they'd drop.NET proper frankly I haven't seen MSFT this unstable since Win 2.0, where everyone didn't have a clue if it was gonna be OS/2 or WinDOS that ended up the new OS. Its obvious Ballmer wants mobile so bad it hurts and he doesn't seem to give a rat's ass about corporate ATM or he wouldn't be trying to push Win 8 and all that social media crap into the corporate space.
So good luck, hope it works out, and glad I'm not you. I'm just so glad I have all my business customers settled down onto win 7 so we can all just batten down the hatches and ride out the next few years. BTW if you need a copy of Win 8 to try out your code on windows.com is selling the Win 8 pro upgrade for $40, so its a cheap way to get a copy to slap in a test bed or VM to see how it holds up. Good luck!
I sign those by the EFF as well, but I have ZERO doubt that me and you are on a list somewhere. Whether they will actually DO anything with that list is unknown ATM but I have zero doubt they exist and anybody that doesn't follow the line most likely are on at least one if not multiple.
You mean like BSD which got backdoored by the FBI? I hate to break the news to ya pal, but if a three letter agency wants to pwn a FOSS project? it would be just as easy if not easier than any proprietary OS.
You should look at some of the entries of the obfuscated C contest to see how damned easy it is to hide nasties in large amounts of code, and those are for bits of code where you KNOW there is a nasty. Now imagine, how many projects are out there with only a handful of guys working on it? How happy would they be to have a highly skilled coder volunteer to help? Have YOU looked at every line of code in the apps popularly packaged in your average distro, hmm? Well if you haven't what proof do you have that anybody else has? Just because you have access to the code does NOT mean anybody that can actually read it and more importantly can spot obfuscated malware has read it line by line you know.
Even reading the apps one at a time wouldn't work since a three letter agency could easily pay for guys to work at multiple projects. Just as we have malware today that simply drops a payload I could easily see program Foo not doing anything by itself but checking to see if you have program Bar and Boned and if all three are present the combination opened a door. After all who is gonna notice dependencies? Those are SOP in FOSS OSes, programs having dependencies really aren't rare ya know.
In the end FOSS is no more a "magic bullet" than painting a cross on the box to ward off evil. there is simply too many millions of lines of code in your average distro for anyone, even Linus himself, to be able to tell you with 100% certainty every single interaction when a program is called. Sure if you were to DIY starting with the kernel it would be more secure, but how many actually do that?
What amazes me is how many waste their time with those stupid petitions. I mean after the first two or three prettily worded 'Fuck you peasant LOL" responses shouldn't everyone have learned by now those things are as fucking worthless as a suggestion box with a waste basket for a bottom?
The sad part is there really isn't any choice anymore, hell you may as well not even vote. I mean WTF are you gonna vote FOR? Rich money whoring sellout A, or rich money whoring sellout B? Does anybody think a McSame presidency would have been any different from a Nobama? Or that Mittens will do ANYTHING differently, other than put a different spin on it?
Lets face it folks, until things get bad enough we have a full on collapse and an Arab Spring all we are gonna get is what the 1%ers want us to have, nice little corporate puppets that do what they are told and heel when their chains are yanked. In the end we'll end up with MORE draconian laws, MORE power and control for those at the top and LESS for everyone that isn't in their little club. As Buffet said years ago "There has been class warfare for years, and we've won"
I do something similar for my customers, I always make them a low rights account for any friends/kids/etc that come over and when the owner is in their account while i can't lock them down as well as you can I give them Comodo Dragon with ABP, since Dragon runs in low rights mode, and on top of that I give them Comodo CIS AV which has sandboxing and scan before load on web pages. Both are free and since doing so my customers getting nasty bugs has frankly dropped right off the chart. You'd be surprised how much those three little steps help, ABP, low rights browser and sandboxing. you take the web out of the equation and there goes the bugs.
And that exact same advice frankly works just as well on Windows but if the user doesn't follow it you are screwed.
Ultimately there is only so much you can do technically against the dancing bunny problem because if the user WANTS to see the bunnies, and you try to stop the user from getting to the bunnies? they will happily thwart any and ALL security measures you put in their way to see the bunnies. Again I've seen this with my very own two eyes, i even had to throw a guy out of the shop once when he removed his fricking AV because it wouldn't let him have "The New Limewire" which I had ALREADY TOLD HIM was a fake trojan and had even gone so far as to give him eMule and BT so he wouldn't be needing it, but in the end he liked Limewire, refused to believe Limewire was dead, and when a malware writer offered him a fake that the AV pointed out was nothing but a trojan he simply removed the AV. His final words as I was pushing him out of the shop was "It says right there its the new limewire so you MAKE IT WORK!"
In the end OSes and AVs have frankly never been better, but if the user refuses to listen or show even the tiniest bit of common sense? Well you just can't fix stupid.
If it can wait until first quarter of next year I would, otherwise I'd be VERY careful not to invest too much in MSFT's "latest and greatest" in regards to frameworks. if anyone asks why I'd just point to all those that invested heavily in Silverlight and are now getting put on the same bus all those VB6 companies got.
I would argue that THIS point, more than any other in the company's history, is the absolute worst time to be betting on MSFT anything long term. if you look at their moves in the past 2 years its pretty obvious they frankly don't HAVE any long term plan and while I doubt they'd send.NET the way of Silverlight there is simply no guarantee they will stick with Entity or not.
So if it were me I'd try to keep my options open and not put all my eggs in one basket. Even if you decide to go with LINQ it would be wise to look at other options and to make sure everything has enough good documentation that if you HAD to switch to something else it wouldn't be too horribly painful. Remember MSFT is in a really bad place right now, their main market is mature and flatline and will be staying that way, so trying to predict what they are gonna do before the release of Win 8 is gonna be really REALLY difficult.
Final verdict? It'll probably be safe but try to keep your options open with an eye to the future and we should be able to see by first quarter next year whether MSFT is gonna continue to be a corporate player or if Ballmer's insane desire to become Apple will cause him to go with even more crazy schemes down the road. It wouldn't hurt in either case to treat Entity as a possible short term solution, simply because MSFT has been quick to drop support for other projects without thought to what it does to developers, see VB6, Silverlight, and soon WinPhone 7.
I hate to break the news to ya, but lets gets some facts straight, mmmkay? First of all CLI doesn't give you mystical gonad powers, second of all CLI is a GUI not any kind of mystical I/O, its just a very VERY primitive GUI, finally here is a nice article that points out better than I ever could why your CLI is a pile of old cat turds not that you'll read it.
In the end, know what it comes down to REALLY, I mean what is really at the heart of it all? Losers. CLI has become the haven of the maladjusted loser, because it gives them the illusion, and that's all it is, merely an illusion, of being better/smarter/more leet than someone else. And THAT is why you desperately hang onto a GUI everyone else abandoned over 20 years ago, not because it makes ANYTHING better, but precisely because it does not. Linux is the bizzaro-world where the more fiddly and PITA you can possibly make it the better because it "proves" that you MUST be smarter/better/more leet by virtue of making the damnd thing work. Well to stick that final needle in your bubble copypasta into a CLI doesn't make you leet, it makes you a script kiddie.
So enjoy the 1970s Disco Stu, the rest of us will laugh our collective asses off and enjoy our nice GUIs and smirk.
.NET was originally supposed to be the "next new thing" that would have taken the place of VB 6 and been used for practically everything, the way they were talking at the time.NET should have been VB6, Flash, and Java all rolled into one and frankly other than corporate its fizzled. Then came Silverlight which was supposed to kill Flash and become the one video and animation tool to rule them all, yet other than a few that use it for DRM it fizzled too, and then finally there is HTML V5, great for Linux and iOS/OSX users, stupid as fuck for MSFT since it yanks any and ALL control out of their hands and puts it straight into the hands of Google and Apple, who have been leading the charge. Honestly nobody is gonna give a wet fart WTF MSFT supports when it comes to HTML V5 since the majority writing HTML V5 don't give a rat's ass about MSFT, they are writing for iPhone.
so it has been one dumbass move after another, and with each bridge they burned they lost that many more devs that spent time and money learning something that was tossed or no longer considered the "cool thing" at MSFT, from VB 6 to.NET, from Silverlight to who the hell knows what parts of HTML V5 will be or won't be supported. One thing we HAVE learned from MSFT is "standards compliant" simply isn't in their vocabulary so I frankly wouldn't be surprised if they try the same kind of stupid shit they did with IE 6 only now nobody will give a crap and will just let Windows be broken.
Hmmm...personally I'd put Steve-O at a solid 3 myself, just look at all the companies he has thrown money at either buying outright or trying to use to buy his way into a market that doesn't want them. See Zune, Kin, Nokia, for examples.
The sad part is they are going classic cargo cult usability, where they think they can ape something and then recreate its success without asking WHY, why is it like this? The answer is simple: NOBODY and I mean NOBODY buys Windows because they like MSFT, they buy it because they have a bazillion third party X86 programs they want/need to run. this is completely the opposite of Apple, where big products like iTunes are owned by Apple. Also Apple has for the most part kept iOS and OSX separate entities, you don't see them throwing teeny tiny desktops onto iPhones like MSFT did for years, nor do you see them making OSX a single tasking phone OS which is the current meme at MSFT.
In the end if Ballmer is to have a snowball's chance in hell in the mobile market he does NOT need to be aping apple, which will never ever work, what he instead needs to do is go crawling to Intel and AMD and beg their asses for chips that will work well in phones and tablets. Because without X86 support MSFT is well and truly fucked, and ironically its because "Devevlopers developers developers" who got tired of MSFT changing their fucking mind with regards to direction every 5 damned minutes (.NET? Silverlight? HTML V5?) are completely ignoring them for iOS and Android. And I don't think all the aping of Apple in the world is gonna get those devs back MSFT,not a chance.
How about letting us vote for some changes to Steam itself?
I know there is a couple of things i would love to change, such as 1.-On the big lists of games on the Steam sales have an icon or change the color of the listing or SOMETHING that lets us know the game uses any DRM other than Steam. I already got bit in the ass by a GFWL game thanks to THAT one, and 2.-Have a setting where we can choose to tell our friends "This user prefers ONLY Steam and no third party DRM" because when you receive a present from someone its kinda hard to tell them you don't want it because of DRM, especially family. I got TAGES on my system now thanks to the Steam XMas sale and a present bought for me by one of my nephews.
Finally as for EA? Fuck EA and the horse they rode in on. To see what kind of douchebags they are watch this Jimquistition video where he lists just a few of the truly douchebaggy things EA has pulled over the years. i like how he says that "EA even looks worse than Activision who are positively fricking satanic" but the simple fact is Origin is nothing but an attempt by EA to make PC gaming just as expensive as the consoles. Hell if they had their way they'd probably charge you by the fricking clip in their FPS games, while ignoring the fact that the reason why valve has so many customers is they OFFER A BETTER VALUE than shitty companies like EA. Hell I've got over 60 games in Steam now, couldn't i have just pirated them? yep but steam gives me 1.-Cheap prices, 2.-easy matchmaking MP, 3.-Chat with my friends and family, 4.- hassle free patching, 5.-DLC cheap and in many cases on the sales included with the game.
So while I love Steam and have switched both my boys off of the consoles for Steam it can always be better. lets hope some valve dev reads this and brings it up because I know I'd probably buy even more games on the Steam sales if I could just check games off the list without having to go to the game page on every. single. one. just to make sure I don't get Starfucked.
BTW OT but anybody know when the big summer sale starts? My youngest has been saving up for it and I swear every other question is "Has it started yet?" so knowing the date and time would be nice, thanks.
Uhhh...yes please? frankly CLI has become the all purpose crutch in Linux for several years now and needs to go the way of disco. Can't design a GUI worth shit? CLI. Can't build a driver worth a shit? Well a CLI fix will patch that up! Sound problems, network problems, get thrown into single user mode because the driver took a shit? CLI CLI aaaand..CLI.
You could completely remove CLI from Windows and OSX and I bet my last dollar so few people would notice that it wouldn't even make page 3, why? because they do not NEED CLI just to use the damned machine, that's why! There is a REASON why Android doesn't come with CLI you know, its not needed.
The fact that your OS can't even function without a 1970s throwback UI says more about the OS than it does the users friend. CLI is only good for TWO things, neither of which is useful to the average home user. 1.-Scripting, and 2.-Repeating the same action over and over. Do you honestly think users are using WGET to fetch web pages and send them to an email daemon with scripts like RMS?
Either join the 21st century with the rest of us or don't bitch when nobody uses your OS, it is THAT simple. When people would rather steal the other guy's product, last numbers i saw had it in the millions BTW, than take your OS for 100% free? Well if that don't smack you upside the head with the cluebat than nothing will. pretending the users are gonna "embrace the POWER of CLI" like its the damned force is simply batshit and is about as likely to happen is my flying south for the winter by flapping my arms really hard. Accept and either move up or accept last place, your call. but until you get with the 21st century you might as well quit that "year of the Linux desktop" crap because it ain't EVER gonna happen.
I'll get hate for pointing this out but moving the buttons without any real reason is a classic case of cargo cult usability where you change something to mimic something else without understanding the WHY it is the way it is. We are seeing the same thing in windows with the upcoming windows 8, where someone at MSFT said " Nobody buys our cell phones, people buy our desktops, if we make them both alike people will buy both!" without even bothering to find out WHY cell phones are designed the way they are (hint, its the screen size) and instead simply trying to mimic the look.
But Ubuntu is for home users, how many home users are running remote desktops? You've got all this stuff that frankly isn't need for the ones the OS is being pushed for, and which makes them system more brittle (see the classic rant from thom at OSNews about how X crashed when doing simple tasks for a loooong list of people having trouble with it in the home user space) so why not simply let X be for servers and Wayland be for home users? Choice is good, right?
The sad part is the BSD guys would write them a thank you note for bothering to remember them.
So can we ALL just accept now there is no "Magical OS" that makes one immune from malware please? All OSes are EXTREMELY complex piles of code, having to support tens of thousands of drivers, scheduling and tasking, hell I doubt even Linus can tell you when you launch program Foo every single interaction that is taking place in the system, there is simply more there than any one person can know.
Now that the retard that made XP run by default as admin has been sent packing on the short bus all three major OSes have limited users, hell Windows even has the browser run as a low rights entity to help lower the risk. Now that all three major OSes have common sense defaults ultimately it all comes down to the USER and whether they will take the time to actually think or will simply allow anything to run. I've seen it a billion times in the shop, a fully patched and AVed machine get infected NOT because of the OS but because it was the USER that refused to listen to the warnings being given him/her and choosing instead to run it anyway.
At the end of the day the only foolproof way to get rid of malware is to take away the user's right to control their own machine, to instead stick them in a walled garden where only approved apps get run. i think we can all agree having some corporation own our machines would be a BAD thing so all we can do is warn users, try to make ever hardened systems, and be ready to clean up the messes when they happen. After Android became a hit it was only a matter of time before Linux got put in the crosshairs and now that day appears to be here and I for one will be interested to see how the community reacts.
The trick I found with XP X64 was to stay with the bog standard hardware. All the bog standard stuff, realtek and via sound, ATI and Nvidia GPUs and motherboards, all those had great support. the only thing I ran into that wouldn't run was a CCC capture card that frankly I never could get to run worth a crap on anything but XP SP2, hell it was so Cheapo Chinese I never could find a manufacturer to even look for drivers other than what came on the disc. I switched to a USB Wonder and the problem went away. In a way WinXP X64 was a lot like Win2K Pro, it was just a great workstation OS that got the hell out of you way and let you work, I always liked that.
As for Win 8...ugh. It reminds me of Win 3.x actually, it has the same "hacked together" feel, what with the switching back and forth between desktop and Metro. What pisses me off is the one thing I actually liked about Metro could be easily backported but I'm sure MSFT won't to try to drum up sales, even though most users will never hear of it. I'm talking about services being called on demand and shut off after they are finished which is something they SHOULD have done 10 years ago. Frankly Windows services management has always been poor and this common sense approach should have been in there by XP SP2 but instead it'll only be on Metro which is so damned irritating I'd rather go back to XP before I'd mess with it, its just too irritating.
At least I most likely will only be wiping it in the shop, if the reactions of my customers is anything to go by. You'd think they'd have done some focus groups but Ballmer must be so damned scared of Apple he's afraid to even ask the users. Bad OS goes in the crapper, good OS goes on instead, another year and a half of wiping just like I had to do with all those that got bit by Vista bugs...sigh. it may make me more money but man I hate dealing with it. i think I'm gonna charge an extra 30% to those that have downgrade rights if I have to call the OEM as I sure as hell ain't setting on the damned phone through a half an hour of muzak and sales pitches just to get the damned key again.
Yes but who has to SUPPORT the targeted demographic? that would be us. Did i think about anybody that actually reads/. falling for the SMS spam when i wrote in my journal? Nope but I know that many here are admins and when dealing with clueless users its nice to know what is going down, hence the journal.
In the end we geeks sometimes just don't see what is coming because we wouldn't ever fall for it and naturally assume or users wouldn't fall for something so obvious either. Well I can tell you that from working with average folks fixing and selling PCs since the days of Win 3.x that for every 1 that would turn the stick in 100+ would happily pop it in to a PC just to see what is on it. Curiosity is a natural human condition and we need to warn our users that it can be an attack vector just as much as email or SMS.
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But frankly friend even the bottom o' the line stuff is insanely overpowered. I mean you can get hexa kits for like $335 at tiger, fully loaded prebuilt i3s and i5s for less than $650, its just insane how much power you get nowadays for little money. hell just the other day they were selling AMD quad laptops with dual graphics for less than $450!
Its simply not like during the MHz wars where a 3 year old PC would struggle to do basic tasks, most of the PCs I was building 5 years ago were Phenom I triples and quads. I'm sorry but a triple or quad core PC can do every thing you listed just fine, in fact i have an engineer friend running solidworks on a Phenom i triple with no trouble at all.
So yeah, maybe if you are trying to make the next Gears Of War at home you'd need the bleeding edge, but then again if you were trying to do that you'd be running some workstation into a render farm. On the consumer side the boxes i've been selling for the last 5 plus years can convert DVDs, transcode, hell I'm working on multitrack audio mixing on my bottom o' the line AMD hexa now and I have cycles to spare. There just hasn't been a "killer app" that will force people to upgrade in quite awhile, and most of us aren't willing to spend $1000+ to go more bleeding edge just so we can get our videos converted 7 minutes quicker.
Honestly i don't think very many people will give up their PCs at all, here at the shop those with tablets or smartphones also have laptops or desktops.
No instead what is happening is something we guys in the trenches have been saying for years, and that is computers went past good enough and into insanely overpowered for the average user when multicores became cheap. I mean take my dad for an example, he is probably the perfect use case for the "average PC user" in that he emails, watches videos, uses chat, burns discs, just your bog standard basic stuff. Now a couple of years back when tiger was having one of their "ZOMG $199 quad!" kits I picked him up one. Now this is a 2.1Ghz Phenom I, 4Gb of RAM and a 500Gb HDD, that is about the slowest quad made, know what I found? He has yet to hit above 45% CPU usage! He simply can't come up with enough work to slam even that bottom of the line quad. hell my boys and I are gamers and we are playing on a couple of 2 year old Hexacores and a 3 year old quad and again, just can't slam that many cores for any length of time.
So it isn't that PCs are going away, if anything everyone and their cat and their cat's squeaky toy has one, its simply that everyone has multicores and they don't need to replace every 3 years like during the MHz wars. you'll see the same thing happen to ARM soon enough, there is already talk of "dark silicon" where ARM will have more transistors than power to run them, then we'll see the same thing happen there. hell i have plenty of business customers that are happy with their first gen core duos and Phenom I triples and quads, are they broke? Nope they simply aren't stressing those chips and see no point in buying even more insanely overpowered machines when they aren't using all the cycles they have. Heck I even sold my dual core full size laptop for an E350 netbook, and that is about the weakest dual core you can get above an Atom, because i found when i was mobile even i couldn't come up with enough cycles to stress the E350 out. We just don't need more chips right now, not when the ones we have run well. The machines will get changed out when they break, no different than washers and dryers.
Not unless they are on XP, which if they are still running a 12 year old OS they have worse problems, like how damned many patches on top of patches that XP has had. Most of the gadgets anybody would actually want like the weather are included by default in the Win 7 gadget library, don't know about Vista as i don't have a machine with Vista handy at the shop.
There is one that is excellent that isn't included that I will provide the link for, the most excellent Meter Gadgets which include CPU Meter, which integrates nicely with Coretemp so you can monitor core usage, temps, and RAM all from one little sidebar gadget, the network meter which is great if you have a flaky connection as it has all kinds of useful info and tools such as speedtest and signal quality for WiFi,battery meter which is what it says on the tin, and GPU meter which is nice if you are hot rodding your graphics card.
They have several other gadgets there, everything from worldclocks to control gadgets and now that MSFT has pulled their gadgets page (nice how they use it to hawk Win 8, like we want that crap) it might be a good idea to bookmark it if you actually want some useful gadgets that aren't included with gadget library.
This is something I have been wanting to ask for awhile, seriously, WTF does ANYBODY CARE about these so called "shills" anyway? I mean seriously the real shills are so damned easy to spot they may as well be the PHB on Dilbert, they use the same "buzzword bingo" that the corps just looooove to see in print, like "synergy" and "vertical integration" and "user experience' that nobody IRL uses, and if their point is bullshit? Well its not hard to spot actual bullshit and it gets modded down quick enough.
In the meanwhile all this "ZOMFG It a shill ZOMFG!" creates total paranoia and has the unstable seeing shill EVERYWHERE, I mean anybody that has read my history knows I'm just a little shop owner in the middle of bum fuck nowhere but so far I've been told I'm not actually in a little college town in the middle of AR, nope I'm hidden in a sekret bunker under Redmond, which I actually thought would be a hell of a lot more cool and interesting than my boring shop, oh and I'm also sub contracted to Comodo, AMD, Apple (Still haven't figured THAT one out, I don't even own an iPod), Asus, Gigabyte, and Asrock. I just wish someone would tell me where the sekret Swiss bank account is with all that money from subcontracting as I'd like a new truck, thanks.
As for TFA I smell bullshit. Are you seriously telling me that MSFT can't even keep their own fucking website safe? Seriously? they got all those people working there, they can't even scan the fucking executables put on their own damned website? What are they running it on, a badly done FB page?
Considering the fact I've NEVER seen anyone ever get a gadget at ANY site other than MSFT's, and that when you clicked on "get more gadgets online" it took you straight to their page i have to conclude that they simply want gadgets gone because it offers the same tweeting twitting FB shitting social crap that MSFT is pushing for Win 8. I've said it before and I'll say it again...watch out! I have NO doubt that between now and the release of Win 8 that MSFT will push more "security updates" that will be designed to cripple Win 7, because they are scared to death Win 8 is gonna be WinME the second coming.
So triple check every damned update that comes out between now and then, and be sure to have disc images handy, because Ballmer and Sinofsky isn't gonna do anything that would allow Win 8 to flop and the simple fact is unless you have a touchscreen Win 7 will do anything you want. But if a security update were to...ohh I don't know....say kill 30%+ of performance, or take the decent features away, for 'security reasons" of course, why folks might be more likely to buy Windows 8! The fact that MSFT is offering Win 8 pro upgrades on their website for $40 tells me they are running scared, hell they have NEVER offered pro for anywhere near that cheap, so frankly every single thing they say or do between now and then i would look at as suspect. MSFT is on the ropes, stuck in a niche that is flatline and will never be #1 again, and when backed into a corner as we have seen in the past MSFT can be pretty nasty. Just something to think about.
Not only is it bullshit I'd say its just one more move to try to get people to move over to Win 8. I mean who DIDN'T KNOW that running an executable as admin is a BAD THING, hmm? Are MSFT honestly trying to get us to believe that they don't even have enough common sense to keep malware off their own damned site? if so their security team should be fucking ashamed of themselves!
Most of my users use gadgets and I will be telling them to simply ignore this, because they already have the gadgets they want. But I'm sure MSFT figured out that if you wanted your OS to be a tweeting twitting FB shitting social OS like Win 8 you could just use the gadgets in Win 7 so what do they do? Why lets get rid of the gadgets! Are you HONESTLY telling me you just NOW figured out gadgets run as admin from untrusted sites could be bad MSFT, really? because I find that frankly unbelievable.I know I won't be giving up MY gadgets and I seriously doubt any of my customers will either.
Just one more dick move by MSFT to get functionality that could compete with Win 8 out of Win 7. I have a feeling as the run up to Win 8 gathers steam we'll all have to watch like hawks for more "security updates" that tie a fucking boat anchor to Win 7 to try to make win 8 look better. If you are gonna spout horseshit MSFT, at least TRY to make it believable horseshit,mmmkay?
Jeez, why would you stick with a company that would do that? Seriously dude just get a nice Windows laptop and make a Hackentosh out of it. Then you can have the nicer and cheaper hardware while still enjoying OSX if you want and a free Windows as a bonus, in case you run into something you want that doesn't have a Mac version.
Although I have to wonder, what with the slow updates and the hardware getting farther behind the curve, if Cook isn't gonna end up abandoning the Pro users, if not X86 altogether. It was Jobs that was into "Apple is the machine on which movies are made" whereas Cook just doesn't seem all that jazzed up, not that I can blame him. After all Apple had a damned good thing going with Nvidia that Intel took a giant dump on without even caring what Apple thought and if its one thing Apple likes is control.
So I could easily see Cook keeping just a couple of consumer models, since the consumer units are frankly more powerful than the average user is gonna care about anyway so they don't need refreshes as often, whereas the Pro users need the extra GPU power and more frequent refreshes that the consumers frankly just don't need. Its pretty obvious that Apple is making the majority of its money on consumer electronics so it really wouldn't hurt the bottom line and would probably make more money long term by cutting guys like you loose.
Can it be run in a VM? How hard would it be to make it run in a VM? Because frankly VMs are the "Oh Thank God" when it comes to large projects as you can keep things running even if the company no longer supports it.
So if we are talking 500k plus I'd be wanting to run it in a VM if its at all possible, because that way if MSFT drops support it'll still run. Again while i doubt they'd drop .NET proper frankly I haven't seen MSFT this unstable since Win 2.0, where everyone didn't have a clue if it was gonna be OS/2 or WinDOS that ended up the new OS. Its obvious Ballmer wants mobile so bad it hurts and he doesn't seem to give a rat's ass about corporate ATM or he wouldn't be trying to push Win 8 and all that social media crap into the corporate space.
So good luck, hope it works out, and glad I'm not you. I'm just so glad I have all my business customers settled down onto win 7 so we can all just batten down the hatches and ride out the next few years. BTW if you need a copy of Win 8 to try out your code on windows.com is selling the Win 8 pro upgrade for $40, so its a cheap way to get a copy to slap in a test bed or VM to see how it holds up. Good luck!
I sign those by the EFF as well, but I have ZERO doubt that me and you are on a list somewhere. Whether they will actually DO anything with that list is unknown ATM but I have zero doubt they exist and anybody that doesn't follow the line most likely are on at least one if not multiple.
You mean like BSD which got backdoored by the FBI? I hate to break the news to ya pal, but if a three letter agency wants to pwn a FOSS project? it would be just as easy if not easier than any proprietary OS.
You should look at some of the entries of the obfuscated C contest to see how damned easy it is to hide nasties in large amounts of code, and those are for bits of code where you KNOW there is a nasty. Now imagine, how many projects are out there with only a handful of guys working on it? How happy would they be to have a highly skilled coder volunteer to help? Have YOU looked at every line of code in the apps popularly packaged in your average distro, hmm? Well if you haven't what proof do you have that anybody else has? Just because you have access to the code does NOT mean anybody that can actually read it and more importantly can spot obfuscated malware has read it line by line you know.
Even reading the apps one at a time wouldn't work since a three letter agency could easily pay for guys to work at multiple projects. Just as we have malware today that simply drops a payload I could easily see program Foo not doing anything by itself but checking to see if you have program Bar and Boned and if all three are present the combination opened a door. After all who is gonna notice dependencies? Those are SOP in FOSS OSes, programs having dependencies really aren't rare ya know.
In the end FOSS is no more a "magic bullet" than painting a cross on the box to ward off evil. there is simply too many millions of lines of code in your average distro for anyone, even Linus himself, to be able to tell you with 100% certainty every single interaction when a program is called. Sure if you were to DIY starting with the kernel it would be more secure, but how many actually do that?
What amazes me is how many waste their time with those stupid petitions. I mean after the first two or three prettily worded 'Fuck you peasant LOL" responses shouldn't everyone have learned by now those things are as fucking worthless as a suggestion box with a waste basket for a bottom?
The sad part is there really isn't any choice anymore, hell you may as well not even vote. I mean WTF are you gonna vote FOR? Rich money whoring sellout A, or rich money whoring sellout B? Does anybody think a McSame presidency would have been any different from a Nobama? Or that Mittens will do ANYTHING differently, other than put a different spin on it?
Lets face it folks, until things get bad enough we have a full on collapse and an Arab Spring all we are gonna get is what the 1%ers want us to have, nice little corporate puppets that do what they are told and heel when their chains are yanked. In the end we'll end up with MORE draconian laws, MORE power and control for those at the top and LESS for everyone that isn't in their little club. As Buffet said years ago "There has been class warfare for years, and we've won"
I do something similar for my customers, I always make them a low rights account for any friends/kids/etc that come over and when the owner is in their account while i can't lock them down as well as you can I give them Comodo Dragon with ABP, since Dragon runs in low rights mode, and on top of that I give them Comodo CIS AV which has sandboxing and scan before load on web pages. Both are free and since doing so my customers getting nasty bugs has frankly dropped right off the chart. You'd be surprised how much those three little steps help, ABP, low rights browser and sandboxing. you take the web out of the equation and there goes the bugs.
And that exact same advice frankly works just as well on Windows but if the user doesn't follow it you are screwed.
Ultimately there is only so much you can do technically against the dancing bunny problem because if the user WANTS to see the bunnies, and you try to stop the user from getting to the bunnies? they will happily thwart any and ALL security measures you put in their way to see the bunnies. Again I've seen this with my very own two eyes, i even had to throw a guy out of the shop once when he removed his fricking AV because it wouldn't let him have "The New Limewire" which I had ALREADY TOLD HIM was a fake trojan and had even gone so far as to give him eMule and BT so he wouldn't be needing it, but in the end he liked Limewire, refused to believe Limewire was dead, and when a malware writer offered him a fake that the AV pointed out was nothing but a trojan he simply removed the AV. His final words as I was pushing him out of the shop was "It says right there its the new limewire so you MAKE IT WORK!"
In the end OSes and AVs have frankly never been better, but if the user refuses to listen or show even the tiniest bit of common sense? Well you just can't fix stupid.
If it can wait until first quarter of next year I would, otherwise I'd be VERY careful not to invest too much in MSFT's "latest and greatest" in regards to frameworks. if anyone asks why I'd just point to all those that invested heavily in Silverlight and are now getting put on the same bus all those VB6 companies got.
I would argue that THIS point, more than any other in the company's history, is the absolute worst time to be betting on MSFT anything long term. if you look at their moves in the past 2 years its pretty obvious they frankly don't HAVE any long term plan and while I doubt they'd send .NET the way of Silverlight there is simply no guarantee they will stick with Entity or not.
So if it were me I'd try to keep my options open and not put all my eggs in one basket. Even if you decide to go with LINQ it would be wise to look at other options and to make sure everything has enough good documentation that if you HAD to switch to something else it wouldn't be too horribly painful. Remember MSFT is in a really bad place right now, their main market is mature and flatline and will be staying that way, so trying to predict what they are gonna do before the release of Win 8 is gonna be really REALLY difficult.
Final verdict? It'll probably be safe but try to keep your options open with an eye to the future and we should be able to see by first quarter next year whether MSFT is gonna continue to be a corporate player or if Ballmer's insane desire to become Apple will cause him to go with even more crazy schemes down the road. It wouldn't hurt in either case to treat Entity as a possible short term solution, simply because MSFT has been quick to drop support for other projects without thought to what it does to developers, see VB6, Silverlight, and soon WinPhone 7.
I hate to break the news to ya, but lets gets some facts straight, mmmkay? First of all CLI doesn't give you mystical gonad powers, second of all CLI is a GUI not any kind of mystical I/O, its just a very VERY primitive GUI, finally here is a nice article that points out better than I ever could why your CLI is a pile of old cat turds not that you'll read it.
In the end, know what it comes down to REALLY, I mean what is really at the heart of it all? Losers. CLI has become the haven of the maladjusted loser, because it gives them the illusion, and that's all it is, merely an illusion, of being better/smarter/more leet than someone else. And THAT is why you desperately hang onto a GUI everyone else abandoned over 20 years ago, not because it makes ANYTHING better, but precisely because it does not. Linux is the bizzaro-world where the more fiddly and PITA you can possibly make it the better because it "proves" that you MUST be smarter/better/more leet by virtue of making the damnd thing work. Well to stick that final needle in your bubble copypasta into a CLI doesn't make you leet, it makes you a script kiddie.
So enjoy the 1970s Disco Stu, the rest of us will laugh our collective asses off and enjoy our nice GUIs and smirk.
.NET was originally supposed to be the "next new thing" that would have taken the place of VB 6 and been used for practically everything, the way they were talking at the time .NET should have been VB6, Flash, and Java all rolled into one and frankly other than corporate its fizzled. Then came Silverlight which was supposed to kill Flash and become the one video and animation tool to rule them all, yet other than a few that use it for DRM it fizzled too, and then finally there is HTML V5, great for Linux and iOS/OSX users, stupid as fuck for MSFT since it yanks any and ALL control out of their hands and puts it straight into the hands of Google and Apple, who have been leading the charge. Honestly nobody is gonna give a wet fart WTF MSFT supports when it comes to HTML V5 since the majority writing HTML V5 don't give a rat's ass about MSFT, they are writing for iPhone.
so it has been one dumbass move after another, and with each bridge they burned they lost that many more devs that spent time and money learning something that was tossed or no longer considered the "cool thing" at MSFT, from VB 6 to .NET, from Silverlight to who the hell knows what parts of HTML V5 will be or won't be supported. One thing we HAVE learned from MSFT is "standards compliant" simply isn't in their vocabulary so I frankly wouldn't be surprised if they try the same kind of stupid shit they did with IE 6 only now nobody will give a crap and will just let Windows be broken.
Hmmm...personally I'd put Steve-O at a solid 3 myself, just look at all the companies he has thrown money at either buying outright or trying to use to buy his way into a market that doesn't want them. See Zune, Kin, Nokia, for examples.
The sad part is they are going classic cargo cult usability, where they think they can ape something and then recreate its success without asking WHY, why is it like this? The answer is simple: NOBODY and I mean NOBODY buys Windows because they like MSFT, they buy it because they have a bazillion third party X86 programs they want/need to run. this is completely the opposite of Apple, where big products like iTunes are owned by Apple. Also Apple has for the most part kept iOS and OSX separate entities, you don't see them throwing teeny tiny desktops onto iPhones like MSFT did for years, nor do you see them making OSX a single tasking phone OS which is the current meme at MSFT.
In the end if Ballmer is to have a snowball's chance in hell in the mobile market he does NOT need to be aping apple, which will never ever work, what he instead needs to do is go crawling to Intel and AMD and beg their asses for chips that will work well in phones and tablets. Because without X86 support MSFT is well and truly fucked, and ironically its because "Devevlopers developers developers" who got tired of MSFT changing their fucking mind with regards to direction every 5 damned minutes (.NET? Silverlight? HTML V5?) are completely ignoring them for iOS and Android. And I don't think all the aping of Apple in the world is gonna get those devs back MSFT,not a chance.
If you don't know then perhaps this song will illuminate it for you. WARNING: Its catchy!
How about letting us vote for some changes to Steam itself?
I know there is a couple of things i would love to change, such as 1.-On the big lists of games on the Steam sales have an icon or change the color of the listing or SOMETHING that lets us know the game uses any DRM other than Steam. I already got bit in the ass by a GFWL game thanks to THAT one, and 2.-Have a setting where we can choose to tell our friends "This user prefers ONLY Steam and no third party DRM" because when you receive a present from someone its kinda hard to tell them you don't want it because of DRM, especially family. I got TAGES on my system now thanks to the Steam XMas sale and a present bought for me by one of my nephews.
Finally as for EA? Fuck EA and the horse they rode in on. To see what kind of douchebags they are watch this Jimquistition video where he lists just a few of the truly douchebaggy things EA has pulled over the years. i like how he says that "EA even looks worse than Activision who are positively fricking satanic" but the simple fact is Origin is nothing but an attempt by EA to make PC gaming just as expensive as the consoles. Hell if they had their way they'd probably charge you by the fricking clip in their FPS games, while ignoring the fact that the reason why valve has so many customers is they OFFER A BETTER VALUE than shitty companies like EA. Hell I've got over 60 games in Steam now, couldn't i have just pirated them? yep but steam gives me 1.-Cheap prices, 2.-easy matchmaking MP, 3.-Chat with my friends and family, 4.- hassle free patching, 5.-DLC cheap and in many cases on the sales included with the game.
So while I love Steam and have switched both my boys off of the consoles for Steam it can always be better. lets hope some valve dev reads this and brings it up because I know I'd probably buy even more games on the Steam sales if I could just check games off the list without having to go to the game page on every. single. one. just to make sure I don't get Starfucked.
BTW OT but anybody know when the big summer sale starts? My youngest has been saving up for it and I swear every other question is "Has it started yet?" so knowing the date and time would be nice, thanks.
Uhhh...yes please? frankly CLI has become the all purpose crutch in Linux for several years now and needs to go the way of disco. Can't design a GUI worth shit? CLI. Can't build a driver worth a shit? Well a CLI fix will patch that up! Sound problems, network problems, get thrown into single user mode because the driver took a shit? CLI CLI aaaand..CLI.
You could completely remove CLI from Windows and OSX and I bet my last dollar so few people would notice that it wouldn't even make page 3, why? because they do not NEED CLI just to use the damned machine, that's why! There is a REASON why Android doesn't come with CLI you know, its not needed.
The fact that your OS can't even function without a 1970s throwback UI says more about the OS than it does the users friend. CLI is only good for TWO things, neither of which is useful to the average home user. 1.-Scripting, and 2.-Repeating the same action over and over. Do you honestly think users are using WGET to fetch web pages and send them to an email daemon with scripts like RMS?
Either join the 21st century with the rest of us or don't bitch when nobody uses your OS, it is THAT simple. When people would rather steal the other guy's product, last numbers i saw had it in the millions BTW, than take your OS for 100% free? Well if that don't smack you upside the head with the cluebat than nothing will. pretending the users are gonna "embrace the POWER of CLI" like its the damned force is simply batshit and is about as likely to happen is my flying south for the winter by flapping my arms really hard. Accept and either move up or accept last place, your call. but until you get with the 21st century you might as well quit that "year of the Linux desktop" crap because it ain't EVER gonna happen.
Hell why don't you wish for an Alyson Hannigan sexbot delivered to you in a flying car? both are about as fricking likely.
I'll get hate for pointing this out but moving the buttons without any real reason is a classic case of cargo cult usability where you change something to mimic something else without understanding the WHY it is the way it is. We are seeing the same thing in windows with the upcoming windows 8, where someone at MSFT said " Nobody buys our cell phones, people buy our desktops, if we make them both alike people will buy both!" without even bothering to find out WHY cell phones are designed the way they are (hint, its the screen size) and instead simply trying to mimic the look.
But Ubuntu is for home users, how many home users are running remote desktops? You've got all this stuff that frankly isn't need for the ones the OS is being pushed for, and which makes them system more brittle (see the classic rant from thom at OSNews about how X crashed when doing simple tasks for a loooong list of people having trouble with it in the home user space) so why not simply let X be for servers and Wayland be for home users? Choice is good, right?
The sad part is the BSD guys would write them a thank you note for bothering to remember them.
So can we ALL just accept now there is no "Magical OS" that makes one immune from malware please? All OSes are EXTREMELY complex piles of code, having to support tens of thousands of drivers, scheduling and tasking, hell I doubt even Linus can tell you when you launch program Foo every single interaction that is taking place in the system, there is simply more there than any one person can know.
Now that the retard that made XP run by default as admin has been sent packing on the short bus all three major OSes have limited users, hell Windows even has the browser run as a low rights entity to help lower the risk. Now that all three major OSes have common sense defaults ultimately it all comes down to the USER and whether they will take the time to actually think or will simply allow anything to run. I've seen it a billion times in the shop, a fully patched and AVed machine get infected NOT because of the OS but because it was the USER that refused to listen to the warnings being given him/her and choosing instead to run it anyway.
At the end of the day the only foolproof way to get rid of malware is to take away the user's right to control their own machine, to instead stick them in a walled garden where only approved apps get run. i think we can all agree having some corporation own our machines would be a BAD thing so all we can do is warn users, try to make ever hardened systems, and be ready to clean up the messes when they happen. After Android became a hit it was only a matter of time before Linux got put in the crosshairs and now that day appears to be here and I for one will be interested to see how the community reacts.
The trick I found with XP X64 was to stay with the bog standard hardware. All the bog standard stuff, realtek and via sound, ATI and Nvidia GPUs and motherboards, all those had great support. the only thing I ran into that wouldn't run was a CCC capture card that frankly I never could get to run worth a crap on anything but XP SP2, hell it was so Cheapo Chinese I never could find a manufacturer to even look for drivers other than what came on the disc. I switched to a USB Wonder and the problem went away. In a way WinXP X64 was a lot like Win2K Pro, it was just a great workstation OS that got the hell out of you way and let you work, I always liked that.
As for Win 8...ugh. It reminds me of Win 3.x actually, it has the same "hacked together" feel, what with the switching back and forth between desktop and Metro. What pisses me off is the one thing I actually liked about Metro could be easily backported but I'm sure MSFT won't to try to drum up sales, even though most users will never hear of it. I'm talking about services being called on demand and shut off after they are finished which is something they SHOULD have done 10 years ago. Frankly Windows services management has always been poor and this common sense approach should have been in there by XP SP2 but instead it'll only be on Metro which is so damned irritating I'd rather go back to XP before I'd mess with it, its just too irritating.
At least I most likely will only be wiping it in the shop, if the reactions of my customers is anything to go by. You'd think they'd have done some focus groups but Ballmer must be so damned scared of Apple he's afraid to even ask the users. Bad OS goes in the crapper, good OS goes on instead, another year and a half of wiping just like I had to do with all those that got bit by Vista bugs...sigh. it may make me more money but man I hate dealing with it. i think I'm gonna charge an extra 30% to those that have downgrade rights if I have to call the OEM as I sure as hell ain't setting on the damned phone through a half an hour of muzak and sales pitches just to get the damned key again.
Yes but who has to SUPPORT the targeted demographic? that would be us. Did i think about anybody that actually reads /. falling for the SMS spam when i wrote in my journal? Nope but I know that many here are admins and when dealing with clueless users its nice to know what is going down, hence the journal.
In the end we geeks sometimes just don't see what is coming because we wouldn't ever fall for it and naturally assume or users wouldn't fall for something so obvious either. Well I can tell you that from working with average folks fixing and selling PCs since the days of Win 3.x that for every 1 that would turn the stick in 100+ would happily pop it in to a PC just to see what is on it. Curiosity is a natural human condition and we need to warn our users that it can be an attack vector just as much as email or SMS.