Why did this get flamebait? working in a PC shop 6 days a week i can tell you that since Vista damned near every bug I've seen has been a PEBKAC related infection.
What you see is the infections taking certain obvious routes over and over:: 1.- "ZOMG U got teh viruz! Run "Iz not viruz iz cleanerz!.exe" to kill teh bug ZOMG!" 2.-"want teh hot lezboz? U 2 can have teh hot lezboz! Just run "Iz not bug iz codecz.exe" and U can be watching teh hot lezboz right now!" 3.-"Want teh latest (insert Hollywood movie or song) for free? U 2 can have teh (insert Hollywood movie or song) for free! Just run "Iz not bug iz new limewirez" and U can have (insert Hollywood movie or song) right now!" 4.- "Hey my BFF on FB LOL! Look at my funny video! Just run "Iz Not Bug iz video.exe" and be sure to say yes to UAC so U can see teh funny!"
Notice how EVERY DAMNED ONE is a PEBKAC problem? That damned "New Limewire" one I even had an ID10T that I had to throw out of the shop because when the AV practically threw itself onto the screen screaming "ITS A BUG! DON'T DO IT!" what did he do? he uninstalled the AV and then wanted ME to fix it because "It says right there its the New Limewire so make it work dammit!"
So I'm sorry but as XP dies the days of the easy driveby are dying with it, replaced by an even easier target, lazy and or greedy and or stupid users.
The problem with this is damned near every ISP is going to caps which i'm sure will only get nastier, at least in the USA because by God charging assraping prices while not spending shit on infrastructure is in the constitution! And if its not citizens united will get around to it next week.
So either you 1.-pay assraping per Gb charges thanks to your pipes being loaded even when you aren't downloading or 2.-you can't download shit, either way they win.
The problem with freenet is it has yet to be tested in the courts and the way i had it explained to me you could possibly be looking at SERIOUS TIME depending on what state you are in and how fucked up their laws are.
Let me explain: if i hand you a wall safe and tell you to deliver it for me and the cops stop you and they find dope and kiddie porn in it from what i was told it doesn't matter if you didn't have the combination because they can STILL get you for delivery. By that same token if they are hunting for CP and download a piece of the file from your system likewise, again depending on how fucked up the laws are there, every state is different, they can just show the logs and you are guilty distributing CP, again it doesn't matter if you yourself could access it, only that a piece of CP (or even the whole file in the case of pics) came from your system.
so until their encrypted store and plausible deniability has been tested in court i'd be seriously fricking leery of using it, after all how would YOU like to be the test case if the court rules against you? Most states a single CP pic can get you over a decade now, and that is if they don't pile on the charges, I don't know about you but I don't think I'd be willing to take a chance at life in PMITA prison with the label of child molestor just in the hope that the courts would show common fricking sense.
Well I said downer because i still remember the 80s, when you had all these different choices like Commodore, Atari, Tandy, Sinclair, IBM, Apple, and for a little bit there it looked like we might have gotten that again, damned shame that we'll end up with another duopoly, only instead of Apple and MSFT it'll be Apple and Google.
And tell me friend, because I have yet to hear someone come up with a sensible answer, what ELSE was Elop supposed to do? The company was bleeding money, they had something like three phone OSes all fighting for people and resources, the company was a mess. HP had gotten WebOS, apple sure as hell isn't gonna license iOS, and before you say Android that would have been suicide because Samsung and Asus already had kick ass phones and tablets respectively so if they would have tried Android they would have been SOL. what they had in house simply wasn't up to competing with Android and iOS, so seriously what was left? What? MSFT practically gave them the OS AND the engineers AND an advertising budget AND a nice check to boot.
While its clear now there is simply no room for a third party at the time Elop had his balls in a sling and no product to compete with. I know there are fans of Symbian and Maemo here but be honest with yourself, there was no way in hell in the form they were in when Elop took over that they could compete with Google sinking a billion plus into android development and Apple having the buzz, just no way.
While many here may think Elop made a bad move i would argue he made the ONLY move he had left and considering MSFT's history of spending their way into a market frankly it wasn't a bad call, but even with all their money MSFT couldn't stop the twin juggernauts of iOS and Android so expecting Nokia to be able to do it with an in house OS is just ridiculous.
Non lead solder (makes devices fail a LOT faster thanks to tin whiskers thus making more landfill fodder), fat tax, sugar tax, pretty much ALL of the so called "sin taxes' came about because someone thought YOU were too stupid to make choices for yourself, you filthy dirty peasant you.
But are there enough "Linux hackers" that would bother to buy the thing? After all we've seen that Linux hackers would rather have the Windows Tax break than buy from places like System76 as the Newegg article from a few weeks back showed, and Open Moko didn't sell enough to make it worth doing, so I'm seriously doubtful there are enough hackers that give a shit about their phone OS to actually make this worthwhile.
After all if Linux hackers only bought from Linux vendors and bought open hardware we'd already have a market with such devices, but the fact that we don't leads me to believe there just isn't enough that care what runs on their phones. Hell without economy of scale on their side these things will probably be higher than a decent Android phone, not to mention I seriously doubt ANY carrier is gonna offer a hacker friendly phone on contract so it'll be full price city which averages $400-$600, at least around here. How many people are gonna pay that just to have a fully hackable phone? Raise of hands, how many here will be pre-ordering if they offer it?
Sorry to be a downer but without a major OEM like Samsung or Nokia behind it I just don't see any of these niche phones going anywhere, and that goes for WebOS, MozOS, and WinPhone as well.
Or maybe its due to the simple fact that your average IE user doesn't use tabs and therefor that is what the IE team targets their optimization towards while the others are targeting tabs?
Dealing with customers down at the shop I can tell you that IE users by and large don't have a damned clue about tabs and will instead open new windows so frankly its no surprise that single tabs would be where the IE devotes their time. Hell it took me over a year to teach my dad not to automatically go for a new window when i moved him away from IE a few years back and to this day he won't open more than 3, he says its "too cluttered' to have any more and will instead open a new instance and switch between.
As for the results while I'm glad to see the FF guys caring about memory, could we maybe get a fork that goes back to the old UI....please? I switch back and forth between Dragon and FF ESR because I still miss the fox but I just can't take the new UI and if they stick with what they've been showing its gonna end up a Metro mess around the first of next year, so can we please please PLEASE have a fork with the new memory management under the old UI...pretty please?
Well this is why we need a joke tab, because I have seen WAAAAY too many posts being deadly serious saying the same thing, just as i'm sure you saw RMS and his "I'm glad he's gone" bit about Jobs which frankly made me sick. And I'll have you know I did NOT remain silent and if you'll look up RMS story about Jobs on LinuxInsider i was quoted calling him out in the article by K. Noyes saying the very same thing, that whether you were a fan or not the man truly changed the world and deserved better than the sick shit RMS spewed.
And have you even imagined a world where there WAS no Windows? The average PC sells for $400, the people that buy those could NEVER afford a Mac. my customers are backhoe operators and checkout girls, a Mac might as well be $10,000 to them because they will NEVER be able to afford one. Know what my lowest systems go for? $120, and that gets you an offlease P4 with a Gb of RAM, a 17 inch CRT with speakers, keyboard, and optical mouse. And you know what? That is frankly all a lot of folks need, and for those that can't even afford that I refurb older systems and give those away, just so everyone can have a computer which I've seen first hand how much good they can do.
So while I appreciate you were making a joke (though again, hard to tell with all the "all go to hell except cave 76!" types out there) just remember that just because Windows is a "low rent" OS run by a frankly shitty CEO doesn't mean we should wish they would die out, we should wish that someone with a fucking brain will take over the company and take it back to what it USED to be good at, which is building easy to use OSes for the masses at affordable prices.
Most of those I've seen (At least on the Dells) are VERY limited and are pretty much "Cd/HDD/Restore/LAN" and very few have USB boot in that which is the preferred method for modern distros.
And again I would point out that if they have enough common sense they are gonna want to go in there ANYWAY since most machines from the factory have the HDDs set for "IDE Mode" which is more compatible but slower and since I do believe most Linux distros support AHCI it would be kinda stupid not to go ahead and turn it on.
But lets cut the shit and be honest, okay AC? Now do you REALLY think someone who doesn't even have enough skills to go into BIOS and set boot order is REALLY gonna have the skills to troubleshoot a Linux install when the first update borks their Wifi or they run into a Pulse audio problem, really? You can dumb down the installer all you want but I'm sure even the most die hard Linux advocate will admit it takes at least a LITTLE skill and common sense to run Linux as an everyday OS, and the people too fucking clueless to even flip a switch in BIOS? Really not gonna have the skills to keep Linux running for any length of time.
so either they themselves have enough sense or the person that is setting up and admining the machine for them has enough sense, in either case making the whole question moot.
Actually the ironic part is most will run Linux...and be just as locked down as WinARM. It seems more and more of the manufacturers have figured out its easier to make them replace the unit if they don't allow upgrades and since Android is strictly GPL V2 there is nothing to stop them from doing so.
You just have to be amazed at the sheer irony when some many get their panties in a twist over a version of Windows that most likelye won't ever sell above single digits and will end up being dumped on woot! like the touchpads when it is Android that ends up with MUCH more devices you can't get upgrades for that end up in the dumpster. Hell has anybody taken a count of how many Android devices there are out there without any way to upgrade to the latest version? i know in my own family we've gone through 3 Android phones so far that couldn't be updated and we aren't even a smartphone heavy family, if we went through 3 in 2 years i can imagine how many more are sitting in sock drawers right now because they can't run the new version.
And then I might as well use Win98 because the amount of resources required to make it functional and still keep security patches would cost millions....or i can just sell and support an OS that is a guaranteed 10 years of support and ignore your fiddly bullshit. Maybe NOW you see why people would rather steal the other guy's than have yours for free? hell you get longer support with a Hackentosh than with your average distro, thanks to Linus and his fellow fiddlers.
Not that you will bother, because I have a feeling i'm talking to a "follower of the one true way' which is about as likely to listen to reason as showing carbon dating to those that believe Adam rode a dino, but for everyone else there is this nice list with over 100 links published THIS YEAR so you can't claim "it's old, not like that anymore' showing just what I said which is YOUR SHIT BE BROKE BRO and pretending your shit be NOT broke is just that, pretending.
Now you can stick your head in the sand, pretend that Linus is smarter than the dev teams for BSD, OSX, Windows, and even OS/2 who ALL HAVE AN ABI but that don't make it reality, anymore than you pointing at a chicken and saying "its a cow!" will make it go moo. The reason your OS doesn't go anywhere unless a corp locks it down and puts it in embedded hardware (like Android) is precisely because Linux is a fiddly PITA without an ABI. Like it or lump it, really don't care at this point.
I have to agree and would add even my older customers switched away from desktop email more than half a decade ago. In fact come to think of it I haven't seen any desktop email on any computer going through the shop since around 2007. The only ones I ever see using desktop is the corporate ones using outlook and frankly they are using it more like a day planner and meeting scheduler than they are an email client.
So....yeah, can't say as i blame 'em, certainly that market hasn't done anything but shrink for over half a decade, hell I'm surprised they didn't just cut them loose like they did Seamonkey. If they did cut it loose other than some geeks at places like...well like this screaming about how much they use it (but then again i wouldn't be surprised if some of the guys here still use Gopher) most would probably go "Huh, they still make that?" and then go back to their Gmail on their smartphone.
Sadly friend i can tell you why it is so, its because like most IP crap nowadays the artists don't own the IP anymore with the vast majority of those old gaming houses going under during the dotbomb and getting bought up by vultures at fire sale prices. Frankly i wouldn't doubt the prices we were quoted were a good 25%-30% more than they paid for the ENTIRE COMPANY and it was obvious talking to these vultures if we couldn't give them iMoney for a title we could fuck off and die.
And I agree its a damned shame, as I said we didn't give a shit about trying to get rich or even making any money off of it, we just had kids that grew up after the days of shareware and wanted ours and other kids to be able to experience the fun we had, all those weird and quirky piles of games just as we experienced them then. it would have made it so you could just plug the stick into any PC or laptop and run them anytime, even saved if the original shareware title allowed saves. And we hoped that we could then provide links to the full titles at the websites of the current owners so we could get these old games saved from the abandonware piles, but alas greed destroys all. yet another reason why we can't have nice things thanks to shitty IP laws.
In the end frankly it won't matter whether we have 'em or they have 'em because as the resources run dry there WILL be more wars, only for dwindling supplies instead of beliefs. We simply haven't been able to come up with anything even close to replacing the fossil fuels, not to mention as populations increase, especially in the third world where things are unstable as fuck, well shit IS gonna happen and adding more nukes to the mix would NOT be a good thing.
The reason peace lasted so long between the USA and USSR was because we were frankly mirror images of each other. Both countries had plenty of resources, both countries had largely secular rulers and belief systems, both saw that the other was an even match for them and that MAD insured that even the winner would be seriously fucked up.
All that shit goes right out the window when you have hundreds of millions that believe WWIII will bring back their spiritual leader that will magically lay the enemy to waste and give them control of the planet. When you are dealing with THAT level of batshit frankly pointing out MAD would insure their homes glowed in the dark wouldn't do jack because they'd just argue right up until impact that their redeemer would turn the bombs into rainbows. Trying to put East/West ideology into that context is not only retarded but dangerous, because even Stalin wasn't keen on starting wars that he had no chance of winning.
That is not only petty and sad, its really pathetic. i'll have you know that most of us Windows guys actually felt sorry for your when you were stuck with one craptastic CEO after another and even though I've never owned an Apple product I happily tuned it to watch Job's first Stevenote as the returning CEO because I was actually happy for you, happy you got to see the incompetent thrown aside for someone who actually knew the product and what you wanted.
So maybe instead of wishing bad on other people you should ask yourself why, why does the product you like ONLY make you happy if you are running someone down, hmmm? maybe its that little niggling doubt you are only buying fashion, that just won't go away how many times you try to swat it with you iPad?
Tell me AC, or better yet give us a link to the ditros that "magically" set CD/USB as first boot? Because frankly i'd like to see THAT trick. I don't care how much you dumb down the installer you still have to set boot order since not a single OEM unit comes from the factory with anything other than HDD set for first boot because it slows down the system while it checks for boot media.
So they are gonna have to go to UEFI/BIOS ANYWAY to set boot, are they smart enough to set a fricking boot order but NOT smart enough to flip a simple yes/no? toggle switch? again i find that beyond ridiculous.
I'm sorry but unless you use newspeak freedom means the freedom to choose or NOT to choose, and the GPL V3 takes part of those freedoms away because you no longer have the right NOT to choose. i would argue that is why Linux will never go anywhere on the desktop, because religious dogma refuses to allow a hardware ABI and they make sure their kernel fiddling breaks shit constantly. Now i'm sure those in the kernel dev team think they can make supporting Linux such a PITA that everyone opens their drivers, but in reality many simply won't support you at all.
if you force me to share with my neighbors at the barrel of a gun, which is what all patents and copyrights are, using the big arm of government to give one group control of something that is neither scarce nor expensive to copy and allowing them to treat it as it is a scarce good, then that is STILL force no matter how much newspeak you use. just because YOU think that force is "good" doesn't change the fact that it is still force anyway you slice it.
My oldest is in pre-med and frankly i'm glad his school caps at 15 hours because otherwise he'd push himself so hard he'd end up burning out. I tried looking at those inorganic chemistry books and they may as well have been in German for all i could understand of those scribbles and he's taking physics and starting A&P on top, any more load and he'd burn.
so i'd say its really about what you are taking, with all the genetic manipulation and insanely complex medicines we have now frankly I'd rather doctors take a little longer and have time to absorb than have them rush and end up killing somebody later on.
How EXACTLY is this insightful? did Canonical stop bleeding money and get some major OEM deals i've not heard of? Last i checked they had a couple of low end units hidden on the back page of Dell, so they don't have anymore pull than "Bob's Distro" in that regard. hell looking at their number fall on distrowatch since Unity Mint would probably have a better shot of influencing the OEMs than canonical has at this point.
sorry but being a big fish in a little pond is a hell of a lot different than being a little fish in a big pond, and compared to OEM sales Canonical's ubuntu wouldn't even be considered a guppy. personally i blame the community for not supporting linux retailers like System76 and instead buying the cheaper Windows units and slapping whatever they wanted on after getting the in reality "Windows tax break" thanks to the trialware and economies of scale. if you want to affect a market you need to be counted, and you're not being counted when you buy Windows units folks, simple as that.
Not to mention there is a REASON that everyone seems to have forgotten as to why MSFT is worried about bootloaders and it ain't malware. Go to TPB and look up "Windows 7 SP1 X64 all versions pre-activated" and you'll find you can download and install Win 7 which WILL pass muster when it comes to updates, in fact it will even automatically uncheck the WGA update that could possibly block the pirate version from getting updates. Feel free to scan the ISO, you'll find that it passes clean with the exception of a few "keygens are naughty!" pop ups from AVs like...well MSE.
So while I personally would have fought piracy by making Win HP upgrade $50 and the Pro and Family Packs $100 you can see why they don't want anyone getting to the Windows bootloader as the pirates have figured out long ago how to completely ruin their shit when it comes to piracy. Hell the Win 7 pirate version is EASIER to install than the old Razr1911 Corporate XP, it doesn't even need a key! So you can bet your ass if Canonical or any other corp lets their keys slip they'll be banhammered majorly quickly. While nobody in the home will give a shit and will just bypass Secureboot for BSA audits it makes it damned easy to spot those pirated Win pro stations because they'll stick out like a sore thumb. One switch to secureboot and they will fail, and then they can pay up for running hot software. Again not how i would have done it, but ultimately its their OS and they can do what they want.
Ubuntu 12 and the PCLOS and Mepis version from the same period new enough for you? The same problems exist, if you'd like a list then here you go, please note this article is the 2012 Edition and he has provided over a hundred links to exactly the same problems i have talked about at length so no need for me to rehash them.
You can stick your head in the sand and go "la la la" all you want but when people would rather risk stealing the other guy's product than taking yours for free? Well i'm sorry but that should be a giant cluebat to the side of the head that you have problems, problems that just don't exist on headless clusters.
Yes but unlike the others I have this thing called a brain which can do this thing call deductive reasoning, I know its a concept, but try to follow: 1.-you have only ONE company that is having their user's emails used in this manner, 2.- That SAME company is seeing a HUGE spike in spam, 3.-That same company is the ONLY one seeing emails with Android headers, 4.-While at the same time an EQUAL NUMBER of spam emails coming through that have no Android headers. 5.-While a Joe Job wouldn't be targeting Yahoo of all people when the target of the job is google, not when google has their own wildly popular webmail address which would cause greater embarrassment.
I'm sorry friend but it don't take Kojack to solve this case as the ONLY COMPANY that is seeing this huge spike across the board is Yahoo which means the odds of it being a Joe Job is VERY low and the odds of it being a Yahoo fuckup, possibly with their yahoo Android and desktop app is VERY high. It just common sense friend, damned shame its practically a superpower now.
I wish that were so friend, but according to a lawyer that is an old friend of my buddy who was gonna do it with me frankly it didn't matter what kind of rights were on the original CDs as they could just bury us in motions and break us, we just didn't have the kind of money to afford standing up to lawsuits. And we made it VERY clear we didn't desire ANY rights to the games themselves, nor were we asking permission to distribute the full versions, we even offered to help work for free on a DOSBox version of the full game they could sell on their website which we would have happily linked to.
No friend I wish I could chalk it up to something else but in the end it was simply PHB greed that made sure your kids can't pick up a Shareware Stick and got to try all those quirky shareware titles and even buy the full versions from the rights holders, which we had planned to provide full links to and made it clear that "If you liked the shareware version you should try the full game!" but these companies were bought up long ago by vultures at firesale prices when the bottom fell out of the shareware market and now they would rather just sit on the IP than allow even the original shareware titles to be distributed without giving them a check for probably more than they paid for the entire company.
But if you were to try distributing new copies of those old discs according to our lawyer friend you WILL be sued, and no matter what the license.txt says you will still have to pay for a couple of years worth of lawyer's fee and court motions, we just couldn't afford that. Just one more nice thing we can't have due to insane copyright laws.
Thanks friend, i'm surprised how many seem to keep ignoring that, but that was the ENTIRE POINT, to recreate the days of shareware and just like the days of shareware we would have had links going back to the parent companies for the full games. hell we even offered to donate our time to get their full game up and running in DOSBox so they could have it pre-packaged and ready to sell on their website for whatever price they chose, it would have been practically free money for them. they would have not only gotten a cut of every Shareware Stick we sold, they would have had the FULL SALES of any complete copies they sold, without us getting a red cent of those.
Hell we figured the MAX we would get is 25c a stick which would have been used to buy more shareware discs and contact more companies. We had hopes of making genre sticks, best of shware puzzlers, platformers, megasticks with dozens or hundreds of games like the big Win95 CDs, and frankly we wouldn't have been making jack shit it was ALL gonna be going to the companies that made the games, we just wanted to make it easy for folks to play them again.
In the end it just shows what uncontrolled greed leaves you with, nothing but worthless IP. Most of the game designers were long gone, the companies bought up ages ago and passing through a dozen hands until it ended up with some PHB who looked at every old piece of code like it was Donkey kong, damned shame that we couldn't have shared our childhood with everyone else by letting them see what shareware was like, but that's greed for ya.
Friend I have a Win 8 CP machine set up in the shop for everyone from tweeners to little old ladies to play with as they shop, know what I found? That this is a typical reaction only with more frustration than that sweet old lady gets. i don't care if it was the business guys or backhoe operators, insurance saleswomen or Suzy the checkout girl ALL OF THEM couldn't figure out fuck all to do with that damned OS.
More speed isn't gonna help you if all it does is lets you get nowhere fast, and that is Win 8 in a nutshell. its just not intuitive, not discoverable,, has ZERO help in the way of tooltips or tutorials that would help the lost users, its just a fricking mess.
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Why did this get flamebait? working in a PC shop 6 days a week i can tell you that since Vista damned near every bug I've seen has been a PEBKAC related infection.
What you see is the infections taking certain obvious routes over and over:: 1.- "ZOMG U got teh viruz! Run "Iz not viruz iz cleanerz!.exe" to kill teh bug ZOMG!" 2.-"want teh hot lezboz? U 2 can have teh hot lezboz! Just run "Iz not bug iz codecz.exe" and U can be watching teh hot lezboz right now!" 3.-"Want teh latest (insert Hollywood movie or song) for free? U 2 can have teh (insert Hollywood movie or song) for free! Just run "Iz not bug iz new limewirez" and U can have (insert Hollywood movie or song) right now!" 4.- "Hey my BFF on FB LOL! Look at my funny video! Just run "Iz Not Bug iz video.exe" and be sure to say yes to UAC so U can see teh funny!"
Notice how EVERY DAMNED ONE is a PEBKAC problem? That damned "New Limewire" one I even had an ID10T that I had to throw out of the shop because when the AV practically threw itself onto the screen screaming "ITS A BUG! DON'T DO IT!" what did he do? he uninstalled the AV and then wanted ME to fix it because "It says right there its the New Limewire so make it work dammit!"
So I'm sorry but as XP dies the days of the easy driveby are dying with it, replaced by an even easier target, lazy and or greedy and or stupid users.
The problem with this is damned near every ISP is going to caps which i'm sure will only get nastier, at least in the USA because by God charging assraping prices while not spending shit on infrastructure is in the constitution! And if its not citizens united will get around to it next week.
So either you 1.-pay assraping per Gb charges thanks to your pipes being loaded even when you aren't downloading or 2.-you can't download shit, either way they win.
The problem with freenet is it has yet to be tested in the courts and the way i had it explained to me you could possibly be looking at SERIOUS TIME depending on what state you are in and how fucked up their laws are.
Let me explain: if i hand you a wall safe and tell you to deliver it for me and the cops stop you and they find dope and kiddie porn in it from what i was told it doesn't matter if you didn't have the combination because they can STILL get you for delivery. By that same token if they are hunting for CP and download a piece of the file from your system likewise, again depending on how fucked up the laws are there, every state is different, they can just show the logs and you are guilty distributing CP, again it doesn't matter if you yourself could access it, only that a piece of CP (or even the whole file in the case of pics) came from your system.
so until their encrypted store and plausible deniability has been tested in court i'd be seriously fricking leery of using it, after all how would YOU like to be the test case if the court rules against you? Most states a single CP pic can get you over a decade now, and that is if they don't pile on the charges, I don't know about you but I don't think I'd be willing to take a chance at life in PMITA prison with the label of child molestor just in the hope that the courts would show common fricking sense.
Well I said downer because i still remember the 80s, when you had all these different choices like Commodore, Atari, Tandy, Sinclair, IBM, Apple, and for a little bit there it looked like we might have gotten that again, damned shame that we'll end up with another duopoly, only instead of Apple and MSFT it'll be Apple and Google.
And tell me friend, because I have yet to hear someone come up with a sensible answer, what ELSE was Elop supposed to do? The company was bleeding money, they had something like three phone OSes all fighting for people and resources, the company was a mess. HP had gotten WebOS, apple sure as hell isn't gonna license iOS, and before you say Android that would have been suicide because Samsung and Asus already had kick ass phones and tablets respectively so if they would have tried Android they would have been SOL. what they had in house simply wasn't up to competing with Android and iOS, so seriously what was left? What? MSFT practically gave them the OS AND the engineers AND an advertising budget AND a nice check to boot.
While its clear now there is simply no room for a third party at the time Elop had his balls in a sling and no product to compete with. I know there are fans of Symbian and Maemo here but be honest with yourself, there was no way in hell in the form they were in when Elop took over that they could compete with Google sinking a billion plus into android development and Apple having the buzz, just no way.
While many here may think Elop made a bad move i would argue he made the ONLY move he had left and considering MSFT's history of spending their way into a market frankly it wasn't a bad call, but even with all their money MSFT couldn't stop the twin juggernauts of iOS and Android so expecting Nokia to be able to do it with an in house OS is just ridiculous.
Non lead solder (makes devices fail a LOT faster thanks to tin whiskers thus making more landfill fodder), fat tax, sugar tax, pretty much ALL of the so called "sin taxes' came about because someone thought YOU were too stupid to make choices for yourself, you filthy dirty peasant you.
But are there enough "Linux hackers" that would bother to buy the thing? After all we've seen that Linux hackers would rather have the Windows Tax break than buy from places like System76 as the Newegg article from a few weeks back showed, and Open Moko didn't sell enough to make it worth doing, so I'm seriously doubtful there are enough hackers that give a shit about their phone OS to actually make this worthwhile.
After all if Linux hackers only bought from Linux vendors and bought open hardware we'd already have a market with such devices, but the fact that we don't leads me to believe there just isn't enough that care what runs on their phones. Hell without economy of scale on their side these things will probably be higher than a decent Android phone, not to mention I seriously doubt ANY carrier is gonna offer a hacker friendly phone on contract so it'll be full price city which averages $400-$600, at least around here. How many people are gonna pay that just to have a fully hackable phone? Raise of hands, how many here will be pre-ordering if they offer it?
Sorry to be a downer but without a major OEM like Samsung or Nokia behind it I just don't see any of these niche phones going anywhere, and that goes for WebOS, MozOS, and WinPhone as well.
Or maybe its due to the simple fact that your average IE user doesn't use tabs and therefor that is what the IE team targets their optimization towards while the others are targeting tabs?
Dealing with customers down at the shop I can tell you that IE users by and large don't have a damned clue about tabs and will instead open new windows so frankly its no surprise that single tabs would be where the IE devotes their time. Hell it took me over a year to teach my dad not to automatically go for a new window when i moved him away from IE a few years back and to this day he won't open more than 3, he says its "too cluttered' to have any more and will instead open a new instance and switch between.
As for the results while I'm glad to see the FF guys caring about memory, could we maybe get a fork that goes back to the old UI....please? I switch back and forth between Dragon and FF ESR because I still miss the fox but I just can't take the new UI and if they stick with what they've been showing its gonna end up a Metro mess around the first of next year, so can we please please PLEASE have a fork with the new memory management under the old UI...pretty please?
Well this is why we need a joke tab, because I have seen WAAAAY too many posts being deadly serious saying the same thing, just as i'm sure you saw RMS and his "I'm glad he's gone" bit about Jobs which frankly made me sick. And I'll have you know I did NOT remain silent and if you'll look up RMS story about Jobs on LinuxInsider i was quoted calling him out in the article by K. Noyes saying the very same thing, that whether you were a fan or not the man truly changed the world and deserved better than the sick shit RMS spewed.
And have you even imagined a world where there WAS no Windows? The average PC sells for $400, the people that buy those could NEVER afford a Mac. my customers are backhoe operators and checkout girls, a Mac might as well be $10,000 to them because they will NEVER be able to afford one. Know what my lowest systems go for? $120, and that gets you an offlease P4 with a Gb of RAM, a 17 inch CRT with speakers, keyboard, and optical mouse. And you know what? That is frankly all a lot of folks need, and for those that can't even afford that I refurb older systems and give those away, just so everyone can have a computer which I've seen first hand how much good they can do.
So while I appreciate you were making a joke (though again, hard to tell with all the "all go to hell except cave 76!" types out there) just remember that just because Windows is a "low rent" OS run by a frankly shitty CEO doesn't mean we should wish they would die out, we should wish that someone with a fucking brain will take over the company and take it back to what it USED to be good at, which is building easy to use OSes for the masses at affordable prices.
Most of those I've seen (At least on the Dells) are VERY limited and are pretty much "Cd/HDD/Restore/LAN" and very few have USB boot in that which is the preferred method for modern distros.
And again I would point out that if they have enough common sense they are gonna want to go in there ANYWAY since most machines from the factory have the HDDs set for "IDE Mode" which is more compatible but slower and since I do believe most Linux distros support AHCI it would be kinda stupid not to go ahead and turn it on.
But lets cut the shit and be honest, okay AC? Now do you REALLY think someone who doesn't even have enough skills to go into BIOS and set boot order is REALLY gonna have the skills to troubleshoot a Linux install when the first update borks their Wifi or they run into a Pulse audio problem, really? You can dumb down the installer all you want but I'm sure even the most die hard Linux advocate will admit it takes at least a LITTLE skill and common sense to run Linux as an everyday OS, and the people too fucking clueless to even flip a switch in BIOS? Really not gonna have the skills to keep Linux running for any length of time.
so either they themselves have enough sense or the person that is setting up and admining the machine for them has enough sense, in either case making the whole question moot.
Actually the ironic part is most will run Linux...and be just as locked down as WinARM. It seems more and more of the manufacturers have figured out its easier to make them replace the unit if they don't allow upgrades and since Android is strictly GPL V2 there is nothing to stop them from doing so.
You just have to be amazed at the sheer irony when some many get their panties in a twist over a version of Windows that most likelye won't ever sell above single digits and will end up being dumped on woot! like the touchpads when it is Android that ends up with MUCH more devices you can't get upgrades for that end up in the dumpster. Hell has anybody taken a count of how many Android devices there are out there without any way to upgrade to the latest version? i know in my own family we've gone through 3 Android phones so far that couldn't be updated and we aren't even a smartphone heavy family, if we went through 3 in 2 years i can imagine how many more are sitting in sock drawers right now because they can't run the new version.
And then I might as well use Win98 because the amount of resources required to make it functional and still keep security patches would cost millions....or i can just sell and support an OS that is a guaranteed 10 years of support and ignore your fiddly bullshit. Maybe NOW you see why people would rather steal the other guy's than have yours for free? hell you get longer support with a Hackentosh than with your average distro, thanks to Linus and his fellow fiddlers.
Not that you will bother, because I have a feeling i'm talking to a "follower of the one true way' which is about as likely to listen to reason as showing carbon dating to those that believe Adam rode a dino, but for everyone else there is this nice list with over 100 links published THIS YEAR so you can't claim "it's old, not like that anymore' showing just what I said which is YOUR SHIT BE BROKE BRO and pretending your shit be NOT broke is just that, pretending.
Now you can stick your head in the sand, pretend that Linus is smarter than the dev teams for BSD, OSX, Windows, and even OS/2 who ALL HAVE AN ABI but that don't make it reality, anymore than you pointing at a chicken and saying "its a cow!" will make it go moo. The reason your OS doesn't go anywhere unless a corp locks it down and puts it in embedded hardware (like Android) is precisely because Linux is a fiddly PITA without an ABI. Like it or lump it, really don't care at this point.
I have to agree and would add even my older customers switched away from desktop email more than half a decade ago. In fact come to think of it I haven't seen any desktop email on any computer going through the shop since around 2007. The only ones I ever see using desktop is the corporate ones using outlook and frankly they are using it more like a day planner and meeting scheduler than they are an email client.
So....yeah, can't say as i blame 'em, certainly that market hasn't done anything but shrink for over half a decade, hell I'm surprised they didn't just cut them loose like they did Seamonkey. If they did cut it loose other than some geeks at places like...well like this screaming about how much they use it (but then again i wouldn't be surprised if some of the guys here still use Gopher) most would probably go "Huh, they still make that?" and then go back to their Gmail on their smartphone.
Sadly friend i can tell you why it is so, its because like most IP crap nowadays the artists don't own the IP anymore with the vast majority of those old gaming houses going under during the dotbomb and getting bought up by vultures at fire sale prices. Frankly i wouldn't doubt the prices we were quoted were a good 25%-30% more than they paid for the ENTIRE COMPANY and it was obvious talking to these vultures if we couldn't give them iMoney for a title we could fuck off and die.
And I agree its a damned shame, as I said we didn't give a shit about trying to get rich or even making any money off of it, we just had kids that grew up after the days of shareware and wanted ours and other kids to be able to experience the fun we had, all those weird and quirky piles of games just as we experienced them then. it would have made it so you could just plug the stick into any PC or laptop and run them anytime, even saved if the original shareware title allowed saves. And we hoped that we could then provide links to the full titles at the websites of the current owners so we could get these old games saved from the abandonware piles, but alas greed destroys all. yet another reason why we can't have nice things thanks to shitty IP laws.
In the end frankly it won't matter whether we have 'em or they have 'em because as the resources run dry there WILL be more wars, only for dwindling supplies instead of beliefs. We simply haven't been able to come up with anything even close to replacing the fossil fuels, not to mention as populations increase, especially in the third world where things are unstable as fuck, well shit IS gonna happen and adding more nukes to the mix would NOT be a good thing.
The reason peace lasted so long between the USA and USSR was because we were frankly mirror images of each other. Both countries had plenty of resources, both countries had largely secular rulers and belief systems, both saw that the other was an even match for them and that MAD insured that even the winner would be seriously fucked up.
All that shit goes right out the window when you have hundreds of millions that believe WWIII will bring back their spiritual leader that will magically lay the enemy to waste and give them control of the planet. When you are dealing with THAT level of batshit frankly pointing out MAD would insure their homes glowed in the dark wouldn't do jack because they'd just argue right up until impact that their redeemer would turn the bombs into rainbows. Trying to put East/West ideology into that context is not only retarded but dangerous, because even Stalin wasn't keen on starting wars that he had no chance of winning.
That is not only petty and sad, its really pathetic. i'll have you know that most of us Windows guys actually felt sorry for your when you were stuck with one craptastic CEO after another and even though I've never owned an Apple product I happily tuned it to watch Job's first Stevenote as the returning CEO because I was actually happy for you, happy you got to see the incompetent thrown aside for someone who actually knew the product and what you wanted.
So maybe instead of wishing bad on other people you should ask yourself why, why does the product you like ONLY make you happy if you are running someone down, hmmm? maybe its that little niggling doubt you are only buying fashion, that just won't go away how many times you try to swat it with you iPad?
Tell me AC, or better yet give us a link to the ditros that "magically" set CD/USB as first boot? Because frankly i'd like to see THAT trick. I don't care how much you dumb down the installer you still have to set boot order since not a single OEM unit comes from the factory with anything other than HDD set for first boot because it slows down the system while it checks for boot media.
So they are gonna have to go to UEFI/BIOS ANYWAY to set boot, are they smart enough to set a fricking boot order but NOT smart enough to flip a simple yes/no? toggle switch? again i find that beyond ridiculous.
I'm sorry but unless you use newspeak freedom means the freedom to choose or NOT to choose, and the GPL V3 takes part of those freedoms away because you no longer have the right NOT to choose. i would argue that is why Linux will never go anywhere on the desktop, because religious dogma refuses to allow a hardware ABI and they make sure their kernel fiddling breaks shit constantly. Now i'm sure those in the kernel dev team think they can make supporting Linux such a PITA that everyone opens their drivers, but in reality many simply won't support you at all.
if you force me to share with my neighbors at the barrel of a gun, which is what all patents and copyrights are, using the big arm of government to give one group control of something that is neither scarce nor expensive to copy and allowing them to treat it as it is a scarce good, then that is STILL force no matter how much newspeak you use. just because YOU think that force is "good" doesn't change the fact that it is still force anyway you slice it.
My oldest is in pre-med and frankly i'm glad his school caps at 15 hours because otherwise he'd push himself so hard he'd end up burning out. I tried looking at those inorganic chemistry books and they may as well have been in German for all i could understand of those scribbles and he's taking physics and starting A&P on top, any more load and he'd burn.
so i'd say its really about what you are taking, with all the genetic manipulation and insanely complex medicines we have now frankly I'd rather doctors take a little longer and have time to absorb than have them rush and end up killing somebody later on.
How EXACTLY is this insightful? did Canonical stop bleeding money and get some major OEM deals i've not heard of? Last i checked they had a couple of low end units hidden on the back page of Dell, so they don't have anymore pull than "Bob's Distro" in that regard. hell looking at their number fall on distrowatch since Unity Mint would probably have a better shot of influencing the OEMs than canonical has at this point.
sorry but being a big fish in a little pond is a hell of a lot different than being a little fish in a big pond, and compared to OEM sales Canonical's ubuntu wouldn't even be considered a guppy. personally i blame the community for not supporting linux retailers like System76 and instead buying the cheaper Windows units and slapping whatever they wanted on after getting the in reality "Windows tax break" thanks to the trialware and economies of scale. if you want to affect a market you need to be counted, and you're not being counted when you buy Windows units folks, simple as that.
Not to mention there is a REASON that everyone seems to have forgotten as to why MSFT is worried about bootloaders and it ain't malware. Go to TPB and look up "Windows 7 SP1 X64 all versions pre-activated" and you'll find you can download and install Win 7 which WILL pass muster when it comes to updates, in fact it will even automatically uncheck the WGA update that could possibly block the pirate version from getting updates. Feel free to scan the ISO, you'll find that it passes clean with the exception of a few "keygens are naughty!" pop ups from AVs like...well MSE.
So while I personally would have fought piracy by making Win HP upgrade $50 and the Pro and Family Packs $100 you can see why they don't want anyone getting to the Windows bootloader as the pirates have figured out long ago how to completely ruin their shit when it comes to piracy. Hell the Win 7 pirate version is EASIER to install than the old Razr1911 Corporate XP, it doesn't even need a key! So you can bet your ass if Canonical or any other corp lets their keys slip they'll be banhammered majorly quickly. While nobody in the home will give a shit and will just bypass Secureboot for BSA audits it makes it damned easy to spot those pirated Win pro stations because they'll stick out like a sore thumb. One switch to secureboot and they will fail, and then they can pay up for running hot software. Again not how i would have done it, but ultimately its their OS and they can do what they want.
Ubuntu 12 and the PCLOS and Mepis version from the same period new enough for you? The same problems exist, if you'd like a list then here you go, please note this article is the 2012 Edition and he has provided over a hundred links to exactly the same problems i have talked about at length so no need for me to rehash them.
You can stick your head in the sand and go "la la la" all you want but when people would rather risk stealing the other guy's product than taking yours for free? Well i'm sorry but that should be a giant cluebat to the side of the head that you have problems, problems that just don't exist on headless clusters.
Yes but unlike the others I have this thing called a brain which can do this thing call deductive reasoning, I know its a concept, but try to follow: 1.-you have only ONE company that is having their user's emails used in this manner, 2.- That SAME company is seeing a HUGE spike in spam, 3.-That same company is the ONLY one seeing emails with Android headers, 4.-While at the same time an EQUAL NUMBER of spam emails coming through that have no Android headers. 5.-While a Joe Job wouldn't be targeting Yahoo of all people when the target of the job is google, not when google has their own wildly popular webmail address which would cause greater embarrassment.
I'm sorry friend but it don't take Kojack to solve this case as the ONLY COMPANY that is seeing this huge spike across the board is Yahoo which means the odds of it being a Joe Job is VERY low and the odds of it being a Yahoo fuckup, possibly with their yahoo Android and desktop app is VERY high. It just common sense friend, damned shame its practically a superpower now.
I wish that were so friend, but according to a lawyer that is an old friend of my buddy who was gonna do it with me frankly it didn't matter what kind of rights were on the original CDs as they could just bury us in motions and break us, we just didn't have the kind of money to afford standing up to lawsuits. And we made it VERY clear we didn't desire ANY rights to the games themselves, nor were we asking permission to distribute the full versions, we even offered to help work for free on a DOSBox version of the full game they could sell on their website which we would have happily linked to.
No friend I wish I could chalk it up to something else but in the end it was simply PHB greed that made sure your kids can't pick up a Shareware Stick and got to try all those quirky shareware titles and even buy the full versions from the rights holders, which we had planned to provide full links to and made it clear that "If you liked the shareware version you should try the full game!" but these companies were bought up long ago by vultures at firesale prices when the bottom fell out of the shareware market and now they would rather just sit on the IP than allow even the original shareware titles to be distributed without giving them a check for probably more than they paid for the entire company.
But if you were to try distributing new copies of those old discs according to our lawyer friend you WILL be sued, and no matter what the license.txt says you will still have to pay for a couple of years worth of lawyer's fee and court motions, we just couldn't afford that. Just one more nice thing we can't have due to insane copyright laws.
Thanks friend, i'm surprised how many seem to keep ignoring that, but that was the ENTIRE POINT, to recreate the days of shareware and just like the days of shareware we would have had links going back to the parent companies for the full games. hell we even offered to donate our time to get their full game up and running in DOSBox so they could have it pre-packaged and ready to sell on their website for whatever price they chose, it would have been practically free money for them. they would have not only gotten a cut of every Shareware Stick we sold, they would have had the FULL SALES of any complete copies they sold, without us getting a red cent of those.
Hell we figured the MAX we would get is 25c a stick which would have been used to buy more shareware discs and contact more companies. We had hopes of making genre sticks, best of shware puzzlers, platformers, megasticks with dozens or hundreds of games like the big Win95 CDs, and frankly we wouldn't have been making jack shit it was ALL gonna be going to the companies that made the games, we just wanted to make it easy for folks to play them again.
In the end it just shows what uncontrolled greed leaves you with, nothing but worthless IP. Most of the game designers were long gone, the companies bought up ages ago and passing through a dozen hands until it ended up with some PHB who looked at every old piece of code like it was Donkey kong, damned shame that we couldn't have shared our childhood with everyone else by letting them see what shareware was like, but that's greed for ya.
Friend I have a Win 8 CP machine set up in the shop for everyone from tweeners to little old ladies to play with as they shop, know what I found? That this is a typical reaction only with more frustration than that sweet old lady gets. i don't care if it was the business guys or backhoe operators, insurance saleswomen or Suzy the checkout girl ALL OF THEM couldn't figure out fuck all to do with that damned OS.
More speed isn't gonna help you if all it does is lets you get nowhere fast, and that is Win 8 in a nutshell. its just not intuitive, not discoverable,, has ZERO help in the way of tooltips or tutorials that would help the lost users, its just a fricking mess.