Ya know, either the community needs to admit they are paranoid or that they think Linux users are really really REALLY dumb. because the doom scenario you are expecting us to believe is that someone who 1.-Even knows what Linux is, and 2.-Decides they want it and have the skills to install their own OS as well as 3.-Download and burn their own installation media is 4.- Too fucking dumb to flip a single switch in BIOS/UEFI. I'm sorry but you can't have your cake and eat it too, either they are smart enough to install Linux and thus smart enough to flip a single switch or they are not, can't be both at once.
Look the ONLY ONES that are gonna give a rat's ass about having Secureboot on is the corps okay? it gives them one more level of CYA if something nasty happens on their network whereas the home users that want to run linux will have to go into UEFI/BIOS ANYWAY to set the DVD/USB as first boot so flipping that single switch? really not a problem. WinARM is not gonna allow you to turn it off because MSFT is most likely gonna take a fricking bath to the tune of hundreds of millions on the hardware, just as they did on the X360, by going for the razor and blades model in the hopes they can make it up with the appstore (they won't, but they can hope all they want) and we all know the net would be ass deep in "How to remove that fugly ass Win 8 and make that tablet into a cool Android tablet".
Look its not like you don't have choices here, if the very thought of UEFI makes your panties get twisted? Then do the smart thing and buy AMD which frankly every damned FOSS users needs to do anyway as they have been bending over backwards to open their code, because AMD chose Coreboot over Intel's UEFI which is of course FOSS so hack away friend.
so would everyone stop getting their panties in a twist over something that is gonna be as easy to switch as whether you boot from IDE or SATA already? it makes everyone look like a bunch of nutters and frankly that's RMS job and I hear he don't like the competition.
But you see we were asking for NO RIGHTS other than the right to put it on the stick, that's all. no IP rights, no right to even put our names on the stick other than whatever plug the DOSBox guys might have given us because that would have been there under creators instead. We offered to give them links to any product they wanted to sell, contact info, anything they wanted without asking to do anymore than those original CDs did back in the day, simply offer them up to people at a cheap price. hell we weren't even gonna ask for the rights to use any of their images in the artwork, instead letting them choose whether they wanted to put something from their game or a logo or not.
so they went from getting an equal cut of every cent over the cost to...nothing. absolutely fucking nothing. Not a SINGLE ONE of the games we were looking at had been in print or sold anywhere for ANY price since the days of Win95, in fact we had gone out of our way to buy up old as the hills shareware discs to purposely find the weird quirky crap you'd find on the discs back then. And I'd remind you that the whole point of those original shareware discs was to sell a taste of a game and link back to the owner with contact info so they could sell you the complete game, not to get the same price as the next Gears Of War, yet that was EXACTLY what these companies wanted. To put just 5 games on the stick we would have had to sell each stick for more than D3, do you HONESTLY think anybody is gonna pay diablo 3 money for a game running in DOSBox that hasn't been touched in 20-25 years?
Meh I'll get hate for saying this but fuck it, truth is truth. Ya wanna know what is REALLY sad? All the Win 8 apologists have damned near copypasta'd their apologies word for word from the more militant members of the FOSS community. You get the classics like "You don't need that" (except if we didn't we wouldn't be asking for it ass), "Our way is better" (without any concrete reasons WHY of course), "Flash is proprietary crap, all must embrace HTML V5" (while ignoring the creation tools aren't there and it still is used by millions daily), its a hit parade of excuses.
In the end while I have no doubt some will like Win 8, after all i know a couple of old folks that actually liked WinME, I'd say that the way to spot either a batshit softie or a paid shill is anybody that defends Ballmer. I mean look at his track record folks, he has blown, what? 20 BILLION on bad deals that have gotten MSFT exactly nowhere? Hell what has he done that wasn't at least a partial failure? you can't even count the X360 because he rushed that out with a fatal flaw that cost them 2 billion bucks! When you look at the man's track record, Zune, Kin, killing playsforsure which had actually given them an inroad into the media market, the X360 flaw, Vista, blowing shitloads on companies that he knew fuck all what to do with, if you would have taken a chimp and left it to fling its own poo at the stock page and then bought major amounts of any stock whose listing was heavily covered in monkey shit I have NO doubt you would have made more money for MSFT than the man who has led the company for the last decade!
So lets make this dupe into something worthwhile, how about it? lets here from all the guys inside MSFT, are you as fucking frustrated at this lame "Me too!" half ass Apple ripping off by your employer? Is the culture there so filled with PHBs and bullshit you wanna puke? What about Ballmer? Does his direction in any way inspire you, or are you like the rest of us and just wishing he'd go away?
While you wrote a nice post and nailed it right on the money, in the future you might want to know there is actually a name for what you are describing and its the smart cow problem which frankly I see all the time at the shop. All it takes is ONE guy, be it a "smart buddy that knows computers" or even just somebody that knows how to use a search engine effectively to make all their little roadblocks completely fricking worthless.
Because, unlike the paranoid FOSSie who thinks I'm trying to besmirch his "precious" FOSS which is ironic as fuck since the browser I'm running is based on Chromium, I run into these things and try to keep an eye out for them because that is what my customers run into at the shop.
As for how I know? Because just as email from an iPhone says it comes from an iPhone so too does email from Android, and as I said the amount of Yahoo spams I've seen has gone WAY up as of late and looking at these spams they seem to be pretty evenly spread between Android and just regular Yahoo users.
Now if it was a "Joe Job" as the "Google Yay!" crowd around here is trying to claim why would BOTH kinds of spam go up? And why ONLY Yahoo spam with the Android tag, not Hotmail or Gmail? Why would spam suddenly spike from Yahoo, but not Gmail or Hotmail if it WAS an Android bug?
Because while there may BE a bug in Android, i'm not an embedded OS programmer so I have no clue what's going on in their code, the fact that it is ONLY Yahoo that I'm seeing makes me believe its a Yahoo problem not an Android one.
Sigh, I just wish I had saved the emails from when I tried talking to some of these defunct game rights holders, because it would have been a perfect example of why we need shorter copyrights and a "use it or lose it"clause but frankly after spending nearly 6 months TRYING to deal with them frankly they just made me wanna puke.
I probably better explain...anybody remember those old shareware discs we got during the days of Win3.x-Win98? You know, those ones filled with cheesy little games from all over the place? Well me and a buddy had the idea that because you can't play those anymore without major hoop jumping that is frankly beyond most, and that is if you can even find the games in the first place, that we'd cook up a nice little GUI frontend to DOSBox and sell flash sticks with these shareware games on them, just to let folks who never got to have that see what it was like and for old farts to have a trip down memory lane.
Now we of course never expected to make any money off of that, any changes to DOSBox would of course been GPLed and the price we were gonna go for was a few bucks over cost plus shipping with the few bucks being split between the guys that had wrote the shareware titles. For us it was strictly a labor of love thing, both me and my friend had kids and we wanted to let them see what it was like when we were their age, so what happened?
We quickly found out that even with games that hadn't been in print in 20+ years and that frankly never sold worth a shit in the first place (we're not talking Doom here folks, we are talking those cheesy knockoffs and platformers and puzzlers) that when we found the owners the amount of sheer fucking insane levels of greed was beyond nuts. There were several wanting 4 and 5 figures up front NOT for the code, NOT for even the complete game, but just for the right to use the original shareware! And many wanted the rights to OUR code on top! The sad part is we also found that we could just go the Chinamart route and say fuck the IP bullshit and get it done that way.
In the end we just gave up, and likely that is what they'll have to do in TFA. With copyright law as it is your grandkids will be in the nursing home before these games are PD, if they EVER are, and the ones that end up with the rights act like every 5th rate game that was placed on a floppy or CD with a dozen other games should bring in the kind of revenue it would have if it was Ms Pacman. Good luck dealing with these greedy bastards friend, because they would rather not do a damned thing with it than settle for less than what a AAA game would go for, I swear its fucking insanity!
As hot as its been across most of the USA you are looking at...pastries? Bah, get you a nice ice cold watermelon! Its sweet and good for you as well, and nothing helps beat the heat like a nice cold slice of watermelon!
As for TFA? sigh, *.A.As are clueless greedy douchebags, film at 11. Seriously there was piracy since the days of the BBS, trying to win with the stick will NEVER work because the geeks are all smarter than the greedy douchebags. No the way you "beat" piracy is to give them MORE for their money so pirated frankly becomes not worth the effort.
Take Valve for example, they have crazy sales, take care of all the updates and MP, built in chat, I used to know tons of guys pirating games, now they are all on Steam. With Steam its just so damned easy and cheap there really isn't much of a point to pirate, not when there are literally hundreds of games on any day for under $10 a pop, I mean why bother? We humans are naturally lazy creatures, you make something cheap and easy enough we will take the easy path.
There is no damned reason why the movie and TV companies couldn't do the same damned thing except they are just too fucking greedy for their own good. What I want is bog standard DivX or H.264 MKVs so they'll play anywhere and be hardware accelerated on my netbook or run on my dad's Nbox and I want them at a decent price with specials just like you get on Steam.
Instead we get the choice of 1.-Buy DVD which depending on the show can be insane (anybody looked at what some of the Star trek series go for? Jesus tap dancing Christ!), 2.-wait for the discs to get here and hope the UPS monkeys don't use them for a tire chuck, 3.-Take the time and tie up our PCs ripping them into a format we can actually use, 4.- watch them. Or alternatively we can 1.-Go to TPB and download in the format we want, 2.-watch them.
Now which one of those sounds easier to you? Piracy is simply the market telling you UR DOIN IT WRONG and your prices are too high, you're not providing what the customer considers a good value, or you aren't offering the product the customer wants to buy, that's all. While they will never wipe out piracy they could sure as hell cut down a lot of it if they made things cheap and easy for the customers but their never ending greed and desire to squeeze every single penny they can get per sale simply won't let that happen, kinda like EA with Origin which is nothing but EA trying to force PC games to keep the higher prices of console games for as long as possible. Never underestimate the ability for corps to shoot themselves in the foot i suppose, as it does seem to be what they are good at.
It don't smell like a Joe Job to me, its smells like another Yahoo bug. Those that read one of my previous journal entries here knows that there was a bug that would let anyone surfing with FF who had a Yahoo account send spam thanks to a hidden iFrame, and frankly looking at my spam folder there is a LOT, I mean a hell of a lot, of spam both coming from Android and from regular but with ONE thing in common...Yahoo.
I have to wonder if the spammers haven't found a way to use the same bug they used on FF on Android, because yahoo's new layout seems especially weak to this form of attack it makes more sense that they are using a browser hack than having the entire Android system compromised but who knows? There are a hell of a lot of older Android versions out there, maybe they found a weakspot in the 2.x line and are hitting it.
But in the end somebody needs to be talking to the security guys at Yahoo and find out what they are using to hit their emails, be it a browser hack or something nastier.
If by "failure" you mean refusing to change his beliefs no matter how many checks get waved at him? well then i guess you'd call him a failure.
Sadly having principles in such a corrupted system will get you a record no different than his, because he won't "sweeten the pot" to get his way, pile on the pork or "play ball" which is why every damned bill that gets passed has so much shit added its not even funny anymore.
Why did this get marked down? Has nobody been watching since Cook took the big chair? Turning FCP into iMovie pro, dragging ass when it comes to updating the pro line (and when they did it was still behind the curve BAD), killing the server line, its pretty damned obvious that while Jobs liked the idea that "The movies are made on Apple products" that Cook? He really don't give a shit.
Mark my words within 2 years the pro line will be quietly canned, probably with some press release stating the iPad is the new Pro tool or some such BS, and the line will be trimmed down to maybe 2 Macbooks and a couple of iMacs and that's it. Frankly I wouldn't be surprised if Cook exits X86 altogether, its just not nearly as high margin as mobile and its controlled by Intel and NOT Apple which has never set well with Apple.
Frankly when Intel slit Nvidia's throat on the chipset business i figured it was the beginning of the end for Apple X86, Apple and Nvidia had a nice relationship and Intel just killing it like that couldn't have made any friends at Cupertino. Then you look into Cook's past, how he likes to lock parts up with multiyear contracts so they know what is coming when and how much and having their X86 line dictated by Intel must not sit nice with them. They should have went with AMD where they would have had more pull but seeing what Apple has been doing in the pro line I have a feeling Cook will just wash his hands of X86 completely instead.
Already seen that thanks. if you want to see the difference between a true leader, ruthless bastard though he was, and Ballmer you should read the yellow road to Cairo where with NOTHING but screenshots and pure bullshit Gates managed to keep the entire industry waiting on MSFT while causing corps with actual selling products to flop because he would lay on the BS so thick everyone looked at the fake screenshots and turned up their nose at the actual products.
Now was that a nice thing to do? Fuck no it wasn't, but it showed what kind of uber sized brass balls Gates was swinging and further shows just how truly pathetic Ballmer is compared to Gates. Gates, Jobs, and Ellison are just in a class by themselves, while Ballmer is the jester doing a little dance and hoping people will buy the shtick, he just doesn't deserve the big chair.
I never understood why everyone acts like this is a big deal, i mean would you be surprised if a moped gets good gas mileage or a truck has good hauling capacity?
Its really REALLY simple folks: Linux is good for embedded, for large clusters (like what CERN uses i'm sure) and for web hosting. Windows is good for desktops, laptops, and small business servers, Apple is good for consumer devices like tablets and phones.
See how easy that is? You don't try to drive in screws with a hammer and you don't run large clusters on Windows, that's just not what its good at. Linux is VERY good at that, so why would that be news? This just in, the guys at CERN use the best tool for the job, film at 11.
How do you explain covering up the PMC that was selling little boys as sex toys to get contracts, and had done the same in Kosovo with little girls? Look up "Bachi Bazi" on Wikileaks (not sure if I spelled it right, Google will check it for you) and you'll see the USA has been doing some pretty fucking evil shit friend.
Missing the point friend which is to make him an EXAMPLE so as to ensure the next one that gets their hands on something like that is too scared to publish shit.
And before anyone says I'm paranoid they may want to look up COINTELPRO and see that we have ALREADY executed at least one American on American soil, without trial or even so much as the killers getting jail time, as well as had the POTUS issue a death warrant for an American overseas without even so much as a trial in absentia, So if you think the gov is just gonna play nice I have some magic beans you might be interested in .
Sorry AC but you are missing the point. When money gets to gates level it is no longer about the money its about the POWER and his foundation has been using their money to ensure the power stays in the hands of multinationals (like MSFT, Monsanto, big pharma) and out of the hands of the people. this ensures the status quo and makes sure USA patents and copyrights will be upheld in these countries which benefits Bill directly, not to mention all the stock I'm sure he has in the other megacorps like Monstanto and big pharma.
Uhhh, Dale Bumpers was from AR not KN, and all we ever elect here are pro business DINOs and RINOs so expecting to call ANY elected official from AR a D or an R is kinda pointless, just FYI.
Man PLEASE don't bring up WinFS, that thing STILL pisses me off! Have you seen the demo they had for it? Imagine a SMART file system, where you could type in "girl in a yellow dress" and the OS would know WTF you are talking about and instantly pop up any videos or pictures you had that had girls in yellow dresses. Any files it had problems with it would ask you about and once you put in the metadata that was it, no more trying to remember WTF you called a file or using old school wildcards, it would all be cataloged and ready to go!
The sad part is if they could get stuff like THAT to market it would probably cause a new PC explosion because one demo of that and they'd be lining up to hand MSFT their money, but as you said they can't ever seen to get the really cool stuff out of the drawing room and into the showroom.
The other guy said get her an iPad but that's bunk, wanna know what would be perfect for her? Something like this, its cheap, 12 inches seems to be the perfect size from dealing with older customers, and it lets her get comfy anywhere and do her email on the Wifi.
But as someone who builds new PCs and sells used as well I can tell you another problem isn't just the speed factor, its that most multicores are more than powerful enough for the average person and they just don't die like they used to. I have several customers with early Athlon X2 and Core Duos and frankly they just can't stress the chips, hence they just don't die. hell i sold my full size laptop for a 12 inch E350, why? Because when i'm mobile I'm frankly not stressing even the E350 and that is one of the weakest chips out there, my surfing just can't push it.
The only reason we are seeing such growth in mobile is they too are having a MHz war but it already looks to be coming to an end, with not heat but battery life becoming the issue. When that happens you'll see the same thing we are seeing now in PCs, people not replacing a unit until they die, although mobile will have a higher turnover simply because its easier to step on your phone or drop it down the stairs than it is your laptop.
Sorry I should have made it more clear, I was talking more the home users and SMBs and not the hardcore, which i will grant you do always need more memory. but even with that I've found at a certain point the apps just aren't keeping up. Funny you should mention DDR 2 as I have 8Gb of DDR 2 in my Hexacore and while it'll support 16Gb as you know the DDR 2 4Gb sticks are just not worth the money. But I have found even with plenty of bling on with Win 7 I rarely get above 1.5Gb of RAM in usage, with 3Gb-4Gb being a rare occurance so having 4 sticks at 2Gb each is more than plenty to keep my hexa fed.
Oh and if you are having trouble finding a board that won't take plenty of DDR 2 you should look at the Asrock boards, I went for this one myself which took the 8Gb I had left from my quad and supports 16Gb as well as crossfire, nice board. If I ever need more memory I'll probably bump up to a DDR 3 or 4 if I can find one that takes my hexa as I'm not happy with the new AMD designs but I have a feeling it'll be a few years before i end up with any bottlenecks due to RAM or CPU.
Actually I've been dealing with that problem and home consumers quite nicely here at the shop, as any $15 GPU can give you full hardware flash acceleration and nearly every PC from 2006 on up has a PCIe slot. Take any HD4650 or HD5450 and you have plenty of RAM for the GPU and fully accelerated H.264, Flash, and DivX which is the three main formats people watch nowadays so there really is no reason to replace that Athlon X2, Phenom I, or Core Duo as its simply cheaper to pay a guy like me to slap in a GPU and call it a day. hell even the wimpiest PSUs can support those cards with ease and with the latest codec pack from AMD its plug and play, hassle free.
Well I DID read TFA and basically its just the word "foundation" wrapped around a lobbying group. Surprise surprise, rich people that reach the level of Gates, Jobs, and Ellison are greedy self serving douchebags, news at 11.
I mean who didn't know that? while I'll give him credit for using what must be a ripped off copy of Job's old RDF when it came to the foundation, seriously guys, who did NOT know the uber rich are greedy soulless self serving douchebags? You see those of us that DO have a soul, and thus a conscience, couldn't actually stomach sitting on billions of dollars while knowing the guy down the street is praying his 92 Dodge stuck on the side of the road will start because if it don't and he misses a day of work he's gonna be homeless, we just couldn't do it.
Hell I'm not rich by ANY means yet I've given away more computers and more of my time than I could ever count, and not taken a cent off of anything because that is not what it was for it was for making someone else's life a little bit better, for helping some single mom or as I've been doing with the guy downstairs helping a guy who has nothing become computer literate. Has someone like Gates EVER invited someone who had no place to go into his home for Xmas dinner? I doubt it,and before anyone asks yes I have, but I didn't do it for any type of credit or recognition, I did it because it was the right thing to do.
So while I'm glad the RDF is starting to fail on the foundation I'm frankly not surprised its a greedy self serving foundation because i have yet to see a single one of the billionaires that aren't just as I described, more sociopath than normal person by a LONG shot. Hell Jobs fucked over Woz with the Atari sale and he was supposed to be Jobs best friend and without him he would have never had a company, I'm sure if you looked into Gates and Ellison you'd find just as many cases of them royally fucking over people that were honestly trying to be friendly and help them when they were starting out. The pure unadulterated greed required to get to that level, to truly be one of the 1%, just requires a viciousness that most of us thankfully do not possess.
It tells ME that you don't know jack squat about the market because other than system builders like myself (who wish they would sell a $50 HP system builders, hint hint MSFT) most folks will simply buy from an OEM, be it a little guy like me or a big OEM like Dell and frankly won't know nor care?
MSFT doesn't raise prices on upgrades because the same guys that actually DO upgrade can pirate just as well. MSFT DID raise the price on the big OEMs last I checked, something like 25% for the current version of Windows compared to what XP was. And that is where they make their money friend, in fact i wouldn't be surprised to see MSFT lower prices for the upgrade to speed adoption, just as they did with Win 7 with the $50 Win 7 HP upgrade and the $100 Family Packs.
Won't happen friend because the ISPs will just label screwing you on bandwidth "free speech" and good luck with being able to do squat in the cloud without bandwidth. to do what you are suggesting we'd need a good 40Mbps connection standard both ways, and there is very few places in the USA that are anywhere close to that. might work in parts of Asia, not planetwide.
Actually the chart is telling, but not in the way you think. Look at the peak, between 2004 and 2006, what happened then? The end of the MHz war because of the thermal barrier and the rise of the multicore, that's what.
I know plenty of folks and even plenty of businesses on first gen Phenom Is and Core duos, are they poor? Nope there is just nothing they do that stresses those chips which are now over 5 years old. look at that chart again and see how quickly it was climbing when AMD and Intel were topping each other in speed with every release, then look at how much faster it drops around 2007 when multicores became cheap for the masses.
In the end the reason why those numbers simply aren't keeping up with Apple is there is no reason to replace PCs anymore whereas Apple is going through their OWN MHz race in the mobile sector. Also thanks to the switchover to intel nobody has to choose "either/or" anymore so they can just pick up a copy of OEM Windows and run bootcamp (which your chart doesn't figure in, only new PCs sold) while still having the hipness of the frankly nicer looking Apple hardware.
Mark my words if you produce a chart for ARM 5 years from now you'll see the same thing, as i predict they will run into their own wall in less than 3, only instead of thermal it'll be battery life. Then just like with PCs people will simply keep them until they die, although naturally their sales will be a little higher as its easier for your dog to eat your phone than your desktop.
I think there is an even better comparison...AOL. For awhile AOL practically ruled the consumer Internet market but even when they got products like WinAmp that were insanely popular they smothered them to death because EVERYTHING had to tie into "the service" and it got to the point everyone working there either quit or just quit giving a fuck.And just like MSFT AOL found themselves in charge of a market that simply stop growing and although it won't just die as dialup did it'll never be as big as mobile is ever again.
You look at everything MSFT is doing right now and its the same thing, they just keep trying to tie everything into Windows and Office even if it doesn't make any sense. i mean including Office on WinARM when they haven't even included AD or GPO support? Its a fricking consumer OS, it makes no damned sense! But some PHB said it HAS to tie in, hence Office.
Sadly looking back I'd have to say the best damned thing that could have happened to MSFT would have been if the courts would have split them up, because with so many groups fighting among themselves and so many things being pushed to tie into the two sacred cows of MS Windows and Office they really are backed into a corner there. If mobile would have been split off from Windows maybe they wouldn't have given us a decade of teeny tiny start buttons on WinCE devices, nor would we be seeing Ballmer taking a crap on the desktop just so he can try to gain a couple of shares in the smartphone arena.
Anyway you look at it while MSFT has a steady revenue with their sacred cows there is just no growth there and with the corporate culture its looking more and more doubtful they will be able to branch out.
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Ya know, either the community needs to admit they are paranoid or that they think Linux users are really really REALLY dumb. because the doom scenario you are expecting us to believe is that someone who 1.-Even knows what Linux is, and 2.-Decides they want it and have the skills to install their own OS as well as 3.-Download and burn their own installation media is 4.- Too fucking dumb to flip a single switch in BIOS/UEFI. I'm sorry but you can't have your cake and eat it too, either they are smart enough to install Linux and thus smart enough to flip a single switch or they are not, can't be both at once.
Look the ONLY ONES that are gonna give a rat's ass about having Secureboot on is the corps okay? it gives them one more level of CYA if something nasty happens on their network whereas the home users that want to run linux will have to go into UEFI/BIOS ANYWAY to set the DVD/USB as first boot so flipping that single switch? really not a problem. WinARM is not gonna allow you to turn it off because MSFT is most likely gonna take a fricking bath to the tune of hundreds of millions on the hardware, just as they did on the X360, by going for the razor and blades model in the hopes they can make it up with the appstore (they won't, but they can hope all they want) and we all know the net would be ass deep in "How to remove that fugly ass Win 8 and make that tablet into a cool Android tablet".
Look its not like you don't have choices here, if the very thought of UEFI makes your panties get twisted? Then do the smart thing and buy AMD which frankly every damned FOSS users needs to do anyway as they have been bending over backwards to open their code, because AMD chose Coreboot over Intel's UEFI which is of course FOSS so hack away friend.
so would everyone stop getting their panties in a twist over something that is gonna be as easy to switch as whether you boot from IDE or SATA already? it makes everyone look like a bunch of nutters and frankly that's RMS job and I hear he don't like the competition.
But you see we were asking for NO RIGHTS other than the right to put it on the stick, that's all. no IP rights, no right to even put our names on the stick other than whatever plug the DOSBox guys might have given us because that would have been there under creators instead. We offered to give them links to any product they wanted to sell, contact info, anything they wanted without asking to do anymore than those original CDs did back in the day, simply offer them up to people at a cheap price. hell we weren't even gonna ask for the rights to use any of their images in the artwork, instead letting them choose whether they wanted to put something from their game or a logo or not.
so they went from getting an equal cut of every cent over the cost to...nothing. absolutely fucking nothing. Not a SINGLE ONE of the games we were looking at had been in print or sold anywhere for ANY price since the days of Win95, in fact we had gone out of our way to buy up old as the hills shareware discs to purposely find the weird quirky crap you'd find on the discs back then. And I'd remind you that the whole point of those original shareware discs was to sell a taste of a game and link back to the owner with contact info so they could sell you the complete game, not to get the same price as the next Gears Of War, yet that was EXACTLY what these companies wanted. To put just 5 games on the stick we would have had to sell each stick for more than D3, do you HONESTLY think anybody is gonna pay diablo 3 money for a game running in DOSBox that hasn't been touched in 20-25 years?
Meh I'll get hate for saying this but fuck it, truth is truth. Ya wanna know what is REALLY sad? All the Win 8 apologists have damned near copypasta'd their apologies word for word from the more militant members of the FOSS community. You get the classics like "You don't need that" (except if we didn't we wouldn't be asking for it ass), "Our way is better" (without any concrete reasons WHY of course), "Flash is proprietary crap, all must embrace HTML V5" (while ignoring the creation tools aren't there and it still is used by millions daily), its a hit parade of excuses.
In the end while I have no doubt some will like Win 8, after all i know a couple of old folks that actually liked WinME, I'd say that the way to spot either a batshit softie or a paid shill is anybody that defends Ballmer. I mean look at his track record folks, he has blown, what? 20 BILLION on bad deals that have gotten MSFT exactly nowhere? Hell what has he done that wasn't at least a partial failure? you can't even count the X360 because he rushed that out with a fatal flaw that cost them 2 billion bucks! When you look at the man's track record, Zune, Kin, killing playsforsure which had actually given them an inroad into the media market, the X360 flaw, Vista, blowing shitloads on companies that he knew fuck all what to do with, if you would have taken a chimp and left it to fling its own poo at the stock page and then bought major amounts of any stock whose listing was heavily covered in monkey shit I have NO doubt you would have made more money for MSFT than the man who has led the company for the last decade!
So lets make this dupe into something worthwhile, how about it? lets here from all the guys inside MSFT, are you as fucking frustrated at this lame "Me too!" half ass Apple ripping off by your employer? Is the culture there so filled with PHBs and bullshit you wanna puke? What about Ballmer? Does his direction in any way inspire you, or are you like the rest of us and just wishing he'd go away?
While you wrote a nice post and nailed it right on the money, in the future you might want to know there is actually a name for what you are describing and its the smart cow problem which frankly I see all the time at the shop. All it takes is ONE guy, be it a "smart buddy that knows computers" or even just somebody that knows how to use a search engine effectively to make all their little roadblocks completely fricking worthless.
Because, unlike the paranoid FOSSie who thinks I'm trying to besmirch his "precious" FOSS which is ironic as fuck since the browser I'm running is based on Chromium, I run into these things and try to keep an eye out for them because that is what my customers run into at the shop.
As for how I know? Because just as email from an iPhone says it comes from an iPhone so too does email from Android, and as I said the amount of Yahoo spams I've seen has gone WAY up as of late and looking at these spams they seem to be pretty evenly spread between Android and just regular Yahoo users.
Now if it was a "Joe Job" as the "Google Yay!" crowd around here is trying to claim why would BOTH kinds of spam go up? And why ONLY Yahoo spam with the Android tag, not Hotmail or Gmail? Why would spam suddenly spike from Yahoo, but not Gmail or Hotmail if it WAS an Android bug?
Because while there may BE a bug in Android, i'm not an embedded OS programmer so I have no clue what's going on in their code, the fact that it is ONLY Yahoo that I'm seeing makes me believe its a Yahoo problem not an Android one.
Sigh, I just wish I had saved the emails from when I tried talking to some of these defunct game rights holders, because it would have been a perfect example of why we need shorter copyrights and a "use it or lose it"clause but frankly after spending nearly 6 months TRYING to deal with them frankly they just made me wanna puke.
I probably better explain...anybody remember those old shareware discs we got during the days of Win3.x-Win98? You know, those ones filled with cheesy little games from all over the place? Well me and a buddy had the idea that because you can't play those anymore without major hoop jumping that is frankly beyond most, and that is if you can even find the games in the first place, that we'd cook up a nice little GUI frontend to DOSBox and sell flash sticks with these shareware games on them, just to let folks who never got to have that see what it was like and for old farts to have a trip down memory lane.
Now we of course never expected to make any money off of that, any changes to DOSBox would of course been GPLed and the price we were gonna go for was a few bucks over cost plus shipping with the few bucks being split between the guys that had wrote the shareware titles. For us it was strictly a labor of love thing, both me and my friend had kids and we wanted to let them see what it was like when we were their age, so what happened?
We quickly found out that even with games that hadn't been in print in 20+ years and that frankly never sold worth a shit in the first place (we're not talking Doom here folks, we are talking those cheesy knockoffs and platformers and puzzlers) that when we found the owners the amount of sheer fucking insane levels of greed was beyond nuts. There were several wanting 4 and 5 figures up front NOT for the code, NOT for even the complete game, but just for the right to use the original shareware! And many wanted the rights to OUR code on top! The sad part is we also found that we could just go the Chinamart route and say fuck the IP bullshit and get it done that way.
In the end we just gave up, and likely that is what they'll have to do in TFA. With copyright law as it is your grandkids will be in the nursing home before these games are PD, if they EVER are, and the ones that end up with the rights act like every 5th rate game that was placed on a floppy or CD with a dozen other games should bring in the kind of revenue it would have if it was Ms Pacman. Good luck dealing with these greedy bastards friend, because they would rather not do a damned thing with it than settle for less than what a AAA game would go for, I swear its fucking insanity!
As hot as its been across most of the USA you are looking at...pastries? Bah, get you a nice ice cold watermelon! Its sweet and good for you as well, and nothing helps beat the heat like a nice cold slice of watermelon!
As for TFA? sigh, *.A.As are clueless greedy douchebags, film at 11. Seriously there was piracy since the days of the BBS, trying to win with the stick will NEVER work because the geeks are all smarter than the greedy douchebags. No the way you "beat" piracy is to give them MORE for their money so pirated frankly becomes not worth the effort.
Take Valve for example, they have crazy sales, take care of all the updates and MP, built in chat, I used to know tons of guys pirating games, now they are all on Steam. With Steam its just so damned easy and cheap there really isn't much of a point to pirate, not when there are literally hundreds of games on any day for under $10 a pop, I mean why bother? We humans are naturally lazy creatures, you make something cheap and easy enough we will take the easy path.
There is no damned reason why the movie and TV companies couldn't do the same damned thing except they are just too fucking greedy for their own good. What I want is bog standard DivX or H.264 MKVs so they'll play anywhere and be hardware accelerated on my netbook or run on my dad's Nbox and I want them at a decent price with specials just like you get on Steam.
Instead we get the choice of 1.-Buy DVD which depending on the show can be insane (anybody looked at what some of the Star trek series go for? Jesus tap dancing Christ!), 2.-wait for the discs to get here and hope the UPS monkeys don't use them for a tire chuck, 3.-Take the time and tie up our PCs ripping them into a format we can actually use, 4.- watch them. Or alternatively we can 1.-Go to TPB and download in the format we want, 2.-watch them.
Now which one of those sounds easier to you? Piracy is simply the market telling you UR DOIN IT WRONG and your prices are too high, you're not providing what the customer considers a good value, or you aren't offering the product the customer wants to buy, that's all. While they will never wipe out piracy they could sure as hell cut down a lot of it if they made things cheap and easy for the customers but their never ending greed and desire to squeeze every single penny they can get per sale simply won't let that happen, kinda like EA with Origin which is nothing but EA trying to force PC games to keep the higher prices of console games for as long as possible. Never underestimate the ability for corps to shoot themselves in the foot i suppose, as it does seem to be what they are good at.
It don't smell like a Joe Job to me, its smells like another Yahoo bug. Those that read one of my previous journal entries here knows that there was a bug that would let anyone surfing with FF who had a Yahoo account send spam thanks to a hidden iFrame, and frankly looking at my spam folder there is a LOT, I mean a hell of a lot, of spam both coming from Android and from regular but with ONE thing in common...Yahoo.
I have to wonder if the spammers haven't found a way to use the same bug they used on FF on Android, because yahoo's new layout seems especially weak to this form of attack it makes more sense that they are using a browser hack than having the entire Android system compromised but who knows? There are a hell of a lot of older Android versions out there, maybe they found a weakspot in the 2.x line and are hitting it.
But in the end somebody needs to be talking to the security guys at Yahoo and find out what they are using to hit their emails, be it a browser hack or something nastier.
If by "failure" you mean refusing to change his beliefs no matter how many checks get waved at him? well then i guess you'd call him a failure.
Sadly having principles in such a corrupted system will get you a record no different than his, because he won't "sweeten the pot" to get his way, pile on the pork or "play ball" which is why every damned bill that gets passed has so much shit added its not even funny anymore.
Why did this get marked down? Has nobody been watching since Cook took the big chair? Turning FCP into iMovie pro, dragging ass when it comes to updating the pro line (and when they did it was still behind the curve BAD), killing the server line, its pretty damned obvious that while Jobs liked the idea that "The movies are made on Apple products" that Cook? He really don't give a shit.
Mark my words within 2 years the pro line will be quietly canned, probably with some press release stating the iPad is the new Pro tool or some such BS, and the line will be trimmed down to maybe 2 Macbooks and a couple of iMacs and that's it. Frankly I wouldn't be surprised if Cook exits X86 altogether, its just not nearly as high margin as mobile and its controlled by Intel and NOT Apple which has never set well with Apple.
Frankly when Intel slit Nvidia's throat on the chipset business i figured it was the beginning of the end for Apple X86, Apple and Nvidia had a nice relationship and Intel just killing it like that couldn't have made any friends at Cupertino. Then you look into Cook's past, how he likes to lock parts up with multiyear contracts so they know what is coming when and how much and having their X86 line dictated by Intel must not sit nice with them. They should have went with AMD where they would have had more pull but seeing what Apple has been doing in the pro line I have a feeling Cook will just wash his hands of X86 completely instead.
Already seen that thanks. if you want to see the difference between a true leader, ruthless bastard though he was, and Ballmer you should read the yellow road to Cairo where with NOTHING but screenshots and pure bullshit Gates managed to keep the entire industry waiting on MSFT while causing corps with actual selling products to flop because he would lay on the BS so thick everyone looked at the fake screenshots and turned up their nose at the actual products.
Now was that a nice thing to do? Fuck no it wasn't, but it showed what kind of uber sized brass balls Gates was swinging and further shows just how truly pathetic Ballmer is compared to Gates. Gates, Jobs, and Ellison are just in a class by themselves, while Ballmer is the jester doing a little dance and hoping people will buy the shtick, he just doesn't deserve the big chair.
I never understood why everyone acts like this is a big deal, i mean would you be surprised if a moped gets good gas mileage or a truck has good hauling capacity?
Its really REALLY simple folks: Linux is good for embedded, for large clusters (like what CERN uses i'm sure) and for web hosting. Windows is good for desktops, laptops, and small business servers, Apple is good for consumer devices like tablets and phones.
See how easy that is? You don't try to drive in screws with a hammer and you don't run large clusters on Windows, that's just not what its good at. Linux is VERY good at that, so why would that be news? This just in, the guys at CERN use the best tool for the job, film at 11.
How do you explain covering up the PMC that was selling little boys as sex toys to get contracts, and had done the same in Kosovo with little girls? Look up "Bachi Bazi" on Wikileaks (not sure if I spelled it right, Google will check it for you) and you'll see the USA has been doing some pretty fucking evil shit friend.
Missing the point friend which is to make him an EXAMPLE so as to ensure the next one that gets their hands on something like that is too scared to publish shit.
And before anyone says I'm paranoid they may want to look up COINTELPRO and see that we have ALREADY executed at least one American on American soil, without trial or even so much as the killers getting jail time, as well as had the POTUS issue a death warrant for an American overseas without even so much as a trial in absentia, So if you think the gov is just gonna play nice I have some magic beans you might be interested in .
Sorry AC but you are missing the point. When money gets to gates level it is no longer about the money its about the POWER and his foundation has been using their money to ensure the power stays in the hands of multinationals (like MSFT, Monsanto, big pharma) and out of the hands of the people. this ensures the status quo and makes sure USA patents and copyrights will be upheld in these countries which benefits Bill directly, not to mention all the stock I'm sure he has in the other megacorps like Monstanto and big pharma.
Uhhh, Dale Bumpers was from AR not KN, and all we ever elect here are pro business DINOs and RINOs so expecting to call ANY elected official from AR a D or an R is kinda pointless, just FYI.
Man PLEASE don't bring up WinFS, that thing STILL pisses me off! Have you seen the demo they had for it? Imagine a SMART file system, where you could type in "girl in a yellow dress" and the OS would know WTF you are talking about and instantly pop up any videos or pictures you had that had girls in yellow dresses. Any files it had problems with it would ask you about and once you put in the metadata that was it, no more trying to remember WTF you called a file or using old school wildcards, it would all be cataloged and ready to go!
The sad part is if they could get stuff like THAT to market it would probably cause a new PC explosion because one demo of that and they'd be lining up to hand MSFT their money, but as you said they can't ever seen to get the really cool stuff out of the drawing room and into the showroom.
The other guy said get her an iPad but that's bunk, wanna know what would be perfect for her? Something like this, its cheap, 12 inches seems to be the perfect size from dealing with older customers, and it lets her get comfy anywhere and do her email on the Wifi.
But as someone who builds new PCs and sells used as well I can tell you another problem isn't just the speed factor, its that most multicores are more than powerful enough for the average person and they just don't die like they used to. I have several customers with early Athlon X2 and Core Duos and frankly they just can't stress the chips, hence they just don't die. hell i sold my full size laptop for a 12 inch E350, why? Because when i'm mobile I'm frankly not stressing even the E350 and that is one of the weakest chips out there, my surfing just can't push it.
The only reason we are seeing such growth in mobile is they too are having a MHz war but it already looks to be coming to an end, with not heat but battery life becoming the issue. When that happens you'll see the same thing we are seeing now in PCs, people not replacing a unit until they die, although mobile will have a higher turnover simply because its easier to step on your phone or drop it down the stairs than it is your laptop.
Sorry I should have made it more clear, I was talking more the home users and SMBs and not the hardcore, which i will grant you do always need more memory. but even with that I've found at a certain point the apps just aren't keeping up. Funny you should mention DDR 2 as I have 8Gb of DDR 2 in my Hexacore and while it'll support 16Gb as you know the DDR 2 4Gb sticks are just not worth the money. But I have found even with plenty of bling on with Win 7 I rarely get above 1.5Gb of RAM in usage, with 3Gb-4Gb being a rare occurance so having 4 sticks at 2Gb each is more than plenty to keep my hexa fed.
Oh and if you are having trouble finding a board that won't take plenty of DDR 2 you should look at the Asrock boards, I went for this one myself which took the 8Gb I had left from my quad and supports 16Gb as well as crossfire, nice board. If I ever need more memory I'll probably bump up to a DDR 3 or 4 if I can find one that takes my hexa as I'm not happy with the new AMD designs but I have a feeling it'll be a few years before i end up with any bottlenecks due to RAM or CPU.
Actually I've been dealing with that problem and home consumers quite nicely here at the shop, as any $15 GPU can give you full hardware flash acceleration and nearly every PC from 2006 on up has a PCIe slot. Take any HD4650 or HD5450 and you have plenty of RAM for the GPU and fully accelerated H.264, Flash, and DivX which is the three main formats people watch nowadays so there really is no reason to replace that Athlon X2, Phenom I, or Core Duo as its simply cheaper to pay a guy like me to slap in a GPU and call it a day. hell even the wimpiest PSUs can support those cards with ease and with the latest codec pack from AMD its plug and play, hassle free.
Well I DID read TFA and basically its just the word "foundation" wrapped around a lobbying group. Surprise surprise, rich people that reach the level of Gates, Jobs, and Ellison are greedy self serving douchebags, news at 11.
I mean who didn't know that? while I'll give him credit for using what must be a ripped off copy of Job's old RDF when it came to the foundation, seriously guys, who did NOT know the uber rich are greedy soulless self serving douchebags? You see those of us that DO have a soul, and thus a conscience, couldn't actually stomach sitting on billions of dollars while knowing the guy down the street is praying his 92 Dodge stuck on the side of the road will start because if it don't and he misses a day of work he's gonna be homeless, we just couldn't do it.
Hell I'm not rich by ANY means yet I've given away more computers and more of my time than I could ever count, and not taken a cent off of anything because that is not what it was for it was for making someone else's life a little bit better, for helping some single mom or as I've been doing with the guy downstairs helping a guy who has nothing become computer literate. Has someone like Gates EVER invited someone who had no place to go into his home for Xmas dinner? I doubt it,and before anyone asks yes I have, but I didn't do it for any type of credit or recognition, I did it because it was the right thing to do.
So while I'm glad the RDF is starting to fail on the foundation I'm frankly not surprised its a greedy self serving foundation because i have yet to see a single one of the billionaires that aren't just as I described, more sociopath than normal person by a LONG shot. Hell Jobs fucked over Woz with the Atari sale and he was supposed to be Jobs best friend and without him he would have never had a company, I'm sure if you looked into Gates and Ellison you'd find just as many cases of them royally fucking over people that were honestly trying to be friendly and help them when they were starting out. The pure unadulterated greed required to get to that level, to truly be one of the 1%, just requires a viciousness that most of us thankfully do not possess.
It tells ME that you don't know jack squat about the market because other than system builders like myself (who wish they would sell a $50 HP system builders, hint hint MSFT) most folks will simply buy from an OEM, be it a little guy like me or a big OEM like Dell and frankly won't know nor care?
MSFT doesn't raise prices on upgrades because the same guys that actually DO upgrade can pirate just as well. MSFT DID raise the price on the big OEMs last I checked, something like 25% for the current version of Windows compared to what XP was. And that is where they make their money friend, in fact i wouldn't be surprised to see MSFT lower prices for the upgrade to speed adoption, just as they did with Win 7 with the $50 Win 7 HP upgrade and the $100 Family Packs.
Won't happen friend because the ISPs will just label screwing you on bandwidth "free speech" and good luck with being able to do squat in the cloud without bandwidth. to do what you are suggesting we'd need a good 40Mbps connection standard both ways, and there is very few places in the USA that are anywhere close to that. might work in parts of Asia, not planetwide.
Actually the chart is telling, but not in the way you think. Look at the peak, between 2004 and 2006, what happened then? The end of the MHz war because of the thermal barrier and the rise of the multicore, that's what.
I know plenty of folks and even plenty of businesses on first gen Phenom Is and Core duos, are they poor? Nope there is just nothing they do that stresses those chips which are now over 5 years old. look at that chart again and see how quickly it was climbing when AMD and Intel were topping each other in speed with every release, then look at how much faster it drops around 2007 when multicores became cheap for the masses.
In the end the reason why those numbers simply aren't keeping up with Apple is there is no reason to replace PCs anymore whereas Apple is going through their OWN MHz race in the mobile sector. Also thanks to the switchover to intel nobody has to choose "either/or" anymore so they can just pick up a copy of OEM Windows and run bootcamp (which your chart doesn't figure in, only new PCs sold) while still having the hipness of the frankly nicer looking Apple hardware.
Mark my words if you produce a chart for ARM 5 years from now you'll see the same thing, as i predict they will run into their own wall in less than 3, only instead of thermal it'll be battery life. Then just like with PCs people will simply keep them until they die, although naturally their sales will be a little higher as its easier for your dog to eat your phone than your desktop.
I think there is an even better comparison...AOL. For awhile AOL practically ruled the consumer Internet market but even when they got products like WinAmp that were insanely popular they smothered them to death because EVERYTHING had to tie into "the service" and it got to the point everyone working there either quit or just quit giving a fuck.And just like MSFT AOL found themselves in charge of a market that simply stop growing and although it won't just die as dialup did it'll never be as big as mobile is ever again.
You look at everything MSFT is doing right now and its the same thing, they just keep trying to tie everything into Windows and Office even if it doesn't make any sense. i mean including Office on WinARM when they haven't even included AD or GPO support? Its a fricking consumer OS, it makes no damned sense! But some PHB said it HAS to tie in, hence Office.
Sadly looking back I'd have to say the best damned thing that could have happened to MSFT would have been if the courts would have split them up, because with so many groups fighting among themselves and so many things being pushed to tie into the two sacred cows of MS Windows and Office they really are backed into a corner there. If mobile would have been split off from Windows maybe they wouldn't have given us a decade of teeny tiny start buttons on WinCE devices, nor would we be seeing Ballmer taking a crap on the desktop just so he can try to gain a couple of shares in the smartphone arena.
Anyway you look at it while MSFT has a steady revenue with their sacred cows there is just no growth there and with the corporate culture its looking more and more doubtful they will be able to branch out.