Bimbo Newton Crosby, when your screen is 4 inches piling a bunch of blinking, flashing ad shit is only gonna piss people off and run them away from your site. Not to mention I have YET to hear of anybody that actually BOUGHT something from a mobile ad. I have known people that bought from a regular ad, in fact before I switched to ABP and simply signed up for email flyers from those i like to buy from I'd occasionally click on an ad for Tiger or Newegg that had a great deal on a HDD or GPU, but I honestly can't remember anybody I've worked with or myself ever buying off a mobile ad. Its just easier to do your shopping at home on a big screen where you can take your time, compare, look at the pictures of the item in a much greater resolution, etc.
So I honestly don't think there is any money" left on the table" because they simply aren't using mobile phones as far as shopping goes except for price checks. I'd love to see how many mobile ads equal a sale because i bet the numbers are ten times worse than desktops, its just not an enjoyable experience.
Oh c'mon now, where else can you get such nasty venom? You just gots to love stuff like this where he says ARM is nothing but "embedded crap" How can you NOT like such an arrogant little self important shit? hell he reminds me of little Mickey 500 accounts here, all he needs to do is add "You are pathetic" at the end of each post and he'd have it down pat!
Not to mention this "thing" misses a fundamental truth that even today so few geeks can comprehend. Ready? because its heavy...To the average user the cell phone isn't a computer its a "Phone that i poke that plays Angry Birds and does FB". The average user looks at cell phones the way they look at an ATM, its a "poking screen" and NOT a computer. A computer runs Windows and lets them use that pile of X86 programs that they have built up over the years which this thing won't do. This is why the ARM netbooks went nowhere fast, because a netbook is NOT some general web device to the average user, its a "baby laptop and should do everything a big laptop can be slower, because babies are littler than grown ups".
As someone whose dealt with consumers 6 days a week since Win 3.x I know their ways are strange, in fact in many ways its like talking to a martian. Things that WE think are obvious, or take for granted, as just as alien to them as could possibly be. You see to them a thing IS what it LOOKS like. If it LOOKS like a laptop it should BEHAVE like a laptop, because to them if it has a keyboard and a flip up screen and a touchpad it should run their Windows stuff because it looks like the thing that DOES run their Windows stuff.
Look I KNOW it sounds crazy, but that is how they think, believe me I've seen it more times than I can count. A phone is a screen you poke, a tablet is a "really big phone that don't make calls" and a laptop runs Windows and will play those old games they got at Walmart several years ago, that's what they want, and that's what they get. If you want to sell big to the masses you have to think like them, crazy as that thinking is.
Sigh...he is NOT talking about putting it into ROM, that is impossible with that chip. What he is talking about is putting a software "lock" on the chip so you can NOT UPDATE and that somehow magically makes it a "circuit" which just shows how cult like the man is, how he can just manipulate language to his own ends.
Its like how his FSF sues people for violating the GPL but he says stealing copyrighted code is fine and dandy, even labels it "sharing with a neighbor"...WTF? Ya can't have your cake and eat it to ya nutter, either infringement is GOOD, or it is BAD, it is NOT possible to make it ONLY good when you do it to the other guy. If you want the link here you go, and I think the hypocrisy is pretty damned self evident. Its okay to steal the OTHER guy's stuff without their permission, but if you steal HIS stuff without permission, aka following his rules? prepared to be sued.
Look, I'm not asking for much here, as one movie reviewer put it "Just be consistent in your bullshit" but RMS has been very much NOT consistent in his bullshit, its quite clear that according to him the rules are pretty much whatever he wants the rules to be to fit with his bullshit this week, like the circuit crap. The chip is STILL firmware, it STILL has to interact with the kernel, but if you can't update it it magically becomes 'freer"...yeah and my dick is 14 foot long and plays jungle bells when you rub it. Bullshit is bullshit is bullshit, and what RMS has been slinging lately, in fact for the last 6 or so years, hasn't even been consistent bullshit JUST bullshit.
Finally as for Torvalds? remember this is the same guy that posed at a Win 7 booth in Japan on release day with a snarky smile and a double thumbs up,that's just the kind of BS he likes to pull. That's why we need snark and sarcasm tags because its hard to tell when someone who is naturally a smart ass like Torvalds is being snarky and teasing or joking and when they are being serious. OTOH its quite clear that what RMS was writing was NOT being snarky and he was actually requesting the community to help achieve these aims which as I pointed out aren't even consistent in his rhetoric, it was just his way of magically cooking up a loophole to jump through so he could get what he wanted because his dogma didn't work. Well if your dogma don't work you crazy then CHANGE THE DAMNED DOGMA instead of cooking up insane logic hoops to jump through. as I said be consistent in your bullshit, which RMS hasn't been for awhile now.
IIRC someone makes a mechanical adapter for those, kinda like I have some of the really old Compaq clacky keyboards (I just love the old mechanical switch boards, don't you?) that like the clacky adapter is just a switching around to the correct way with a little wiring hardness. But if I can't find that or it costs more than a buck or two i always have a ton of 200w-300w PSUs lying around so just swapping it out won't be a problem.
As for the board....I'm still leaning towards the Athlon AM2 which is a standard mATX. I've always liked AMD and unlike the Pentium D which is AGP the AM2 board is PCIe so I can slap a cheap GPU in it and make it a nice HTPC. I just need to find a cheap AM2 Athlon dual somewhere, that customer I got the board from ended up buying the Athlon Dual i had from my own upgrade to a quad (went from dual to quad to hexa in a year as the prices dropped) because she didn't want to wait on shipping so while I have a few nice Intel CPUs lying in the shop CPU drawer all I have left on the AMD side is a Sempron, yuck.
As for the gaming mod, damned cool idea...if I didn't already have a EEE E350 netbook i use for that. the only ones I LAN with anymore are my two boys who like to occasionally smack me around in TF2. Hopefully Torchlight II will be coming out soon so we'll have something co-op to play, because as much as I still enjoy SP shooters my reflexes simply can't keep up with a 19 and 17 year old.
Anyway thanks for the reminder about the PSU, I figured i'd have to pull it anyway as those older boxes usually were pretty wimpy on the wattage but your post just made up my mind for me, it'll be getting a new 250w to go with whichever board i end up going with. Thanks.
Actually you'll probably think its a stupid idea, but I'm seriously thinking about one of the E350 boards like this one or there is this cool site i tripped over ages ago i've been shopping at called Starmicro that sells CPUs REAL cheap and i have a nice little socket AM2 board I got from a customer who had me upgrade hers only to find her CPU was the problem. I'm torn between using that board and one of the higher rated Athlon singles or saying fuck it and using the Pentium D board I also have in the closet since they sell Pentium Ds there for like $12 with $3 to ship so for $15 and a couple of cheap RAM sticks I'd have a nice dual core i could keep or sell.
Looking at the prices I'd probably skip the E350 as you can get a nice Mini-ITX kit with an E350 already in it for like $100 so no point on using one of those when I can just get the kit, but in any case it is such a pretty box I just can't stand the thought of throwing it away. hell its pretty enough that with a decent PCIe card on the board i could see someone using it as an HTPC simply because its pretty enough to have sitting in a living room. And I agree the fold out thing IS cool as hell, in fact the reason i picked it up off the girl on Freecycle (besides the fact she was also giving away a damned nice monitor I could use at the time) was because i wanted to play with PPC and loved the case design.
Sadly the damned thing just won't play nice with my PS/2 KVM, no matter what kind of adapter i use and I'm not giving up my KVM, its like new and has audio ports so i can control 4 systems with audio all of my single LCD so in the closet it sits. I did drag it downstairs to the shop where I had some spare monitors and played with it for a while, even with that being a G3 the Panther OSX installed on it was quite peppy, its just a shame I don't really have a use for it and even with a cheap price on it its never sold as is, so i figure next time i have a break she'll be the case for my next project PC.
Nooo..and BTW mods that is NOT insightful, because its as ridiculous as saying "People have been having babies forever, so clones aren't a big deal". Wrong it IS a big deal, because you can cross breed until the cows come home but there is NO WAY you are gonna get a fricking starfish and a strawberry to cross breed but that is EXACTLY the kind of shit they've been pulling with GMOs!
They have plants mixed with fish, insects, all the breeding in the world would never allow that to happen! And what is worse is they use what is known as the "shotgun method" where strands of DNA are shot into cultures of what you want to mix it with. that means that even with a "successful" GMO there is dozens to hundreds of foreign genes inside the plant that are simply not turned on. While this sounds fine in theory, frankly we have ZERO idea what those extra strands of alien DNA are gonna do long term. They can cause mutations in the plant, they could turn into something that causes problems with those that eat it, frankly they have NO CLUE what this shit is gonna do long term.
So either you are being obtuse on purpose or you haven't actually looked into GMOs, because we aren't talking mixing different breeds here, or even different kinds of plants. We are talking fish, insect, mammal, you name it they're mixing it. This isn't even covering the social implications, like how are Muslims and Jews gonna even eat when they can't tell if a plant is Kosher or Haram because who the hell knows what all has been mixed in. Could be bug, could be cow, could be fish, who the fuck knows. hell i doubt one could even be a vegetarian as your plants will have meat in it!
And i'd add just one thing on why that shit NEEDS to be locked up, at least here in the states...Kudzu. Do you have ANY idea how far that shit has spread across the south? That damned Kudzu is like a cancer of the land, swallowing everything in its path. I've seen huge buildings just swallowed up whole by the Kudzu and once that shit digs in its hell to get out without pesticides and burning, because it quickly becomes home to poisonous snakes and is damned dangerous to be near.
So please keep that shit locked away because the LAST thing we need is weeds like kudzu getting resistance to herbicides by being exposed to GMOs planted in nearby fields. Hell as it is now its spread all over the south and started working its way up so all we would need is resistant Kudzu spreading all over the damned place!
Well in the shop I have everything running on a KVM to a 19inch Dell so lucky me I only need one monitor for work and one for home, which is a 20 inch Dell that was given to me brand new by that customer that had the fire, he was having hell dealing with the insurance so I just handed him 3 older towers and some CRTs that hadn't sold at the shop and just told him "You hang onto these until you get that mess straightened out, don't want you to be shut down while you deal with the red tape". So when he got the money he came by the shop and ordered the parts for me to build him some new towers and had me throw 4 monitors in the cart. when the boxes were built and he came to load them up i reached to load in the fourth and he said "That's yours, I don't forget those that help me when i'm down" and slapped $400 above the cost of the job in my hand and refused to take it back. So its nice to know that karma does come back around from time to time.
Anyway if you decide you want a nice big monitor for the basement keep an eye out on your local Craigslist, anything that isn't a laptop or tablet will often sell for stupidly cheap on there. I recently helped a customer pick up a 32 inch trinitron from a CL ad, damned nice set, beautiful picture, know how much he paid? $110. Guy had gotten a plasma and didn't want it anymore. Hell I had a buddy that wanted a little netbook and we scored him an Atom dual core, nice little Dell Mini, $80. Hell it was so new the guy still had the original packaging. Got him an iPad and decided he didn't want it, simple as that. I swear there are some seriously stupid people on that site. I got myself a brand new still in the box Rogue electric acoustic bass in a beautiful black tigereye for $50. College kid decided playing guitar was 'cooler" so he played it a week and put it back in the box, makes a wonderful bass for sitting on the porch or playing a little unplugged. So keep an eye out, you can score some crazy deals if you keep your eyes open.
BTW if its just stuck pixels you might want to give this a try as it might fix it. Its really a coin flip when it comes to stuck pixels but hell its free and the worse it'll do is leave you in the same position you are in now, so couldn't hurt.
But Java and.NET really doesn't fit the SMB niche because as one put it above you "Its a OOP minefield" that has a pretty decent learning curve, whereas frankly a weekend with VB 6 could have virtually anyone cook up a basic GUI front to a DB which is a BIG need for small businesses.
Hell I'm not a programmer but a VB6 program I wrote last i heard is still being run at the local junkyard. All it does is they input where on the lot they put a new car, we divided the lot into a grid with 22 rows lengthwise (since while they can grow sideways the highway blocks any further growth lengthwise) and when i had finished it I believe it went to J across but of course they can keep adding letters or even double letters if they expand that far so that all they do is either type in or pull down a make and pick the model from the list and it would give them a grid location, like say G14,B09,C12 if they had multiples of the same car.
It really was a nice little app for that one little niche that would have probably cost them far too much to have written by a 'real" programmer. They didn't even have to pay me in cash, I swapped it for a nice set of rims for my King Cab I had at the time LOL!
I used to have a programmer buddy who'd say "If I ever go postal and you see me hauled off in cuffs you'll know it was Excel or Access that drove me to do it!"
But I'll tell you like I told him "Whose fault is it REALLY? Whose to blame?" and the answer is the PHBs and the BOFH IT guys that won't let them have even a free IDE like Netbeans or Eclipse but what is installed on damned near every PC? Office Pro.
So in those cases you can't really blame Bill for all these guys using VB or Excel or Access to make things they were never designed to do, but the suits that won't give them the tools to use anything better. It would be like telling someone to build a house but only giving them a tire jack and a rusty saw to do it with, can you REALLY blame them if the house turns out to be a lean to with a leaky roof?
Uhhh...its pretty obvious it was just Torvalds being a frustrated programmer and joking about a piece of software that was being a giant PITA, which we've ALL been there. Try working with some of the DRM heavy niche software like Solidworks or Rosetta Stone and see how quick you want to hunt down those DRM designers and just smack the shit out of them with a large carp, just ignorant shit.
Now compare that to the two links I just gave, RMS' big claim to fame is the GPL and yet the man isn't even consistent on the ONE THING that above all else he SHOULD be consistent on. I mean locking something down makes it "freer" than if you can update it? WTF? that sounds like the RIAA more than it does the FSF but it boils down to his own dogma simply doesn't work so he has to cook up hoops to jump through that defy logic so that he can jam that dogma into situations where it wouldn't otherwise go. I mean look at those two links, Its BETTER if you DO lock it down but WORSE if you can see and manipulate the code UNLESS that code is GNU....okay, how in the FUCK does that make ANY sense? At all? Its like Mad hatter logic!
Hey if you want to quote a guy that can't even keep his logic consistent on the one thing he's famous for, a guy that I might add did some seriously repulsive shit on fricking stage like some crazy old homeless guy? hey knock yourself out pal, I'm just pointing out the man contradicts himself on his own beliefs.
Obviously Poo you do NOT remember what a living fucking hell it was to deal with an office in the 80s. Until the clones made X86 the standard it was sucktastic, and other than the FOSSie love of anything that isn't X86 (in the vain hope that Linux might actually go somewhere on the desktop) X86 has been a DAMN good arch. It can go from a couple of watts for Atoms and AMD C series to these multi-socket number crunching monsters, they just scale VERY VERY well. The only thing I've seen that comes anywhere close to scaling that well is some of the POWER and vector chips but those are really designed for doing a few jobs VERY well as opposed to general use like X86.
And while it may have been originally selling to IBM that started it off i well remember how several brands crashed and burned making their own DOS because it often wouldn't be binary compatible which made it worthless. What really kicked off the software revolution was being able to go to any store, buy software right off the shelf and have it "just work" which back before GPUs and sound cards and all the other add ons it did pretty damned well. Then came the networking revolution because software could actually talk to each other and trade files across LANs and again it was because they all spoke the same "language" for want of a better term. Remember if IBM would have had its way we would have marched right back to the early 80s because they wanted to make OS/2 insanely priced UNLESS you bought an IBM PC, which at the time was still stuck on 286 because IBM had a license to those and not later models. We would have went right back to nobody talking to anybody else unless you bought ONLY from the same vendor if IBM would have won.
So whether you are happy with the way things turned out or not its pretty damned obvious computers wouldn't be as common as dirt if it weren't for gates and the cloners. While yes there were Apple clones for a little while frankly the Motorola chips still cost too much compared to what you could get an AMD (or Cyrix, or WinChip, man I remember those) for and they never really gained even a tenth of the market that X86 got, again that was because of gates and all the IBM PC clones making X86 so cheap.
So frankly even the FOSS guys ought to be thankful, thanks to gates and the clones you can get truly insanely powered hardware cheap or even free that will let you do pretty much anything you'd want a PC for. I just had a neighbor leave my apt who was buying a flight stick for his PC and not a year ago the man didn't even know how to turn on much less use a PC. Thanks to Pcs being so cheap his boss simply gave him an office spare, which i later added an HD4650, a couple of Gb of RAM and a Pentium D to so he could game, and now he is happily knocking Germans out of the sky and more importantly getting in touch with his family which he hadn't seen in over a decade thanks to FB, so whether you like X86 or not it HAS changed many people's lives for the better, and that probably wouldn't have happened if gates and the cloners wouldn't have made X86 standard.
Actually its been ages since I've seen a PPC desktop (other than the old B&W G3 in my closest I'm thinking of building an AMD into because i can't think of anything else to do with it) but I still see quite a few of those old Macbooks around, they were hellishly popular and since they can be found cheap quite a few people have one.
So I'd say not having Wireless on the G4 macbooks? yeah that could be a serious problem. Of course all the G4 Macbooks i've seen have been running the last version of OSX released for G4s (Jaguar? Panther? hell if I can remember) so maybe that's not their target audience anyway. Frankly other than niche appeal I don't really see why you'd want a PPC desktop, the X86 chips now are so insanely overpowered they'd slaughter those things while using less power to boot. hell that's why I'm probably gonna trash the B&W and put an AMD board in it, really can't find a use for a PPC at the shop but I hate to throw away such a beautiful case. No matter what you thought of Apple then they did make some damned pretty hardware, real art.
I'd say there is an even bigger reason why he should get praise along with another early star that should have gotten more, Jack Tramiel, and that is because he helped make massively available computers affordable to the masses thanks to the clones.
As much as I liked Commodore their machines suffered the same as Apple and Atari at the time, and that was software was written for them and ONLY them. Much software at the time was written for one machine, two if you were lucky, and one software to run on them all was just a dream for the majority of software.
What Gates did by selling to the clones was make it so instead of writing to a particular machine you could just write to the IBM PC "standard" and then it didn't matter if I had a Compaq and you had an IBM, we could BOTH communicate, network, and share work because the same stuff "just worked" no matter who built the machine, Gates made computers a true commodity product. This in turn allowed for massive commodities of scale since both the big guys and the clones were buying the same chips which helped start the price wars and drove prices down to where we see them today, where you can get truly insanely powered computers for less money than the VIC cost without its tape drive.
So I can see Gates getting more accolades, not because of his foundation although that is a damned nice thing he's done, but simply because what he did back in the day touched the lives of more people than what Jobs did. As much as some here may love Jobs his Macs never did become truly affordable for the masses, in fact in several interviews during his NeXT period he basically said he never wanted to make a mass market computer, he just wasn't interested. In a way he was more like Ferrari, interested in making the absolute BEST, the most powerful, the fastest, most easy to use, a piece of art. And everyone knows while a Ferrari is a rolling piece of art they sure as hell ain't something your average person is gonna be able to go out and buy. Jobs was able to make a mass market device DESPITE himself and DESPITE the high prices of his gear in PMPs and Cell Phone frankly because the other choices were so damned horribly designed, that just wasn't the case with X86.
Anyway yeah, I can see Gates getting more cheers, at least when it comes to the guys at the start, just as I can see jobs getting more cheers for showing the world that simple and elegant could be applied to hardware. they both have their place but the reason that most of us are reading and replying to this on X86 PCs with insane power can be traced back to gates and the clones. I don't own a single Apple device, i know plenty of people that likewise don't own an Apple device, but other than the old PCs I refurb for single moms and other folks REALLY down on their luck its damned hard to find folks that don't own at least one X86 PC and that's Gates doing.
Nahhh, I'm sure as soon as the officials there see one of his lectures I'm sure they'll decide "RMS wants to be free!" and push his butt into the nearest waiting plane. Whether that plane is actually going somewhere RMS WANTS to go will be another matter, but so long as he is free I'm sure the people of Argentina will be happy;-)
Sounds like you got your money's worth out of it, that's what matters. the average price I've been spending on the Dell Business monitors is around $140 for the 20 inchers and in the 3 years or so I've been using them for my small business customers the only losses reported were by a customer who sadly had a fire that destroyed everything, otherwise they've been quiet with clear pictures. On the consumer side i've had good luck with the Hanns-G monitors and my consumer customers like the fact they have decent (if not bassy) speakers built in as it lets them set up a quad sound in a small space, especially great for the college kids with dorms. I've had enough good luck with them that when my dad asked what the boys would probably like for Xmas (he HATES shopping and ever since i introduced him to tiger and newegg he's a net tech buying fool LOL!) I pointed him towards a couple of 22 inch Hanns-Gs for the boys that they just adore. I was afraid going from CRTs they'd complain but the blacks are nice and they haven't suffered any ghosting that we can see, even when they are smacking me around in TF2 LOL!
As for Sony.....sigh. Speaking of brand loyalty my dad is a Sony man all the way but I can tell you their consumer gear just ain't what it used to be. They were good about honoring the warranty on my dad's new (and damned sure NOT cheap) 42 inch Bravia but after the second set had the speakers crap and die, and my dad does NOT crank TVs at all, he said to hell with going through all the BS and just had me point him to a decent soundbar for his set and he just killed the internals. I used to swear by Sony but after hearing so many complaints from customers and seeing the trouble dad had i just don't think the quality is there. my customers have me often hooking up HTPCs and other media devices so I get to talk to them about and check out a LOT of different setups and I think LG and Toshiba get the most positive praises sung about them so if that Sony craps out when the warranty expires i'll probably try to steer him to one of those, but when it comes to brand loyalty dad sticks for ages.
Anyway damn sorry to hear about your troubles, i always hate when something just bites it without warning, the least it could do is give me a few days for shipping LOL! Frankly with monitors being so cheap I don't know if caring about the warranty is even worth it unless you get a $1K+ monster. Personally I'd just get a triple setup with Eyefinity if I wanted to go large but since i sit in a comfy chair close enough to my 20 incher I can touch it I don't really see the point. Good luck on your next monitor though.
Because if I'm not mistaken you are talking about OO languages and Basic is a procedural language? At its core basic is frankly so simple and VB6 in particular is so simple for doing this one task that the thing practically builds itself. I've never bothered with.NET but i can tell you just from looking at the code that its language is a LOT more complex.
Sigh, I wish I still had my old VB6 code sitting on the hard drive instead of backed up on a DVD in the closet somewhere because i'd show that because of its very simple structure and built in autocomplete (intellisense I think its called? God its been years since i wrote in VB) that covered just about every variation one would want to use VB for you could bang out a pretty nice looking functional program in a few hours with a minimum of fuss. While i'm sure you could do something similar in.NET....once you learned all the new names and ways of doing things frankly VB was laid out so simple in its flow you could probably hack together a GUI with a dozen inputs for a DB without having to type more than 40 actual words, just letting the drop down intellisense fill in the blanks with the very logically named functions.
Hell I still use a VB program damned near every day in Win 7 X64, its a little app that scans a CD/DVD and puts the info into a DB and for that little job its bloody brilliant. its insanely fast, both at save/load and at search, it takes up almost no space, and you can just plop it onto a thumbstick and it works fine. ever since i got burnt with my old circa 2000 CD DB app being 16 bit and not running on X64 i always use two programs to back up the data (in case one is no longer functional in the future) and the other in this case is XML based and frankly it just isn't as good as the old VB one. Its slower in everything, especially slow in saving, takes up more space, and generally the layout just isn't as nice.
So VB has its place, as long as you know its limitations and don't go trying to force it into doing a job it wasn't really made for. Heck last I heard a little VB app I wrote in 04 for a local junkyard is still running 6 days a week, helping them keep track of where wrecks are in the large field and what parts have already been sold. for that simple task there frankly wasn't and isn't a point in hiring a 'real' programmer to write some large DB app, day after day it does its job very quickly on a little old 1GHz box that sits in the corner not connected to the network, and every day they back it up to a flash stick just in case the box ever fails. honestly if it ain't broke, why fix it?
BTW I apologize if I got any terminology wrong, i have a major skullthumper and I honestly can't be too sure on my nerd talk with a mule doing a tango on the back of my brain. Anyway i hope I got it right and explained it correctly and i'm sorry i don't have any of my old code to use as examples, peace.
Please don't quote RMS. if you have a quote from Torvalds or Perens or frankly anybody else then great, but RMS tried to claim "if you can't update its a circuit" so the man's logic isn't even consistent with itself anymore. hell if you go by that then the PS2 is FOSS friendly since you can't update it so its a circuit and if you disabled updates for the PS3 and X360 then they'd be circuits as well. The man honestly doesn't even make sense with his own logic anymore (you can see and modify JavaScript but its bad if its not GNU, but locking down a chip so it can't be updated and you can't see the code is GNU-friendly) so please don't use him to bolster an argument, as he gets older he just contradicts himself. At least Torvalds has been consistent in his views over the years.
As for TFA...what is the odds we are gonna end up with another Rambus mess all over again? Because i really don't want to go through that, the prices went all over the place and it seemed to take forever to get it all straightened out. hell this company only has 60 million in revenue a year so why don't Micron or a couple of the big boys just get together and buy the damned thing and make their patents RAND. As we saw with Rambus it would probably cheaper in the long run just to buy 'em and RAND it than it would be to pay lawyers for years worth of court dragging, if this tech is really that important frankly the big four memory makers could buy this corp with what they make in profits in the average month with plenty of change left over.
Well I think that is because they are having to work on both the GPUs and APUs and since APUs is a MUCH bigger market i think they have been more of the devs time. hell it wasn't too long ago that Fusion APUs didn't have any support at all and now there are plenty of distros OOTB supporting the APUs and OpenELEC even has a Fusion build so you can take that $150 E350 kit and make yourself a pretty badass XBMC HTPC on the cheap.
If what I heard was true, not saying it is, just what i heard, the reason the closed source Nvidia driver works well is it basically guts X and some of the underlying GPU subsystem and replaces it with proprietary code designed to better interact with their GPU models. if so it would explain a lot and also explain why Nvidia has a whole dev team just for Linux drivers, because keeping all that working must be a nightmare. whether you are happy with AMD performance or not you have to admit AMD is doing exactly as the community asked them to, giving up their specs as fast as they can pass them through legal and beyond by hiring extra devs for the FOSS team. I have a feeling in the long run this is gonna turn out to be a better strategy, at least until Linux gets a proper ABI, because it will mean that you will be able to support pretty much ANY distro with ANY card by AMD and have it "just work".
In the end I don't suppose it will affect me all that much as my customers buy Windows and at the crucial sub $150 price point AMD pretty much stands alone. the amount of bang per buck is just insane so while I'm often trying new distros just to see they are nearly always in VMs so the AMD GPU performance really isn't even in play there.
Noooo...because frankly I don't give a rat's ass about ARM mobile devices, I sell them but since they are closed systems that are beyond a PITA into pretty much impossible to fix i treat them about like an SD card but what I DO care about is X86 mobile, such as laptops and desktops.
So in ARM it isn't gonna matter, as nobody will be using the desktop, it'll be tweeting twitting fart apps all the way down but that's exactly the opposite of X86 as EVERYONE has X86 programs they are gonna want to run often that will NEVER be metro apps, even MSFT has said that MS office won't be Metro so that is one of the biggest office suites that won't even support the new "wonder interface" and its by the same company that wants us to believe metro is a viable desktop!
But how many people are gonna be able to FIND the damned thing? hell there is usually a button for everything in Windows, its finding the damned thing that is a giant headache. Like the first month I switched from XP to 7 it took me a good month to equate sharing--adapter settings with network settings, I mean WTF? Why EXACTLY do i need sharing combined with networking? It wasn't like sharing anything with Win 7 was difficult in the first place, so tying those two things together just seemed kinda pointless to me.
in the end though i don't think its gonna matter, as just like with Vista where the bugs, bloat, and UAC becoming a parody had them running to me to "Get rid of this damned thing and put XP back on" I have a feeling Sinofsky's "supergigantic smartphone OS" is gonna put quite a lot of extra cash in my pocket when people come in, all pissed and frustrated and say 'get rid of this damned thing and put win 7 back on". It really isn't very discoverable or intuitive and one thing I've found is that folks really don't have a lot of tolerance from a PITA desktop or lap, especially when they know they have a choice and don't have to put up with it.It'll be another year and a half of dealing with downgrade rights (from now on I'm charging an extra 20% if they don't make the call, I'm tired of 30 minute sales pitches before they just give me the damned key) and selling copies of Win 7 Home and pro to those without rights.
See? We men tend to like a brand and stick with them. For me on the tech front, Samsung HDDs, especially their EcoDrives but since they are gone now I'll go like you with WD, As far as monitors go while you can't go wrong with Samsung I've been quite happy with Dell Business for the last few purchases. their desktops may be crap but their business monitors are quite reliable, for routers I like D-Link as well for wireless but prefer trendnet for wired, as I have set several of them up on jobs sites because i honestly thought the harsh conditions there would kill any router and didn't see the point in buying more expensive but frankly they surprised me, not a single dead one despite such nasty conditions and temp shifts. Tough little bastards they are.
So you see why I said the men can bring you a long term customer that keeps coming back, we find something we like we tend to stick with it. Women just don't seem to develop preferences when it comes to tech, as I said my GF treats her phone like she does shoes, something to be used while she likes it and tossed when she doesn't and I honestly can't think of a single tech device where she got the same brand twice. What I find funny is that in clothes she knows all the brands, tells me without me even trying them on which companies make their sizes a little tighter or a little looser, and have her preferences there for both herself and for me while I honestly don't give a rat's ass as long as it covers me without cutting off the blood flow, but while i know all the geek brands and all the quirks and preferences she honestly couldn't care less about the whole thing, its strictly what catches her eye or what some GF of hers recommends that month. But I guess that's why its smart to aim clothing at women and tech at the guys, build customer loyalty with the sex that will care about your product.
I just don't get why so many find it hard to believe VB 6 has such long legs. it did ONE job and it did that job fucking brilliantly, which was to make an easy to use GUI front end to a DB, that's it, that's all. This is what MSFT fucked up with with.NET because frankly ALL of the VB 6 I've seen being used and being built really was only variants on that one function.
What MSFT refused to accept was was how important one small function can be to an SMB or SOHO. There is a HELL of a lot of times a small business can use a custom GUI to a DB, everything from contacts to records can be kept in a simple DB that just needs an easy to use front end so the user doesn't have to know anything about DBs, just fill out the forms.
Finally all those "real" programmers that gnash their teeth at even the mention of the word VB? GET OVER IT, you wouldn't expect them to call a 'real"engineer when all they need is something that can be banged together out of an Erector set would you? of course not and it just so happens there is a hell of a lot of business jobs that don't need some full blown SQL DB just to get the job done. Its just like how we've all seen "applications" built out of VBA and Access, it has its little niche and as long as one doesn't try to build something outside of its little niche? Then its a perfectly valid tool.
MSFT failed with.NET because they assumed if you were doing job A that you would want to learn to have the power to do jobs B-K, when in reality frankly there were tons of guys that frankly only needed to do job A so B-K were simply overkill and pointless. That is why VB 6 has such long legs, frankly there hasn't been any other language that filled the SMB small DB niche quite as well as VB 6.
You are most welcome. I really get sick of the whole religious wars when it comes to Linux, like any criticizing is burning a cross, because frankly we should ALL want things to get better, all want problems to be fixed and better ways of doing things to be explored. hell what would the world be like if Linus said "Minix is good enough" and walked away? If a better idea can make a better OS i'm personally ALL for it.
And as far as Linux and graphics intensive games...I'd argue all the underlying video issues is why most will need to keep Windows to game with. if they could get the subsystem truly stable then porting the games to run natively wouldn't be such a PITA, where you have to target THIS version of the kernel and THAT driver and THIS version of the software. part of what makes Windows great for gaming is there is really only 3 versions (XP,Vista,7) and since the kernel isn't being changed nor the graphics subsystem and audio subsystem constantly being fiddled with one can just "write once and be done". Hell there are many games from the late 90s I can play without compatibility mode on Win 7 X64 simply because they wrote to the APIs instead of using software and hardware hacks, which there are a few games that can't be run on anything other than Win98 simply because they DID use hacks, such as Mechwarrior 3 or i76.
Frankly as for AMD I think the whole TFA is a tempest in a teacup as ASLR IS USED FOR THE BROWSER which running a little PC shop I get to see what is going around and frankly the browser is the ONLY attack vector I've seen, either by using social engineering or browser drive bys. From what I've seen you stop the malware at the browser you are done, its game over for the bad guys. Not saying that some time in the future some nasty might target GPUs, anything is possible, but that just isn't what I'm seeing in the wild, its all security tool or AV201x or drive bys and so far the ONLY bugs I've seen do any harm at all on Win 7 without the user actively helping it was the Firefox bug I wrote about in my journal and that can be traced to Firefox not respecting or using low rights mode which lets the malware pop up an invisible iFrame and spam their yahoo address book, even if they aren't looged in when it hits.
so as long as AMD/ATI give me and my customers the best bang for the buck in the huge $150 and under market i think I'll stick with them, their drivers are damned good on Windows, they have opened their specs on Linux and even went so far as to hire devs to help get the FOSS driver up to speed, and the chips are cheap and powerful. that makes AMD a winner in my book.
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Bimbo Newton Crosby, when your screen is 4 inches piling a bunch of blinking, flashing ad shit is only gonna piss people off and run them away from your site. Not to mention I have YET to hear of anybody that actually BOUGHT something from a mobile ad. I have known people that bought from a regular ad, in fact before I switched to ABP and simply signed up for email flyers from those i like to buy from I'd occasionally click on an ad for Tiger or Newegg that had a great deal on a HDD or GPU, but I honestly can't remember anybody I've worked with or myself ever buying off a mobile ad. Its just easier to do your shopping at home on a big screen where you can take your time, compare, look at the pictures of the item in a much greater resolution, etc.
So I honestly don't think there is any money" left on the table" because they simply aren't using mobile phones as far as shopping goes except for price checks. I'd love to see how many mobile ads equal a sale because i bet the numbers are ten times worse than desktops, its just not an enjoyable experience.
Oh c'mon now, where else can you get such nasty venom? You just gots to love stuff like this where he says ARM is nothing but "embedded crap" How can you NOT like such an arrogant little self important shit? hell he reminds me of little Mickey 500 accounts here, all he needs to do is add "You are pathetic" at the end of each post and he'd have it down pat!
Not to mention this "thing" misses a fundamental truth that even today so few geeks can comprehend. Ready? because its heavy...To the average user the cell phone isn't a computer its a "Phone that i poke that plays Angry Birds and does FB". The average user looks at cell phones the way they look at an ATM, its a "poking screen" and NOT a computer. A computer runs Windows and lets them use that pile of X86 programs that they have built up over the years which this thing won't do. This is why the ARM netbooks went nowhere fast, because a netbook is NOT some general web device to the average user, its a "baby laptop and should do everything a big laptop can be slower, because babies are littler than grown ups".
As someone whose dealt with consumers 6 days a week since Win 3.x I know their ways are strange, in fact in many ways its like talking to a martian. Things that WE think are obvious, or take for granted, as just as alien to them as could possibly be. You see to them a thing IS what it LOOKS like. If it LOOKS like a laptop it should BEHAVE like a laptop, because to them if it has a keyboard and a flip up screen and a touchpad it should run their Windows stuff because it looks like the thing that DOES run their Windows stuff.
Look I KNOW it sounds crazy, but that is how they think, believe me I've seen it more times than I can count. A phone is a screen you poke, a tablet is a "really big phone that don't make calls" and a laptop runs Windows and will play those old games they got at Walmart several years ago, that's what they want, and that's what they get. If you want to sell big to the masses you have to think like them, crazy as that thinking is.
Sigh...he is NOT talking about putting it into ROM, that is impossible with that chip. What he is talking about is putting a software "lock" on the chip so you can NOT UPDATE and that somehow magically makes it a "circuit" which just shows how cult like the man is, how he can just manipulate language to his own ends.
Its like how his FSF sues people for violating the GPL but he says stealing copyrighted code is fine and dandy, even labels it "sharing with a neighbor"...WTF? Ya can't have your cake and eat it to ya nutter, either infringement is GOOD, or it is BAD, it is NOT possible to make it ONLY good when you do it to the other guy. If you want the link here you go, and I think the hypocrisy is pretty damned self evident. Its okay to steal the OTHER guy's stuff without their permission, but if you steal HIS stuff without permission, aka following his rules? prepared to be sued.
Look, I'm not asking for much here, as one movie reviewer put it "Just be consistent in your bullshit" but RMS has been very much NOT consistent in his bullshit, its quite clear that according to him the rules are pretty much whatever he wants the rules to be to fit with his bullshit this week, like the circuit crap. The chip is STILL firmware, it STILL has to interact with the kernel, but if you can't update it it magically becomes 'freer"...yeah and my dick is 14 foot long and plays jungle bells when you rub it. Bullshit is bullshit is bullshit, and what RMS has been slinging lately, in fact for the last 6 or so years, hasn't even been consistent bullshit JUST bullshit.
Finally as for Torvalds? remember this is the same guy that posed at a Win 7 booth in Japan on release day with a snarky smile and a double thumbs up,that's just the kind of BS he likes to pull. That's why we need snark and sarcasm tags because its hard to tell when someone who is naturally a smart ass like Torvalds is being snarky and teasing or joking and when they are being serious. OTOH its quite clear that what RMS was writing was NOT being snarky and he was actually requesting the community to help achieve these aims which as I pointed out aren't even consistent in his rhetoric, it was just his way of magically cooking up a loophole to jump through so he could get what he wanted because his dogma didn't work. Well if your dogma don't work you crazy then CHANGE THE DAMNED DOGMA instead of cooking up insane logic hoops to jump through. as I said be consistent in your bullshit, which RMS hasn't been for awhile now.
IIRC someone makes a mechanical adapter for those, kinda like I have some of the really old Compaq clacky keyboards (I just love the old mechanical switch boards, don't you?) that like the clacky adapter is just a switching around to the correct way with a little wiring hardness. But if I can't find that or it costs more than a buck or two i always have a ton of 200w-300w PSUs lying around so just swapping it out won't be a problem.
As for the board....I'm still leaning towards the Athlon AM2 which is a standard mATX. I've always liked AMD and unlike the Pentium D which is AGP the AM2 board is PCIe so I can slap a cheap GPU in it and make it a nice HTPC. I just need to find a cheap AM2 Athlon dual somewhere, that customer I got the board from ended up buying the Athlon Dual i had from my own upgrade to a quad (went from dual to quad to hexa in a year as the prices dropped) because she didn't want to wait on shipping so while I have a few nice Intel CPUs lying in the shop CPU drawer all I have left on the AMD side is a Sempron, yuck.
As for the gaming mod, damned cool idea...if I didn't already have a EEE E350 netbook i use for that. the only ones I LAN with anymore are my two boys who like to occasionally smack me around in TF2. Hopefully Torchlight II will be coming out soon so we'll have something co-op to play, because as much as I still enjoy SP shooters my reflexes simply can't keep up with a 19 and 17 year old.
Anyway thanks for the reminder about the PSU, I figured i'd have to pull it anyway as those older boxes usually were pretty wimpy on the wattage but your post just made up my mind for me, it'll be getting a new 250w to go with whichever board i end up going with. Thanks.
Actually you'll probably think its a stupid idea, but I'm seriously thinking about one of the E350 boards like this one or there is this cool site i tripped over ages ago i've been shopping at called Starmicro that sells CPUs REAL cheap and i have a nice little socket AM2 board I got from a customer who had me upgrade hers only to find her CPU was the problem. I'm torn between using that board and one of the higher rated Athlon singles or saying fuck it and using the Pentium D board I also have in the closet since they sell Pentium Ds there for like $12 with $3 to ship so for $15 and a couple of cheap RAM sticks I'd have a nice dual core i could keep or sell.
Looking at the prices I'd probably skip the E350 as you can get a nice Mini-ITX kit with an E350 already in it for like $100 so no point on using one of those when I can just get the kit, but in any case it is such a pretty box I just can't stand the thought of throwing it away. hell its pretty enough that with a decent PCIe card on the board i could see someone using it as an HTPC simply because its pretty enough to have sitting in a living room. And I agree the fold out thing IS cool as hell, in fact the reason i picked it up off the girl on Freecycle (besides the fact she was also giving away a damned nice monitor I could use at the time) was because i wanted to play with PPC and loved the case design.
Sadly the damned thing just won't play nice with my PS/2 KVM, no matter what kind of adapter i use and I'm not giving up my KVM, its like new and has audio ports so i can control 4 systems with audio all of my single LCD so in the closet it sits. I did drag it downstairs to the shop where I had some spare monitors and played with it for a while, even with that being a G3 the Panther OSX installed on it was quite peppy, its just a shame I don't really have a use for it and even with a cheap price on it its never sold as is, so i figure next time i have a break she'll be the case for my next project PC.
Nooo..and BTW mods that is NOT insightful, because its as ridiculous as saying "People have been having babies forever, so clones aren't a big deal". Wrong it IS a big deal, because you can cross breed until the cows come home but there is NO WAY you are gonna get a fricking starfish and a strawberry to cross breed but that is EXACTLY the kind of shit they've been pulling with GMOs!
They have plants mixed with fish, insects, all the breeding in the world would never allow that to happen! And what is worse is they use what is known as the "shotgun method" where strands of DNA are shot into cultures of what you want to mix it with. that means that even with a "successful" GMO there is dozens to hundreds of foreign genes inside the plant that are simply not turned on. While this sounds fine in theory, frankly we have ZERO idea what those extra strands of alien DNA are gonna do long term. They can cause mutations in the plant, they could turn into something that causes problems with those that eat it, frankly they have NO CLUE what this shit is gonna do long term.
So either you are being obtuse on purpose or you haven't actually looked into GMOs, because we aren't talking mixing different breeds here, or even different kinds of plants. We are talking fish, insect, mammal, you name it they're mixing it. This isn't even covering the social implications, like how are Muslims and Jews gonna even eat when they can't tell if a plant is Kosher or Haram because who the hell knows what all has been mixed in. Could be bug, could be cow, could be fish, who the fuck knows. hell i doubt one could even be a vegetarian as your plants will have meat in it!
And i'd add just one thing on why that shit NEEDS to be locked up, at least here in the states...Kudzu. Do you have ANY idea how far that shit has spread across the south? That damned Kudzu is like a cancer of the land, swallowing everything in its path. I've seen huge buildings just swallowed up whole by the Kudzu and once that shit digs in its hell to get out without pesticides and burning, because it quickly becomes home to poisonous snakes and is damned dangerous to be near.
So please keep that shit locked away because the LAST thing we need is weeds like kudzu getting resistance to herbicides by being exposed to GMOs planted in nearby fields. Hell as it is now its spread all over the south and started working its way up so all we would need is resistant Kudzu spreading all over the damned place!
Well in the shop I have everything running on a KVM to a 19inch Dell so lucky me I only need one monitor for work and one for home, which is a 20 inch Dell that was given to me brand new by that customer that had the fire, he was having hell dealing with the insurance so I just handed him 3 older towers and some CRTs that hadn't sold at the shop and just told him "You hang onto these until you get that mess straightened out, don't want you to be shut down while you deal with the red tape". So when he got the money he came by the shop and ordered the parts for me to build him some new towers and had me throw 4 monitors in the cart. when the boxes were built and he came to load them up i reached to load in the fourth and he said "That's yours, I don't forget those that help me when i'm down" and slapped $400 above the cost of the job in my hand and refused to take it back. So its nice to know that karma does come back around from time to time.
Anyway if you decide you want a nice big monitor for the basement keep an eye out on your local Craigslist, anything that isn't a laptop or tablet will often sell for stupidly cheap on there. I recently helped a customer pick up a 32 inch trinitron from a CL ad, damned nice set, beautiful picture, know how much he paid? $110. Guy had gotten a plasma and didn't want it anymore. Hell I had a buddy that wanted a little netbook and we scored him an Atom dual core, nice little Dell Mini, $80. Hell it was so new the guy still had the original packaging. Got him an iPad and decided he didn't want it, simple as that. I swear there are some seriously stupid people on that site. I got myself a brand new still in the box Rogue electric acoustic bass in a beautiful black tigereye for $50. College kid decided playing guitar was 'cooler" so he played it a week and put it back in the box, makes a wonderful bass for sitting on the porch or playing a little unplugged. So keep an eye out, you can score some crazy deals if you keep your eyes open.
BTW if its just stuck pixels you might want to give this a try as it might fix it. Its really a coin flip when it comes to stuck pixels but hell its free and the worse it'll do is leave you in the same position you are in now, so couldn't hurt.
But Java and .NET really doesn't fit the SMB niche because as one put it above you "Its a OOP minefield" that has a pretty decent learning curve, whereas frankly a weekend with VB 6 could have virtually anyone cook up a basic GUI front to a DB which is a BIG need for small businesses.
Hell I'm not a programmer but a VB6 program I wrote last i heard is still being run at the local junkyard. All it does is they input where on the lot they put a new car, we divided the lot into a grid with 22 rows lengthwise (since while they can grow sideways the highway blocks any further growth lengthwise) and when i had finished it I believe it went to J across but of course they can keep adding letters or even double letters if they expand that far so that all they do is either type in or pull down a make and pick the model from the list and it would give them a grid location, like say G14,B09,C12 if they had multiples of the same car.
It really was a nice little app for that one little niche that would have probably cost them far too much to have written by a 'real" programmer. They didn't even have to pay me in cash, I swapped it for a nice set of rims for my King Cab I had at the time LOL!
I used to have a programmer buddy who'd say "If I ever go postal and you see me hauled off in cuffs you'll know it was Excel or Access that drove me to do it!"
But I'll tell you like I told him "Whose fault is it REALLY? Whose to blame?" and the answer is the PHBs and the BOFH IT guys that won't let them have even a free IDE like Netbeans or Eclipse but what is installed on damned near every PC? Office Pro.
So in those cases you can't really blame Bill for all these guys using VB or Excel or Access to make things they were never designed to do, but the suits that won't give them the tools to use anything better. It would be like telling someone to build a house but only giving them a tire jack and a rusty saw to do it with, can you REALLY blame them if the house turns out to be a lean to with a leaky roof?
Uhhh...its pretty obvious it was just Torvalds being a frustrated programmer and joking about a piece of software that was being a giant PITA, which we've ALL been there. Try working with some of the DRM heavy niche software like Solidworks or Rosetta Stone and see how quick you want to hunt down those DRM designers and just smack the shit out of them with a large carp, just ignorant shit.
Now compare that to the two links I just gave, RMS' big claim to fame is the GPL and yet the man isn't even consistent on the ONE THING that above all else he SHOULD be consistent on. I mean locking something down makes it "freer" than if you can update it? WTF? that sounds like the RIAA more than it does the FSF but it boils down to his own dogma simply doesn't work so he has to cook up hoops to jump through that defy logic so that he can jam that dogma into situations where it wouldn't otherwise go. I mean look at those two links, Its BETTER if you DO lock it down but WORSE if you can see and manipulate the code UNLESS that code is GNU....okay, how in the FUCK does that make ANY sense? At all? Its like Mad hatter logic!
Hey if you want to quote a guy that can't even keep his logic consistent on the one thing he's famous for, a guy that I might add did some seriously repulsive shit on fricking stage like some crazy old homeless guy? hey knock yourself out pal, I'm just pointing out the man contradicts himself on his own beliefs.
Obviously Poo you do NOT remember what a living fucking hell it was to deal with an office in the 80s. Until the clones made X86 the standard it was sucktastic, and other than the FOSSie love of anything that isn't X86 (in the vain hope that Linux might actually go somewhere on the desktop) X86 has been a DAMN good arch. It can go from a couple of watts for Atoms and AMD C series to these multi-socket number crunching monsters, they just scale VERY VERY well. The only thing I've seen that comes anywhere close to scaling that well is some of the POWER and vector chips but those are really designed for doing a few jobs VERY well as opposed to general use like X86.
And while it may have been originally selling to IBM that started it off i well remember how several brands crashed and burned making their own DOS because it often wouldn't be binary compatible which made it worthless. What really kicked off the software revolution was being able to go to any store, buy software right off the shelf and have it "just work" which back before GPUs and sound cards and all the other add ons it did pretty damned well. Then came the networking revolution because software could actually talk to each other and trade files across LANs and again it was because they all spoke the same "language" for want of a better term. Remember if IBM would have had its way we would have marched right back to the early 80s because they wanted to make OS/2 insanely priced UNLESS you bought an IBM PC, which at the time was still stuck on 286 because IBM had a license to those and not later models. We would have went right back to nobody talking to anybody else unless you bought ONLY from the same vendor if IBM would have won.
So whether you are happy with the way things turned out or not its pretty damned obvious computers wouldn't be as common as dirt if it weren't for gates and the cloners. While yes there were Apple clones for a little while frankly the Motorola chips still cost too much compared to what you could get an AMD (or Cyrix, or WinChip, man I remember those) for and they never really gained even a tenth of the market that X86 got, again that was because of gates and all the IBM PC clones making X86 so cheap.
So frankly even the FOSS guys ought to be thankful, thanks to gates and the clones you can get truly insanely powered hardware cheap or even free that will let you do pretty much anything you'd want a PC for. I just had a neighbor leave my apt who was buying a flight stick for his PC and not a year ago the man didn't even know how to turn on much less use a PC. Thanks to Pcs being so cheap his boss simply gave him an office spare, which i later added an HD4650, a couple of Gb of RAM and a Pentium D to so he could game, and now he is happily knocking Germans out of the sky and more importantly getting in touch with his family which he hadn't seen in over a decade thanks to FB, so whether you like X86 or not it HAS changed many people's lives for the better, and that probably wouldn't have happened if gates and the cloners wouldn't have made X86 standard.
Actually its been ages since I've seen a PPC desktop (other than the old B&W G3 in my closest I'm thinking of building an AMD into because i can't think of anything else to do with it) but I still see quite a few of those old Macbooks around, they were hellishly popular and since they can be found cheap quite a few people have one.
So I'd say not having Wireless on the G4 macbooks? yeah that could be a serious problem. Of course all the G4 Macbooks i've seen have been running the last version of OSX released for G4s (Jaguar? Panther? hell if I can remember) so maybe that's not their target audience anyway. Frankly other than niche appeal I don't really see why you'd want a PPC desktop, the X86 chips now are so insanely overpowered they'd slaughter those things while using less power to boot. hell that's why I'm probably gonna trash the B&W and put an AMD board in it, really can't find a use for a PPC at the shop but I hate to throw away such a beautiful case. No matter what you thought of Apple then they did make some damned pretty hardware, real art.
I'd say there is an even bigger reason why he should get praise along with another early star that should have gotten more, Jack Tramiel, and that is because he helped make massively available computers affordable to the masses thanks to the clones.
As much as I liked Commodore their machines suffered the same as Apple and Atari at the time, and that was software was written for them and ONLY them. Much software at the time was written for one machine, two if you were lucky, and one software to run on them all was just a dream for the majority of software.
What Gates did by selling to the clones was make it so instead of writing to a particular machine you could just write to the IBM PC "standard" and then it didn't matter if I had a Compaq and you had an IBM, we could BOTH communicate, network, and share work because the same stuff "just worked" no matter who built the machine, Gates made computers a true commodity product. This in turn allowed for massive commodities of scale since both the big guys and the clones were buying the same chips which helped start the price wars and drove prices down to where we see them today, where you can get truly insanely powered computers for less money than the VIC cost without its tape drive.
So I can see Gates getting more accolades, not because of his foundation although that is a damned nice thing he's done, but simply because what he did back in the day touched the lives of more people than what Jobs did. As much as some here may love Jobs his Macs never did become truly affordable for the masses, in fact in several interviews during his NeXT period he basically said he never wanted to make a mass market computer, he just wasn't interested. In a way he was more like Ferrari, interested in making the absolute BEST, the most powerful, the fastest, most easy to use, a piece of art. And everyone knows while a Ferrari is a rolling piece of art they sure as hell ain't something your average person is gonna be able to go out and buy. Jobs was able to make a mass market device DESPITE himself and DESPITE the high prices of his gear in PMPs and Cell Phone frankly because the other choices were so damned horribly designed, that just wasn't the case with X86.
Anyway yeah, I can see Gates getting more cheers, at least when it comes to the guys at the start, just as I can see jobs getting more cheers for showing the world that simple and elegant could be applied to hardware. they both have their place but the reason that most of us are reading and replying to this on X86 PCs with insane power can be traced back to gates and the clones. I don't own a single Apple device, i know plenty of people that likewise don't own an Apple device, but other than the old PCs I refurb for single moms and other folks REALLY down on their luck its damned hard to find folks that don't own at least one X86 PC and that's Gates doing.
Nahhh, I'm sure as soon as the officials there see one of his lectures I'm sure they'll decide "RMS wants to be free!" and push his butt into the nearest waiting plane. Whether that plane is actually going somewhere RMS WANTS to go will be another matter, but so long as he is free I'm sure the people of Argentina will be happy ;-)
Sounds like you got your money's worth out of it, that's what matters. the average price I've been spending on the Dell Business monitors is around $140 for the 20 inchers and in the 3 years or so I've been using them for my small business customers the only losses reported were by a customer who sadly had a fire that destroyed everything, otherwise they've been quiet with clear pictures. On the consumer side i've had good luck with the Hanns-G monitors and my consumer customers like the fact they have decent (if not bassy) speakers built in as it lets them set up a quad sound in a small space, especially great for the college kids with dorms. I've had enough good luck with them that when my dad asked what the boys would probably like for Xmas (he HATES shopping and ever since i introduced him to tiger and newegg he's a net tech buying fool LOL!) I pointed him towards a couple of 22 inch Hanns-Gs for the boys that they just adore. I was afraid going from CRTs they'd complain but the blacks are nice and they haven't suffered any ghosting that we can see, even when they are smacking me around in TF2 LOL!
As for Sony.....sigh. Speaking of brand loyalty my dad is a Sony man all the way but I can tell you their consumer gear just ain't what it used to be. They were good about honoring the warranty on my dad's new (and damned sure NOT cheap) 42 inch Bravia but after the second set had the speakers crap and die, and my dad does NOT crank TVs at all, he said to hell with going through all the BS and just had me point him to a decent soundbar for his set and he just killed the internals. I used to swear by Sony but after hearing so many complaints from customers and seeing the trouble dad had i just don't think the quality is there. my customers have me often hooking up HTPCs and other media devices so I get to talk to them about and check out a LOT of different setups and I think LG and Toshiba get the most positive praises sung about them so if that Sony craps out when the warranty expires i'll probably try to steer him to one of those, but when it comes to brand loyalty dad sticks for ages.
Anyway damn sorry to hear about your troubles, i always hate when something just bites it without warning, the least it could do is give me a few days for shipping LOL! Frankly with monitors being so cheap I don't know if caring about the warranty is even worth it unless you get a $1K+ monster. Personally I'd just get a triple setup with Eyefinity if I wanted to go large but since i sit in a comfy chair close enough to my 20 incher I can touch it I don't really see the point. Good luck on your next monitor though.
Because if I'm not mistaken you are talking about OO languages and Basic is a procedural language? At its core basic is frankly so simple and VB6 in particular is so simple for doing this one task that the thing practically builds itself. I've never bothered with .NET but i can tell you just from looking at the code that its language is a LOT more complex.
Sigh, I wish I still had my old VB6 code sitting on the hard drive instead of backed up on a DVD in the closet somewhere because i'd show that because of its very simple structure and built in autocomplete (intellisense I think its called? God its been years since i wrote in VB) that covered just about every variation one would want to use VB for you could bang out a pretty nice looking functional program in a few hours with a minimum of fuss. While i'm sure you could do something similar in .NET....once you learned all the new names and ways of doing things frankly VB was laid out so simple in its flow you could probably hack together a GUI with a dozen inputs for a DB without having to type more than 40 actual words, just letting the drop down intellisense fill in the blanks with the very logically named functions.
Hell I still use a VB program damned near every day in Win 7 X64, its a little app that scans a CD/DVD and puts the info into a DB and for that little job its bloody brilliant. its insanely fast, both at save/load and at search, it takes up almost no space, and you can just plop it onto a thumbstick and it works fine. ever since i got burnt with my old circa 2000 CD DB app being 16 bit and not running on X64 i always use two programs to back up the data (in case one is no longer functional in the future) and the other in this case is XML based and frankly it just isn't as good as the old VB one. Its slower in everything, especially slow in saving, takes up more space, and generally the layout just isn't as nice.
So VB has its place, as long as you know its limitations and don't go trying to force it into doing a job it wasn't really made for. Heck last I heard a little VB app I wrote in 04 for a local junkyard is still running 6 days a week, helping them keep track of where wrecks are in the large field and what parts have already been sold. for that simple task there frankly wasn't and isn't a point in hiring a 'real' programmer to write some large DB app, day after day it does its job very quickly on a little old 1GHz box that sits in the corner not connected to the network, and every day they back it up to a flash stick just in case the box ever fails. honestly if it ain't broke, why fix it?
BTW I apologize if I got any terminology wrong, i have a major skullthumper and I honestly can't be too sure on my nerd talk with a mule doing a tango on the back of my brain. Anyway i hope I got it right and explained it correctly and i'm sorry i don't have any of my old code to use as examples, peace.
Please don't quote RMS. if you have a quote from Torvalds or Perens or frankly anybody else then great, but RMS tried to claim "if you can't update its a circuit" so the man's logic isn't even consistent with itself anymore. hell if you go by that then the PS2 is FOSS friendly since you can't update it so its a circuit and if you disabled updates for the PS3 and X360 then they'd be circuits as well. The man honestly doesn't even make sense with his own logic anymore (you can see and modify JavaScript but its bad if its not GNU, but locking down a chip so it can't be updated and you can't see the code is GNU-friendly) so please don't use him to bolster an argument, as he gets older he just contradicts himself. At least Torvalds has been consistent in his views over the years.
As for TFA...what is the odds we are gonna end up with another Rambus mess all over again? Because i really don't want to go through that, the prices went all over the place and it seemed to take forever to get it all straightened out. hell this company only has 60 million in revenue a year so why don't Micron or a couple of the big boys just get together and buy the damned thing and make their patents RAND. As we saw with Rambus it would probably cheaper in the long run just to buy 'em and RAND it than it would be to pay lawyers for years worth of court dragging, if this tech is really that important frankly the big four memory makers could buy this corp with what they make in profits in the average month with plenty of change left over.
Well I think that is because they are having to work on both the GPUs and APUs and since APUs is a MUCH bigger market i think they have been more of the devs time. hell it wasn't too long ago that Fusion APUs didn't have any support at all and now there are plenty of distros OOTB supporting the APUs and OpenELEC even has a Fusion build so you can take that $150 E350 kit and make yourself a pretty badass XBMC HTPC on the cheap.
If what I heard was true, not saying it is, just what i heard, the reason the closed source Nvidia driver works well is it basically guts X and some of the underlying GPU subsystem and replaces it with proprietary code designed to better interact with their GPU models. if so it would explain a lot and also explain why Nvidia has a whole dev team just for Linux drivers, because keeping all that working must be a nightmare. whether you are happy with AMD performance or not you have to admit AMD is doing exactly as the community asked them to, giving up their specs as fast as they can pass them through legal and beyond by hiring extra devs for the FOSS team. I have a feeling in the long run this is gonna turn out to be a better strategy, at least until Linux gets a proper ABI, because it will mean that you will be able to support pretty much ANY distro with ANY card by AMD and have it "just work".
In the end I don't suppose it will affect me all that much as my customers buy Windows and at the crucial sub $150 price point AMD pretty much stands alone. the amount of bang per buck is just insane so while I'm often trying new distros just to see they are nearly always in VMs so the AMD GPU performance really isn't even in play there.
Noooo...because frankly I don't give a rat's ass about ARM mobile devices, I sell them but since they are closed systems that are beyond a PITA into pretty much impossible to fix i treat them about like an SD card but what I DO care about is X86 mobile, such as laptops and desktops.
So in ARM it isn't gonna matter, as nobody will be using the desktop, it'll be tweeting twitting fart apps all the way down but that's exactly the opposite of X86 as EVERYONE has X86 programs they are gonna want to run often that will NEVER be metro apps, even MSFT has said that MS office won't be Metro so that is one of the biggest office suites that won't even support the new "wonder interface" and its by the same company that wants us to believe metro is a viable desktop!
But how many people are gonna be able to FIND the damned thing? hell there is usually a button for everything in Windows, its finding the damned thing that is a giant headache. Like the first month I switched from XP to 7 it took me a good month to equate sharing--adapter settings with network settings, I mean WTF? Why EXACTLY do i need sharing combined with networking? It wasn't like sharing anything with Win 7 was difficult in the first place, so tying those two things together just seemed kinda pointless to me.
in the end though i don't think its gonna matter, as just like with Vista where the bugs, bloat, and UAC becoming a parody had them running to me to "Get rid of this damned thing and put XP back on" I have a feeling Sinofsky's "supergigantic smartphone OS" is gonna put quite a lot of extra cash in my pocket when people come in, all pissed and frustrated and say 'get rid of this damned thing and put win 7 back on". It really isn't very discoverable or intuitive and one thing I've found is that folks really don't have a lot of tolerance from a PITA desktop or lap, especially when they know they have a choice and don't have to put up with it.It'll be another year and a half of dealing with downgrade rights (from now on I'm charging an extra 20% if they don't make the call, I'm tired of 30 minute sales pitches before they just give me the damned key) and selling copies of Win 7 Home and pro to those without rights.
See? We men tend to like a brand and stick with them. For me on the tech front, Samsung HDDs, especially their EcoDrives but since they are gone now I'll go like you with WD, As far as monitors go while you can't go wrong with Samsung I've been quite happy with Dell Business for the last few purchases. their desktops may be crap but their business monitors are quite reliable, for routers I like D-Link as well for wireless but prefer trendnet for wired, as I have set several of them up on jobs sites because i honestly thought the harsh conditions there would kill any router and didn't see the point in buying more expensive but frankly they surprised me, not a single dead one despite such nasty conditions and temp shifts. Tough little bastards they are.
So you see why I said the men can bring you a long term customer that keeps coming back, we find something we like we tend to stick with it. Women just don't seem to develop preferences when it comes to tech, as I said my GF treats her phone like she does shoes, something to be used while she likes it and tossed when she doesn't and I honestly can't think of a single tech device where she got the same brand twice. What I find funny is that in clothes she knows all the brands, tells me without me even trying them on which companies make their sizes a little tighter or a little looser, and have her preferences there for both herself and for me while I honestly don't give a rat's ass as long as it covers me without cutting off the blood flow, but while i know all the geek brands and all the quirks and preferences she honestly couldn't care less about the whole thing, its strictly what catches her eye or what some GF of hers recommends that month. But I guess that's why its smart to aim clothing at women and tech at the guys, build customer loyalty with the sex that will care about your product.
I just don't get why so many find it hard to believe VB 6 has such long legs. it did ONE job and it did that job fucking brilliantly, which was to make an easy to use GUI front end to a DB, that's it, that's all. This is what MSFT fucked up with with .NET because frankly ALL of the VB 6 I've seen being used and being built really was only variants on that one function.
What MSFT refused to accept was was how important one small function can be to an SMB or SOHO. There is a HELL of a lot of times a small business can use a custom GUI to a DB, everything from contacts to records can be kept in a simple DB that just needs an easy to use front end so the user doesn't have to know anything about DBs, just fill out the forms.
Finally all those "real" programmers that gnash their teeth at even the mention of the word VB? GET OVER IT, you wouldn't expect them to call a 'real"engineer when all they need is something that can be banged together out of an Erector set would you? of course not and it just so happens there is a hell of a lot of business jobs that don't need some full blown SQL DB just to get the job done. Its just like how we've all seen "applications" built out of VBA and Access, it has its little niche and as long as one doesn't try to build something outside of its little niche? Then its a perfectly valid tool.
MSFT failed with .NET because they assumed if you were doing job A that you would want to learn to have the power to do jobs B-K, when in reality frankly there were tons of guys that frankly only needed to do job A so B-K were simply overkill and pointless. That is why VB 6 has such long legs, frankly there hasn't been any other language that filled the SMB small DB niche quite as well as VB 6.
You are most welcome. I really get sick of the whole religious wars when it comes to Linux, like any criticizing is burning a cross, because frankly we should ALL want things to get better, all want problems to be fixed and better ways of doing things to be explored. hell what would the world be like if Linus said "Minix is good enough" and walked away? If a better idea can make a better OS i'm personally ALL for it.
And as far as Linux and graphics intensive games...I'd argue all the underlying video issues is why most will need to keep Windows to game with. if they could get the subsystem truly stable then porting the games to run natively wouldn't be such a PITA, where you have to target THIS version of the kernel and THAT driver and THIS version of the software. part of what makes Windows great for gaming is there is really only 3 versions (XP,Vista,7) and since the kernel isn't being changed nor the graphics subsystem and audio subsystem constantly being fiddled with one can just "write once and be done". Hell there are many games from the late 90s I can play without compatibility mode on Win 7 X64 simply because they wrote to the APIs instead of using software and hardware hacks, which there are a few games that can't be run on anything other than Win98 simply because they DID use hacks, such as Mechwarrior 3 or i76.
Frankly as for AMD I think the whole TFA is a tempest in a teacup as ASLR IS USED FOR THE BROWSER which running a little PC shop I get to see what is going around and frankly the browser is the ONLY attack vector I've seen, either by using social engineering or browser drive bys. From what I've seen you stop the malware at the browser you are done, its game over for the bad guys. Not saying that some time in the future some nasty might target GPUs, anything is possible, but that just isn't what I'm seeing in the wild, its all security tool or AV201x or drive bys and so far the ONLY bugs I've seen do any harm at all on Win 7 without the user actively helping it was the Firefox bug I wrote about in my journal and that can be traced to Firefox not respecting or using low rights mode which lets the malware pop up an invisible iFrame and spam their yahoo address book, even if they aren't looged in when it hits.
so as long as AMD/ATI give me and my customers the best bang for the buck in the huge $150 and under market i think I'll stick with them, their drivers are damned good on Windows, they have opened their specs on Linux and even went so far as to hire devs to help get the FOSS driver up to speed, and the chips are cheap and powerful. that makes AMD a winner in my book.