Well if anything I'd say using IE on the 720 is even worse as every cracker in the world is gonna want to be the one to bust that nut wide open, just look at how quickly they swarmed over the X360. I still don't see cracked PS3s being sold anywhere but i can go to Criagslist and be up to my ass in cracked 360s by dark. By giving them a browser they already have experience in attacking this is just another dumbshit move by MSFT to try to up their pathetic IE uptake (which if you look at any chart it got fragmented all to hell after IE 6) at the risk of their new console. I honestly wouldn't be surprised in the least if the first crack in the 720 didn't come from IE, not surprised in the least.
But personally I don't know anybody that surfs on the things because as you noted its just painful. They are naturally locked down to a specific version that quickly becomes horribly out of date, don't support plug ins so many formats aren't gonna work, its just a mess. Everyone around here that has tried using the things as an all in one always end up coming to me wanting to know if I can 'fix it" and I always tell them just let me build them a cheap HTPC. While I'm sure MSFT will try to make IE10 state of the art it won't be 6 months before its badly behind the curve and it'll be the Wii all over again.
I'm just glad I finally got my kids off the consoles, because between the high price of games, the locked down hardware, network issues...sigh, they really aren't a good value anymore. If the specs are correct I could build something nicer than a PS4 for around $450 and that's without being picky about parts and less and less games are being made console exclusive so most of the triple A games my kids will be able to play a hell of a lot cheaper by just getting it off Steam. I ended up building three new gamer PCs that will play just about any game out there at medium or better and the whole smash including monitors set me back less than $1300 after MIRs. The consoles just aren't a good value anymore and now with two hexacores and a quad my boys will be able to game for years with nothing more than the occasional $50 GPU upgrade and the difference in games alone has saved me a ton, so I'm glad to say no matter what MSFT does with Win 8 or the 720 I'm just gonna sit this one out, thanks anyway.
While that is true if that is the case then AMD got a total shut out when it comes to consoles which sell in the tens of millions to hundreds of millions. That is a LOT of chips and will be a damned nice windfall for AMD, especially if it turns out that the PS4 is also using an AMD CPU which so far looks to be the case.
Frankly things aren't looking good for Nvidia where I'm sitting at, they've lost the consoles, the discrete market is a small niche compared to IGPs which they have been locked out of (which i still think Intel should have gotten busted for antitrust over), and while they may have a shot at Mobile without Apple its not a good market, all the high end pretty much belongs to iDevices and the low end has been using broadcom accelerators.
That is why I thought Nvidia should have bought Via. Their Nano CPUs would have not only worked great in low power nettops and netbooks but their onboard crypto acceleration would make it a hell of a low power server chip and paired with an Nvidia GPU in an APU like AMD is making and CUDA to program it would have made a good chip for multiple markets. now it looks like if they don't score big with ARM they are gonna be seriously hurting as AMD has been owning the lucrative under $200 discrete market for several generations now. Its just not a good position to be in for Nvidia right now, not a good position at all.
Then lets see your link drinkypoo, lets see a list of these "many eyes" or even a single study showing patches given by actual non corporate paid workers. You can't just pull "many eyes" out of your ass because i could argue the same thing for Windows, after all I sign an NDA and pay $10k I can look at the source as well but that wouldn't magically give me the ability to spot an obfuscated bug.
And how exactly is many eyes not just another case of the mythical man month which has been shown to be just that, a myth? Just because you can look at the code doesn't magically give you the power to read it you know. A software developer with the skills to actually spot obfuscated bugs is a hell of a lot rarer than a weekend coder, and I urge you to read the code at the obfuscated c code contest and you'll see that even KNOWING the code is a trap, being given knowledge of HOW the code is a trap, being able to spot the actual trap itself? FUCKING DIFFICULT. Now you honestly think some weekend coders are gonna be able to spot obfuscated code in some low level package used in many distros that nobody messes with? Hell I bet my last dollar that most of the code in your average distro isn't looked at by anybody other than the ones that wrote the thing and without links or citations my view is JUST as valid as "many eyes".
And notice the guy below your post using the classic Use Distro X because it doesn't matter WHICH distro you try, or the fact that there really is only a few main branches (Debain, Red hat, and Slax) with just a little futzing (which breaks more things natch) nope, its use distro X! (TM)
For the record i invite anyone to try my experiment and I tried Ubuntu/Kubuntu/Xubuntu, PCLOS, Fedora (I know but I got told Use Distro X with Fedora enough times i did it to shut them up) Mepis, Slax, and a couple more that were niche enough I can't recall the names without looking them up which I can't be arsed and why should I? Pick your poison, the results are the same. Take ANY version from 4 years ago and upgrade to current using ONLY THE GUI as a normal user would be expected to do and THE OS WILL BE BROKEN. It might be totally broken or it might be just slightly broken but it WILL be broken!
And for those that say "Windows will do the same!" BULLSHIT, Bull fucking shit. You get TEN YEARS of support for ANY MSFT OS, home or business. You can't even get a four year old Linux to upgrade without crapping all over itself, especially wireless and sound (although for McGrew I found SiS and AMD NICs got crapped on a lot too) and I'm sure as fuck not gonna bankrupt myself giving away free lifetime support because the damned OS can't even stay current without having the devs take a massive dump all over the damned place.
So believe me friend, what you had happened to you was just the top of a VERY shitty cake. i bet you were using enterprise grade hardware, which while still getting shat upon at least gets shat upon less, try it with any of the hardware you get at your average OEM and see how it goes. They say its a drop in replacement for Windows but that is only in bizarro world, I've had less hassle taking an XP RTM and upgrading it to current, that is TWELVE YEARS of updates and service packs, then getting even a four year old Linux to update its security state without taking a crap. its just too big of a buggy unstable mess for the masses and THAT is why OEMs and shops like mine won't touch it PERIOD.
Hell you can go farther back than that friend, there were injunctions and patent trials over the first steam engines and that case goes back to 1792. and Watt himself used a sun and planet gearing on his steam engines to get around a patent for using a steam crank design so even back then there were inventors having to work around patents, that's the way its been as long as patents have existed.
Yep I surfed on the old Dreamcast many a time back in the age of dialup, its really wasn't bad. of course web pages were a lot simpler then so they didn't take gobs of bandwidth and puke JavaScript everywhere, but for a console (I think it was based on WinCE IIRC) it really was ahead of the game. Its a damned shame it bombed, it was the only console that would run emulators that i know of without hacking. I still have my old DC put up for when i feel like breaking out some classic SNES or Genesis or NES, it was a great console.
As for TFA, has anybody announced the hardware specs on the 720 or whatever they are gonna call it? Because if the reports are to be believed the PS4 is gonna be an X86 that is roughly the same as your average $400 PC, so if MSFT doesn't push the hardware we PC gamers may be ahead of the curve even at release day. Personally I'd be fine with that, the current gen graphics look damned sweet to me and the price of development is getting so high trying to crank up the graphics that if they don't stop we'll be looking at hundred dollar games. Does anybody know if the Xbox is going AMD or Nvidia? because if they go AMD that will leave Nvidia without a console next gen, quite a coup for AMD.
So while I won't be buying one (or Win 8 for that matter) I always like to check out new hardware, so if anybody has a comparison of what the new hardware is gonna be I'd love to read it. I figure the Nintendo will be the weakest but finding out PS4 was going MOR X86 was kinda a shock, now all that's left is to see what MSFT brings to the table.
Its IE dude, it still yucky. I will give the IE guys credit for supporting low rights mode (Which FF STILL doesn't do, even though the feature has been out for 5 years now) but the Chromium based do too and they are frankly faster and suck less resources, at least from what I've seen. They also have a nice version of ABP and it seems like every malware writer on the planet aims straight for IE because that's what grandma uses, so I agree with the other guy, no thanks Billy.
But let me ask you this: Now that you know everything you use Siri for is sent to Apple will you stop using it? I'm betting not, anymore than I give a crap that Steam has a profile of my hardware for their little metrics or that MSFT gets a report if I manage to crash something.
Every day tons of data is being created and generated about you and most folks could NOT care less, they really couldn't. As long as it isn't slapping them in the face they honestly don't care what FB or some webmail or whatever knows, as long as its cheap (or better yet free to them) and above all EASY TO USE.
Like I said my GF uses FB constantly so what did she say when I told about all the info they gathered? "And? It lets me stay close to my kinfolks in Oregon easily, that's all i care about" and that's pretty much it in a nutshell, as long as it does what people want to do easily "free as in freedom' never even is given a first thought, much less a second. Those that follow RMS think there are all these "oppressed masses' when people will give you their passwords for a cookie, they just don't care.
I have actually tried this BTW, just to shut up those "Linux is ready for the desktop!" types, only instead of 12 years old I gave them a HUGE advantage by only going back 4 years, less than half the established MSFT lifecycle for OSes. What did I get? BROKEN BOXES, nothing but broken boxes as far as the eye can see.
In just the past 4 years they've got from ALSA to Pulse, GNOME 2 to 3 and KDE 3 to 4, it was just a fucking mess! Wireless wouldn't work, Ethernet would just drop in and out, give audio up it was just a mess, and of course the Nvidia and ATI drivers were crapped on, the Intel worked but only in VESA mode. So what did I get told then? "Well you should use Red hat, its supported" yeah at $399 a year it IS supported, its also 40 times the cost of Windows over that same 10 year cycle.../facepalm/
For all those that think Linux is ready I invite you to read this article by Ingo Molnar, who is one of the head develeopers at Red hat. if ANYBODY would know what is wrong with Linux this would be the guy, and he says mistakes such as lack of an ABI for drivers and a system where the devs try to "own" and control the repo has led to the "death cries" of the Linux platform. It is simply impossible to do QA on 20,000 packages and over a billion lines of code, it simply can't be done. THAT is why Linux doesn't work for the majority, because it simply can't keep up with the changes in hardware and software.
I'm sorry friend but you are dead wrong and in fact I'd argue that many of the open source projects would probably be EASIER to plant bugs in than Windows, why? Because there are a ton of projects that are made up of a handful of guys that are always understaffed. Don't think those guys would welcome a highly skilled volunteer from XYZ Corp? And just because the code is open don't mean any people with the skills to spot a highly obfuscated bug actually look at the code, look at how an infected Quake 3 was in the repos for over a year and a half.
So I'm sorry friend but all it takes is money and desire and the three letter agencies have both in abundance so it really wouldn't be hard. Look at how many packages are used in damned near every distro, now tell me have YOU looked at the code for all those common packages? How well do you know the teams that made them? Its not magic folks, you find a weak spot and exploit it and with so many FOSS projects understaffed that is a nice target for exploitation, pure and simple.
Sounds like what you are wanting is what Avast and Comodo already do, which is scan before load all web pages and sandbox the browser. This way if the website you try to hook to is "infected' instead of just running the code it blocks it and gives you a warning and since by default the browser is sandboxed anyway if something manages to get past their heuristics its not gonna be going anywhere anyway.
Yes I seriously think the OS companies aren't "in" on this type of operation because its simply too easy to pull off without them and too hard to keep something a secret in a large org like an OS company.
Try picking just ONE of those components out and see how bog standard common they are now, I know I found over a dozen legitimate applications on my system that use SQLite, from my browser to my network bandwidth monitor. SQLite made having little DBs so damned easy that tons of companies jumped on board, why bother making your own file formats and storage solutions for your data when SQLite is right there and free to use?
In the end your argument would make as much sense as saying "The OS companies must be in it because they used a txt file ZOMFG!" because the REASON these technologies are so damned common is because they solve a shitload of problems that programs big and small had, nothing more. I'd love to see a list of how many companies use SQLite in their applications because i bet that list would be tens of thousands and more added by the month. Hell I'd have to wonder if the malware writers used SQLite because they wanted to 'hide in plain sight" as much as they simply had a problem SQLite solved and that was just a happy side effect for them? Because if I was building an app that needed to store data SQLite would probably be the first thing that came to mind, its small, its easy to use, it just makes sense.
Bah EVERYONE knows who did it....it was those damned aliens! Worse than commies those little gray bastards, it was just their way of trolling the scientists. You can just see the little shits parked in orbit and letting out a big pulse from their engines and going "Figure THAT shit out monkey boys! LOL!" before going to piss on some natives heads to make them think their stupid rain dance worked. Sneaky little shits!
Are you talking about the same 1% that use Linux? Because as Loki showed catering to that niche is rather pointless. People that use Linux care about "free as in beer" more than "free as in freedom" which is why companies like Canonical are bleeding to death, and that is NOT the kind of users advertisers want so frankly isn't the kind of users you should be going after.
Look the ONLY ones who have ever been able to make money off those that care about "free as in freedom" users are 1.-Those that sell support, such as Red hat, and those that sell hardware such as routers and the TiVo. The rest of the planet run Windows or OSX and has an iDevice and frankly doesn't give a shit about anything but convenient. Like it or not but the majority don't give a shit how much data you gather, whether you own everything they post, all they care about is easy, that's it.
Hell did you know Siri sends everything you search for to Apple? Did you notice its usage dropping off AT ALL after that came out? Folks don't care,they really don't. You could say they are living a lie because they pretend the net is this invisible "thing" where what they do don't matter but that's the way it is and short of having something pop up going "YOU ARE BEING WATCHED" I doubt you'd ever pop that perception bubble, folks just want easy, no matter the cost in 'freedom" that easy entails.
So let me get this straight...you installed a TWELVE YEAR OLD OS and then are BITCHING because the company actually gave you patches instead of forcing you to upgrade like the OS you are singing the praises of? please stay with Linux, you are obviously too big of a dumbass to run Windows.
What I'd like to know is....why does this question keep coming up? Its as stupid as saying "When will mopeds replace Mac trucks?" so the correct answer should be "Well that's just a stupid fucking question!" followed by hitting the moron who asked it with a fish, maybe a nice trout or red snapper.
While there is a LITTLE overlap, there's not much, and mostly the two are as far apart as mopeds and trucks. The ARM is made to go in little things and is designed for using little power above all, the Intel needs more space but the IPC is just insane so you can get a hell of a lot more work done. You wouldn't try to run Photoshop on your cell would you? So why would you think the chip in your cell would replace the one running Photoshop? ARM simply can't ramp up to the IPC of a P4, much less a Core CPU and if it tried it'd be just as big a user of power as an Intel so it'd be pointless.
So can't we all just accept that some things are good for some jobs and other things are good for others and leave it at that? Neither chip is gonna "beat" the other because except for a couple of tiny overlaps they really aren't in competition.
Oh and a final note, the reason that laptops and netbooks aren't selling as much is the same reason desktops aren't selling as much and that is because we went past "good enough" and into "insanely overpowered" and frankly once we got rid of the space heater chips like P4 Mobile that killed the laptops by thermal cycling honestly? with just a tiny bit of TLC they can last a looong time. I know people still using early Core and Turion laptops simply because there wasn't a point in replacing them. After all a new battery was only $30 and there hasn't been any "killer apps" other than games for years and most folks don't game on a laptop.
So again I wouldn't say one "killed" the other, as everyone I know that has a smartphone or tablet ALSO has a netbook or laptop AND a desktop, its just they don't replace the X86 units until they die because there really isn't a point. While ARM is undergoing its own MHz war frankly for most users even a bottom of the line Pentium or even E350 netbook or laptop is more than enough power for what they are doing with them so they stick with what works. I predict we'll see the same thing with ARM once quads reach mainstream, they'll run into a power wall just as X86 ran into a thermal wall and we'll see the same thing we do now with X86, nobody tossing until the previous one dies.
The author of TFA is also missing something even more fundamental and that is the users don't give a damned about free as in freedom all they give a shit about is convenient. Most users of FB that I've watched are using it for the same reason my GF uses it, and that is to keep in touch with distant friends/relatives easier than email. Her old HS buddies and distant relatives can find her in seconds on FB and contact her, no need to know an email address, and they can keep in touch through FB with a minimum of work.
So the ONLY way I could see FB going down is if they did the same dumbass mistake that MySpace did, and that was spamming the crap out of the users. Everyone I know ditched MySpace not because they didn't like it or felt the need for the "freedom" of FB, its just because MySpace started spamming all over the place. With a service like FB its really their audience to lose, and by doing smart moves like buying Zynga (I swear those games are like catnip to females) I just don't see any real dumbass moves happening.
But I don't think something "cool" would be enough because people are basically lazy and FB could just copy whatever the feature was just as Zynga rips off other games. No the only way I see FB going down is if they decide they need to "monetize the users more" and basically crap all over the network but I haven't seen any signs so far they are THAT stupid.
Well I don't have the link anymore, it went to shit along with the HDD but it was written by one of the promoters that worked with Geffen that was basically pissed that Geffen and friends treated the acts like they did. he actually liked Cherry and as the story showed with just some promotion he could sell but to the guys at the top it was just a game, they bragged how they could basically sell anything and make people buy it with their control of mass media.
And I know all about the radio stations as well, I was playing with a popular regional college band in the early 00s and we had a DJ invite us on to play live just to get our fans to quit calling him. The reason we had to play live was because he couldn't play a single song that wasn't on the corporate list or he'd be fired. Its frankly disgusting the way a few old men in a boardroom somewhere can decide what everyone is gonna listen to simply by controlling the media.
Its like the record engineer and producer Steve Albini said "They make you wade through a river of shit all for the "privilege" of signing away everything and if you are lucky when that million selling album comes back you'll "only" owe $50,000 to the labels, even if you recorded it yourself" and he's right, I've seen guys sell a half a million albums and not only not get a dime but get a BILL for $20k-$30k. The whole thing is a massive scam and it isn't the artists getting shit from these copyrights, its just the leeches.
Yes but the bigger question is is this an Ask Slashdot question and the answer is no, it is not. Network engineers get paid good money to set up places like this because it IS complex, difficult, and basically a royal PITA, especially in a high rise. This isn't a question like "Here is the jobs I have, what kind of CPU would be best with this budget?" or some such, frankly the answers he is gonna get are gonna be worthless because you need to know the layout, what kind of lines are in the area, what kind of throughput are they expecting, etc.
This just isn't the kind of question you can just throw onto a form with so little details and get anything but total bullshit back, sorry.
Actually Carmack admits that he built Rage for the consoles and that PC simply wasn't given the same priority so surprise! the PC version is shit. Water is wet, day comes after night, console ports suck balls, film at 11.
Kinda ironic considering that Id "Games" (I'd call a lot of their later stuff fancy tech demos) have never been bit hits on consoles but instead have had the PC modding community make decent games out of their tech demos, but hey! Piss on your core audience and you shouldn't be surprised if you bomb. Maybe he'll remember next time its the PC Modders that actually make his "games" worth playing (like the Doom 3 flashlight so you wouldn't be Ray Charles on Mars?) so he'll actually devote the resources he should have to the PC.
Dude I've been building machines since Win 3.x was the OS of the day and frankly? Drivers have never been better. I honestly can't even remember the last time I saw a BSOD in the shop that wasn't caused by a piece of hardware actually failing.
On the other hand I have seen a LOT of programs, especially games, where it was obvious it was kicked out the door with minimal testing to make some deadline. Quite obviously game related bug, voice sync issues, textures popping in and out, games just slamming the hell out of the system when there is very little actually going on in the scene, just obvious bugs.
So I see no reason NOT to blame the game devs when obviously buggy code is released, hell it isn't like they really have to worry about much besides testing for various graphics cards as nearly all the sound and networking I see now is the same SiS, Realtek, and Via onboard stuff. They should pick one MOR card and one high end from each series and have play testers give them a run and I bet most of the bugs would be found pre-release. Of course that is assuming they care enough to do this, whereas other than a few companies like Valve I have been seeing more and more games released with what before would have been labeled show stoppers.
And you can't claim its having to support so much hardware, because if that were true how would you explain all the buggy as hell console releases we've been seeing lately? Its pretty obvious the SOP for a lot of these games is "Ship it now, we'll fix it later" which hurts the games themselves and the industry as a whole. i know I've been bit without enough crazy bugs I usually wait 6 months before purchase so that the patches will take care of the worst bugs, because there is nothing more irritating than bringing home or downloading a brand new game only to find its so damned glitchy you are gonna have to wait to play it anyway.
That is why I advise my customers to NEVER buy a mobile that isn't already running the OS they desire, because all it leads to is headaches. Frankly i have YET to see a laptop manufacturer that gave a crap about software once its left the factory, I've dealt with $2000+ units and $450 best Buy specials and ALL are piss poor when it comes to driver support. Hell when i bought my EEE netbook I found that right OOTB the drivers were badly out of date and didn't support half of the features I had bought an E350 for, such as hardware acceleration of most video formats. Luckily for me the stock AMD drivers work just fine on it because Asus haven't released a single driver update in over a year.
But if you run into that problem again feel free to shoot me an email at the address i use here, I've had to do driver hunts for so damned many laptops at the shop i'm usually pretty good about finding drivers for most chips. occasionally I've even had to disassemble the driver EXE and rub Windows nose in its location to get it to take, but if anybody has released a laptop with that same chip and the version of Windows you want I can nearly always get it to work.
What I have always found interesting is how much of their rhetoric, especially against the BSDs and those using proprietary software, is very similar to the *.A.A. In both cases they come up with ever more crazy "doom scenarios" that will befall you if you don't do things THEIR way, and both act like any path other than doing things their way is just insanity and "you must be one of THEM!" if you don't agree with them.
I always found that fascinating, how you can take a post from a rabid GPLer and a rabid pro *.A.A and change very few words and have the same post.
This is extra funny when you read some of the hoops RMS used to get through flaws in his own philosophy, such as by DISABLING the ability to update the firmware that suddenly magically makes it a "circuit" and thus okay, wait, what? Oh its just old RMS finding a way to wiggle around the fact that a piece of software isn't FOSS by coming up with a loophole to make it still work under GPL when it don't.
Frankly I find all the crazy hoop jumping and rhetoric kinda interesting, as RMS doesn't seem to be advocating classic communism, he doesn't seem to be having a problem with paying electricians or doctors or dentists, just programmers who should all work for free. Oh he says you can sell GPL software sure, but logically its obvious you can sell ONE copy and after that you are screwed. of course there is the support model but again logically it wouldn't make sense to do your best as if it works perfectly OOTB why would you need to buy support?
Logically the entire movement just doesn't make sense to me. a good programmer takes years of schooling and experience in the field, yet somehow they are supposed to be worth less than everyone else, as nobody is is being asked to work for free under RMS' rules, just programmers. What makes the sweat off the programmer's brow worth less than the dentist or mechanic? Do they not just as much education and hard work to achieve quality in the field? Hell maybe I could understand it if RMS were a classical communist or socialist, where everyone should work towards the group doing better but he's not, he just doesn't seem to think programmers are worth anything. Kinda ironic when both projects he gets credit for, GCC and Emacs, are actually forks that he "blessed' to keep from being cut out of the loop.
Just don't download every driver, its as simple as that. I've found that if I stick with the even driver numbers there is no hassles at all, but often their odd numbered drivers are glitchy. Now that we know about TFA it was probably because they were fixing bugs and just shoved the odd ones out the door, but I have 3 ATI cards in my family's PCs as well as an AMD APU in my netbook and by just sticking with the even releases its been smooth sailing all the way.
Oh and if you like AMD you might want to snatch a Thuban while they're cheap, I've seen places selling Thubans for as little as $110 to make way for Bulldozers which as you know Thuban beats BD in most benches so getting a Hexacore for so cheap is a hell of a deal. I'd recommend a coolermaster cooler though, the hyper 212 or N520 as the stock cooler suck, but with the coolermasters you can keep them nicely chilled and if you are in the mood get some crazy OCs as well.
But frankly AMD could go to quarterly driver releases for all I care, as long as the drivers are stable and solid who gives a crap? I've been running AMD/ATI for nearly 4 years now and as long as I avoided the odd drivers everything has been smooth sailing, games play great, no BSODS or bugs that I've seen, just as solid as my Nvidia was, so no complaints here.
Thanks for that post, nice to know I'm not the only one bit by that. My oldest wanted that game soooo bad but finally gave up when even an upgrade to a hexacore and HD4850 wasn't enough to keep that game from slowdowns. Considering the not very fancy graphics having it slow down on even a dual wasn't acceptable, but a hex with a 256bit GPU? Give me a break! I finally showed him several other MMOs that had better graphics and more going on and said "Look bud, if these games don't glitch but that one does? its the game" so he said fuck it and chose another game.
It just amazes me what half assed code is allowed out the door nowadays, sure back in the day we'd get little bugs here and there but this? Screen tearing or engines choking with practically nothing going on or serious graphics issues like textures popping all over the damned place? its obvious to me that QA has gone WAY downhill on a lot of the AAA games, they just shove them out the door and make the GPU manufacturers try to code around the mess. Well screw that, both AMD and Nvidia ought to have a little sign pop up when you launch a buggy game for the first time with something like "This game is known to be buggy because of (x), if this happens to you please write the game company at (address) and tell them you would like this fixed" and then maybe they would be shamed into not putting out such crappy code.
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Well if anything I'd say using IE on the 720 is even worse as every cracker in the world is gonna want to be the one to bust that nut wide open, just look at how quickly they swarmed over the X360. I still don't see cracked PS3s being sold anywhere but i can go to Criagslist and be up to my ass in cracked 360s by dark. By giving them a browser they already have experience in attacking this is just another dumbshit move by MSFT to try to up their pathetic IE uptake (which if you look at any chart it got fragmented all to hell after IE 6) at the risk of their new console. I honestly wouldn't be surprised in the least if the first crack in the 720 didn't come from IE, not surprised in the least.
But personally I don't know anybody that surfs on the things because as you noted its just painful. They are naturally locked down to a specific version that quickly becomes horribly out of date, don't support plug ins so many formats aren't gonna work, its just a mess. Everyone around here that has tried using the things as an all in one always end up coming to me wanting to know if I can 'fix it" and I always tell them just let me build them a cheap HTPC. While I'm sure MSFT will try to make IE10 state of the art it won't be 6 months before its badly behind the curve and it'll be the Wii all over again.
I'm just glad I finally got my kids off the consoles, because between the high price of games, the locked down hardware, network issues...sigh, they really aren't a good value anymore. If the specs are correct I could build something nicer than a PS4 for around $450 and that's without being picky about parts and less and less games are being made console exclusive so most of the triple A games my kids will be able to play a hell of a lot cheaper by just getting it off Steam. I ended up building three new gamer PCs that will play just about any game out there at medium or better and the whole smash including monitors set me back less than $1300 after MIRs. The consoles just aren't a good value anymore and now with two hexacores and a quad my boys will be able to game for years with nothing more than the occasional $50 GPU upgrade and the difference in games alone has saved me a ton, so I'm glad to say no matter what MSFT does with Win 8 or the 720 I'm just gonna sit this one out, thanks anyway.
While that is true if that is the case then AMD got a total shut out when it comes to consoles which sell in the tens of millions to hundreds of millions. That is a LOT of chips and will be a damned nice windfall for AMD, especially if it turns out that the PS4 is also using an AMD CPU which so far looks to be the case.
Frankly things aren't looking good for Nvidia where I'm sitting at, they've lost the consoles, the discrete market is a small niche compared to IGPs which they have been locked out of (which i still think Intel should have gotten busted for antitrust over), and while they may have a shot at Mobile without Apple its not a good market, all the high end pretty much belongs to iDevices and the low end has been using broadcom accelerators.
That is why I thought Nvidia should have bought Via. Their Nano CPUs would have not only worked great in low power nettops and netbooks but their onboard crypto acceleration would make it a hell of a low power server chip and paired with an Nvidia GPU in an APU like AMD is making and CUDA to program it would have made a good chip for multiple markets. now it looks like if they don't score big with ARM they are gonna be seriously hurting as AMD has been owning the lucrative under $200 discrete market for several generations now. Its just not a good position to be in for Nvidia right now, not a good position at all.
Then lets see your link drinkypoo, lets see a list of these "many eyes" or even a single study showing patches given by actual non corporate paid workers. You can't just pull "many eyes" out of your ass because i could argue the same thing for Windows, after all I sign an NDA and pay $10k I can look at the source as well but that wouldn't magically give me the ability to spot an obfuscated bug.
And how exactly is many eyes not just another case of the mythical man month which has been shown to be just that, a myth? Just because you can look at the code doesn't magically give you the power to read it you know. A software developer with the skills to actually spot obfuscated bugs is a hell of a lot rarer than a weekend coder, and I urge you to read the code at the obfuscated c code contest and you'll see that even KNOWING the code is a trap, being given knowledge of HOW the code is a trap, being able to spot the actual trap itself? FUCKING DIFFICULT. Now you honestly think some weekend coders are gonna be able to spot obfuscated code in some low level package used in many distros that nobody messes with? Hell I bet my last dollar that most of the code in your average distro isn't looked at by anybody other than the ones that wrote the thing and without links or citations my view is JUST as valid as "many eyes".
And notice the guy below your post using the classic Use Distro X because it doesn't matter WHICH distro you try, or the fact that there really is only a few main branches (Debain, Red hat, and Slax) with just a little futzing (which breaks more things natch) nope, its use distro X! (TM)
For the record i invite anyone to try my experiment and I tried Ubuntu/Kubuntu/Xubuntu, PCLOS, Fedora (I know but I got told Use Distro X with Fedora enough times i did it to shut them up) Mepis, Slax, and a couple more that were niche enough I can't recall the names without looking them up which I can't be arsed and why should I? Pick your poison, the results are the same. Take ANY version from 4 years ago and upgrade to current using ONLY THE GUI as a normal user would be expected to do and THE OS WILL BE BROKEN. It might be totally broken or it might be just slightly broken but it WILL be broken!
And for those that say "Windows will do the same!" BULLSHIT, Bull fucking shit. You get TEN YEARS of support for ANY MSFT OS, home or business. You can't even get a four year old Linux to upgrade without crapping all over itself, especially wireless and sound (although for McGrew I found SiS and AMD NICs got crapped on a lot too) and I'm sure as fuck not gonna bankrupt myself giving away free lifetime support because the damned OS can't even stay current without having the devs take a massive dump all over the damned place.
So believe me friend, what you had happened to you was just the top of a VERY shitty cake. i bet you were using enterprise grade hardware, which while still getting shat upon at least gets shat upon less, try it with any of the hardware you get at your average OEM and see how it goes. They say its a drop in replacement for Windows but that is only in bizarro world, I've had less hassle taking an XP RTM and upgrading it to current, that is TWELVE YEARS of updates and service packs, then getting even a four year old Linux to update its security state without taking a crap. its just too big of a buggy unstable mess for the masses and THAT is why OEMs and shops like mine won't touch it PERIOD.
Hell you can go farther back than that friend, there were injunctions and patent trials over the first steam engines and that case goes back to 1792. and Watt himself used a sun and planet gearing on his steam engines to get around a patent for using a steam crank design so even back then there were inventors having to work around patents, that's the way its been as long as patents have existed.
Yep I surfed on the old Dreamcast many a time back in the age of dialup, its really wasn't bad. of course web pages were a lot simpler then so they didn't take gobs of bandwidth and puke JavaScript everywhere, but for a console (I think it was based on WinCE IIRC) it really was ahead of the game. Its a damned shame it bombed, it was the only console that would run emulators that i know of without hacking. I still have my old DC put up for when i feel like breaking out some classic SNES or Genesis or NES, it was a great console.
As for TFA, has anybody announced the hardware specs on the 720 or whatever they are gonna call it? Because if the reports are to be believed the PS4 is gonna be an X86 that is roughly the same as your average $400 PC, so if MSFT doesn't push the hardware we PC gamers may be ahead of the curve even at release day. Personally I'd be fine with that, the current gen graphics look damned sweet to me and the price of development is getting so high trying to crank up the graphics that if they don't stop we'll be looking at hundred dollar games. Does anybody know if the Xbox is going AMD or Nvidia? because if they go AMD that will leave Nvidia without a console next gen, quite a coup for AMD.
So while I won't be buying one (or Win 8 for that matter) I always like to check out new hardware, so if anybody has a comparison of what the new hardware is gonna be I'd love to read it. I figure the Nintendo will be the weakest but finding out PS4 was going MOR X86 was kinda a shock, now all that's left is to see what MSFT brings to the table.
Its IE dude, it still yucky. I will give the IE guys credit for supporting low rights mode (Which FF STILL doesn't do, even though the feature has been out for 5 years now) but the Chromium based do too and they are frankly faster and suck less resources, at least from what I've seen. They also have a nice version of ABP and it seems like every malware writer on the planet aims straight for IE because that's what grandma uses, so I agree with the other guy, no thanks Billy.
But let me ask you this: Now that you know everything you use Siri for is sent to Apple will you stop using it? I'm betting not, anymore than I give a crap that Steam has a profile of my hardware for their little metrics or that MSFT gets a report if I manage to crash something.
Every day tons of data is being created and generated about you and most folks could NOT care less, they really couldn't. As long as it isn't slapping them in the face they honestly don't care what FB or some webmail or whatever knows, as long as its cheap (or better yet free to them) and above all EASY TO USE.
Like I said my GF uses FB constantly so what did she say when I told about all the info they gathered? "And? It lets me stay close to my kinfolks in Oregon easily, that's all i care about" and that's pretty much it in a nutshell, as long as it does what people want to do easily "free as in freedom' never even is given a first thought, much less a second. Those that follow RMS think there are all these "oppressed masses' when people will give you their passwords for a cookie, they just don't care.
I have actually tried this BTW, just to shut up those "Linux is ready for the desktop!" types, only instead of 12 years old I gave them a HUGE advantage by only going back 4 years, less than half the established MSFT lifecycle for OSes. What did I get? BROKEN BOXES, nothing but broken boxes as far as the eye can see.
In just the past 4 years they've got from ALSA to Pulse, GNOME 2 to 3 and KDE 3 to 4, it was just a fucking mess! Wireless wouldn't work, Ethernet would just drop in and out, give audio up it was just a mess, and of course the Nvidia and ATI drivers were crapped on, the Intel worked but only in VESA mode. So what did I get told then? "Well you should use Red hat, its supported" yeah at $399 a year it IS supported, its also 40 times the cost of Windows over that same 10 year cycle.../facepalm/
For all those that think Linux is ready I invite you to read this article by Ingo Molnar, who is one of the head develeopers at Red hat. if ANYBODY would know what is wrong with Linux this would be the guy, and he says mistakes such as lack of an ABI for drivers and a system where the devs try to "own" and control the repo has led to the "death cries" of the Linux platform. It is simply impossible to do QA on 20,000 packages and over a billion lines of code, it simply can't be done. THAT is why Linux doesn't work for the majority, because it simply can't keep up with the changes in hardware and software.
I'm sorry friend but you are dead wrong and in fact I'd argue that many of the open source projects would probably be EASIER to plant bugs in than Windows, why? Because there are a ton of projects that are made up of a handful of guys that are always understaffed. Don't think those guys would welcome a highly skilled volunteer from XYZ Corp? And just because the code is open don't mean any people with the skills to spot a highly obfuscated bug actually look at the code, look at how an infected Quake 3 was in the repos for over a year and a half.
So I'm sorry friend but all it takes is money and desire and the three letter agencies have both in abundance so it really wouldn't be hard. Look at how many packages are used in damned near every distro, now tell me have YOU looked at the code for all those common packages? How well do you know the teams that made them? Its not magic folks, you find a weak spot and exploit it and with so many FOSS projects understaffed that is a nice target for exploitation, pure and simple.
Sounds like what you are wanting is what Avast and Comodo already do, which is scan before load all web pages and sandbox the browser. This way if the website you try to hook to is "infected' instead of just running the code it blocks it and gives you a warning and since by default the browser is sandboxed anyway if something manages to get past their heuristics its not gonna be going anywhere anyway.
Yes I seriously think the OS companies aren't "in" on this type of operation because its simply too easy to pull off without them and too hard to keep something a secret in a large org like an OS company.
Try picking just ONE of those components out and see how bog standard common they are now, I know I found over a dozen legitimate applications on my system that use SQLite, from my browser to my network bandwidth monitor. SQLite made having little DBs so damned easy that tons of companies jumped on board, why bother making your own file formats and storage solutions for your data when SQLite is right there and free to use?
In the end your argument would make as much sense as saying "The OS companies must be in it because they used a txt file ZOMFG!" because the REASON these technologies are so damned common is because they solve a shitload of problems that programs big and small had, nothing more. I'd love to see a list of how many companies use SQLite in their applications because i bet that list would be tens of thousands and more added by the month. Hell I'd have to wonder if the malware writers used SQLite because they wanted to 'hide in plain sight" as much as they simply had a problem SQLite solved and that was just a happy side effect for them? Because if I was building an app that needed to store data SQLite would probably be the first thing that came to mind, its small, its easy to use, it just makes sense.
Bah EVERYONE knows who did it....it was those damned aliens! Worse than commies those little gray bastards, it was just their way of trolling the scientists. You can just see the little shits parked in orbit and letting out a big pulse from their engines and going "Figure THAT shit out monkey boys! LOL!" before going to piss on some natives heads to make them think their stupid rain dance worked. Sneaky little shits!
Are you talking about the same 1% that use Linux? Because as Loki showed catering to that niche is rather pointless. People that use Linux care about "free as in beer" more than "free as in freedom" which is why companies like Canonical are bleeding to death, and that is NOT the kind of users advertisers want so frankly isn't the kind of users you should be going after.
Look the ONLY ones who have ever been able to make money off those that care about "free as in freedom" users are 1.-Those that sell support, such as Red hat, and those that sell hardware such as routers and the TiVo. The rest of the planet run Windows or OSX and has an iDevice and frankly doesn't give a shit about anything but convenient. Like it or not but the majority don't give a shit how much data you gather, whether you own everything they post, all they care about is easy, that's it.
Hell did you know Siri sends everything you search for to Apple? Did you notice its usage dropping off AT ALL after that came out? Folks don't care,they really don't. You could say they are living a lie because they pretend the net is this invisible "thing" where what they do don't matter but that's the way it is and short of having something pop up going "YOU ARE BEING WATCHED" I doubt you'd ever pop that perception bubble, folks just want easy, no matter the cost in 'freedom" that easy entails.
So let me get this straight...you installed a TWELVE YEAR OLD OS and then are BITCHING because the company actually gave you patches instead of forcing you to upgrade like the OS you are singing the praises of? please stay with Linux, you are obviously too big of a dumbass to run Windows.
What I'd like to know is....why does this question keep coming up? Its as stupid as saying "When will mopeds replace Mac trucks?" so the correct answer should be "Well that's just a stupid fucking question!" followed by hitting the moron who asked it with a fish, maybe a nice trout or red snapper.
While there is a LITTLE overlap, there's not much, and mostly the two are as far apart as mopeds and trucks. The ARM is made to go in little things and is designed for using little power above all, the Intel needs more space but the IPC is just insane so you can get a hell of a lot more work done. You wouldn't try to run Photoshop on your cell would you? So why would you think the chip in your cell would replace the one running Photoshop? ARM simply can't ramp up to the IPC of a P4, much less a Core CPU and if it tried it'd be just as big a user of power as an Intel so it'd be pointless.
So can't we all just accept that some things are good for some jobs and other things are good for others and leave it at that? Neither chip is gonna "beat" the other because except for a couple of tiny overlaps they really aren't in competition.
Oh and a final note, the reason that laptops and netbooks aren't selling as much is the same reason desktops aren't selling as much and that is because we went past "good enough" and into "insanely overpowered" and frankly once we got rid of the space heater chips like P4 Mobile that killed the laptops by thermal cycling honestly? with just a tiny bit of TLC they can last a looong time. I know people still using early Core and Turion laptops simply because there wasn't a point in replacing them. After all a new battery was only $30 and there hasn't been any "killer apps" other than games for years and most folks don't game on a laptop.
So again I wouldn't say one "killed" the other, as everyone I know that has a smartphone or tablet ALSO has a netbook or laptop AND a desktop, its just they don't replace the X86 units until they die because there really isn't a point. While ARM is undergoing its own MHz war frankly for most users even a bottom of the line Pentium or even E350 netbook or laptop is more than enough power for what they are doing with them so they stick with what works. I predict we'll see the same thing with ARM once quads reach mainstream, they'll run into a power wall just as X86 ran into a thermal wall and we'll see the same thing we do now with X86, nobody tossing until the previous one dies.
The author of TFA is also missing something even more fundamental and that is the users don't give a damned about free as in freedom all they give a shit about is convenient. Most users of FB that I've watched are using it for the same reason my GF uses it, and that is to keep in touch with distant friends/relatives easier than email. Her old HS buddies and distant relatives can find her in seconds on FB and contact her, no need to know an email address, and they can keep in touch through FB with a minimum of work.
So the ONLY way I could see FB going down is if they did the same dumbass mistake that MySpace did, and that was spamming the crap out of the users. Everyone I know ditched MySpace not because they didn't like it or felt the need for the "freedom" of FB, its just because MySpace started spamming all over the place. With a service like FB its really their audience to lose, and by doing smart moves like buying Zynga (I swear those games are like catnip to females) I just don't see any real dumbass moves happening.
But I don't think something "cool" would be enough because people are basically lazy and FB could just copy whatever the feature was just as Zynga rips off other games. No the only way I see FB going down is if they decide they need to "monetize the users more" and basically crap all over the network but I haven't seen any signs so far they are THAT stupid.
Well I don't have the link anymore, it went to shit along with the HDD but it was written by one of the promoters that worked with Geffen that was basically pissed that Geffen and friends treated the acts like they did. he actually liked Cherry and as the story showed with just some promotion he could sell but to the guys at the top it was just a game, they bragged how they could basically sell anything and make people buy it with their control of mass media.
And I know all about the radio stations as well, I was playing with a popular regional college band in the early 00s and we had a DJ invite us on to play live just to get our fans to quit calling him. The reason we had to play live was because he couldn't play a single song that wasn't on the corporate list or he'd be fired. Its frankly disgusting the way a few old men in a boardroom somewhere can decide what everyone is gonna listen to simply by controlling the media.
Its like the record engineer and producer Steve Albini said "They make you wade through a river of shit all for the "privilege" of signing away everything and if you are lucky when that million selling album comes back you'll "only" owe $50,000 to the labels, even if you recorded it yourself" and he's right, I've seen guys sell a half a million albums and not only not get a dime but get a BILL for $20k-$30k. The whole thing is a massive scam and it isn't the artists getting shit from these copyrights, its just the leeches.
Yes but the bigger question is is this an Ask Slashdot question and the answer is no, it is not. Network engineers get paid good money to set up places like this because it IS complex, difficult, and basically a royal PITA, especially in a high rise. This isn't a question like "Here is the jobs I have, what kind of CPU would be best with this budget?" or some such, frankly the answers he is gonna get are gonna be worthless because you need to know the layout, what kind of lines are in the area, what kind of throughput are they expecting, etc.
This just isn't the kind of question you can just throw onto a form with so little details and get anything but total bullshit back, sorry.
Actually Carmack admits that he built Rage for the consoles and that PC simply wasn't given the same priority so surprise! the PC version is shit. Water is wet, day comes after night, console ports suck balls, film at 11.
Kinda ironic considering that Id "Games" (I'd call a lot of their later stuff fancy tech demos) have never been bit hits on consoles but instead have had the PC modding community make decent games out of their tech demos, but hey! Piss on your core audience and you shouldn't be surprised if you bomb. Maybe he'll remember next time its the PC Modders that actually make his "games" worth playing (like the Doom 3 flashlight so you wouldn't be Ray Charles on Mars?) so he'll actually devote the resources he should have to the PC.
Dude I've been building machines since Win 3.x was the OS of the day and frankly? Drivers have never been better. I honestly can't even remember the last time I saw a BSOD in the shop that wasn't caused by a piece of hardware actually failing.
On the other hand I have seen a LOT of programs, especially games, where it was obvious it was kicked out the door with minimal testing to make some deadline. Quite obviously game related bug, voice sync issues, textures popping in and out, games just slamming the hell out of the system when there is very little actually going on in the scene, just obvious bugs.
So I see no reason NOT to blame the game devs when obviously buggy code is released, hell it isn't like they really have to worry about much besides testing for various graphics cards as nearly all the sound and networking I see now is the same SiS, Realtek, and Via onboard stuff. They should pick one MOR card and one high end from each series and have play testers give them a run and I bet most of the bugs would be found pre-release. Of course that is assuming they care enough to do this, whereas other than a few companies like Valve I have been seeing more and more games released with what before would have been labeled show stoppers.
And you can't claim its having to support so much hardware, because if that were true how would you explain all the buggy as hell console releases we've been seeing lately? Its pretty obvious the SOP for a lot of these games is "Ship it now, we'll fix it later" which hurts the games themselves and the industry as a whole. i know I've been bit without enough crazy bugs I usually wait 6 months before purchase so that the patches will take care of the worst bugs, because there is nothing more irritating than bringing home or downloading a brand new game only to find its so damned glitchy you are gonna have to wait to play it anyway.
That is why I advise my customers to NEVER buy a mobile that isn't already running the OS they desire, because all it leads to is headaches. Frankly i have YET to see a laptop manufacturer that gave a crap about software once its left the factory, I've dealt with $2000+ units and $450 best Buy specials and ALL are piss poor when it comes to driver support. Hell when i bought my EEE netbook I found that right OOTB the drivers were badly out of date and didn't support half of the features I had bought an E350 for, such as hardware acceleration of most video formats. Luckily for me the stock AMD drivers work just fine on it because Asus haven't released a single driver update in over a year.
But if you run into that problem again feel free to shoot me an email at the address i use here, I've had to do driver hunts for so damned many laptops at the shop i'm usually pretty good about finding drivers for most chips. occasionally I've even had to disassemble the driver EXE and rub Windows nose in its location to get it to take, but if anybody has released a laptop with that same chip and the version of Windows you want I can nearly always get it to work.
What I have always found interesting is how much of their rhetoric, especially against the BSDs and those using proprietary software, is very similar to the *.A.A. In both cases they come up with ever more crazy "doom scenarios" that will befall you if you don't do things THEIR way, and both act like any path other than doing things their way is just insanity and "you must be one of THEM!" if you don't agree with them. I always found that fascinating, how you can take a post from a rabid GPLer and a rabid pro *.A.A and change very few words and have the same post.
This is extra funny when you read some of the hoops RMS used to get through flaws in his own philosophy, such as by DISABLING the ability to update the firmware that suddenly magically makes it a "circuit" and thus okay, wait, what? Oh its just old RMS finding a way to wiggle around the fact that a piece of software isn't FOSS by coming up with a loophole to make it still work under GPL when it don't.
Frankly I find all the crazy hoop jumping and rhetoric kinda interesting, as RMS doesn't seem to be advocating classic communism, he doesn't seem to be having a problem with paying electricians or doctors or dentists, just programmers who should all work for free. Oh he says you can sell GPL software sure, but logically its obvious you can sell ONE copy and after that you are screwed. of course there is the support model but again logically it wouldn't make sense to do your best as if it works perfectly OOTB why would you need to buy support?
Logically the entire movement just doesn't make sense to me. a good programmer takes years of schooling and experience in the field, yet somehow they are supposed to be worth less than everyone else, as nobody is is being asked to work for free under RMS' rules, just programmers. What makes the sweat off the programmer's brow worth less than the dentist or mechanic? Do they not just as much education and hard work to achieve quality in the field? Hell maybe I could understand it if RMS were a classical communist or socialist, where everyone should work towards the group doing better but he's not, he just doesn't seem to think programmers are worth anything. Kinda ironic when both projects he gets credit for, GCC and Emacs, are actually forks that he "blessed' to keep from being cut out of the loop.
Just don't download every driver, its as simple as that. I've found that if I stick with the even driver numbers there is no hassles at all, but often their odd numbered drivers are glitchy. Now that we know about TFA it was probably because they were fixing bugs and just shoved the odd ones out the door, but I have 3 ATI cards in my family's PCs as well as an AMD APU in my netbook and by just sticking with the even releases its been smooth sailing all the way.
Oh and if you like AMD you might want to snatch a Thuban while they're cheap, I've seen places selling Thubans for as little as $110 to make way for Bulldozers which as you know Thuban beats BD in most benches so getting a Hexacore for so cheap is a hell of a deal. I'd recommend a coolermaster cooler though, the hyper 212 or N520 as the stock cooler suck, but with the coolermasters you can keep them nicely chilled and if you are in the mood get some crazy OCs as well.
But frankly AMD could go to quarterly driver releases for all I care, as long as the drivers are stable and solid who gives a crap? I've been running AMD/ATI for nearly 4 years now and as long as I avoided the odd drivers everything has been smooth sailing, games play great, no BSODS or bugs that I've seen, just as solid as my Nvidia was, so no complaints here.
Thanks for that post, nice to know I'm not the only one bit by that. My oldest wanted that game soooo bad but finally gave up when even an upgrade to a hexacore and HD4850 wasn't enough to keep that game from slowdowns. Considering the not very fancy graphics having it slow down on even a dual wasn't acceptable, but a hex with a 256bit GPU? Give me a break! I finally showed him several other MMOs that had better graphics and more going on and said "Look bud, if these games don't glitch but that one does? its the game" so he said fuck it and chose another game.
It just amazes me what half assed code is allowed out the door nowadays, sure back in the day we'd get little bugs here and there but this? Screen tearing or engines choking with practically nothing going on or serious graphics issues like textures popping all over the damned place? its obvious to me that QA has gone WAY downhill on a lot of the AAA games, they just shove them out the door and make the GPU manufacturers try to code around the mess. Well screw that, both AMD and Nvidia ought to have a little sign pop up when you launch a buggy game for the first time with something like "This game is known to be buggy because of (x), if this happens to you please write the game company at (address) and tell them you would like this fixed" and then maybe they would be shamed into not putting out such crappy code.