Frankly the whole "cyber bullying" thing is bullshit, there has been trolls and douchebags on the net as long as there HAS been a net, see Gabe's theory which has been proven true time and time again. IRL bullying is violence and real threats of violence, whereas trolls are like monkeys at the zoo flinging poo, don't like it? don't stand next to the monkey cage. Nearly every site has ToS that lets the mods banhammer the real shitheads and most places have mods that have a VERY limited tolerance for douchebaggery.
The problem with cyber bullying bullshit is frankly you never know who is gonna be offended over what, hell look at the "PC Police" that get offended if you don't follow the little PC rules like hyphen-American and other horseshit. Look at this very site and how some get royally butthurt if you dare say anything negative about their software/religion of choice, be it FOSS or should I say GPL-FOSS or the Cult Of iSteve. Funny you don't see that near as much from the Softies, but then again how could you be offended when the CEO is a giant sweating howler monkey whose strategy is "I heart Apple lots!" and who honestly thought the public would like to squirt a shit brown brick sized media player? Of course the one group that is impossible to offend is the BSD guys, those poor lonely sods are just so damned happy that anybody remembered they existed they take everything as a compliment.
in the end I think free speech is worth a hell of a lot more than making sure every little Mary Milktoast out there don't get their little feelings hurt. The Internet is the biggest force of change we have ever seen in the history of mass communication, governments have literally fallen thanks to its ability to organize and spread speech, I just think we shouldn't risk destroying such a powerful engine of speech just to keep some people from getting butthurt.
But that argument not only doesn't work it frankly has NEVER worked. How many here boycott the big labels? I know i haven't bought a big label CD anywhere but the occasional yard sale in over a decade. How many here boycott games with always on DRM? Or Apple because of their walled garden? didn't stop D3 from backing up the money truck or make those lines for the latest iDevice any smaller now did it?
The ONLY way such a thing could work was if you had a spokesman with enough charisma to make the MASSES boycott, otherwise the only person being deprived is you. Hell they'll just blame the lost sales on piracy anyway and get ever more draconian laws passed, so its not like you are hurting them any.
As for TFA, isn't it about time for an antitrust investigation into Apple? Lets face it they have enough control over mobile that they could kill flash and get businesses and academia to suddenly support iPads. Remember folks you do NOT have to have 100% to be considered a monopoly, just that you can exert influence upon the market and I doubt even the most ardent iFanboy would refuse to admit that Apple can shape the market. Sure there are plenty of Android devices out there but they are fragmented among dozens of OEMs fighting over the scraps while the big cheese has been and probably will be Apple.
So I say its time for the DoD to take a look at possible antitrust, hell they exert more on an iron grip on the software ecosystem of Apple devices than MSFT did in their wettest dream and if they are using the huge mobile market to muscle their way in and control prices? Well then I'd say now is a perfect time to look at the bigger picture and see what is going down at Cupertino. It might even be good for Apple in the long run, after all after MSFT got spanked and had to watch what they bundled we ended up with more software for Windows than ever because companies didn't fear being crushed like a bug.
But their argument sucks, replacing one controlling corp with another controlling corp ain't exactly an improvement and if they are using their control of the huge appstore market to sign exclusives and set prices that an ebook can be sold to a competitor? Yeah i'd say its time for an antitrust investigation.
Uhhh...why exactly are you bothering? After he basically said "Yeah LOL go fuck yourself" over the pot petition all should know you'd get more results by writing it on a piece of paper and promptly burning it. For all his bullshit he is just as big if not a bigger sellout that Dubya was, personally I'd say he's worse as Dubya actually believed a lot of the shit he was saying whereas this one is just cashing the checks. But if you think he is gonna give a flying shit what the "people" think I have some swampland you may be interested in. If you manage to get the requisite number all you will get is a flowery "Ur not rich so fuck off' speech, so why bother?
As for TFA...is anybody surprised? With every move Forbes gets proved right on Ballmer being a shitty CEO, hell if the man had an original thought his head would asplode. And as for the rest of the list, Sony and Ericson are doing lousy and could probably use the cash, same with RIM, and Apple just plain old hates to have ANY competition other than MSFT. See Job's comments on how he would use his fortune to nuke Android for instance.
So how anybody could look at THAT list of names and no figure out they were gonna do something nasty I'll never know.
Whether the guy is an idiot, a troll, or just a dumbass doesn't change one simple fact...Free Trade DOES NOT WORK because it is just what we see in TFA, we are simply exporting our pollution to the third world!
This is why i have been saying for years you just can't have free trade with countries like China and India which let corps dump toxins out the back and belch toxic clouds of filth into the sky because, and I'm sure the free market types will scream for me daring to point this out, but we live in a fishbowl folks and anything you dump on one side eventually affects everyone. all that crap dumped into rivers ends up in the ocean, all that crap in the air ends up carried over here or likewise settles in the oceans, it all comes around.
This is why we should simply not allow trade with countries that don't have similar environmental regulations to us, because all that is happening is the mutilnationals are playing three card monty with the pollution and they enjoy higher profits the more they pollute.
So frankly the "greenies" can stick it right in their ass, because as long as we allow multinationals to just pollute the third world while selling to the first all that green shit is fucking pointless. Its like simply throwing all the garbage in the basement and then bragging about how clean your house is, you're just putting the nasty shit out of sight, not actually doing anything about it. You can screw Americans with carbon credits and give huge tax breaks to electric cars but so long as damned near every thing in every store is made in pollution friendly countries then none of it will make a damned bit of difference, not a damned bit at all.
Ugh, don't even get me starting on that piece of shit. We've already blown a shitpile of money and it looks like it'll be over the trillion dollar mark to fix all the damned bugs and that isn't counting having the STOL F35b, that's just for the F35a. Did you know we have yet to use the F22 ANYWHERE? Why? too damned expensive to risk, and I'm betting the same will be said of the F35.
What is sad is if there is another major conflict we are gonna be the Germans in WWII, with VERY expensive and fussy as hell aircraft in very few numbers whereas anybody we go against will probably have Russian tech, which means the MiG 29 at something like 30 million a pop or the SU27 at 60. Compare this to a minimum of 250 million a pop for the F35 and you can see any enemy will just be able to spam us right out of the sky.
If we were smart and actually cared about defense, instead of making sure the MIC has tons of money for hookers and blow, we'd take a page from Iran and go back to using proven tech. Toss the F35, if you want stealth buy the F15 Stealth Eagle, load up on F15s and F16s, both of which have incredible kill ratios and are damned nice planes,give the navy more F18s and personally I'd bring back the warthog as every conflict we have been in since the cold war ended showed how valuable having that much firepower in a package that can loiter is and we have too damned few of 'em.
But if we don't watch it we could end up like Japan in the latter half of WWII, with all these carriers and no planes to put on them. last I checked the wiki we had less than 4000 planes and 11 aircraft carriers and most of the planes we have are old. that's not good and the military has been basically betting the entire farm on the F35 and if it turns out to be another F22 we are screwed as there is nothing else in the pipe. the ONLY thing in our favor right now is that the F15, F16, and F18 production lines are still open. if anybody at the DoD has ANY sense they'll be putting in some orders. Even if the F35 works frankly its gonna be short ranged and expensive as hell, certainly not the "one plane to replace them all" that the military had planned. Personally i bet its gonna be another F22 clusterfuck, too damned expensive to really use in combat.
Glad to see I'm not the only one. i like to hang out on tech feeds like Daily Rotation and Fresh news and when i saw this I went "since when did Cisco make an iPad ripoff?" and had to go look it up. Maybe if these companies actually tried a little marketing and advertising then they might actually get some sales, don't ya think?
Looking at the specs it was an interesting looking device although i'd have to question using an Atom for it. if you wanted to go X86 you would be better off with an AMD C series bobcat since that would give you dual cores and 1080p over HDMI and if you wanted battery life you'd be better off with ARM, and of course android is used primarily on ARM so I really don't get it. and why would you want to put a single core CPU in this day and age? Aren't most of the midrange and up tablets running dual cores? Looking at the price...holy fuck! The cheapest place is $940? for a single core Atom?
So maybe its best that they killed the thing and that we hadn't heard of it because somebody obviously didn't think this thing through.
Uhhh...bigot much? the words "elitist programmer" or even more likely "elitist Linux programmer" pop in my head as you seem to think just because YOU don't like something or think it is inelegant means its bad, when the real judge should be "does it do its job well?" and the answer for most of those VB+Access DBs is YES in all caps. If a business is never gonna grow beyond a certain size (like say a family practice, mom & pop store, hell I've even been to a junkyard that uses VB+Access to keep up with what cars are in the field) then frankly nobody gives a shit and they shouldn't, because it will do its job. I personally use a VB+Access to keep up with my burned DVDs because its simple, I can just drop it on a new machine with no install, and it "just works' year after year, so no need to change.
Your second point is the one that often gets Linux users labeled freetards because its just a "free as in freedom!" cry that frankly? Most don't give a rat's ass about, they really don't. unlike the nightmare scenarios your ilk frequently cook up most small software firms frankly aren't gouging and why should they? they want their customers to buy more software so acting like douches or charging Adobe prices simply wouldn't make sense. these are private companies and since they don't have to please wall street they can build a long term rep with a company and again the cost of the software is trivial compared to the amount of bullshit you expect one to jump through just to please the lovers of RMS. the rest of us? REALLY do not care, we really really don't.
Finally isn't it funny that ONLY the Linux guys can't seem to get Windows to run? what does it say about your "skills" if running windows turns into a nightmare from hell for YOU, while the rest of the planet run it just fine? and I don't know where you get your info from but I have a 1.8GHz Sempron running Win 7, that is an 8 year old machine BTW, and the only thing it doesn't do is run Aero, so what, who cares. Any machine that is still worth using in the average office could run Win 7 without a problem and most machines will have been rotated out long before Windows is EOLed. After all WinXP has still got 2 more years but how many people you think are still running 600MHz P3s like what originally came with XP? I get something that old and its straight to the dump, do not pass go.
And your "costs" of Windows are frankly trivial compared to Linux. You either pay some "guru" to do nothing but tend to the fussy thing, deal with the biannual upgrade deathmarch and all the broken drivers, or you buy a supported business OS which would be Red hat...which costs $400 per seat a year in support contracts ALONE. Or you buy Windows, buy a good AV like Eset, have all the important files on the server so if any hardware fails you can just image a new box and slap it on the floor, and call it a day. There is a REASON why Windows runs business, and that is because it is one of the easiest turn key solutions out there BY FAR. Tell me friend, name a single supported Linux that can take the place of Windows + Exchange + AD + GPO + Sharepoint? You can't, because all you have is a bunch of little projects run by different groups that do NOT interact with each other and frankly have no problem crapping on each other's work if they get an itch to scratch.
So I'm sorry but you just don't have a selling point for Linux on the desktop, if you did then the B&M stores or the OEMs would fill the niche when there just isn't a niche to fill. Hell if there was then the little shops like mine would sell it because system builders takes a chunk out of our bottom line but again we don't because there are simply no positives only negatives. because while you may give a shit about "free as in freedom!" the rest of us frankly really don't give a flying crap. if you want proof simply look at the lines when the latest iDevice is about to be released and Apple makes Windows look open by comparison. All folks care about is "does it work?" and with Linux the answer is NO it does N
And how much of the current US arsenal is from the 70s and 80s? that would be the majority. Just because its an older design doesn't mean it can't royally fuck you up, Israel still uses them as does the USMC and with missiles and its ability to use terrain to conceal and then pop up and fire the Cobra can still be VERY deadly. The problem with the Hind is they tried to build a craft with the troop carrying capacity of the Huey with the attack capability of the Cobra and ended up with a VERY large target. Not saying it isn't deadly but its huge size made it a pretty inviting target in Afghanistan and unlike the Cobra nimble it wasn't.
so I can see why they wanted to copy 70s US tech because sadly IMHO all we have produced since is overpriced tech turkeys like the F22 that are insanely priced and spend more time being worked on than flying. The Cobra is proven tech and is nimble while giving them plenty of firepower at an affordable price. if the pics in TFA are correct they also have a Huey knockoff which means they probably don't need the troop carrying ability of the Hind, just pair it with the Cobras as we did.
Not to mention there are plenty of places that offer square trade with their laptops for 3 years. Had a customer that bought it and someone swinging a book bag managed to hit her laptop in the library and killed the screen, they paid for the shipping, made the system good as new, it was pretty damned hassle free. So it isn't like AppleCare is the only way to go here and you are correct about bugs and hassles no different than any other OS.
As for a recommendation it is obvious in TFA they want an Intel because they don't care about graphics (rimshot) so if it were my customer I'd recommend an Asus Zenbook as it meets all the requirements and I've had nothing but good experiences with asus. Comes with Core i5,1600x900 resolution, 128Gb SSD, 4Gb of RAM, and a 1 year accidental coverage which they can bring up to 3 years for $224 if they wish and the unit comes in at just under $1000 so even adding 3 years no questions asked will still bring them in under the $1500 mentioned in TFA. of course if it were me personally I'd prefer an AMD quad but then again I DO care about graphics, but if all they are doing is video watching the intel GPU does that very well and with great battery life so overall a very nice unit that is thin and light and matches the desires in TFA.
Wow just....wow. For every one that says FF isn't a memory piggie all they have to do is look at that. There is over 23,000 users running an extension that dumps the browser and restarts so they can get the memory back...wow. BTW for all those FF users may i make a suggestion? Try Pale Moon as I've found that it doesn't seem to be QUITE as big a piggie and as a bonus it is compiled with the later SSE flags so it is snappier and as a BIG bonus they have forked away from FF because they have NO intention of going with the Metro UI look that FF is gonna be switching to. so for those that like the current look and just want it faster and less piggie, give pale moon a try.
As for TFA man i'd hate to see it go but sadly this is a problem with a browser being proprietary. with FF and Chromium if you don't like where a company is headed there is usually a fork because many feel the same way as you do, but with opera and presto there isn't a damned thing you can do but just stick with the old version. I know that is what my oldest boy will do rather than give up his opera but that isn't really the best move security wise, but with a locked down browser that is pretty much the only choice you have if you want to stick with it. maybe someone will cook up a Chromium version with the Opera UI?
Funnily enough looking at the pictures of Rockmelt (who thinks up these shit names anyway?) it reminded me of Expressgate which is built around tons of social crap, maybe FB should buy something like that and have their own FB OS? That would probably scare the hell out of Google.
Man I'd hate to see Opera go though because with Presto being proprietary you couldn't even fork it like with Gecko or Webkit. While I never could stand the Opera UI my oldest boy has been using it since it was a for pay browser and knowing him he would sandbox and run the last version rather than give up his opera or deal with it FBed all to hell. He swears it loads pages faster than anything else and by hacking the UA he even does his online courses in it.
Personally i'd just hate to see the loss in competition as opera is one of the few mobile browsers that will damned near run anywhere and AFAIK they don't do all the tracking crap like Chrome does. So if FB does buy Opera let us hope they open the source so that if all they want is the devs then the community could keep it running, cause it would be sad to see it go the way of Netscape.
Let ya in on a little secret...old barb has been doing that one for years. the funny part is for a Linux user i have never heard anyone bitch about the broken crap as much as her and in fact last i heard she had said she had wiped her SUSE and replaced it with....WinXP! Anyway she's part of Noyes roundtable on Linux Insider (along with me as the "token Windows guy") and spends most of her time over there bitching but if you see her "Tom" UID she be trolling. hell I think the whole "Tom" handle stand for Trolling On...something, damned if I can remember.
And you can tell your roomie i know what that is like, PC repair can be feast or famine and I have some customers on disability, that's a rough life. Tell him to keep an eye out on Craigslist, that is what I did for one of my disabled customers and I managed to snag him a less than 8 month old mint shape Dell mini Atom netbook for $80. compared to that POS old Pentium 4 Mobile (no shit, a P4 jammed in a laptop case! Talk about a lap burner) that Atom runs rings around it while giving him nearly 8 hours on a battery. I did some tweaking on it, cleaned out the extra Dell crap, turned off the services he'd never use, the usual, and now Win 7 starter shows he has nearly 600Mb free out of 1Gb on first boot and the thing is snappy as hell. Not as nice as my E350 but I wouldn't have any problem using it as a day to day machine.
Nice choice on CPU BTW, those i7s are damned nice chips, little too rich for my blood. I got a couple of teen boys who also game so if I was rocking something THAT nice while they were sucking hind tit I'd never hear the end LOL! So me and the boys went AMD, the youngest has a Deneb quad while me and the oldest are rocking Thubans. You'd be surprised how much headroom those 1035Ts have, just for shits and giggles since my board has a killer OCing tool I decided to see what she would do and managed to go from 2.6Ghz to nearly 3.1Ghz without bumping the volts but in the end I figured...why bother? As you know with the i7 once you have that many cores it blows through any job like crap through a goose so now I just run stock, Turbo shoots it up to 3Ghz anyway when I just have 3 cores being hit so it isn't like it is dragging ass or anything.
But you have yourself a great memorial day weekend APK,and just remember there really ain't no point in arguing against groupthink on THIS site, you may as well be pissing in the wind for all the good it'll do. I mean there is Barb running WinXP and STILL defending Linux, when the damned thing wouldn't even work for her without crapping all over itself on update LOL! That is why I have any FOSS articles just blocked, no point in wasting your breath on the close minded ya know? Peace.
That is why I laugh when I hear "real programmers" scream about VB+Access. You have ANY idea how many millions of dollars is made in sales each year in part by some VB+Access DB? Hell I've even built a few of 'em myself and last I heard they are all still running, doing what they are supposed to do. And that's just the home grown apps, do you have ANY idea how many small, say 5-10 man, software houses there are out there writing for Windows?
When I was getting my checkup the other day i was yakking with the nurse because she was carrying an X86 flip over laptop/tablet combo and when she let me check it out I could instantly see why. All she had to do was typethe first two letters of what drug they were on and a drop down popped up that she could just tap and fill in the blank, she could type in my name and all the usual info, DoB, address, etc, all filled in.,etc. She just gushed on and on about how much easier it was for her to just carry this one unit, which considering I had seen my old chart (been using the same doc since i was 4) and the thing is as thick as a damned dictionary I can see why she loved the thing. is there any way in hell they could switch to Linux? Nope because i doubt seriously you find any software in Linux that is as highly specialized as nurses charting programs and even if you could you'd have to pay someone to transfer all that damned data and for what? What would they gain?
It amazes me that so many in the Linux world complain of the "Windows tax" and act like 'free as in beer' is a selling point when honestly? For most the price of Windows isn't even in the top 5 of their expense report. If you look at Windows having a 10 year support cycle (which is now standard on ALL versions of Windows) that is $8 a year for Windows home (unless you buy the family pack, then its just $4) and $14 a year for Windows pro....THAT is supposed to be high? hell most of my customers, most of my family even, spend more on stupid crap in a week than Windows costs per year.
Linux is compelling in the server room because MSFT MAKES it compelling, by having insane EULAs and crazy license requirements like per user CALs. If MSFT wanted to wipe Linux out in the server room they could simply offer WinServer at $300 and no user CALs but they make so damned much money off of server its not worth picking up the low end sales to them. the desktop is the exact opposite, they have economies of scale so large that they can sell their product cheap as hell and still make billions. While i actually like Linux in the web server and embedded roles there is simply no real selling point for Linux on the desktop.
Sorry friend but as the wiki states "randomly generated token (unique ID), RLZ Identifier, Client ID, Suggest, page not found,bug tracker, Google Updater, and downloads" the info is here and as someone who didn't know they did THAT much tracking it just makes me feel even better than I'm using Dragon, which has all that crap stripped out.
You sir should be modded up to 11 because you nailed it, I would just add that not only did he not grow but he actually shot his own company in the face with a key piece of tech he killed and that was PlaysFor Sure or PFS.
At the time he got the bug in his ass to be "squirting" with his Zune PFS was a VERY popular program with a ton of licensees, all bring in money to MSFT and at the same time giving people a reason to use Windows and MSFT software for music. with PFS there was a ton of "all you can eat" sites where you could download all the tunes your player could hold as well as get 10 or 15 tracks in MP3 for a flat $10-$15 a month, they also had great features like playlists based on your choice of genres or favs so that each month you could just load your PFS device with tunes from bands that played the style you liked or new artists in whatever genre you prefer, it was VERY popular at the time.
When he announced he was killing PFS to push the Zune and Zune market I knew at that moment he was a piss poor CEO, because he could have easily just added PFS support to the Zune and kept what was an easy to manage money making market, instead he took a crap all over it and killed any momentum that Windows had in media players. With PFS you had everything from those $20 MP3 players at the checkout lines to $300 Archos players so it was easy peasy for anybody to use PFS. By killing it he not only killed all those popular PFS sites he also gave the ones making MP3 players a reason not to support Zune market. just one more boneheaded move from a truly piss poor CEO.
To rip a line off from a former president "Its the APPS stupid". Whether the Linux guys choose to accept it or not most of the world uses more than a web browser and an office suite. there are a billion and one Windows only programs, from the ones everyone knows like Quickbooks and photoshop to a bazillion others you've never heard of, niche software for inventory, accounting, bookkeeping, medical records, you name it there is probably a half a dozen Windows apps designed for it...and ZERO Linux apps.
Like it or not Linux just doesn't have the programs. the guys writing programs for Linux are mainly programmer geeks and so their programs are based around that niche, which is why for instance you have dozens of different text editors with all kinds of little extras like syntax highlighting for this language or that, its because geeks are writing the programs and NOT for niche business markets which is where Windows shines.
So have a fit, waste some mod points, but it won't change reality. as a retailer i deal with ordinary folks 6 days a week and I can tell you that NOT A SINGLE ONE could be converted to Linux because there are ALWAYS a few "must haves" that just don't exist on Linux. You just can't expect people to take your OS if it won't run what they need it to run, and if the best that Linux can come up with for the big names is bad ersatz programs like Gimp for photoshop what chance do you have of coming up with all the niche applications?
No harm done, i'm the first to admit when it comes to music I'm not that tech heavy, I just know what sounds good to me. Hell the audiophiles would probably scream if they saw my bass rig as I'm running a Zoom pedal into the Trace but the Zoom pedals have a really nice fat bass compression and some good chorus and phases and being able to dial in how much effect i want in real time with the expression pedal is a plus. In the end all that matters to me is it sounds good, which is why when we finally go into the studio it'll be tubes for the guitarist and my trace for me.
I take it that its a REALLY old laptop then? Might want to tell him to keep an eye out on this site and grab him a cheap return because the celery is frankly a dog of a chip which i'm sure you know. I got myself one of those EEE-PC E350 netbooks and I can tell ya it stomped the Pentium mobile I had before it, really sweet and even does 1080p over HDMI.
But that little trick i told you will fix him right up, hell i had to do that trick myself a couple of days ago because MSE crapped itself by trying to update while WU was trying to update MSE and boned itself. one of these days i'll have to toss it for Comodo but since that machine is mainly gaming and transcoding its not like its really in any danger of bugs and Comodo takes about 3 days to train.
BTW if you give your roomie a hand be sure to point him towards ninite as that will take care of most of the "must have" software without any toolbars or 'clicky clicky next next next" bullshit. its the closest thing to a Windows repo I've ever found, you can even check the boxes for stuff you already have and it'll only install if there is a new version, just a great little resource. peace.
Exactly, the real world programs folks use daily simply can't stress these monster X86 chips to any reasonable degree. Hell I even sold my full size laptop and bought one of those e350 netbooks, that is one of the smallest chips you can get but for what i do when I'm mobile, surf, download drivers, maybe watch a movie? I have tons of cycles to spare and 6 and a half hours battery life. Hell even the gamer PCs me and the kids are playing on are a couple of low end hexacores and a middle range quad and with $50 HD4850s we have yet to stress the systems, we have just too many cycles, too much power.
As I said X86 is the victim of its own success, that's all. Even the cheapest AMD and Intel chips have so damned much power that even if you multitask like mad you just won't ever bog these babies down, so what is the point in buying a new one? The stupid thing was the OEMs and Wall Street acted like the MHz wars was never gonna end but once the systems went multicore there simply wasn't a point. I mean look at all the work you are doing on a C2D and that's...what? A 6 year old chip? Then realize that most folks rarely do more than one or two things at a time MAX, does anybody think they'd be able to actually choke a C2D? Or even an old Phenom I dual? Hell I use an 8 year old Sempron 1.8GHz as a nettop in the shop and for the jobs it has...downloading drivers, letting me look up parts, even doing some web surfing when I'm waiting on an install, it just works beautifully.
In the end even a laptop or netbook given a little TLC will easily last you 5 to 7 years so there simply is not point in jumping on the upgrade bandwagon when your apps don't even stress the machine you have. THAT is why X86 sales have bottomed out, not some magical "We're all gonna use iPads" bullshit. Funny that despite all that talk about "Apple quality" the guys i knew with iPads sold them the second the new version came out, because to them owning last year's model just wasn't cool. To them it was just as much about fashion as it was any features because just like X86 frankly they weren't stressing their iPads either. That's great for Apple, but that shit just don't fly in X86 land as nobody cares what year your laptop is, just as long as it does its job.
I'm sorry AC but you are full of shit. NOBODY is gonna want to do serious work like photoshop or quickbooks or a bazillion other jobs on no damned iPad. what you and all those that worship the Cult of Steve seem to be missing is the big picture which i will now give to you..
The VAST majority of the PCs that were made in the last 5 to 7 years are not only "good enough" for the jobs people have, for most they are INSANELY over powered. The reason why all the OEMs like HP and Dell are shitting on themselves is frankly they got waaaay too fucking spoiled and thought the MHz wars were just gonna last forever, but those of us in the trenches could have told you when the first dual cores starting hitting mainstream that the gravy train was over. there just isn't any real "killer apps" that require the insane power of a hexa or octocore PC, most people with duals aren't even really stressing the system. I gave my GF a triple core Athlon for Xmas to replace her aging P4. Now this is probably considered dog slow by this group but after a month I checked her stats and you know what? The thing hadn't even hit 45% load. the kind of tasks that she and most consumers have simply aren't stressing the systems they have, so why buy a new one when they won't feel a difference?
So I'm sorry but for a few jobs iPads work, for the rest they are but a toy. Apple sells on brand like Prada and Nike, just ask those people standing in line for a new one "does the one you have not work? Is there something wrong with it?" and the answer is no, its just COOLER to have the newest one. its a status thing, nothing more.
The reason MSFT and the OEMs can't do this is frankly nobody gives a rat's ass about Windows or these OEMs as a brand, the ONLY thing they want a Windows PC for is to run their third party apps....which frankly aren't even stressing what they have. I have built e350 units for office workers, that is probably the weakest chip made that is out of order. do they complain? Is it slowing them down? Nope because for basic office jobs frankly ANY dual core gives them cycles to spare.
so ultimately X86 is simply a victim of its own success. they made chips so damned powerful that honestly nobody bothers to replace one until it dies and with just a tiny bit of care even that netbook or laptop can last 5 years or more. the OEMs thought they could just follow the same path and keep cashing the checks, they were wrong. ARM is currently undergoing its own MHz war but when that peters out i have NO doubt you'll see the exact same thing you see now in X86, incredibly overpowered devices that aren't replaced until the previous one fails. Except for Apple of course, because owning last year's iPad is like wearing last year's designer fashions, its just not hip.
Why did you have ANY doubt before? just look at the man's track record...killing a profitable playsforsure for Zune market, the Zune itself, rushing Vista out with show stopping bugs, the Kin, rushing the X360 out with a billion dollar heating problem, the whole Vista capable fiasco, and now forcing the metro (aka WinPhone) UI onto the desktop, which is a place it should NEVER be, all because even after pissing away hundreds of millions he can't even give WinPhones away.
Frankly this should be a surprise to no one, he is frankly strictly middle management sales guy that only got the job he did because he was there at the start and was gates' little buddy. The man makes the Apple pepsi period look like fricking genius, he has literally pissed away billions of dollars and doesn't have shit to show for it. The numbers haven't changed, they still own the desktop and THAT IS IT, in mobile they are nowhere, and there is even still some debate if the X360 has actually given them a ROI yet or if they just wrote off all the money they spent on R&D for Xbox I and the X360.
So i'm sorry but even those that like MSFT software should be able to see what an incredible failure as a CEO he has been. his entire term behind the wheel has been either coasting on past success or getting blindsided by the next new thing and then trying to do a half ass ripoff of whatever is a hit and failing miserably. hell they only really have two cash cows and now he's gonna take a big old shit on one of them because he just can't accept his mobile strategy is a giant fucking fail! I only hope the Win 8 failwhale is the last straw and the board punts his ass, which frankly should have happened after the Vista failure and the billion dollar X360 write off. I would LOVE to see the exact figures of the amount of cash he has pissed down the drain on failures, anybody know what the figure is? i bet its billions, the man is just a giant walking disaster.
But that covers the OBJECT but not the land the object is sitting on. like i said what if where the Apollo 11 landed turns out to be a major source of H3 which can be VERY useful for fusion and somebody wants to mine it? it is not like it would be very feasible to tunnel UNDER the site just to keep from disturbing what to any non American would probably be space junk, just as i'm sure the Russians would have a fit if we moved the Luna probes to mine where they are sitting.
In the end who owns what and where is something we are just gonna have to sit down and work out, hell we are already seeing problems in LEO as countries like China think blowing shit up in space is cool but all that space crap takes decades to come down. So we really do need to write up a list of not only who owns what but what responsibilities comes with that access, because we only have one blue marble, one moon, and even in space shit can get crowded if we aren't careful.
Ya wanna know what REALLY sucks? because so many new systems comes with Norton or McAfee trial i've found a lot of malware guys write for those AVs so that if it blows past Norton and Mccrappy they consider it ready to go. the record for the worst infected machine at the last shop i worked at was a Toshiba laptop that had norton home...and over 2200 infections! That thing took nearly an hour and a half to boot on AC power just because of all the shit running on it. Just for laughs my boss ran the Norton that was installed and it said "nope! All clean!" while we were seeing pop ups and crap going everywhere. That is why I always give them either Avast or Comodo, because they run like a dream compared to those pieces of malware pretending to be AV.
As for Vista...the problems with Vista could be summed up in one sentence...crappy drivers and Vista capable, both of which were MSFT's fault. if you had tried the alpha and beta you'd have found that just a few months before release MSFT changed the driver model enough that drivers that worked on alpha wouldn't run on beta 2 which left the OEMs scrambling for drivers and the ones building the actual parts naturally pissed off. By the time SP2 had rolled around most of the problems had been fixed but by then it was already too late as everyone was gearing up for Win 7 and simply didn't care. if MSFT would have withheld the launch for 6 months to get better drivers built and told the OEMs that if they wanted to advertise their machines as capable of running vista they'd have to throw in a cheap DX9 card then Vista would have probably gotten the love that Win 7 did, but they totally screwed the pooch. you watch Win 8 will likewise be a pooch screw and just cement in users minds that MSFT follows the Star trek rule of "every other release is shitty".
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Frankly the whole "cyber bullying" thing is bullshit, there has been trolls and douchebags on the net as long as there HAS been a net, see Gabe's theory which has been proven true time and time again. IRL bullying is violence and real threats of violence, whereas trolls are like monkeys at the zoo flinging poo, don't like it? don't stand next to the monkey cage. Nearly every site has ToS that lets the mods banhammer the real shitheads and most places have mods that have a VERY limited tolerance for douchebaggery.
The problem with cyber bullying bullshit is frankly you never know who is gonna be offended over what, hell look at the "PC Police" that get offended if you don't follow the little PC rules like hyphen-American and other horseshit. Look at this very site and how some get royally butthurt if you dare say anything negative about their software/religion of choice, be it FOSS or should I say GPL-FOSS or the Cult Of iSteve. Funny you don't see that near as much from the Softies, but then again how could you be offended when the CEO is a giant sweating howler monkey whose strategy is "I heart Apple lots!" and who honestly thought the public would like to squirt a shit brown brick sized media player? Of course the one group that is impossible to offend is the BSD guys, those poor lonely sods are just so damned happy that anybody remembered they existed they take everything as a compliment.
in the end I think free speech is worth a hell of a lot more than making sure every little Mary Milktoast out there don't get their little feelings hurt. The Internet is the biggest force of change we have ever seen in the history of mass communication, governments have literally fallen thanks to its ability to organize and spread speech, I just think we shouldn't risk destroying such a powerful engine of speech just to keep some people from getting butthurt.
But that argument not only doesn't work it frankly has NEVER worked. How many here boycott the big labels? I know i haven't bought a big label CD anywhere but the occasional yard sale in over a decade. How many here boycott games with always on DRM? Or Apple because of their walled garden? didn't stop D3 from backing up the money truck or make those lines for the latest iDevice any smaller now did it?
The ONLY way such a thing could work was if you had a spokesman with enough charisma to make the MASSES boycott, otherwise the only person being deprived is you. Hell they'll just blame the lost sales on piracy anyway and get ever more draconian laws passed, so its not like you are hurting them any.
As for TFA, isn't it about time for an antitrust investigation into Apple? Lets face it they have enough control over mobile that they could kill flash and get businesses and academia to suddenly support iPads. Remember folks you do NOT have to have 100% to be considered a monopoly, just that you can exert influence upon the market and I doubt even the most ardent iFanboy would refuse to admit that Apple can shape the market. Sure there are plenty of Android devices out there but they are fragmented among dozens of OEMs fighting over the scraps while the big cheese has been and probably will be Apple.
So I say its time for the DoD to take a look at possible antitrust, hell they exert more on an iron grip on the software ecosystem of Apple devices than MSFT did in their wettest dream and if they are using the huge mobile market to muscle their way in and control prices? Well then I'd say now is a perfect time to look at the bigger picture and see what is going down at Cupertino. It might even be good for Apple in the long run, after all after MSFT got spanked and had to watch what they bundled we ended up with more software for Windows than ever because companies didn't fear being crushed like a bug.
But their argument sucks, replacing one controlling corp with another controlling corp ain't exactly an improvement and if they are using their control of the huge appstore market to sign exclusives and set prices that an ebook can be sold to a competitor? Yeah i'd say its time for an antitrust investigation.
Uhhh...why exactly are you bothering? After he basically said "Yeah LOL go fuck yourself" over the pot petition all should know you'd get more results by writing it on a piece of paper and promptly burning it. For all his bullshit he is just as big if not a bigger sellout that Dubya was, personally I'd say he's worse as Dubya actually believed a lot of the shit he was saying whereas this one is just cashing the checks. But if you think he is gonna give a flying shit what the "people" think I have some swampland you may be interested in. If you manage to get the requisite number all you will get is a flowery "Ur not rich so fuck off' speech, so why bother?
As for TFA...is anybody surprised? With every move Forbes gets proved right on Ballmer being a shitty CEO, hell if the man had an original thought his head would asplode. And as for the rest of the list, Sony and Ericson are doing lousy and could probably use the cash, same with RIM, and Apple just plain old hates to have ANY competition other than MSFT. See Job's comments on how he would use his fortune to nuke Android for instance.
So how anybody could look at THAT list of names and no figure out they were gonna do something nasty I'll never know.
Whether the guy is an idiot, a troll, or just a dumbass doesn't change one simple fact...Free Trade DOES NOT WORK because it is just what we see in TFA, we are simply exporting our pollution to the third world!
This is why i have been saying for years you just can't have free trade with countries like China and India which let corps dump toxins out the back and belch toxic clouds of filth into the sky because, and I'm sure the free market types will scream for me daring to point this out, but we live in a fishbowl folks and anything you dump on one side eventually affects everyone. all that crap dumped into rivers ends up in the ocean, all that crap in the air ends up carried over here or likewise settles in the oceans, it all comes around.
This is why we should simply not allow trade with countries that don't have similar environmental regulations to us, because all that is happening is the mutilnationals are playing three card monty with the pollution and they enjoy higher profits the more they pollute.
So frankly the "greenies" can stick it right in their ass, because as long as we allow multinationals to just pollute the third world while selling to the first all that green shit is fucking pointless. Its like simply throwing all the garbage in the basement and then bragging about how clean your house is, you're just putting the nasty shit out of sight, not actually doing anything about it. You can screw Americans with carbon credits and give huge tax breaks to electric cars but so long as damned near every thing in every store is made in pollution friendly countries then none of it will make a damned bit of difference, not a damned bit at all.
Ugh, don't even get me starting on that piece of shit. We've already blown a shitpile of money and it looks like it'll be over the trillion dollar mark to fix all the damned bugs and that isn't counting having the STOL F35b, that's just for the F35a. Did you know we have yet to use the F22 ANYWHERE? Why? too damned expensive to risk, and I'm betting the same will be said of the F35.
What is sad is if there is another major conflict we are gonna be the Germans in WWII, with VERY expensive and fussy as hell aircraft in very few numbers whereas anybody we go against will probably have Russian tech, which means the MiG 29 at something like 30 million a pop or the SU27 at 60. Compare this to a minimum of 250 million a pop for the F35 and you can see any enemy will just be able to spam us right out of the sky.
If we were smart and actually cared about defense, instead of making sure the MIC has tons of money for hookers and blow, we'd take a page from Iran and go back to using proven tech. Toss the F35, if you want stealth buy the F15 Stealth Eagle, load up on F15s and F16s, both of which have incredible kill ratios and are damned nice planes,give the navy more F18s and personally I'd bring back the warthog as every conflict we have been in since the cold war ended showed how valuable having that much firepower in a package that can loiter is and we have too damned few of 'em.
But if we don't watch it we could end up like Japan in the latter half of WWII, with all these carriers and no planes to put on them. last I checked the wiki we had less than 4000 planes and 11 aircraft carriers and most of the planes we have are old. that's not good and the military has been basically betting the entire farm on the F35 and if it turns out to be another F22 we are screwed as there is nothing else in the pipe. the ONLY thing in our favor right now is that the F15, F16, and F18 production lines are still open. if anybody at the DoD has ANY sense they'll be putting in some orders. Even if the F35 works frankly its gonna be short ranged and expensive as hell, certainly not the "one plane to replace them all" that the military had planned. Personally i bet its gonna be another F22 clusterfuck, too damned expensive to really use in combat.
Glad to see I'm not the only one. i like to hang out on tech feeds like Daily Rotation and Fresh news and when i saw this I went "since when did Cisco make an iPad ripoff?" and had to go look it up. Maybe if these companies actually tried a little marketing and advertising then they might actually get some sales, don't ya think?
Looking at the specs it was an interesting looking device although i'd have to question using an Atom for it. if you wanted to go X86 you would be better off with an AMD C series bobcat since that would give you dual cores and 1080p over HDMI and if you wanted battery life you'd be better off with ARM, and of course android is used primarily on ARM so I really don't get it. and why would you want to put a single core CPU in this day and age? Aren't most of the midrange and up tablets running dual cores? Looking at the price...holy fuck! The cheapest place is $940? for a single core Atom?
So maybe its best that they killed the thing and that we hadn't heard of it because somebody obviously didn't think this thing through.
Uhhh...bigot much? the words "elitist programmer" or even more likely "elitist Linux programmer" pop in my head as you seem to think just because YOU don't like something or think it is inelegant means its bad, when the real judge should be "does it do its job well?" and the answer for most of those VB+Access DBs is YES in all caps. If a business is never gonna grow beyond a certain size (like say a family practice, mom & pop store, hell I've even been to a junkyard that uses VB+Access to keep up with what cars are in the field) then frankly nobody gives a shit and they shouldn't, because it will do its job. I personally use a VB+Access to keep up with my burned DVDs because its simple, I can just drop it on a new machine with no install, and it "just works' year after year, so no need to change.
Your second point is the one that often gets Linux users labeled freetards because its just a "free as in freedom!" cry that frankly? Most don't give a rat's ass about, they really don't. unlike the nightmare scenarios your ilk frequently cook up most small software firms frankly aren't gouging and why should they? they want their customers to buy more software so acting like douches or charging Adobe prices simply wouldn't make sense. these are private companies and since they don't have to please wall street they can build a long term rep with a company and again the cost of the software is trivial compared to the amount of bullshit you expect one to jump through just to please the lovers of RMS. the rest of us? REALLY do not care, we really really don't.
Finally isn't it funny that ONLY the Linux guys can't seem to get Windows to run? what does it say about your "skills" if running windows turns into a nightmare from hell for YOU, while the rest of the planet run it just fine? and I don't know where you get your info from but I have a 1.8GHz Sempron running Win 7, that is an 8 year old machine BTW, and the only thing it doesn't do is run Aero, so what, who cares. Any machine that is still worth using in the average office could run Win 7 without a problem and most machines will have been rotated out long before Windows is EOLed. After all WinXP has still got 2 more years but how many people you think are still running 600MHz P3s like what originally came with XP? I get something that old and its straight to the dump, do not pass go.
And your "costs" of Windows are frankly trivial compared to Linux. You either pay some "guru" to do nothing but tend to the fussy thing, deal with the biannual upgrade deathmarch and all the broken drivers, or you buy a supported business OS which would be Red hat...which costs $400 per seat a year in support contracts ALONE. Or you buy Windows, buy a good AV like Eset, have all the important files on the server so if any hardware fails you can just image a new box and slap it on the floor, and call it a day. There is a REASON why Windows runs business, and that is because it is one of the easiest turn key solutions out there BY FAR. Tell me friend, name a single supported Linux that can take the place of Windows + Exchange + AD + GPO + Sharepoint? You can't, because all you have is a bunch of little projects run by different groups that do NOT interact with each other and frankly have no problem crapping on each other's work if they get an itch to scratch.
So I'm sorry but you just don't have a selling point for Linux on the desktop, if you did then the B&M stores or the OEMs would fill the niche when there just isn't a niche to fill. Hell if there was then the little shops like mine would sell it because system builders takes a chunk out of our bottom line but again we don't because there are simply no positives only negatives. because while you may give a shit about "free as in freedom!" the rest of us frankly really don't give a flying crap. if you want proof simply look at the lines when the latest iDevice is about to be released and Apple makes Windows look open by comparison. All folks care about is "does it work?" and with Linux the answer is NO it does N
And how much of the current US arsenal is from the 70s and 80s? that would be the majority. Just because its an older design doesn't mean it can't royally fuck you up, Israel still uses them as does the USMC and with missiles and its ability to use terrain to conceal and then pop up and fire the Cobra can still be VERY deadly. The problem with the Hind is they tried to build a craft with the troop carrying capacity of the Huey with the attack capability of the Cobra and ended up with a VERY large target. Not saying it isn't deadly but its huge size made it a pretty inviting target in Afghanistan and unlike the Cobra nimble it wasn't.
so I can see why they wanted to copy 70s US tech because sadly IMHO all we have produced since is overpriced tech turkeys like the F22 that are insanely priced and spend more time being worked on than flying. The Cobra is proven tech and is nimble while giving them plenty of firepower at an affordable price. if the pics in TFA are correct they also have a Huey knockoff which means they probably don't need the troop carrying ability of the Hind, just pair it with the Cobras as we did.
Not to mention there are plenty of places that offer square trade with their laptops for 3 years. Had a customer that bought it and someone swinging a book bag managed to hit her laptop in the library and killed the screen, they paid for the shipping, made the system good as new, it was pretty damned hassle free. So it isn't like AppleCare is the only way to go here and you are correct about bugs and hassles no different than any other OS.
As for a recommendation it is obvious in TFA they want an Intel because they don't care about graphics (rimshot) so if it were my customer I'd recommend an Asus Zenbook as it meets all the requirements and I've had nothing but good experiences with asus. Comes with Core i5,1600x900 resolution, 128Gb SSD, 4Gb of RAM, and a 1 year accidental coverage which they can bring up to 3 years for $224 if they wish and the unit comes in at just under $1000 so even adding 3 years no questions asked will still bring them in under the $1500 mentioned in TFA. of course if it were me personally I'd prefer an AMD quad but then again I DO care about graphics, but if all they are doing is video watching the intel GPU does that very well and with great battery life so overall a very nice unit that is thin and light and matches the desires in TFA.
Wow just....wow. For every one that says FF isn't a memory piggie all they have to do is look at that. There is over 23,000 users running an extension that dumps the browser and restarts so they can get the memory back...wow. BTW for all those FF users may i make a suggestion? Try Pale Moon as I've found that it doesn't seem to be QUITE as big a piggie and as a bonus it is compiled with the later SSE flags so it is snappier and as a BIG bonus they have forked away from FF because they have NO intention of going with the Metro UI look that FF is gonna be switching to. so for those that like the current look and just want it faster and less piggie, give pale moon a try.
As for TFA man i'd hate to see it go but sadly this is a problem with a browser being proprietary. with FF and Chromium if you don't like where a company is headed there is usually a fork because many feel the same way as you do, but with opera and presto there isn't a damned thing you can do but just stick with the old version. I know that is what my oldest boy will do rather than give up his opera but that isn't really the best move security wise, but with a locked down browser that is pretty much the only choice you have if you want to stick with it. maybe someone will cook up a Chromium version with the Opera UI?
Funnily enough looking at the pictures of Rockmelt (who thinks up these shit names anyway?) it reminded me of Expressgate which is built around tons of social crap, maybe FB should buy something like that and have their own FB OS? That would probably scare the hell out of Google.
Man I'd hate to see Opera go though because with Presto being proprietary you couldn't even fork it like with Gecko or Webkit. While I never could stand the Opera UI my oldest boy has been using it since it was a for pay browser and knowing him he would sandbox and run the last version rather than give up his opera or deal with it FBed all to hell. He swears it loads pages faster than anything else and by hacking the UA he even does his online courses in it.
Personally i'd just hate to see the loss in competition as opera is one of the few mobile browsers that will damned near run anywhere and AFAIK they don't do all the tracking crap like Chrome does. So if FB does buy Opera let us hope they open the source so that if all they want is the devs then the community could keep it running, cause it would be sad to see it go the way of Netscape.
Let ya in on a little secret...old barb has been doing that one for years. the funny part is for a Linux user i have never heard anyone bitch about the broken crap as much as her and in fact last i heard she had said she had wiped her SUSE and replaced it with....WinXP! Anyway she's part of Noyes roundtable on Linux Insider (along with me as the "token Windows guy") and spends most of her time over there bitching but if you see her "Tom" UID she be trolling. hell I think the whole "Tom" handle stand for Trolling On...something, damned if I can remember.
And you can tell your roomie i know what that is like, PC repair can be feast or famine and I have some customers on disability, that's a rough life. Tell him to keep an eye out on Craigslist, that is what I did for one of my disabled customers and I managed to snag him a less than 8 month old mint shape Dell mini Atom netbook for $80. compared to that POS old Pentium 4 Mobile (no shit, a P4 jammed in a laptop case! Talk about a lap burner) that Atom runs rings around it while giving him nearly 8 hours on a battery. I did some tweaking on it, cleaned out the extra Dell crap, turned off the services he'd never use, the usual, and now Win 7 starter shows he has nearly 600Mb free out of 1Gb on first boot and the thing is snappy as hell. Not as nice as my E350 but I wouldn't have any problem using it as a day to day machine.
Nice choice on CPU BTW, those i7s are damned nice chips, little too rich for my blood. I got a couple of teen boys who also game so if I was rocking something THAT nice while they were sucking hind tit I'd never hear the end LOL! So me and the boys went AMD, the youngest has a Deneb quad while me and the oldest are rocking Thubans. You'd be surprised how much headroom those 1035Ts have, just for shits and giggles since my board has a killer OCing tool I decided to see what she would do and managed to go from 2.6Ghz to nearly 3.1Ghz without bumping the volts but in the end I figured...why bother? As you know with the i7 once you have that many cores it blows through any job like crap through a goose so now I just run stock, Turbo shoots it up to 3Ghz anyway when I just have 3 cores being hit so it isn't like it is dragging ass or anything.
But you have yourself a great memorial day weekend APK,and just remember there really ain't no point in arguing against groupthink on THIS site, you may as well be pissing in the wind for all the good it'll do. I mean there is Barb running WinXP and STILL defending Linux, when the damned thing wouldn't even work for her without crapping all over itself on update LOL! That is why I have any FOSS articles just blocked, no point in wasting your breath on the close minded ya know? Peace.
That is why I laugh when I hear "real programmers" scream about VB+Access. You have ANY idea how many millions of dollars is made in sales each year in part by some VB+Access DB? Hell I've even built a few of 'em myself and last I heard they are all still running, doing what they are supposed to do. And that's just the home grown apps, do you have ANY idea how many small, say 5-10 man, software houses there are out there writing for Windows?
When I was getting my checkup the other day i was yakking with the nurse because she was carrying an X86 flip over laptop/tablet combo and when she let me check it out I could instantly see why. All she had to do was typethe first two letters of what drug they were on and a drop down popped up that she could just tap and fill in the blank, she could type in my name and all the usual info, DoB, address, etc, all filled in.,etc. She just gushed on and on about how much easier it was for her to just carry this one unit, which considering I had seen my old chart (been using the same doc since i was 4) and the thing is as thick as a damned dictionary I can see why she loved the thing. is there any way in hell they could switch to Linux? Nope because i doubt seriously you find any software in Linux that is as highly specialized as nurses charting programs and even if you could you'd have to pay someone to transfer all that damned data and for what? What would they gain?
It amazes me that so many in the Linux world complain of the "Windows tax" and act like 'free as in beer' is a selling point when honestly? For most the price of Windows isn't even in the top 5 of their expense report. If you look at Windows having a 10 year support cycle (which is now standard on ALL versions of Windows) that is $8 a year for Windows home (unless you buy the family pack, then its just $4) and $14 a year for Windows pro....THAT is supposed to be high? hell most of my customers, most of my family even, spend more on stupid crap in a week than Windows costs per year.
Linux is compelling in the server room because MSFT MAKES it compelling, by having insane EULAs and crazy license requirements like per user CALs. If MSFT wanted to wipe Linux out in the server room they could simply offer WinServer at $300 and no user CALs but they make so damned much money off of server its not worth picking up the low end sales to them. the desktop is the exact opposite, they have economies of scale so large that they can sell their product cheap as hell and still make billions. While i actually like Linux in the web server and embedded roles there is simply no real selling point for Linux on the desktop.
Sorry friend but as the wiki states "randomly generated token (unique ID), RLZ Identifier, Client ID, Suggest, page not found,bug tracker, Google Updater, and downloads" the info is here and as someone who didn't know they did THAT much tracking it just makes me feel even better than I'm using Dragon, which has all that crap stripped out.
Am I the only one who thought "Idiocracy" when watching that?
You sir should be modded up to 11 because you nailed it, I would just add that not only did he not grow but he actually shot his own company in the face with a key piece of tech he killed and that was PlaysFor Sure or PFS.
At the time he got the bug in his ass to be "squirting" with his Zune PFS was a VERY popular program with a ton of licensees, all bring in money to MSFT and at the same time giving people a reason to use Windows and MSFT software for music. with PFS there was a ton of "all you can eat" sites where you could download all the tunes your player could hold as well as get 10 or 15 tracks in MP3 for a flat $10-$15 a month, they also had great features like playlists based on your choice of genres or favs so that each month you could just load your PFS device with tunes from bands that played the style you liked or new artists in whatever genre you prefer, it was VERY popular at the time.
When he announced he was killing PFS to push the Zune and Zune market I knew at that moment he was a piss poor CEO, because he could have easily just added PFS support to the Zune and kept what was an easy to manage money making market, instead he took a crap all over it and killed any momentum that Windows had in media players. With PFS you had everything from those $20 MP3 players at the checkout lines to $300 Archos players so it was easy peasy for anybody to use PFS. By killing it he not only killed all those popular PFS sites he also gave the ones making MP3 players a reason not to support Zune market. just one more boneheaded move from a truly piss poor CEO.
To rip a line off from a former president "Its the APPS stupid". Whether the Linux guys choose to accept it or not most of the world uses more than a web browser and an office suite. there are a billion and one Windows only programs, from the ones everyone knows like Quickbooks and photoshop to a bazillion others you've never heard of, niche software for inventory, accounting, bookkeeping, medical records, you name it there is probably a half a dozen Windows apps designed for it...and ZERO Linux apps.
Like it or not Linux just doesn't have the programs. the guys writing programs for Linux are mainly programmer geeks and so their programs are based around that niche, which is why for instance you have dozens of different text editors with all kinds of little extras like syntax highlighting for this language or that, its because geeks are writing the programs and NOT for niche business markets which is where Windows shines.
So have a fit, waste some mod points, but it won't change reality. as a retailer i deal with ordinary folks 6 days a week and I can tell you that NOT A SINGLE ONE could be converted to Linux because there are ALWAYS a few "must haves" that just don't exist on Linux. You just can't expect people to take your OS if it won't run what they need it to run, and if the best that Linux can come up with for the big names is bad ersatz programs like Gimp for photoshop what chance do you have of coming up with all the niche applications?
No harm done, i'm the first to admit when it comes to music I'm not that tech heavy, I just know what sounds good to me. Hell the audiophiles would probably scream if they saw my bass rig as I'm running a Zoom pedal into the Trace but the Zoom pedals have a really nice fat bass compression and some good chorus and phases and being able to dial in how much effect i want in real time with the expression pedal is a plus. In the end all that matters to me is it sounds good, which is why when we finally go into the studio it'll be tubes for the guitarist and my trace for me.
I take it that its a REALLY old laptop then? Might want to tell him to keep an eye out on this site and grab him a cheap return because the celery is frankly a dog of a chip which i'm sure you know. I got myself one of those EEE-PC E350 netbooks and I can tell ya it stomped the Pentium mobile I had before it, really sweet and even does 1080p over HDMI.
But that little trick i told you will fix him right up, hell i had to do that trick myself a couple of days ago because MSE crapped itself by trying to update while WU was trying to update MSE and boned itself. one of these days i'll have to toss it for Comodo but since that machine is mainly gaming and transcoding its not like its really in any danger of bugs and Comodo takes about 3 days to train.
BTW if you give your roomie a hand be sure to point him towards ninite as that will take care of most of the "must have" software without any toolbars or 'clicky clicky next next next" bullshit. its the closest thing to a Windows repo I've ever found, you can even check the boxes for stuff you already have and it'll only install if there is a new version, just a great little resource. peace.
Exactly, the real world programs folks use daily simply can't stress these monster X86 chips to any reasonable degree. Hell I even sold my full size laptop and bought one of those e350 netbooks, that is one of the smallest chips you can get but for what i do when I'm mobile, surf, download drivers, maybe watch a movie? I have tons of cycles to spare and 6 and a half hours battery life. Hell even the gamer PCs me and the kids are playing on are a couple of low end hexacores and a middle range quad and with $50 HD4850s we have yet to stress the systems, we have just too many cycles, too much power.
As I said X86 is the victim of its own success, that's all. Even the cheapest AMD and Intel chips have so damned much power that even if you multitask like mad you just won't ever bog these babies down, so what is the point in buying a new one? The stupid thing was the OEMs and Wall Street acted like the MHz wars was never gonna end but once the systems went multicore there simply wasn't a point. I mean look at all the work you are doing on a C2D and that's...what? A 6 year old chip? Then realize that most folks rarely do more than one or two things at a time MAX, does anybody think they'd be able to actually choke a C2D? Or even an old Phenom I dual? Hell I use an 8 year old Sempron 1.8GHz as a nettop in the shop and for the jobs it has...downloading drivers, letting me look up parts, even doing some web surfing when I'm waiting on an install, it just works beautifully.
In the end even a laptop or netbook given a little TLC will easily last you 5 to 7 years so there simply is not point in jumping on the upgrade bandwagon when your apps don't even stress the machine you have. THAT is why X86 sales have bottomed out, not some magical "We're all gonna use iPads" bullshit. Funny that despite all that talk about "Apple quality" the guys i knew with iPads sold them the second the new version came out, because to them owning last year's model just wasn't cool. To them it was just as much about fashion as it was any features because just like X86 frankly they weren't stressing their iPads either. That's great for Apple, but that shit just don't fly in X86 land as nobody cares what year your laptop is, just as long as it does its job.
You got it back asswards friend, Opera MINI does the whole "go through Opera servers" thing whereas opera MOBILE only does so if you activate turbo.
I'm sorry AC but you are full of shit. NOBODY is gonna want to do serious work like photoshop or quickbooks or a bazillion other jobs on no damned iPad. what you and all those that worship the Cult of Steve seem to be missing is the big picture which i will now give to you..
The VAST majority of the PCs that were made in the last 5 to 7 years are not only "good enough" for the jobs people have, for most they are INSANELY over powered. The reason why all the OEMs like HP and Dell are shitting on themselves is frankly they got waaaay too fucking spoiled and thought the MHz wars were just gonna last forever, but those of us in the trenches could have told you when the first dual cores starting hitting mainstream that the gravy train was over. there just isn't any real "killer apps" that require the insane power of a hexa or octocore PC, most people with duals aren't even really stressing the system. I gave my GF a triple core Athlon for Xmas to replace her aging P4. Now this is probably considered dog slow by this group but after a month I checked her stats and you know what? The thing hadn't even hit 45% load. the kind of tasks that she and most consumers have simply aren't stressing the systems they have, so why buy a new one when they won't feel a difference?
So I'm sorry but for a few jobs iPads work, for the rest they are but a toy. Apple sells on brand like Prada and Nike, just ask those people standing in line for a new one "does the one you have not work? Is there something wrong with it?" and the answer is no, its just COOLER to have the newest one. its a status thing, nothing more.
The reason MSFT and the OEMs can't do this is frankly nobody gives a rat's ass about Windows or these OEMs as a brand, the ONLY thing they want a Windows PC for is to run their third party apps....which frankly aren't even stressing what they have. I have built e350 units for office workers, that is probably the weakest chip made that is out of order. do they complain? Is it slowing them down? Nope because for basic office jobs frankly ANY dual core gives them cycles to spare.
so ultimately X86 is simply a victim of its own success. they made chips so damned powerful that honestly nobody bothers to replace one until it dies and with just a tiny bit of care even that netbook or laptop can last 5 years or more. the OEMs thought they could just follow the same path and keep cashing the checks, they were wrong. ARM is currently undergoing its own MHz war but when that peters out i have NO doubt you'll see the exact same thing you see now in X86, incredibly overpowered devices that aren't replaced until the previous one fails. Except for Apple of course, because owning last year's iPad is like wearing last year's designer fashions, its just not hip.
Why did you have ANY doubt before? just look at the man's track record...killing a profitable playsforsure for Zune market, the Zune itself, rushing Vista out with show stopping bugs, the Kin, rushing the X360 out with a billion dollar heating problem, the whole Vista capable fiasco, and now forcing the metro (aka WinPhone) UI onto the desktop, which is a place it should NEVER be, all because even after pissing away hundreds of millions he can't even give WinPhones away.
Frankly this should be a surprise to no one, he is frankly strictly middle management sales guy that only got the job he did because he was there at the start and was gates' little buddy. The man makes the Apple pepsi period look like fricking genius, he has literally pissed away billions of dollars and doesn't have shit to show for it. The numbers haven't changed, they still own the desktop and THAT IS IT, in mobile they are nowhere, and there is even still some debate if the X360 has actually given them a ROI yet or if they just wrote off all the money they spent on R&D for Xbox I and the X360.
So i'm sorry but even those that like MSFT software should be able to see what an incredible failure as a CEO he has been. his entire term behind the wheel has been either coasting on past success or getting blindsided by the next new thing and then trying to do a half ass ripoff of whatever is a hit and failing miserably. hell they only really have two cash cows and now he's gonna take a big old shit on one of them because he just can't accept his mobile strategy is a giant fucking fail! I only hope the Win 8 failwhale is the last straw and the board punts his ass, which frankly should have happened after the Vista failure and the billion dollar X360 write off. I would LOVE to see the exact figures of the amount of cash he has pissed down the drain on failures, anybody know what the figure is? i bet its billions, the man is just a giant walking disaster.
But that covers the OBJECT but not the land the object is sitting on. like i said what if where the Apollo 11 landed turns out to be a major source of H3 which can be VERY useful for fusion and somebody wants to mine it? it is not like it would be very feasible to tunnel UNDER the site just to keep from disturbing what to any non American would probably be space junk, just as i'm sure the Russians would have a fit if we moved the Luna probes to mine where they are sitting.
In the end who owns what and where is something we are just gonna have to sit down and work out, hell we are already seeing problems in LEO as countries like China think blowing shit up in space is cool but all that space crap takes decades to come down. So we really do need to write up a list of not only who owns what but what responsibilities comes with that access, because we only have one blue marble, one moon, and even in space shit can get crowded if we aren't careful.
Ya wanna know what REALLY sucks? because so many new systems comes with Norton or McAfee trial i've found a lot of malware guys write for those AVs so that if it blows past Norton and Mccrappy they consider it ready to go. the record for the worst infected machine at the last shop i worked at was a Toshiba laptop that had norton home...and over 2200 infections! That thing took nearly an hour and a half to boot on AC power just because of all the shit running on it. Just for laughs my boss ran the Norton that was installed and it said "nope! All clean!" while we were seeing pop ups and crap going everywhere. That is why I always give them either Avast or Comodo, because they run like a dream compared to those pieces of malware pretending to be AV.
As for Vista...the problems with Vista could be summed up in one sentence...crappy drivers and Vista capable, both of which were MSFT's fault. if you had tried the alpha and beta you'd have found that just a few months before release MSFT changed the driver model enough that drivers that worked on alpha wouldn't run on beta 2 which left the OEMs scrambling for drivers and the ones building the actual parts naturally pissed off. By the time SP2 had rolled around most of the problems had been fixed but by then it was already too late as everyone was gearing up for Win 7 and simply didn't care. if MSFT would have withheld the launch for 6 months to get better drivers built and told the OEMs that if they wanted to advertise their machines as capable of running vista they'd have to throw in a cheap DX9 card then Vista would have probably gotten the love that Win 7 did, but they totally screwed the pooch. you watch Win 8 will likewise be a pooch screw and just cement in users minds that MSFT follows the Star trek rule of "every other release is shitty".