I'm sorry friend but frankly the SCOTUS has been crippled since they let FDR mangle the commerce clause to keep him from simply stuffing the court with enough votes to get what he wanted. Honestly i wish they had stuck to their guns because at least then SCOTUS wouldn't have this air of impartiality when there are so many blatantly unconstitutional rulings on the books from previous courts it would probably take them a couple of decades just to fix the mess that the previous courts allowed.
So I'm sorry friend but once they let the commerce clause be "anything you want it to be" things have just gone downhill. Now you have justices like Thomas getting bribed through his wife, Scalia taking trips with the VP, the impartiality is simply not there.
I'm sorry but this is NOT insightful, because to "vote against it" one has to actually have someone to vote for that IS against it. As we have seen again and again BOTH the Ds and Rs are as corrupt as they come and our system is designed to make sure third parties have less of a chance on the national stage than a snowball in hell.
In my own state we had a choice in the general election of a DINO that kissed corporate ass or a RINO that kissed corporate ass, and the primaries were the same, a handful of asskissers in training. tell me friend how EXACTLY can one "vote against it" when your choices are "Check this box to vote for el presidente" and "Show the world how mad you are by...voting for el presidente!". Because if you think either the Ds or Rs give a rat's ass about anyone who can't write 6 figure checks I have a bridge you might be interested in.
Because he already mentioned in TFA he simply can't install software on the clients due to "legal issues' so frankly it smells like someone trying to pull some sort of man in the middle and coming up with a flimsy excuse to cover for it? After all if the person he is working for owns the machines he can install whatever software he wanted to on them, once legal had written up the appropriate forms to let the workers know what is and is not allowed on their network.
so at least it sounds to me more like some sort of man in the middle, where he wants to capture the data without being obvious or letting anyone know what is going on, say like a restaurant or coffee shop with free Wifi?
Not to mention the dead student's own words and actions made it frankly look to me like there really wasn't a case here. the school offered twice to get him a new roommate, he refused, which if he was so damned bothered by this why would he stay with a douchebag?
In the end this excuse was frankly covering for what I truly believe the real cause of this young man's death was, which was the fact his parents made it clear they wanted to have nothing to do with him, the mother going so far as to disown him. Now which do YOU think the more likely cause of the suicide, your family which by all accounts he had been close to telling you to go to hell when they find out you're gay, or one asshole roommate which you aren't bothered enough by to even take a different room when offered. To me this smells like the whole "cyber suicide" case where someone acted like a prick online and they tried to find something to hang her with. Ultimately YOU are in charge of your own life and "acting like a douchebag" simply isn't illegal. What's next, we gonna throw trolls in prison when they hurt someone's feelings?
And this is coming from someone who has a gay child, but unlike the sorry parents of this kid we actually supported ours. If anyone tries to pick on him because he is gay he simply says "So what? why should I give a damned WHAT you think?" and walks on. You see that is what happens when you actually support your kid, they can be confident to just be themselves instead of feeling isolated and alone which is what i'm sure that kid felt like after his own parents turned on him. Contrast this with the "big scene" when our youngest came out, all that was said is my dear sweet grandmother said "Dear, we kinda knew that already. I'm old and half deaf, not blind honey" and that was that. I just wish I'd had a camera at the time because the look on his face as his great grandma said that and scooted along with her walker was priceless!
Here is what royally pissed me off...your use case? TOTALLY makes sense. A well educated server admin using a rock solid business designed Linux like SciLi makes TOTAL sense....but...that does NOT in ANY way, shape, or form, describe the consumer market AT ALL!
The first argument was that "windoze" was hard to use yet it is so fucking simple my 71 year old clueless dad installed Win 7 by himself with NO troubles, NO driver issues, hell he didn't even need the CD that came with the board. The only thing I had to do when I showed up to install the OS and found out he had got bored and decided to go DIY is to show him how to install Firefox and put his info into it so it would import his bookmarks..that's it. that's all.
Now surely even you will admit that what you went through to set up that wireless on Linux is frankly beyond the skillset of a good 85%+ of the users out there, yes? Or that SciLi is NOT designed for the home market but for those with years of exp with Linux systems and who has full working knowledge of the underpinnings, correct? So how does that in ANY way translate to the consumer market which is what we were talking about? Do you honestly think i sell the majority or even minority of systems to server admins? No of course not.
So my argument still stands, for the vast majority of consumers Linux DOES NOT WORK unless they 1.-Have a full time IT staffer to control the system or 2.-has a family member willing and able to be a full time IT staffer and admin the system. this is in a nutshell why Linux doesn't work, it assumes that everyone has a skillset that frankly fewer than 10% of the market has and those 10% frankly don't have any problems with adminning Windows either so there is no point. While Ubuntu and others claim to be "Linux for humans" in reality its just a sugar coating over the same old problems. The driver model sucks balls, the upgrade in place system is totally broken, at least on every version designed for consumers that I've ever tried, there is no simple GUI to find drivers or rollback drivers when something goes wrong (which it always does) and the answer to everything is "open up bash and type" this big mess that you will have to have the skills to debug because Linux is so damned picky you can't just download a generic driver, it has to be tweaked because if anything is even slightly different, say the rev of firmware, then it simply doesn't work. Compare this to Windows where a free AV and auto updates is all most will ever need as the system handles everything else for the life of the OS which is 10 years standard now.
so while I can totally understand why someone with a niche use case such as yours would be better off with Linux the vast majority of users would just end up with a useless broken system, so for them frankly any modern Windows is the MUCH better choice period.
Thanks and I too don't use either FF or Chrome. For my customers I offer a choice of Pale Moon which has forked away from Firefox specifically because they did not want to go with the whole metro UI change or Comodo Dragon which is what i personally use as its based on Chromium but with some nice extra security features and no phoning home to Google. Finally for those that need cross platform I would highly recommend QTWeb which runs on Linux, Apple,BSD or Windows, is fully portable so you can just run it on a flash, and has Flash support and Adblock.
But I was a BIG supporter of Mozilla, both when FF was still in beta and the Moz Suite before that, but frankly their devs might as well change the opening screen to someone giving the finger as that seems to be their attitude as of late. You would think seeing how their numbers climbed right up through FF V4 and then started nosediving and never recovered they would get the hint that the users don't like the current direction, but frankly they don't seem to give a shit. This is sad as FF had ONE killer feature, the same one that caused some of my customers to go to Seamonkey or Pale Moon rather than give up the Gecko engine, and that is the awesome extension framework. if they would quit pissing on the users with the UI and do something about the CPU spiking I would go running back to FF in a heartbeat but its pretty obvious from their roadmap that the ONLY users they want are those on Windows 8 using appstores and that just ain't me. So long FF and thanks for all the fish.
Nooo...he is saying what Apple and Foxconn is doing is simply a variation of a Potemkin Village where you build a front to please the suits but in reality the vast majority of Foxconn workers will be living like shit. This lets Apple say they are "changing things" when in reality they are still doing business with a scummy company, they are simply having a nice front made for THEIR products and their products alone.
The problem with your argument is thus, Humans are NOT the ultimate resource but SMART humans ARE. the problem is the smart are NOT breeding in any real numbers while the dumb as fuck, barely able to count their change total retards are popping out kids by the pile. Hell didn't you see that story that went around last week about the guy that had THIRTY KIDS and wanted them to cut down his child support because he only makes minimum wage (and frankly always will) even though divided up among that many damned kids they each get on average $1.94 a month?
Sadly what we are seeing is the simple fact that while a comedy Idiocracy is rapidly becoming reality. When you have someone with a 90 IQ frankly education will only go so far, because just as you can't train someone without the genetically gifted muscle type (lack of lactic acid buildup but off the top of my head i can't remember if there is a term for it) to be a world class or even state level sprinter you simply can't turn people with 80 to 90 IQ into rocket scientists, it simply can NOT be done.
Whether you choose to believe it or not frankly a HELL of a lot of the work at the bottom of the ladder in the USA right now is simply "make work" that wouldn't be feasible if the government didn't pay for it by taking it out of your pocket. Walmart even shows a training video on how to apply for food stamps for Pete's sake! Do you HONESTLY think if those government programs disappeared tomorrow it would be cheaper for the stores like Walmart to pay a living wage than to simply automate?
In the end we are playing IQ musical chairs and more and more simply will never get a seat. Most of the minimum wage jobs in the USA could be replaced by machines tomorrow if government programs didn't artificially tilt the favor for humans. Hell you could replace most fast food with automated assembly quite easily, stocking shelves with robots, self checkout lines, hell you could even replace most plumbers and electricians by just using prefabbed homes.
Whether we like it or not the day is RAPIDLY approaching where capitalism, like every other ism before it, will simply fail. If the workers can't trade their labor for capital then how is capitalism gonna survive? We are already seeing the beginnings of it by how so few at the top can control so much of the capital while it becomes ever harder for those at the bottom to rise above anything but poverty because they simply can't get the capital required to advance from labor alone. Did you know you can put the ones that control over 80% of the capitol in your average HS gym and still have seats left over? This is a sign that the system is failing because otherwise those workers killing themselves daily would be able to work their way into that club but the majority just can't.
In the end it just doesn't work friend, you have nearly half a billion people in the USA alone and with just current technology you could get by just fine without any real losses with just 1/5th of that number. Mark my words the next bubble to burst will be the education bubble as millions go into debt they will never be able to pay only to find that the jobs simply don't exist. With robots and computers frankly we just DO NOT NEED all of these people, so short of make work or handouts you are gonna have some major upheavals as all these unneeded people aren't simply gonna wander off and die, they WILL fight back any way they can. But in the end one simply can't escape the simple fact that we have millions more people than we have jobs that need doing.
They are leaving because they can dump toxic waste straight into the rivers there and treat workers VERY poorly. they can expose them to chemicals you'd never get away with here, unsafe working conditions that would never be allowed, and basically they are nothing but "disposable people". It is no accident that over 10% of the farmland in China is now so toxic the produce from them is unfit for human consumption or 9 out of the top 10 cancer causing cities are in China.
So please get off the bullshit high horse that it is somehow the west's fault because they gasp! horror! Refuse to live like a Charles Dickens novel while sucking carcinogens with every breath and having drinking water just slightly better than raw sewage. free trade should be banned simply because it does not exist but is instead an excuse those 1%ers use to poison third world countries with the help of the 1%ers in power in those same countries. The amount of toxins the average peasant is exposed to in India and china is not only horrifying it just serves as proof that the west has been brainwashed by the "job creators" elite class that exploiting peasants and treating them as disposable people is perfectly alright as long as they aren't over here. Its disgusting, shameful, and I believe the history books will look upon this period just as they do the "white man's burden" of the 19th century.
But why would you care? Ever since web devs quit building "this site is made for IE 6" websites frankly it really doesn't matter WHAT browser folks use as finally all the websites can be rendered in any of the major (and even most minor) browsers without the least bit of trouble. And funny you should talk about evil and mention Netscape as they were just as proprietary and nasty as MSFT, or did everyone forget the "blink" tag and other NS only crap?
But as you noted in your sig we now have Seamonkey , plus Pale Moon, FF, Chrome, Chromium, Dragon, QTWeb, SWIron, Safari, Opera, Kmeleon and Kmeleon CCF ME, hell probably a dozen more I haven't named and they all just work across the vast majority of the web without hassle or rendering problems.
So as long as MSFT can no longer dictate the web "Works best in IE (version number)" frankly I don't give a rat's ass what the majority uses because the rest of us have a wealth of choices. And isn't THAT what really matters? that nobody is tied to a single browser just to be able to use the web?
Well lets say...how many of my customers have had to bring their systems back because they caught a bug? that would be...ONE. That's it. And the ONLY reason that he caught a bug was he not only refused to listen to me but first tried to disable and then uninstalled his AV when it wouldn't let him install "The New Limewire" which of course was just a malware package labeled limewire. It doesn't take ANY knowledge to run Vista or 7 perfectly safe, since neither OS runs as admin which was the one big flaw. A free AV, leaving OS updates to automatic, using IE or Chrome, yeah that's so hard. BTW isn't it funny that it is the Linux guys that always can't seem to get Windows to run? What does it say about your "leet" skills?
And I'm sorry but I call bullshit. if you are using Linux and not talking out your ass you are using it on a dumpster dived Intel box because frankly on laptops or more modern systems it royally blows ass. I have tried more than 15 different distros on bog standard desktops and laptops and following the GUI instructions (As a NORMAL user would be expected to, or are you HONESTLY arguing that running a free AV is "too hard" but that Suzy the checkout girl is gonna learn bash?) as listed by the OS and watched as it royally crapped itself. Pulseaudio is a bad fucking joke and the wireless networking is absolute shit. With latter version of Windows one frankly rarely needs the driver for such things because WU already has them and will install automatically. tell me friend, where is the "find drivers" or "rollback drivers" buttons in Linux? Oh right, they just don't exist even though windows has had them for a fricking dozen years now. Some great OS you have there chief.
In the end Linux is DEAD on the desktop, the numbers lower than fucking Java cell phones, and its all because frankly to paraphrase the line from Full Metal Jacket you think that "Inside every Suzy the checkout girl is a bash programmer waiting to get out" and then you have the sheer mind numbing gall to complain that Windows is hard? Really? BTW next time why don't you do us both a favor and simply list which Linuxtrademarks you are gonna use to save us both some time. Honestly I can take any FOSSie rant such as yours and replace with nothing but the Linux TMs because the same tired old horseshit has been used over and over AND OVER, yet you gain NO share? Guess your "leet OS" isn't so great after all, huh?
And all the rants above about Chrome and the rest of the Chromium based browsers is missing one thing...there is a REASON why FF usage has been dropping like a stone, and that is the devs at FF have taken a 'fuck you, we're going this way!" attitude that is running off their users!
This is one thing I give credit to all the different Chromium based browsers for because there have been VERY few UI changes and the ones that have happened have been fairly subtle. the FF devs seem to get a bug up their ass and totally crap all over the UI without a care in the world as to what the users think. Hell look at these mockups of the next UI by Mozilla and they might as well say "We ONLY want Windows 8 users! If you aren't into Metro UI then piss off" and is it ANY wonder that Chrome and its ilk have blown away FF?
I used FF before it was even called FF and the Moz Suite before that but it has been obvious at least to me that somewhere between V4 and V7 that they quit giving a fuck what the users thought and became nothing but devs scratching itches. The rise of Chrome is a classic case of users voting with their feet as if the FF devs had just held a damned poll and ASKED WHAT WE WANTED then frankly they wouldn't have seen their users nosedive as its pretty damned clear that like me most users do not want to go where they are heading.
Because we frankly have ZERO problems with our systems, unlike the Linux guys? When was the last time Linux crapped on one of your drivers? When was the last time the upgrade deathmarch didn't go well? We simply don't have to worry about such things in Windows friend. My shop PC has been running the same XP install for 8 years now, no bugs, no crashes, no hassles, no fuss, can YOU say the same? my home machine has been running Win 7 since Oct 09, no muss or fuss even though I have replaced just about every part in that machine but the case. When I changed out the board and CPU I had to reactivate which took less than 15 seconds and pushing a single button and that's it, smooth sailing.
So I don't see what you thinking we are supposed to be "going through" because anybody with half a brain can have Windows run perfectly. The reason I have people bring their PCs to me is they either bought some Dell special that is loaded with crapware or they frankly did something REALLY stupid, such as surf with an outdated IE or run around the net with some 30 day AV trial that expired 3 years ago and caught a bug. But if you have enough common sense to build your own desktop you have more than enough to run Windows flawlessly.
I don't ever have to Google for fixes, no going to forums to look for solutions, no pouring in the CLI garbage just to get my system to run. if that kind of crap is what you like to do, more power to you, but its more than a little ironic that you rail against Windows when it is frankly the easiest OS to run by far.
I don't know where you get your figures, probably out of your behind, but I paid $350 for my netbook and I get 7 and a half hours thanks.
You also completely ignored the fact that ITS THE PROGRAMS PEOPLE NEED THAT ARE ON X86 and your $79 chip ain't worth 79c to most if they can't run the programs they need. its the same reason why Linux has gone exactly nowhere on the desktop, because most people do more with a machine than simply run a web browser.
We have been down this road before you know, all through the 90s and 00s companies sold ARM desktops, some with RISCOS and some with Linux. Where are they now? Gone, dead, closed shop. You seem to think that ARM is magical but in reality the ONLY thing ARM has to sell itself is ultra low power which when you are plugged into an outlet is completely negated. Nobody will notice the few watts difference on their electric bill but they WILL notice when all they can run on their desktop is cell phone apps.
Why would THAT be attractive? You can already do that for less than $300 with X86 and have it any way you want, $340 for a complete system just add the OS of your choice. These units take less than 18w under full load, no noise, and you can run any software you want. Just use the VESA mount on the back of any monitor and voila! No muss no fuss.
BTW these also make excellent HTPCs with either Windows or if you don't want to spend the money there is OpenELEC which has a build just for these units and has XBMC with the 10 foot UI built in, a really cheap and easy way to have a truly kick ass HTPC.
So I could see the appeal in mobile but on the desktop? Not really seeing a point. I have changed out a few office buildings with units like these and the nice thing is unlike an ARM unit they can run the software required to do their business. When it comes to the desktop there are just too many X86 only programs people depend on so unless someone comes out with hardware accelerated X86 emulation (which you probably couldn't do without getting sued by intel) then I just don't see it gaining any real ground.
That unit you listed frankly isn't a good buy anyway. it has a single core CPU, uses 12w, and is $200 for a 10 inch. You can find Atom dual core netbooks in 10 inch for damned close to that price and they use less power for twice the cores. The AMD versions are 12 inches and they feel more like an ultraportable and both the Intel and AMD can run all the X86 apps while this of course can't.
Not saying ARM can't compete in that market, just saying so far nobody has been putting out competitive units at the right price point. what they need is a dual core unit, either 10 or 12 inches (12 would probably be cheaper as those screens are being made more than the 10 inch now) and a price point of $150 or less. This is the same problem that those have tried to compete with Apple have run into, in that unless you have something really innovative like the transformer if you get your price too close to Apple's most will choose the Apple and the same holds true of X86 and ARM. After all if there is only $20-$50 difference why would I want to limit myself to a cell phone OS and programs when i can have X86 and run anything I want including those same cell phone programs (sold through Intel Appstore) as well as x86 programs?
If you are in the EU you have your answer, the VAT kills you. Here in the states i paid $350 for my EEE 1215B new and that was with an added 8Gb of RAM and a nice carrying case for the unit. Now that was pre flood but they still sell for $440 and that is for the HP that beats my EEE in most benches. You are talking 12 inch so its easy to carry, less than 3 pounds, able to hold between 4Gb and 8Gb of RAM, and at least for the EEE I can get between 6 and 7 hours stock, longer if I use Brazos tweaker to lower the idle a little.
And finally as for those benches...were they compiled with the intel compiler? do they even list what compiler they used? if not its worthless as its well known intel compilers cripple the code if you run it on AMD chips. If you take a Via (the only chip that can change the CPUID) and change the CPUID from centaur hauls to genuine Intel them gasp! The chip magically gains 30% on the benches. this is why I completely ignore benches because its quack.exe all over again. What matters is real world usage and I can tell you the E350 does every job I can throw at it quite well, I've even used it for editing multitrack audio recordings in the practice room and never had a bit of struggle, nor has it struggled when i play some L4D or GTA:VC. For real world usage its a really great chip.
Do they? Because from what I've seen the desires of the public for MOAR POWER in mobile devices has been going nowhere but up. Folks used to be happy with something that could do webmail and surf badly, now they want HD video, gaming, hell some you can even plug into a monitor and keyboard and use as a full blown PC.
I would argue the only reason you aren't seeing some of the lower end C series Bobcats put into such form factors is frankly AMD can't even keep up with demand for the markets they have now, much less add new form factors. It is widely known that AMD ramped down some of their desktop production to make room for more mobile chips and even then they aren't able to keep up with demand. you go into any Walmart or Best buy and the Fusion chips pretty much own the sub $600 market which is a BIG market, and that don't count the nettops and all in ones. The OEMs have been gobbling up AMD Bobcats as fast as they can get them out the door.
So I'd say with one or two die shrinks and peoples desire for their mobile devices to do ever more than it will only be a generation or two before both Intel and AMD have chips that will fit that market just fine. People want their tablets and smartphones to do everything a full blown PC can do and while i'm sure there are a few that care about battery life above all frankly that isn't the majority. the future appears to be "high speed with low enough power to do the job" and the big three, AMD, Intel, and Nvidia, all seem to be going this direction.
The big problem at AMD right now isn't the power but capacity. Hopefully now that they are cutting themselves loose from GloFlo they will be able to shop around and get more chips cranked out. I know TSMC have been cranking out the Bobcats and the Radeon GPUs and they are scheduled to bring more fabs online so that should help with the crunch, but if you look at the numbers even the panned Bulldozer chips are selling as fast as they can make them.
So I honestly wouldn't be too worried if I was AMD, a couple more die shrinks will help with the power and the consumers desire for ever more performance will also be in their favor. ARM may be great for super low power but as we have seen they really can't ramp up the performance without the power usage spiking. In the end I bet tablets and phones will end up a hell of a lot more like a portable PC, able to do any job a PC is capable of and that is gonna be in AMD's favor.
Well you could do all that OR...you could teach them not to be a dumbass and that no stupid text is worth risking their life and health over.
One of the first things I drilled into my oldest boy's head was to NEVER talk on the cell or text while driving. I know the owner of one of the local salvage yards and had him point out a few of the wrecks where they had been using the cell phone or texting and it was a VERY sobering sight, cars twisted and mangled and obvious places where someone's head had hit or even a little splatter left on the interior, really nasty stuff. I know this worked because just the other day I saw my oldest pulled over in a parking lot sitting on the tailgate of his truck and asked if he was having a problem and he said "Nope, everything is fine, I just got a call and a text and pulled over to reply", needless to say i handed him a $20 right there and told him its nice to see him so responsible.
So I'd say instead of going through all that trouble just 10 minutes in any junkyard ought to do the trick. No video can compare to seeing the results right there where you can touch it, to see the results of such stupidity.
Glad the heads up helped, I still get the occasional spam email from someone using Firefox and having a Yahoo mail account so that bug is still out there but it isn't as easy to set off as it was during FF 9 so hopefully they are working on it.
Hell you may be right, for the life of me I can't remember the name of the place. I was a little kid and hearing about such horrible shit noting the details about the place just wasn't something I ever thought to do. When you are a kid you think your family is gonna be around forever and it was frankly a total shock when my grandfather died because he wasn't even 60 years old when he suddenly keeled over with a heart attack. I doubt the man would have even told me if I hadn't asked what the deal was with the Nazi marches and why so many were screaming dirty words at them, because to a kid it looked just like a bunch of guys in funny clothes walking in a line, not very scary, but after he told me what he saw at the camp and that the neighborhood they wanted to go through was full of people from those camps it was easy for even a child to understand.
One of these days I'll slip the gal downstairs some money and have her do a record search on my grandfather as I'm sure the military will have detailed records of his movements, but all I can remember was it was either Poland or close to the border with Poland and not long after he had a wall dropped on him while in Germany and he got to spend the V days in a full body cast being ferried from Germany back to the states with the last leg in a Douglas transport. Hell the only reason I remember the Douglas is my grandfather loved the transport planes and would talk about how much punishment those birds would take without falling.
Anyway glad that post helped, just be sure if you are using FF to have a password for your password file which will protect you from the iFrame trick. Oh and if you are still writing that story look at the PAKs and MGs as those both scared the living hell out of the troops. There are videos of both being fired on youtube and if you want authentic be sure to talk about the sound. Both the PAK and the MG had a distinctive sound that the troops knew by heart. Grandfather said if you heard either sound you would hit the deck just on instinct because the Germans could just slaughter an entire platoon with those weapons if you weren't damn careful.
Oh and one other thing that struck me as weird that nobody seems to mention is that all the troops used to listen to enemy broadcasts! There was a Nazi version of Tokyo Rose and she would broadcast reports of wounded and captured Allied troops so the guys would listen to see if any group they knew had been captured. He told me the hitler broadcasts always reminded him of a preacher, in that even though he and his friends spoke no German Hitler would build this cadence up to the point you knew exactly where the Sieg heil part was gonna come in because it was all about the cadence, kinda like how they would teach the troops to march by using the whole "your left, your left, left right left" cadences.
Uhhh...did you not read my GP post? It takes less than an hour on average and the ONLY thing that will be running on startup besides the standard Windows services is the graphics icon in the taskbar. I could of course kill that since it isn't STRICTLY needed but ATI for some damned reason doesn't put a control panel icon when you install so if you disable that many would have trouble finding where to call up the controls.
Hell if all they wanted was just the crapware tossed with no reinstall that is even quicker, just run PC Decrapifier which takes MAYBE 10 minutes. Now if you wanted to argue that I should be charging based on my years of experience then maybe, but that then gets into economics. i find that with the lower price i get much more customers and due to the tiny amount of my time it takes i can crank them out and make more money. It simply makes more sense to charge $50 if you can do a dozen in a day than it is to charge $100 and only get 2 through the door a day, its just simple math.
So I'm sorry friend but you are wrong, server is a completely different beast. With server you have to set up groups, password policies, permissions, it takes much longer and you have to know a lot about the org to do it right. With home users there really isn't anything to know, you set the password to blank so they can put in their own, you give them a bog standard clean system with the basic apps they will require (which thanks to Ninite all but two of the apps I give them is fully automated), there really isn't all that much to it honestly.
Not to mention the whole thing would be like saying "These new mopeds are gonna wipe out truck sales!"....what? ARM and X86 are about as different as different can possibly be and their uses are likewise very different!
ARM is all about low power, its IPC is lower than an Atom or Bobcat but it runs at sub watt power. But as we have seen this arch does NOT scale well. You crank up the IPC? The power usage jumps to the point it is getting damned close to Atom and Bobcat, again both of which have much higher IPC.
X86 on the other hand has always been about speed and power. Sure they have been working on lowering the power usage for the past few years but there is only so far they can go before people start bitching. Again take the Atom for an example, the first couple batches gained a rep for being slow as hell and frankly their rep isn't really much better now, why? They sip power like an ARM but people want speed in their netbooks and laptops and Atom just isn't. The Bobcats are better but that is because they have a decent GPU doing a lot of the heavy lifting but that comes at the price of power, 3.5 w for Atom vs 9w to 18w for Bobcat.
So this entire "We're gonna kick your ass!" bullshit is just that, bullshit. Each design has its own niche with VERY little overlap between the two. Now if the rumors are true and Intel and AMD get Atom and Bobcat small enough and low power enough? Frankly I wouldn't be surprised to see them end up in some tablets and smartphopnes, after all they are already selling an X86 smartphone in India. If that happens I would NOT be betting on ARM in that fight simply because X86 can get truly insane IPC and so far barring some breakthrough ARM has their power suckage jump every time they boost IPC. With the two arches it looks like it will be easier to die shrink X86 and lower its power usage than it will be for ARM to raise its IPC.
In the end if I was ARM I would seriously be worried. The current trend is people demanding more and more and MORE from their smartphones and tablets. Just look at how far we have come, 5 years ago if you could surf and check your mail VERY slowly it was considered good, now people want HD video, gaming, high res screens, hell some models even let you plug them into a monitor like a PC. It seems like if given the choice of low power or more speed just like with the PCs people want more speed. if that trend continues it isn't Intel or X86 that needs to worry, its ARM. Hell look at the benches that the CULV Ivy Bridge chips get, its truly insane. If they can incorporate some of those features (which the rumor is the next gen Atom is out of order and has the Ivy bridge GPU) then if anything ARM is gonna be the one losing ground.
That doesn't change the fact that other than garbage like junk mail and a few places that still send paper bills there really isn't much use of mail by the general pop, certainly not enough to justify daily deliveries.
Hell my parents are in their 70s and not tech heads by ANY means yet I don't think either one has sent a letter in years, why? Because with email, chat, and FB frankly there just isn't a reason to. it is easier for both of them to just pop open the laptop or sit at the desk and type than it is to go through the time and BS of writing a letter, getting a stamp, mailing it, and then waiting to get a reply.
In the end like 8-tracks and DOS this is just something that really isn't needed and isn't used much anymore. I know that other than the occasional package frankly all I ever get through the mail is junk crap, I mean why bother? you have email and chat and cell phones, all of which can give you instant or near instant responses.
So I doubt even raising the rates would do much good, as many of the places that once sent me junk mail now simply has newsletters they email. Personally I hope they do get to raise it in the hope it'll kill junk mail faster but either way i think even junk mail will probably be dead in a decade, its just like those old AOHell discs in that you waste all those resources for very few sales.
I knew the old guard with any sense had left the building when even on MSFT's own blogs I saw plenty writing "how to" articles on how to make WinServer into Windows workstation. Why were they doing that? because MSFT wasn't serving the needs of those that use computers for workstations that's why. I was one of the first ones who got WinXP X64 because that was what it was, a 64 bit workstation OS.
Where you and I disagree was on 16 bit support. Frankly DOS support in the NT line was a kludge and buggy as fuck anyway so i honestly don't see that as a real loss. anybody that wanted to run 16 bit is probably wanting DOS which DOSBox frankly did better. The only thing I would have done different if I were MSFT is make DOS support optional and if they chose it then it would give them a version of DOSBox which I'm sure the DOSBox guys would have been happy to sell them a license for.
But where I bet you and I agree is the current practically insane obsession MSFT has for smartphones ATM is frankly a BAD move and will most likely make Win 8 a bigger bomb than Vista. While I agree they need to be pushing guidelines frankly I thought Win 7 was the best release from MSFT since Win2K pro, the combo of search, breadcrumbs, and jumplists make it just a pleasure to work in every day. But now Ballmer wants to be Apple so damned badly they are trying to turn Windows into iOS, simply in the hopes of getting some of the ARM market and fooling devs into writing apps for it.
In the end its not gonna work, and that is because of Wintel. if you can't run your X86 programs the customers simply aren't gonna want it PERIOD. BTW if you want a laugh look up some of sinofsky's talks on win 8 and count how many times he says "touch screens" and listen to some of the insane scenarios he comes up with to justify the touch screen UI of Win 8. last one I saw I quit counting at 30 and he said that the majority of people would buy touch enabled devices. he even came up with a scenario of someone trading stocks buying a triple monitor with a touch screen in the middle! Yep because when a single wrong move can cost my life savings I want to bet it all on whether my big fat fingers poke the right spot.
Try the Win 8 CP though, just for a laugh. I swear the first time you log in you'll wonder if this isn't some sort of trick, like you've been rickrolled by MSFT. you honestly won't believe what a UI disaster it is.
Funny you should say that as a lot of the work i got at the last shop I worked at before going out on my own was from those that went to a big name first and found THEM to be dodgy. after all I have never heard of a mom and pop shop ripping out RAM sticks, searching drives for porn and music, or swapping a good graphics card for a cheaper model but I HAVE heard many a horror story involving just that from places like Best Buy and Rent A Center.
As for Linux you are wrong, because if it were just advertising then little shops like mine would carry it as it helps our bottom line. The problem with Linux is twofold, 1.-Their in place upgrade system is a broken pile of shit and 2.- You can run Wintel programs easily. I have tried virtually every distro out there and I can tell you that in place upgrades just do not work. the drivers fail horribly and often, programs or subsystems (I'm looking at YOU pulse and Wifi!) will crap all over themselves, its a mess. Frankly the ONLY way you are gonna get Linux to work consistently is to re-install from scratch and with the insane release schedule it just isn't worth it. I've even tried LTS to LTS and LTS to regular, it just doesn't have any consistency.
The second problem is the reason I think Win 8 is gonna fail as nobody LIKES Windows, they want it because they like the third party programs they run on top of Windows which is why WOA is gonna bomb.I don't care who it is they ALL have windows programs they consider "must have" that they simply won't live without. Even my 72 year old mom who doesn't know squat about PCs and has me as a full time admin won't take Linux, because she has a collection of little cheap games she has bought over the years and they just don't work in Linux.
Frankly I don't care how much budget they have I predict like every other Apple ripoff they have attempted they'll fail. after all how many hundreds of millions did they spend on WinPhone ads? Or that stupid Mojave ad trying to make people believe Vista didn't suck ass? Didn't they take over the market since they spent the most money? Nope because like most of the things under Ballmer even their ads suck.
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I'm sorry friend but frankly the SCOTUS has been crippled since they let FDR mangle the commerce clause to keep him from simply stuffing the court with enough votes to get what he wanted. Honestly i wish they had stuck to their guns because at least then SCOTUS wouldn't have this air of impartiality when there are so many blatantly unconstitutional rulings on the books from previous courts it would probably take them a couple of decades just to fix the mess that the previous courts allowed.
So I'm sorry friend but once they let the commerce clause be "anything you want it to be" things have just gone downhill. Now you have justices like Thomas getting bribed through his wife, Scalia taking trips with the VP, the impartiality is simply not there.
I'm sorry but this is NOT insightful, because to "vote against it" one has to actually have someone to vote for that IS against it. As we have seen again and again BOTH the Ds and Rs are as corrupt as they come and our system is designed to make sure third parties have less of a chance on the national stage than a snowball in hell.
In my own state we had a choice in the general election of a DINO that kissed corporate ass or a RINO that kissed corporate ass, and the primaries were the same, a handful of asskissers in training. tell me friend how EXACTLY can one "vote against it" when your choices are "Check this box to vote for el presidente" and "Show the world how mad you are by...voting for el presidente!". Because if you think either the Ds or Rs give a rat's ass about anyone who can't write 6 figure checks I have a bridge you might be interested in.
Because he already mentioned in TFA he simply can't install software on the clients due to "legal issues' so frankly it smells like someone trying to pull some sort of man in the middle and coming up with a flimsy excuse to cover for it? After all if the person he is working for owns the machines he can install whatever software he wanted to on them, once legal had written up the appropriate forms to let the workers know what is and is not allowed on their network.
so at least it sounds to me more like some sort of man in the middle, where he wants to capture the data without being obvious or letting anyone know what is going on, say like a restaurant or coffee shop with free Wifi?
Not to mention the dead student's own words and actions made it frankly look to me like there really wasn't a case here. the school offered twice to get him a new roommate, he refused, which if he was so damned bothered by this why would he stay with a douchebag?
In the end this excuse was frankly covering for what I truly believe the real cause of this young man's death was, which was the fact his parents made it clear they wanted to have nothing to do with him, the mother going so far as to disown him. Now which do YOU think the more likely cause of the suicide, your family which by all accounts he had been close to telling you to go to hell when they find out you're gay, or one asshole roommate which you aren't bothered enough by to even take a different room when offered. To me this smells like the whole "cyber suicide" case where someone acted like a prick online and they tried to find something to hang her with. Ultimately YOU are in charge of your own life and "acting like a douchebag" simply isn't illegal. What's next, we gonna throw trolls in prison when they hurt someone's feelings?
And this is coming from someone who has a gay child, but unlike the sorry parents of this kid we actually supported ours. If anyone tries to pick on him because he is gay he simply says "So what? why should I give a damned WHAT you think?" and walks on. You see that is what happens when you actually support your kid, they can be confident to just be themselves instead of feeling isolated and alone which is what i'm sure that kid felt like after his own parents turned on him. Contrast this with the "big scene" when our youngest came out, all that was said is my dear sweet grandmother said "Dear, we kinda knew that already. I'm old and half deaf, not blind honey" and that was that. I just wish I'd had a camera at the time because the look on his face as his great grandma said that and scooted along with her walker was priceless!
Here is what royally pissed me off...your use case? TOTALLY makes sense. A well educated server admin using a rock solid business designed Linux like SciLi makes TOTAL sense....but...that does NOT in ANY way, shape, or form, describe the consumer market AT ALL!
The first argument was that "windoze" was hard to use yet it is so fucking simple my 71 year old clueless dad installed Win 7 by himself with NO troubles, NO driver issues, hell he didn't even need the CD that came with the board. The only thing I had to do when I showed up to install the OS and found out he had got bored and decided to go DIY is to show him how to install Firefox and put his info into it so it would import his bookmarks..that's it. that's all.
Now surely even you will admit that what you went through to set up that wireless on Linux is frankly beyond the skillset of a good 85%+ of the users out there, yes? Or that SciLi is NOT designed for the home market but for those with years of exp with Linux systems and who has full working knowledge of the underpinnings, correct? So how does that in ANY way translate to the consumer market which is what we were talking about? Do you honestly think i sell the majority or even minority of systems to server admins? No of course not.
So my argument still stands, for the vast majority of consumers Linux DOES NOT WORK unless they 1.-Have a full time IT staffer to control the system or 2.-has a family member willing and able to be a full time IT staffer and admin the system. this is in a nutshell why Linux doesn't work, it assumes that everyone has a skillset that frankly fewer than 10% of the market has and those 10% frankly don't have any problems with adminning Windows either so there is no point. While Ubuntu and others claim to be "Linux for humans" in reality its just a sugar coating over the same old problems. The driver model sucks balls, the upgrade in place system is totally broken, at least on every version designed for consumers that I've ever tried, there is no simple GUI to find drivers or rollback drivers when something goes wrong (which it always does) and the answer to everything is "open up bash and type" this big mess that you will have to have the skills to debug because Linux is so damned picky you can't just download a generic driver, it has to be tweaked because if anything is even slightly different, say the rev of firmware, then it simply doesn't work. Compare this to Windows where a free AV and auto updates is all most will ever need as the system handles everything else for the life of the OS which is 10 years standard now .
so while I can totally understand why someone with a niche use case such as yours would be better off with Linux the vast majority of users would just end up with a useless broken system, so for them frankly any modern Windows is the MUCH better choice period.
Thanks and I too don't use either FF or Chrome. For my customers I offer a choice of Pale Moon which has forked away from Firefox specifically because they did not want to go with the whole metro UI change or Comodo Dragon which is what i personally use as its based on Chromium but with some nice extra security features and no phoning home to Google. Finally for those that need cross platform I would highly recommend QTWeb which runs on Linux, Apple,BSD or Windows, is fully portable so you can just run it on a flash, and has Flash support and Adblock.
But I was a BIG supporter of Mozilla, both when FF was still in beta and the Moz Suite before that, but frankly their devs might as well change the opening screen to someone giving the finger as that seems to be their attitude as of late. You would think seeing how their numbers climbed right up through FF V4 and then started nosediving and never recovered they would get the hint that the users don't like the current direction, but frankly they don't seem to give a shit. This is sad as FF had ONE killer feature, the same one that caused some of my customers to go to Seamonkey or Pale Moon rather than give up the Gecko engine, and that is the awesome extension framework. if they would quit pissing on the users with the UI and do something about the CPU spiking I would go running back to FF in a heartbeat but its pretty obvious from their roadmap that the ONLY users they want are those on Windows 8 using appstores and that just ain't me. So long FF and thanks for all the fish.
Nooo...he is saying what Apple and Foxconn is doing is simply a variation of a Potemkin Village where you build a front to please the suits but in reality the vast majority of Foxconn workers will be living like shit. This lets Apple say they are "changing things" when in reality they are still doing business with a scummy company, they are simply having a nice front made for THEIR products and their products alone.
The problem with your argument is thus, Humans are NOT the ultimate resource but SMART humans ARE. the problem is the smart are NOT breeding in any real numbers while the dumb as fuck, barely able to count their change total retards are popping out kids by the pile. Hell didn't you see that story that went around last week about the guy that had THIRTY KIDS and wanted them to cut down his child support because he only makes minimum wage (and frankly always will) even though divided up among that many damned kids they each get on average $1.94 a month?
Sadly what we are seeing is the simple fact that while a comedy Idiocracy is rapidly becoming reality. When you have someone with a 90 IQ frankly education will only go so far, because just as you can't train someone without the genetically gifted muscle type (lack of lactic acid buildup but off the top of my head i can't remember if there is a term for it) to be a world class or even state level sprinter you simply can't turn people with 80 to 90 IQ into rocket scientists, it simply can NOT be done.
Whether you choose to believe it or not frankly a HELL of a lot of the work at the bottom of the ladder in the USA right now is simply "make work" that wouldn't be feasible if the government didn't pay for it by taking it out of your pocket. Walmart even shows a training video on how to apply for food stamps for Pete's sake! Do you HONESTLY think if those government programs disappeared tomorrow it would be cheaper for the stores like Walmart to pay a living wage than to simply automate?
In the end we are playing IQ musical chairs and more and more simply will never get a seat. Most of the minimum wage jobs in the USA could be replaced by machines tomorrow if government programs didn't artificially tilt the favor for humans. Hell you could replace most fast food with automated assembly quite easily, stocking shelves with robots, self checkout lines, hell you could even replace most plumbers and electricians by just using prefabbed homes.
Whether we like it or not the day is RAPIDLY approaching where capitalism, like every other ism before it, will simply fail. If the workers can't trade their labor for capital then how is capitalism gonna survive? We are already seeing the beginnings of it by how so few at the top can control so much of the capital while it becomes ever harder for those at the bottom to rise above anything but poverty because they simply can't get the capital required to advance from labor alone. Did you know you can put the ones that control over 80% of the capitol in your average HS gym and still have seats left over? This is a sign that the system is failing because otherwise those workers killing themselves daily would be able to work their way into that club but the majority just can't.
In the end it just doesn't work friend, you have nearly half a billion people in the USA alone and with just current technology you could get by just fine without any real losses with just 1/5th of that number. Mark my words the next bubble to burst will be the education bubble as millions go into debt they will never be able to pay only to find that the jobs simply don't exist. With robots and computers frankly we just DO NOT NEED all of these people, so short of make work or handouts you are gonna have some major upheavals as all these unneeded people aren't simply gonna wander off and die, they WILL fight back any way they can. But in the end one simply can't escape the simple fact that we have millions more people than we have jobs that need doing.
They are leaving because they can dump toxic waste straight into the rivers there and treat workers VERY poorly. they can expose them to chemicals you'd never get away with here, unsafe working conditions that would never be allowed, and basically they are nothing but "disposable people". It is no accident that over 10% of the farmland in China is now so toxic the produce from them is unfit for human consumption or 9 out of the top 10 cancer causing cities are in China.
So please get off the bullshit high horse that it is somehow the west's fault because they gasp! horror! Refuse to live like a Charles Dickens novel while sucking carcinogens with every breath and having drinking water just slightly better than raw sewage. free trade should be banned simply because it does not exist but is instead an excuse those 1%ers use to poison third world countries with the help of the 1%ers in power in those same countries. The amount of toxins the average peasant is exposed to in India and china is not only horrifying it just serves as proof that the west has been brainwashed by the "job creators" elite class that exploiting peasants and treating them as disposable people is perfectly alright as long as they aren't over here. Its disgusting, shameful, and I believe the history books will look upon this period just as they do the "white man's burden" of the 19th century.
But why would you care? Ever since web devs quit building "this site is made for IE 6" websites frankly it really doesn't matter WHAT browser folks use as finally all the websites can be rendered in any of the major (and even most minor) browsers without the least bit of trouble. And funny you should talk about evil and mention Netscape as they were just as proprietary and nasty as MSFT, or did everyone forget the "blink" tag and other NS only crap?
But as you noted in your sig we now have Seamonkey , plus Pale Moon, FF, Chrome, Chromium, Dragon, QTWeb, SWIron, Safari, Opera, Kmeleon and Kmeleon CCF ME, hell probably a dozen more I haven't named and they all just work across the vast majority of the web without hassle or rendering problems.
So as long as MSFT can no longer dictate the web "Works best in IE (version number)" frankly I don't give a rat's ass what the majority uses because the rest of us have a wealth of choices. And isn't THAT what really matters? that nobody is tied to a single browser just to be able to use the web?
Well lets say...how many of my customers have had to bring their systems back because they caught a bug? that would be...ONE. That's it. And the ONLY reason that he caught a bug was he not only refused to listen to me but first tried to disable and then uninstalled his AV when it wouldn't let him install "The New Limewire" which of course was just a malware package labeled limewire. It doesn't take ANY knowledge to run Vista or 7 perfectly safe, since neither OS runs as admin which was the one big flaw. A free AV, leaving OS updates to automatic, using IE or Chrome, yeah that's so hard. BTW isn't it funny that it is the Linux guys that always can't seem to get Windows to run? What does it say about your "leet" skills?
And I'm sorry but I call bullshit. if you are using Linux and not talking out your ass you are using it on a dumpster dived Intel box because frankly on laptops or more modern systems it royally blows ass. I have tried more than 15 different distros on bog standard desktops and laptops and following the GUI instructions (As a NORMAL user would be expected to, or are you HONESTLY arguing that running a free AV is "too hard" but that Suzy the checkout girl is gonna learn bash?) as listed by the OS and watched as it royally crapped itself. Pulseaudio is a bad fucking joke and the wireless networking is absolute shit. With latter version of Windows one frankly rarely needs the driver for such things because WU already has them and will install automatically. tell me friend, where is the "find drivers" or "rollback drivers" buttons in Linux? Oh right, they just don't exist even though windows has had them for a fricking dozen years now. Some great OS you have there chief.
In the end Linux is DEAD on the desktop, the numbers lower than fucking Java cell phones, and its all because frankly to paraphrase the line from Full Metal Jacket you think that "Inside every Suzy the checkout girl is a bash programmer waiting to get out" and then you have the sheer mind numbing gall to complain that Windows is hard? Really? BTW next time why don't you do us both a favor and simply list which Linux trademarks you are gonna use to save us both some time. Honestly I can take any FOSSie rant such as yours and replace with nothing but the Linux TMs because the same tired old horseshit has been used over and over AND OVER, yet you gain NO share? Guess your "leet OS" isn't so great after all, huh?
And all the rants above about Chrome and the rest of the Chromium based browsers is missing one thing...there is a REASON why FF usage has been dropping like a stone, and that is the devs at FF have taken a 'fuck you, we're going this way!" attitude that is running off their users!
This is one thing I give credit to all the different Chromium based browsers for because there have been VERY few UI changes and the ones that have happened have been fairly subtle. the FF devs seem to get a bug up their ass and totally crap all over the UI without a care in the world as to what the users think. Hell look at these mockups of the next UI by Mozilla and they might as well say "We ONLY want Windows 8 users! If you aren't into Metro UI then piss off" and is it ANY wonder that Chrome and its ilk have blown away FF?
I used FF before it was even called FF and the Moz Suite before that but it has been obvious at least to me that somewhere between V4 and V7 that they quit giving a fuck what the users thought and became nothing but devs scratching itches. The rise of Chrome is a classic case of users voting with their feet as if the FF devs had just held a damned poll and ASKED WHAT WE WANTED then frankly they wouldn't have seen their users nosedive as its pretty damned clear that like me most users do not want to go where they are heading.
Because we frankly have ZERO problems with our systems, unlike the Linux guys? When was the last time Linux crapped on one of your drivers? When was the last time the upgrade deathmarch didn't go well? We simply don't have to worry about such things in Windows friend. My shop PC has been running the same XP install for 8 years now, no bugs, no crashes, no hassles, no fuss, can YOU say the same? my home machine has been running Win 7 since Oct 09, no muss or fuss even though I have replaced just about every part in that machine but the case. When I changed out the board and CPU I had to reactivate which took less than 15 seconds and pushing a single button and that's it, smooth sailing.
So I don't see what you thinking we are supposed to be "going through" because anybody with half a brain can have Windows run perfectly. The reason I have people bring their PCs to me is they either bought some Dell special that is loaded with crapware or they frankly did something REALLY stupid, such as surf with an outdated IE or run around the net with some 30 day AV trial that expired 3 years ago and caught a bug. But if you have enough common sense to build your own desktop you have more than enough to run Windows flawlessly.
I don't ever have to Google for fixes, no going to forums to look for solutions, no pouring in the CLI garbage just to get my system to run. if that kind of crap is what you like to do, more power to you, but its more than a little ironic that you rail against Windows when it is frankly the easiest OS to run by far.
I don't know where you get your figures, probably out of your behind, but I paid $350 for my netbook and I get 7 and a half hours thanks.
You also completely ignored the fact that ITS THE PROGRAMS PEOPLE NEED THAT ARE ON X86 and your $79 chip ain't worth 79c to most if they can't run the programs they need. its the same reason why Linux has gone exactly nowhere on the desktop, because most people do more with a machine than simply run a web browser.
We have been down this road before you know, all through the 90s and 00s companies sold ARM desktops, some with RISCOS and some with Linux. Where are they now? Gone, dead, closed shop. You seem to think that ARM is magical but in reality the ONLY thing ARM has to sell itself is ultra low power which when you are plugged into an outlet is completely negated. Nobody will notice the few watts difference on their electric bill but they WILL notice when all they can run on their desktop is cell phone apps.
Why would THAT be attractive? You can already do that for less than $300 with X86 and have it any way you want, $340 for a complete system just add the OS of your choice. These units take less than 18w under full load, no noise, and you can run any software you want. Just use the VESA mount on the back of any monitor and voila! No muss no fuss.
BTW these also make excellent HTPCs with either Windows or if you don't want to spend the money there is OpenELEC which has a build just for these units and has XBMC with the 10 foot UI built in, a really cheap and easy way to have a truly kick ass HTPC.
So I could see the appeal in mobile but on the desktop? Not really seeing a point. I have changed out a few office buildings with units like these and the nice thing is unlike an ARM unit they can run the software required to do their business. When it comes to the desktop there are just too many X86 only programs people depend on so unless someone comes out with hardware accelerated X86 emulation (which you probably couldn't do without getting sued by intel) then I just don't see it gaining any real ground.
That unit you listed frankly isn't a good buy anyway. it has a single core CPU, uses 12w, and is $200 for a 10 inch. You can find Atom dual core netbooks in 10 inch for damned close to that price and they use less power for twice the cores. The AMD versions are 12 inches and they feel more like an ultraportable and both the Intel and AMD can run all the X86 apps while this of course can't.
Not saying ARM can't compete in that market, just saying so far nobody has been putting out competitive units at the right price point. what they need is a dual core unit, either 10 or 12 inches (12 would probably be cheaper as those screens are being made more than the 10 inch now) and a price point of $150 or less. This is the same problem that those have tried to compete with Apple have run into, in that unless you have something really innovative like the transformer if you get your price too close to Apple's most will choose the Apple and the same holds true of X86 and ARM. After all if there is only $20-$50 difference why would I want to limit myself to a cell phone OS and programs when i can have X86 and run anything I want including those same cell phone programs (sold through Intel Appstore) as well as x86 programs?
If you are in the EU you have your answer, the VAT kills you. Here in the states i paid $350 for my EEE 1215B new and that was with an added 8Gb of RAM and a nice carrying case for the unit. Now that was pre flood but they still sell for $440 and that is for the HP that beats my EEE in most benches. You are talking 12 inch so its easy to carry, less than 3 pounds, able to hold between 4Gb and 8Gb of RAM, and at least for the EEE I can get between 6 and 7 hours stock, longer if I use Brazos tweaker to lower the idle a little.
And finally as for those benches...were they compiled with the intel compiler? do they even list what compiler they used? if not its worthless as its well known intel compilers cripple the code if you run it on AMD chips. If you take a Via (the only chip that can change the CPUID) and change the CPUID from centaur hauls to genuine Intel them gasp! The chip magically gains 30% on the benches. this is why I completely ignore benches because its quack.exe all over again. What matters is real world usage and I can tell you the E350 does every job I can throw at it quite well, I've even used it for editing multitrack audio recordings in the practice room and never had a bit of struggle, nor has it struggled when i play some L4D or GTA:VC. For real world usage its a really great chip.
Do they? Because from what I've seen the desires of the public for MOAR POWER in mobile devices has been going nowhere but up. Folks used to be happy with something that could do webmail and surf badly, now they want HD video, gaming, hell some you can even plug into a monitor and keyboard and use as a full blown PC.
I would argue the only reason you aren't seeing some of the lower end C series Bobcats put into such form factors is frankly AMD can't even keep up with demand for the markets they have now, much less add new form factors. It is widely known that AMD ramped down some of their desktop production to make room for more mobile chips and even then they aren't able to keep up with demand. you go into any Walmart or Best buy and the Fusion chips pretty much own the sub $600 market which is a BIG market, and that don't count the nettops and all in ones. The OEMs have been gobbling up AMD Bobcats as fast as they can get them out the door.
So I'd say with one or two die shrinks and peoples desire for their mobile devices to do ever more than it will only be a generation or two before both Intel and AMD have chips that will fit that market just fine. People want their tablets and smartphones to do everything a full blown PC can do and while i'm sure there are a few that care about battery life above all frankly that isn't the majority. the future appears to be "high speed with low enough power to do the job" and the big three, AMD, Intel, and Nvidia, all seem to be going this direction.
The big problem at AMD right now isn't the power but capacity. Hopefully now that they are cutting themselves loose from GloFlo they will be able to shop around and get more chips cranked out. I know TSMC have been cranking out the Bobcats and the Radeon GPUs and they are scheduled to bring more fabs online so that should help with the crunch, but if you look at the numbers even the panned Bulldozer chips are selling as fast as they can make them.
So I honestly wouldn't be too worried if I was AMD, a couple more die shrinks will help with the power and the consumers desire for ever more performance will also be in their favor. ARM may be great for super low power but as we have seen they really can't ramp up the performance without the power usage spiking. In the end I bet tablets and phones will end up a hell of a lot more like a portable PC, able to do any job a PC is capable of and that is gonna be in AMD's favor.
Well you could do all that OR...you could teach them not to be a dumbass and that no stupid text is worth risking their life and health over.
One of the first things I drilled into my oldest boy's head was to NEVER talk on the cell or text while driving. I know the owner of one of the local salvage yards and had him point out a few of the wrecks where they had been using the cell phone or texting and it was a VERY sobering sight, cars twisted and mangled and obvious places where someone's head had hit or even a little splatter left on the interior, really nasty stuff. I know this worked because just the other day I saw my oldest pulled over in a parking lot sitting on the tailgate of his truck and asked if he was having a problem and he said "Nope, everything is fine, I just got a call and a text and pulled over to reply", needless to say i handed him a $20 right there and told him its nice to see him so responsible.
So I'd say instead of going through all that trouble just 10 minutes in any junkyard ought to do the trick. No video can compare to seeing the results right there where you can touch it, to see the results of such stupidity.
Glad the heads up helped, I still get the occasional spam email from someone using Firefox and having a Yahoo mail account so that bug is still out there but it isn't as easy to set off as it was during FF 9 so hopefully they are working on it.
Hell you may be right, for the life of me I can't remember the name of the place. I was a little kid and hearing about such horrible shit noting the details about the place just wasn't something I ever thought to do. When you are a kid you think your family is gonna be around forever and it was frankly a total shock when my grandfather died because he wasn't even 60 years old when he suddenly keeled over with a heart attack. I doubt the man would have even told me if I hadn't asked what the deal was with the Nazi marches and why so many were screaming dirty words at them, because to a kid it looked just like a bunch of guys in funny clothes walking in a line, not very scary, but after he told me what he saw at the camp and that the neighborhood they wanted to go through was full of people from those camps it was easy for even a child to understand.
One of these days I'll slip the gal downstairs some money and have her do a record search on my grandfather as I'm sure the military will have detailed records of his movements, but all I can remember was it was either Poland or close to the border with Poland and not long after he had a wall dropped on him while in Germany and he got to spend the V days in a full body cast being ferried from Germany back to the states with the last leg in a Douglas transport. Hell the only reason I remember the Douglas is my grandfather loved the transport planes and would talk about how much punishment those birds would take without falling.
Anyway glad that post helped, just be sure if you are using FF to have a password for your password file which will protect you from the iFrame trick. Oh and if you are still writing that story look at the PAKs and MGs as those both scared the living hell out of the troops. There are videos of both being fired on youtube and if you want authentic be sure to talk about the sound. Both the PAK and the MG had a distinctive sound that the troops knew by heart. Grandfather said if you heard either sound you would hit the deck just on instinct because the Germans could just slaughter an entire platoon with those weapons if you weren't damn careful.
Oh and one other thing that struck me as weird that nobody seems to mention is that all the troops used to listen to enemy broadcasts! There was a Nazi version of Tokyo Rose and she would broadcast reports of wounded and captured Allied troops so the guys would listen to see if any group they knew had been captured. He told me the hitler broadcasts always reminded him of a preacher, in that even though he and his friends spoke no German Hitler would build this cadence up to the point you knew exactly where the Sieg heil part was gonna come in because it was all about the cadence, kinda like how they would teach the troops to march by using the whole "your left, your left, left right left" cadences.
Uhhh...did you not read my GP post? It takes less than an hour on average and the ONLY thing that will be running on startup besides the standard Windows services is the graphics icon in the taskbar. I could of course kill that since it isn't STRICTLY needed but ATI for some damned reason doesn't put a control panel icon when you install so if you disable that many would have trouble finding where to call up the controls.
Hell if all they wanted was just the crapware tossed with no reinstall that is even quicker, just run PC Decrapifier which takes MAYBE 10 minutes. Now if you wanted to argue that I should be charging based on my years of experience then maybe, but that then gets into economics. i find that with the lower price i get much more customers and due to the tiny amount of my time it takes i can crank them out and make more money. It simply makes more sense to charge $50 if you can do a dozen in a day than it is to charge $100 and only get 2 through the door a day, its just simple math.
So I'm sorry friend but you are wrong, server is a completely different beast. With server you have to set up groups, password policies, permissions, it takes much longer and you have to know a lot about the org to do it right. With home users there really isn't anything to know, you set the password to blank so they can put in their own, you give them a bog standard clean system with the basic apps they will require (which thanks to Ninite all but two of the apps I give them is fully automated), there really isn't all that much to it honestly.
Not to mention the whole thing would be like saying "These new mopeds are gonna wipe out truck sales!"....what? ARM and X86 are about as different as different can possibly be and their uses are likewise very different!
ARM is all about low power, its IPC is lower than an Atom or Bobcat but it runs at sub watt power. But as we have seen this arch does NOT scale well. You crank up the IPC? The power usage jumps to the point it is getting damned close to Atom and Bobcat, again both of which have much higher IPC.
X86 on the other hand has always been about speed and power. Sure they have been working on lowering the power usage for the past few years but there is only so far they can go before people start bitching. Again take the Atom for an example, the first couple batches gained a rep for being slow as hell and frankly their rep isn't really much better now, why? They sip power like an ARM but people want speed in their netbooks and laptops and Atom just isn't. The Bobcats are better but that is because they have a decent GPU doing a lot of the heavy lifting but that comes at the price of power, 3.5 w for Atom vs 9w to 18w for Bobcat.
So this entire "We're gonna kick your ass!" bullshit is just that, bullshit. Each design has its own niche with VERY little overlap between the two. Now if the rumors are true and Intel and AMD get Atom and Bobcat small enough and low power enough? Frankly I wouldn't be surprised to see them end up in some tablets and smartphopnes, after all they are already selling an X86 smartphone in India. If that happens I would NOT be betting on ARM in that fight simply because X86 can get truly insane IPC and so far barring some breakthrough ARM has their power suckage jump every time they boost IPC. With the two arches it looks like it will be easier to die shrink X86 and lower its power usage than it will be for ARM to raise its IPC.
In the end if I was ARM I would seriously be worried. The current trend is people demanding more and more and MORE from their smartphones and tablets. Just look at how far we have come, 5 years ago if you could surf and check your mail VERY slowly it was considered good, now people want HD video, gaming, high res screens, hell some models even let you plug them into a monitor like a PC. It seems like if given the choice of low power or more speed just like with the PCs people want more speed. if that trend continues it isn't Intel or X86 that needs to worry, its ARM. Hell look at the benches that the CULV Ivy Bridge chips get, its truly insane. If they can incorporate some of those features (which the rumor is the next gen Atom is out of order and has the Ivy bridge GPU) then if anything ARM is gonna be the one losing ground.
That doesn't change the fact that other than garbage like junk mail and a few places that still send paper bills there really isn't much use of mail by the general pop, certainly not enough to justify daily deliveries.
Hell my parents are in their 70s and not tech heads by ANY means yet I don't think either one has sent a letter in years, why? Because with email, chat, and FB frankly there just isn't a reason to. it is easier for both of them to just pop open the laptop or sit at the desk and type than it is to go through the time and BS of writing a letter, getting a stamp, mailing it, and then waiting to get a reply.
In the end like 8-tracks and DOS this is just something that really isn't needed and isn't used much anymore. I know that other than the occasional package frankly all I ever get through the mail is junk crap, I mean why bother? you have email and chat and cell phones, all of which can give you instant or near instant responses.
So I doubt even raising the rates would do much good, as many of the places that once sent me junk mail now simply has newsletters they email. Personally I hope they do get to raise it in the hope it'll kill junk mail faster but either way i think even junk mail will probably be dead in a decade, its just like those old AOHell discs in that you waste all those resources for very few sales.
I knew the old guard with any sense had left the building when even on MSFT's own blogs I saw plenty writing "how to" articles on how to make WinServer into Windows workstation. Why were they doing that? because MSFT wasn't serving the needs of those that use computers for workstations that's why. I was one of the first ones who got WinXP X64 because that was what it was, a 64 bit workstation OS.
Where you and I disagree was on 16 bit support. Frankly DOS support in the NT line was a kludge and buggy as fuck anyway so i honestly don't see that as a real loss. anybody that wanted to run 16 bit is probably wanting DOS which DOSBox frankly did better. The only thing I would have done different if I were MSFT is make DOS support optional and if they chose it then it would give them a version of DOSBox which I'm sure the DOSBox guys would have been happy to sell them a license for.
But where I bet you and I agree is the current practically insane obsession MSFT has for smartphones ATM is frankly a BAD move and will most likely make Win 8 a bigger bomb than Vista. While I agree they need to be pushing guidelines frankly I thought Win 7 was the best release from MSFT since Win2K pro, the combo of search, breadcrumbs, and jumplists make it just a pleasure to work in every day. But now Ballmer wants to be Apple so damned badly they are trying to turn Windows into iOS, simply in the hopes of getting some of the ARM market and fooling devs into writing apps for it.
In the end its not gonna work, and that is because of Wintel. if you can't run your X86 programs the customers simply aren't gonna want it PERIOD. BTW if you want a laugh look up some of sinofsky's talks on win 8 and count how many times he says "touch screens" and listen to some of the insane scenarios he comes up with to justify the touch screen UI of Win 8. last one I saw I quit counting at 30 and he said that the majority of people would buy touch enabled devices. he even came up with a scenario of someone trading stocks buying a triple monitor with a touch screen in the middle! Yep because when a single wrong move can cost my life savings I want to bet it all on whether my big fat fingers poke the right spot.
Try the Win 8 CP though, just for a laugh. I swear the first time you log in you'll wonder if this isn't some sort of trick, like you've been rickrolled by MSFT. you honestly won't believe what a UI disaster it is.
Funny you should say that as a lot of the work i got at the last shop I worked at before going out on my own was from those that went to a big name first and found THEM to be dodgy. after all I have never heard of a mom and pop shop ripping out RAM sticks, searching drives for porn and music, or swapping a good graphics card for a cheaper model but I HAVE heard many a horror story involving just that from places like Best Buy and Rent A Center.
As for Linux you are wrong, because if it were just advertising then little shops like mine would carry it as it helps our bottom line. The problem with Linux is twofold, 1.-Their in place upgrade system is a broken pile of shit and 2.- You can run Wintel programs easily. I have tried virtually every distro out there and I can tell you that in place upgrades just do not work. the drivers fail horribly and often, programs or subsystems (I'm looking at YOU pulse and Wifi!) will crap all over themselves, its a mess. Frankly the ONLY way you are gonna get Linux to work consistently is to re-install from scratch and with the insane release schedule it just isn't worth it. I've even tried LTS to LTS and LTS to regular, it just doesn't have any consistency.
The second problem is the reason I think Win 8 is gonna fail as nobody LIKES Windows, they want it because they like the third party programs they run on top of Windows which is why WOA is gonna bomb.I don't care who it is they ALL have windows programs they consider "must have" that they simply won't live without. Even my 72 year old mom who doesn't know squat about PCs and has me as a full time admin won't take Linux, because she has a collection of little cheap games she has bought over the years and they just don't work in Linux.
Frankly I don't care how much budget they have I predict like every other Apple ripoff they have attempted they'll fail. after all how many hundreds of millions did they spend on WinPhone ads? Or that stupid Mojave ad trying to make people believe Vista didn't suck ass? Didn't they take over the market since they spent the most money? Nope because like most of the things under Ballmer even their ads suck.