Thanks but since I have it down so pat honestly it takes VERY little of my actual time and the nice prices and professional work gets me a LOT of referrals and repeat customers. hell i don't even bother with cards or fliers anymore as I rarely have any free time as it is, I simply don't need more work right now. thanks for the compliment though, I do take pride in my work and when i set up a PC unless they go out of their way to screw it up it STAYS running and clean.
Along with the rest of us. it is pretty obvious that the cartels are gonna take the Internet and turn it into a home shopping network. Of course the politicians will be happy to do this because not only will they get to cash some MAFIAA checks but after the Arab Springs they are naturally afraid that some tea party or occupy style movement might actually get all the screwed over public to demand they do more than bullshit and cash checks.
So what we need here isn't public outcry, we have seen how worthless that is. They will just sit and wait for the public to get tired and then cash the checks and do it anyway so that just doesn't work. What we need is more work on projects like Freenet and Tor so that we can simply bypass the Internet proper, otherwise the net is gonna end up nothing but astroturf and shopping channels.
What is sad to me is that the west is frankly becoming as much of a shitty, controlling, nasty, elite controlled craphole as the old USSR was. Kinda sad that we survived the cold war only to become the thing we were fighting against.
Hell every mom and pop PC shop has been doing that offline forever, and if you want an online example tigerdirect has been doing the same thing for at least a decade. Its just a variation of the classic upselling of the customer and that technique is as old as dirt. Nothing novel about seeing someone bought A and then trying to sell them things that compliment A, its just common salesmanship.
A good one would be MPEG-LA because their patents are so vast and cover damned near every step in the process that it would be extremely unlikely one could make a decent encoder or decoder without running into the mines.
One also has to consider that the present as well as the future is gonna be based around portable devices and there is only so many ways to do things without wasting more power. After all what good would be finding a way around the H.26x patents if your method that avoids the patents causes your way to suck twice as much power as theirs?
And how many consumers are using.NET apps exclusively? hell how many are using.NET apps AT ALL? while i still have.NET on my PCs because of the old ATI drivers needing.NET frankly I can't think of a single program I use that is made with.NET, not a single one. Plenty use Visual C++, I have one or two that use SQL Server Compact Edition for a backend, but not a single.NET program.
Again this goes back to MSFT making a serious mistake when they didn't listen to Cutler and keep Windows truly portable. Cutler's big thing with WinNT was to keep the code portable and to make it trivial as possible for a program written for Windows to run on Windows everywhere. In a way what he was pushing for was similar to the idea that Sun used for Java, the whole "write once use everywhere" meme. But MSFT gave at best really token support for anything other than Wintel, hell they never even ported over their entire MS office suite to the other arches because IIRC they never ported Access or Excel. When other companies saw MSFT was only gonna barely bother many of them didn't bother either and that was the end of NT being truly portable.
As I said this showed severe shortsightedness on the part of MSFT who acted like nothing would ever come along to defeat Wintel. But this kind of small vision is frankly been a hallmark of Ballmer's reign, look how they really didn't seem to care about how bloated WinVista was until netbooks showed up and nearly gave Linux a market all to itself. But you watch, I predict WinRT and Win 8 WILL bomb, simply because nobody is gonna want Windows simply for the "pleasure" of having windows and this is from someone who has been running Windows since the days of Win 3.x.
How MSFT can be so blind as to not see that people buy windows for the Wintel programs and not for the MSFT brand is beyond me, if I didn't know any better I'd swear that the CEO was a plant, like how many say Elop is a MSFT plant. Because otherwise...how could you be so damned blind about your own damned product or the people who buy it?
Actually friend its really not, you just haven't had anyone show you the correct way to do so. before you do a wipe and reinstall you need to go to WSUS Offline and have it download any patches and service packs you need for later. In mine I have every patch and service pack from Win2K through Win 7 X64 so no problems there, just launch once a month to have it update the latest patches. If you use MS Office you can have the service packs and patches included with WSUS, same with MSE antivirus. At this point you can download the latest drivers if you wish, but I only go for the graphics and wireless usually as I've found some of the OEM drivers for sound and NICs to be more buggy than the Windows defaults.
Next once the OS is installed you run WSUS, depending on how far behind your OS disc is from current this could take anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour but since its all automated who cares. My discs have the last service packs already so only the patches after the last release are needed, about 30 minutes or so depending on the system. after that has finished and you see all the drivers are checked out you simply go to Ninite and pick any of the third party stuff you need,browser, Libre office, codecs, flash, whatever. the only third party I use that I don't get from Ninite is either Pale moon (a Firefox fork compiled for newer CPUs) or Comodo Dragon (Chromium based with some nice security features) but since I have both of those on my network drive along with WSUS no time there. Once that is installed i go to Ninite and pick Klite, flash, Hulu TV (my customers enjoy having Internet TV) LO, Foxit, and PDF Creator. I usually give them Comodo Internet Security but if you use MSE or Avast you can just skip that step or grab Avast at Ninite.
Voila! You are talking about maybe an hour, hour and a half tops and since the majority of it is fully automated you only have to look in once in a while and see if you are ready for the next step. Since I usually have the systems on my KVM all I have to do is click over once in a while, couldn't be simpler friend. That is why I only charge $50 plus tax for the same service MSFT is wanting $100 for so I don't see why MSFT couldn't do it even quicker and cheaper than me.
Hell most of the little mom & pop shops do the same thing, at my shop I do it for a flat $50 plus tax and I even offer a full software pack with all the programs you'd need to do most of the average tasks (Libre Office, their choice of Pale moon or Comodo Dragon browser with adblock, all the codecs and flash, etc) for an extra $5. of course i have most of this fully automated so it doesn't take much at all of my time but its a lot easier for most folks to just have me do it than waste the time to do it by hand.
So i really don't see what the selling point is for MSFT. hell at that price its more expensive than an OEM copy of Win 7 Home so it would be cheaper just to go buy the disc if you don't have it already. To me it sounds almost like somebody said "Well Apple has genius bars so we need those too" while ignoring the fact that frankly not a lot of places besides Apple stores work on Apple products so it makes sense for them to have them. But is there anybody who honestly thinks having stores that do a wipe and re-install on Windows is rare? Hell my town is only got a population of 15k and we have at least 3 that i know of, probably one or two more than I don't.
So I don't really know who this is supposed to appeal to, especially when their price is higher than any place i know, it just doesn't make sense. If they were offering data backup with that then yes it would be a good deal because the rest of us charge extra for that, but $100 plus tax just to do a wipe and re-install?
Uhhh...you just backed up what vux984 said when it came to CLI friend. What did he say? That CLI was best when the action was repetitious or had to be done across multiple systems. Now I'm not a CAD guy but I'm betting its usage is similar to my engineering friends using Solidworks in that you have certain actions you do a LOT which is naturally gonna lend itself to CLI because that is what CLI is good at, repetition. But I can tell you that home users, which are the majority of Windows PC users, simply don't have hardly any tasks that would be better served by the CLI so I'd say vux984 was right in that most people would be better with a GUI.
As for Win 8...can we have a "supergiganticsmartphpone" tag please? We ALL know that everything they are doing for Win 8 ties into the smartphone and tablet market, hell try the free CP and it feels like you replaced your PC with a REALLY big smartphone. This change, like the craptastic Metro is because having Aero on tablets and smartphones would run down the battery too quick, that's all. This whole dumb as a bag of hammers exercise is simply Ballmer doing a Hail Mary pass because he knows that x86 is a VERY mature market and that the writing is on the wall, the future is people not replacing their PCs until they die. With smartphones they are as much fashion as anything and people go through them like crap through a goose, not to mention they are in the middle of their own MHz war, so MSFT needs to get into that market BAD if they want a market that is growing because X86 has gone past "good enough" and into "insanely powerful" for the vast majority.
But what I find ironically delicious is the reason they are doomed to fail is the exact same thing that gave MSFT a monopoly on the desktop, which is Wintel. Nobody buys Windows because they LIKE Windows or desire the programs that MSFT includes by default, Windows is ONLY a platform for third party programs as far as the masses are concerned. You could replace Windows with Linux or Mac tomorrow and as long as it ran their programs the majority really wouldn't give a shit. But that very same strength is gonna weigh MSFT down like a boat anchor because you can't run Windows x86 programs on ARM and at least for now neither Intel nor AMD is pushing x86 smartphones.
As a final note both Dave Cutler (the designer of the NT kernel) and of all people Apple showed them the way but MSFT didn't listen and now its too late. Cutler pushed for NT to be kept portable and Apple showed that if you want to change arches you need to have a crossover period where you can run both new and old on the new platform. But in a classic example of shortsightedness MSFT hitched themselves exclusively to Wintel and now they are screwed. maybe if they would have pushed R&D to come up with an x86 emulation layer for ARM like Apple did with Classic? Then maybe it would have worked, maybe. But nobody is gonna want to run Win 8 on the obvious platform it was designed for since WinRT don't run wintel apps.
Personally i just went back to Vista Black because 1.-It was the only thing I really liked about Vista and 2.- I saw no need in keeping my GPU active when I was surfing simply so I could see a tiny strip of wallpaper through the task bar. Some parts of Aero I do like though, the ability to flip through open windows is nice and the winkey+left or right to make a window half size is great for file compares but that was about it for me.
That said after running Win 8 CP for a month and having it set up on a spare box at the shop so my customers could play with it there is one thing we all agreed on, we are NOT going to Windows 8! That Metro Crap seems designed to piss you the fuck off if you don't have a touchscreen which is retarded when the VAST majority of X86 devices are NOT touch and will not be magically turned into touch devices by Oct. You would think if MSFT got the OEMs behind them then they would be cranking out the touchscreen desktops and laptops NOW but go to Amazon, Tiger, Newegg, Walmart....almost no touchscreen X86 laptops or desktops. And without touch Win 8 feels like it is fighting you every step of the way, its just not good without touch.
But don't take MY word for it, download the free Win 8 consumer preview yourself. Just fire up a VM and give it a spin if you don't have a spare machine to try it on and you'll see the same thing I did, that is sucks without a touchscreen. The ONLY way I see Win 8 having a snowball's chance in hell is if there is a switch or checkbox at first run that lets you disable metro completely and replace it with a standard desktop but from the way MSFT has been talking that isn't gonna happen. After giving up after a month of fighting that PITA the only nice thing I can say about Win 8 for consumers is that it it makes for funny parodies.
And you sir are frankly an arrogant ass. You say there is "something wrong" but then don't bother even saying WTF you are talking about or backing your statement up in ANY way.
And yet AGAIN you completely ignore the damned point, which is thus: the amount of savings you are gonna have from a chip that can't even be trusted to do basic math is NOT gonna be more than the power cost of having a simple ARM FPU to do those calculations.
Now if you want to argue that you frankly shouldn't make a CPU that can't even do basic math? Agree completely. But just bringing up the lame ass "free lunch" meme without backing your post in the slightest OR even addressing the question? makes you look like a troll. Maybe the rest of/. isn't so damned arrogant and was actually swift enough to understand by the rest of the context I had simply switched FPU for ALU, ever think of that?
Not everyone is net savvy you know. I have been teaching a neighbor who was computer illiterate and I've had to go through explaining as many of the tricks as i could off the top of my head but he STILL ended up with a bug trying to install itself because he used a local Wifi hotspot that required IE and thus blew my adblock and pop up blocking all to crap.
Luckily i taught him to always listen to the AV and if the AV said no them dammit don't do it, so when the AV popped up and said "Don't run that!" he listened. but I can see how easily those like him could have been fooled because he took a picture of the screen and it looked pretty damned close to a Windows dialog box. While you or I would have known it was bullshit, someone like him who didn't know about such tricks? i could easily see why they get burned.
Uhhh..friend? The purchase version is for SMBs and is based on KDE 4. What you want is under "VectorLinux 6.0 Standard Family" and is clearly labeled "KDE Classic Edition".
So i'm sorry buddy you just missed it. BTW the purchase version is really not for home users but businesses that need support or for those that want to donate and get a CD in return. The KDE Classic edition has been going for over 2 years now so I don't think you have any worries there and again they have your choice of an installer only version or live edition, take your pick. it really is quite nice if you want something stable and don't care about bleeding edge packages.
Oh and if you want something even lighter go down to the bottom of the page and they have a light edition with IceWM or JWm as the desktop. Not really my cup o' tea but that version will run great even on ancient hardware.
Excuse me for getting the term wrong, I meant FPU. Happy now? doesn't change the point which is if your chip is a power pig when doing math then DON'T USE IT FOR MATH. Or are you HONESTLY gonna sit here and argue that a chip that can't even be trusted to do basic addition is preferable to simply having an off chip FPU for certain calculations?
We ALREADY can make very specialized ARM chips for certain functions, they are called DSPs, there is NO REASON to have a chip that "kinda sorta" does math because the amount of applications where getting the math wrong would be okay would be very small whereas the ones where getting the math wrong would royally suck would be very large. This chip has no damned point!
The bigger question will be is it affordable? if you look at the stats the average car on the road now is 11 years old and the average MPG a piss poor 20 simply because we have so many working poor that simply can't afford some $35K+ new car which is why I have been saying we need a "people's car" that practically anyone can afford that gets at least 40 MPG.
Now for all the bullshit about "being green" with expensive electric cars and hybrids that many can't afford imagine what a truly game changing situation you would have if you got damned near all the old clunkers off the road for vehicles that got 40MPG+? think about how many 10 to 15 year old cars or even older you see on the road every day now imagine those GONE, hell you could probably cut down gas use in the USA by over 30% simply by giving the working poor an affordable car that got good MPG!
So while I'm all for new ideas until they can make a truly fuel efficient car that can replace all the used gas guzzlers on the road I say it just won't make a big enough difference. Frankly if they would have had a people's car along with cash for clunkers you might have seen that program make a real dent, but as it is now you have too many working poor getting by with frankly horrible gas suckers just because they can't afford anything better. if we are serious about this then we need to make it easy for EVERYONE to drive green, not just those with plenty of money.
Re:The 21st century formula for a successful compa
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HP To Cut 30,000 Jobs
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The better question would be WHY is Gateway sitting in the corner? I'd argue its because their quality and service went to shit and ran off their customers. too many are trying to play Dell's "Lets sell some cheap shit!" game and frankly it just doesn't work. Cheap shit is just that, cheap shit, and many folks don't like getting burned by a laptop or desktop that barely lasts beyond the warranty.
The last numbers I could find in chart form is 2011 which was 350 million units sold which is ANYTHING but a dead market. I'm sure someone will point out the higher number of cell phones in the chart but frankly other than iPhone I've found most folks treat those as disposable. Other than the "i" products there is pretty much ZERO brand loyalty whereas you get a good rep in the PC market and you can build some loyalty there.
While adding those other markets is a fine idea and a company should have more than a single product Apotheker was frankly an idiot for talking about exiting the PC business and there is no telling how many customers he spooked off with that stupidity. Not only are their PC sales making a solid 6-8% profit but it also helps them to sell more printers thanks to bundle deals. Funny how many think Apotheker was right, yet is IBM doing better than they were before? last I checked they were still cutting more and more from the payroll while Lenovo has been enjoying nice steady 7% profits last i checked.
Frankly its THAT attitude that is destroying American business because all act like profits should be "iMoney or bust!" when all you get is just that, bust. Sure they won't make iMoney on their PC line but profits is profits and trying to fight their way into a completely different market while killing a successful line was just a retarded as hell idea and frankly I'm not surprised that Apotheker got the boot.
Read TFA a little more carefully friend, they are keeping the CCC (Cheapo Chinese crap) and the sales guys and ditching pretty much everything else (except management I'm sure) so I'm betting the only "R&D" will be figuring out how to cut yet more corners or to make the plastic even thinner to save a buck. Man I hate to see a once proud company that made truly great, solid, and long lasting products just become another Dell "Buy some cheap shit!" junk dealer.
This is why for laptops and netbooks I've been getting Asus and Acer units for my customers, as both have been making damned good laptops and netbooks at decent prices. And if you are wanting more innovative stuff Asus has been making some nice units like the transformer.
HP was once THE company to go to, especially for notebooks. they had great service and had well built units at decent prices. But its pretty obvious by the last couple of CEOs that HP has been bitten by the same bug that has ruined other companies, that "damn everything but the quarterly earnings!" bug that causes companies to only think in the short term. Hell I wouldn't be surprised if after a couple of years of cutting they end up selling the PC division to some Chinese company with a brain, after all you don't see Lenovo bitching about "only" making 6-8% profit.
With American companies it seems to be "iMoney or bust!" while ignoring that they simply can't compete with the Apple brand. Don't get me wrong, they make good products, but Apple is as much about the name brand as anything, like Ferrari or Prada. Cutting services and support may give their stocks a short term bounce but it won't take too many "Hi my name is Peggy" crappy service incidents to run off the customer base.
Well you can with win 7 Pro, by using IE 6 in XP Mode and using IE 9 for everything else which is why i don't understand why they don't do something similar with JUST IE 6 instead of needing the full blown VM. It really shouldn't be difficult to put just IE 6 and just enough of the Windows underpinnings to support IE 6 in a VM based on an.exe that could be pushed with Group Policy.
Hell I was making single app Windows back in the late 90s and early 00s for HTPCs by simply stripping out everything that wasn't needed for the media capture and then having a batch file load the app on launch. If i could do that back then without access to the code i don't see why MSFT couldn't do something similar WITH the code.
First of all with Treewalk DNS running in a corner box i only go to each site ONCE and then from then on its cached so having my DNS records from Comodo wouldn't show much of nothing. BTW I do this not for privacy reason but for speed, taking out DNS hops really gives surfing a major kick in the ass.
Second what EXACTLY do you think I'm "leaking"? I have HTTP Referrer headers blocked,all third party content is blocked, ads are blocked and the ONLY cookies are those on a whitelist which is VERY small, less than 5 sites and since the browser is sandboxed in a much lower permission level trying to access those cookies by anyone not on the whitelist would raise a flag. I've already been to those sites that try to tell what you have or don't have based on cookies and referrer and all they can tell me is I'm on SOMETHING based on Chromium and that have have the Flash plugin, that's it.
So I don't see what data you think anybody is gonna get. All Google could tell you is that I watch the history channel on youtube and get a bunch of spam (since that's my spamdump), all Yahoo would be able to tell you is I have a bunch of REALLY clueless relatives and customers, all Bing could tell you is I like wallpapers of hot babes like Scarlet Johannson (like who doesn't?) and all Comodo could tell you is which sites i have been to one time in the past 30 days. Again if you were say the NSA, to where you could get the data from ALL of these services? then sure, but if you are the NSA you could just put a tap on the ISP and save yourself the trouble. the rest only have a small piece of the big picture, like the old parable of the blind men and the elephant.
While everyone sits here making jokes all i can think of is...why? Dear sweet lord why would you want this? are you telling me those chips in the 50c calcs are so damned expensive you couldn't use one?
Everyone seems to be missing the most obvious answer which is thus: If your general purpose CPU sucks too much power doing math then DON'T USE THE CPU TO DO MATH and instead have a math processor...duh! I have NO doubt you could build a simple ARM chip that sucks almost no power and does all the basic math functions, hell it would probably do all that your average graphing calc could do and again the ARM arch is a power sipper so no problems there.
I just don't why we have to keep reionventing the wheel. back in the day the CPU sucked for certain functions so you had an ALU to do that job, so if your CPU still sucks too much then leave the CPU for other tasks and use an ultra low power ALU for the math. Isn't it funny how these things just seem to go round and round?
Mind a suggestion? Give Vector Linux a spin. They have a supported KDE 3 (called KDE Classic) and they have several versions tailored for different uses, such as light, standard, and SOHO editions. They of course also have Live CDs so give it a spin, its nice.
Which is why I don't understand why anyone would care. Gecko is leaky and kinda buggy folks and it isn't like there aren't other nice browsers that are cross platform.
Here is one you may not of heard of but is quite nice and frankly i don't understand why more aren't using it...QTweb. Its sleek, elegant, FOSS, cross platform, has Adblock and plugin support, its even portable and runs great from a flash.
Frankly seeing some of the "Metro-ifed' mockups for the future roadmap doesn't give me much confidence in the future of Moz anyway. their numbers have been falling pretty consistently and its pretty obvious they aren't gonna listen to the users, so why care? let 'em go.
Actually the GP above you was talking about how Google knows too much about you which if you are not using Google for everything? They can't know too much about you. For anyone to build a full profile of me that would have to have Google's Gmail AND Yahoo Mail AND Bing Search AND Comodo DNS. the odds that ALL of these companies are gonna share data? non existent.
Exactly, this is like colorization. You can't recreate what wasn't recorded in the first place, all you can do is add shit on top. The funniest part? Ask teens and early 20s and they will tell you they LIKE the "sizzle" of MP3 because that is what they have grown up with. so not only are you adding shit that isn't there but the "artifacts' they are complaining about are ENJOYED by the younger generations which is the big target demographic everyone shoots for!
And whose fault is that? How many Superfund sites did We, The People get stuck with again? these corps have NO problem making shitpiles of money off these resources but when its found that they have caused serious harm they disappear and leave that to the people. Hell the NG wildcatters in my state have have already set up their exit strategies if something horrible happens by having ALL the assets and mineral rights owned by a shell corp they control while the public facing corp mearly LEASES the rights and equipment...from themselves!
I'm sorry but the corporations in this country have shown us time and time again they are nothing but socialism for the rich, all the profits are private, all the risks public. Considering the amount of pure wanton destruction they have done in the past century you honestly can't blame nobody for not trusting these assholes. After all do YOU see them setting up any funds for in case something goes horribly wrong? nope, its grab the cash and sneak out the back if shit hits the fan.
Or you can use Comodo DNS which is good about blocking malware infested sites, or Open DNS or one of the dozen or more free DNS servers out there.
If someone wants to use Google for DNS I hear that its a good service but it isn't like we don't have a wealth of choices out there. No need to go through the hassle of running your own resolver unless you just want to.
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Thanks but since I have it down so pat honestly it takes VERY little of my actual time and the nice prices and professional work gets me a LOT of referrals and repeat customers. hell i don't even bother with cards or fliers anymore as I rarely have any free time as it is, I simply don't need more work right now. thanks for the compliment though, I do take pride in my work and when i set up a PC unless they go out of their way to screw it up it STAYS running and clean.
Along with the rest of us. it is pretty obvious that the cartels are gonna take the Internet and turn it into a home shopping network. Of course the politicians will be happy to do this because not only will they get to cash some MAFIAA checks but after the Arab Springs they are naturally afraid that some tea party or occupy style movement might actually get all the screwed over public to demand they do more than bullshit and cash checks.
So what we need here isn't public outcry, we have seen how worthless that is. They will just sit and wait for the public to get tired and then cash the checks and do it anyway so that just doesn't work. What we need is more work on projects like Freenet and Tor so that we can simply bypass the Internet proper, otherwise the net is gonna end up nothing but astroturf and shopping channels.
What is sad to me is that the west is frankly becoming as much of a shitty, controlling, nasty, elite controlled craphole as the old USSR was. Kinda sad that we survived the cold war only to become the thing we were fighting against.
Hell every mom and pop PC shop has been doing that offline forever, and if you want an online example tigerdirect has been doing the same thing for at least a decade. Its just a variation of the classic upselling of the customer and that technique is as old as dirt. Nothing novel about seeing someone bought A and then trying to sell them things that compliment A, its just common salesmanship.
A good one would be MPEG-LA because their patents are so vast and cover damned near every step in the process that it would be extremely unlikely one could make a decent encoder or decoder without running into the mines.
One also has to consider that the present as well as the future is gonna be based around portable devices and there is only so many ways to do things without wasting more power. After all what good would be finding a way around the H.26x patents if your method that avoids the patents causes your way to suck twice as much power as theirs?
And how many consumers are using .NET apps exclusively? hell how many are using .NET apps AT ALL? while i still have .NET on my PCs because of the old ATI drivers needing .NET frankly I can't think of a single program I use that is made with .NET, not a single one. Plenty use Visual C++, I have one or two that use SQL Server Compact Edition for a backend, but not a single .NET program.
Again this goes back to MSFT making a serious mistake when they didn't listen to Cutler and keep Windows truly portable. Cutler's big thing with WinNT was to keep the code portable and to make it trivial as possible for a program written for Windows to run on Windows everywhere. In a way what he was pushing for was similar to the idea that Sun used for Java, the whole "write once use everywhere" meme. But MSFT gave at best really token support for anything other than Wintel, hell they never even ported over their entire MS office suite to the other arches because IIRC they never ported Access or Excel. When other companies saw MSFT was only gonna barely bother many of them didn't bother either and that was the end of NT being truly portable.
As I said this showed severe shortsightedness on the part of MSFT who acted like nothing would ever come along to defeat Wintel. But this kind of small vision is frankly been a hallmark of Ballmer's reign, look how they really didn't seem to care about how bloated WinVista was until netbooks showed up and nearly gave Linux a market all to itself. But you watch, I predict WinRT and Win 8 WILL bomb, simply because nobody is gonna want Windows simply for the "pleasure" of having windows and this is from someone who has been running Windows since the days of Win 3.x.
How MSFT can be so blind as to not see that people buy windows for the Wintel programs and not for the MSFT brand is beyond me, if I didn't know any better I'd swear that the CEO was a plant, like how many say Elop is a MSFT plant. Because otherwise...how could you be so damned blind about your own damned product or the people who buy it?
Actually friend its really not, you just haven't had anyone show you the correct way to do so. before you do a wipe and reinstall you need to go to WSUS Offline and have it download any patches and service packs you need for later. In mine I have every patch and service pack from Win2K through Win 7 X64 so no problems there, just launch once a month to have it update the latest patches. If you use MS Office you can have the service packs and patches included with WSUS, same with MSE antivirus. At this point you can download the latest drivers if you wish, but I only go for the graphics and wireless usually as I've found some of the OEM drivers for sound and NICs to be more buggy than the Windows defaults.
Next once the OS is installed you run WSUS, depending on how far behind your OS disc is from current this could take anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour but since its all automated who cares. My discs have the last service packs already so only the patches after the last release are needed, about 30 minutes or so depending on the system. after that has finished and you see all the drivers are checked out you simply go to Ninite and pick any of the third party stuff you need,browser, Libre office, codecs, flash, whatever. the only third party I use that I don't get from Ninite is either Pale moon (a Firefox fork compiled for newer CPUs) or Comodo Dragon (Chromium based with some nice security features) but since I have both of those on my network drive along with WSUS no time there. Once that is installed i go to Ninite and pick Klite, flash, Hulu TV (my customers enjoy having Internet TV) LO, Foxit, and PDF Creator. I usually give them Comodo Internet Security but if you use MSE or Avast you can just skip that step or grab Avast at Ninite.
Voila! You are talking about maybe an hour, hour and a half tops and since the majority of it is fully automated you only have to look in once in a while and see if you are ready for the next step. Since I usually have the systems on my KVM all I have to do is click over once in a while, couldn't be simpler friend. That is why I only charge $50 plus tax for the same service MSFT is wanting $100 for so I don't see why MSFT couldn't do it even quicker and cheaper than me.
Hell most of the little mom & pop shops do the same thing, at my shop I do it for a flat $50 plus tax and I even offer a full software pack with all the programs you'd need to do most of the average tasks (Libre Office, their choice of Pale moon or Comodo Dragon browser with adblock, all the codecs and flash, etc) for an extra $5. of course i have most of this fully automated so it doesn't take much at all of my time but its a lot easier for most folks to just have me do it than waste the time to do it by hand.
So i really don't see what the selling point is for MSFT. hell at that price its more expensive than an OEM copy of Win 7 Home so it would be cheaper just to go buy the disc if you don't have it already. To me it sounds almost like somebody said "Well Apple has genius bars so we need those too" while ignoring the fact that frankly not a lot of places besides Apple stores work on Apple products so it makes sense for them to have them. But is there anybody who honestly thinks having stores that do a wipe and re-install on Windows is rare? Hell my town is only got a population of 15k and we have at least 3 that i know of, probably one or two more than I don't.
So I don't really know who this is supposed to appeal to, especially when their price is higher than any place i know, it just doesn't make sense. If they were offering data backup with that then yes it would be a good deal because the rest of us charge extra for that, but $100 plus tax just to do a wipe and re-install?
Uhhh...you just backed up what vux984 said when it came to CLI friend. What did he say? That CLI was best when the action was repetitious or had to be done across multiple systems. Now I'm not a CAD guy but I'm betting its usage is similar to my engineering friends using Solidworks in that you have certain actions you do a LOT which is naturally gonna lend itself to CLI because that is what CLI is good at, repetition. But I can tell you that home users, which are the majority of Windows PC users, simply don't have hardly any tasks that would be better served by the CLI so I'd say vux984 was right in that most people would be better with a GUI.
As for Win 8...can we have a "supergiganticsmartphpone" tag please? We ALL know that everything they are doing for Win 8 ties into the smartphone and tablet market, hell try the free CP and it feels like you replaced your PC with a REALLY big smartphone. This change, like the craptastic Metro is because having Aero on tablets and smartphones would run down the battery too quick, that's all. This whole dumb as a bag of hammers exercise is simply Ballmer doing a Hail Mary pass because he knows that x86 is a VERY mature market and that the writing is on the wall, the future is people not replacing their PCs until they die. With smartphones they are as much fashion as anything and people go through them like crap through a goose, not to mention they are in the middle of their own MHz war, so MSFT needs to get into that market BAD if they want a market that is growing because X86 has gone past "good enough" and into "insanely powerful" for the vast majority.
But what I find ironically delicious is the reason they are doomed to fail is the exact same thing that gave MSFT a monopoly on the desktop, which is Wintel. Nobody buys Windows because they LIKE Windows or desire the programs that MSFT includes by default, Windows is ONLY a platform for third party programs as far as the masses are concerned. You could replace Windows with Linux or Mac tomorrow and as long as it ran their programs the majority really wouldn't give a shit. But that very same strength is gonna weigh MSFT down like a boat anchor because you can't run Windows x86 programs on ARM and at least for now neither Intel nor AMD is pushing x86 smartphones.
As a final note both Dave Cutler (the designer of the NT kernel) and of all people Apple showed them the way but MSFT didn't listen and now its too late. Cutler pushed for NT to be kept portable and Apple showed that if you want to change arches you need to have a crossover period where you can run both new and old on the new platform. But in a classic example of shortsightedness MSFT hitched themselves exclusively to Wintel and now they are screwed. maybe if they would have pushed R&D to come up with an x86 emulation layer for ARM like Apple did with Classic? Then maybe it would have worked, maybe. But nobody is gonna want to run Win 8 on the obvious platform it was designed for since WinRT don't run wintel apps.
Personally i just went back to Vista Black because 1.-It was the only thing I really liked about Vista and 2.- I saw no need in keeping my GPU active when I was surfing simply so I could see a tiny strip of wallpaper through the task bar. Some parts of Aero I do like though, the ability to flip through open windows is nice and the winkey+left or right to make a window half size is great for file compares but that was about it for me.
That said after running Win 8 CP for a month and having it set up on a spare box at the shop so my customers could play with it there is one thing we all agreed on, we are NOT going to Windows 8! That Metro Crap seems designed to piss you the fuck off if you don't have a touchscreen which is retarded when the VAST majority of X86 devices are NOT touch and will not be magically turned into touch devices by Oct. You would think if MSFT got the OEMs behind them then they would be cranking out the touchscreen desktops and laptops NOW but go to Amazon, Tiger, Newegg, Walmart....almost no touchscreen X86 laptops or desktops. And without touch Win 8 feels like it is fighting you every step of the way, its just not good without touch.
But don't take MY word for it, download the free Win 8 consumer preview yourself. Just fire up a VM and give it a spin if you don't have a spare machine to try it on and you'll see the same thing I did, that is sucks without a touchscreen. The ONLY way I see Win 8 having a snowball's chance in hell is if there is a switch or checkbox at first run that lets you disable metro completely and replace it with a standard desktop but from the way MSFT has been talking that isn't gonna happen. After giving up after a month of fighting that PITA the only nice thing I can say about Win 8 for consumers is that it it makes for funny parodies.
And you sir are frankly an arrogant ass. You say there is "something wrong" but then don't bother even saying WTF you are talking about or backing your statement up in ANY way.
And yet AGAIN you completely ignore the damned point, which is thus: the amount of savings you are gonna have from a chip that can't even be trusted to do basic math is NOT gonna be more than the power cost of having a simple ARM FPU to do those calculations.
Now if you want to argue that you frankly shouldn't make a CPU that can't even do basic math? Agree completely. But just bringing up the lame ass "free lunch" meme without backing your post in the slightest OR even addressing the question? makes you look like a troll. Maybe the rest of /. isn't so damned arrogant and was actually swift enough to understand by the rest of the context I had simply switched FPU for ALU, ever think of that?
Not everyone is net savvy you know. I have been teaching a neighbor who was computer illiterate and I've had to go through explaining as many of the tricks as i could off the top of my head but he STILL ended up with a bug trying to install itself because he used a local Wifi hotspot that required IE and thus blew my adblock and pop up blocking all to crap.
Luckily i taught him to always listen to the AV and if the AV said no them dammit don't do it, so when the AV popped up and said "Don't run that!" he listened. but I can see how easily those like him could have been fooled because he took a picture of the screen and it looked pretty damned close to a Windows dialog box. While you or I would have known it was bullshit, someone like him who didn't know about such tricks? i could easily see why they get burned.
Uhhh..friend? The purchase version is for SMBs and is based on KDE 4. What you want is under "VectorLinux 6.0 Standard Family" and is clearly labeled "KDE Classic Edition".
So i'm sorry buddy you just missed it. BTW the purchase version is really not for home users but businesses that need support or for those that want to donate and get a CD in return. The KDE Classic edition has been going for over 2 years now so I don't think you have any worries there and again they have your choice of an installer only version or live edition, take your pick. it really is quite nice if you want something stable and don't care about bleeding edge packages.
Oh and if you want something even lighter go down to the bottom of the page and they have a light edition with IceWM or JWm as the desktop. Not really my cup o' tea but that version will run great even on ancient hardware.
Excuse me for getting the term wrong, I meant FPU. Happy now? doesn't change the point which is if your chip is a power pig when doing math then DON'T USE IT FOR MATH. Or are you HONESTLY gonna sit here and argue that a chip that can't even be trusted to do basic addition is preferable to simply having an off chip FPU for certain calculations?
We ALREADY can make very specialized ARM chips for certain functions, they are called DSPs, there is NO REASON to have a chip that "kinda sorta" does math because the amount of applications where getting the math wrong would be okay would be very small whereas the ones where getting the math wrong would royally suck would be very large. This chip has no damned point!
The bigger question will be is it affordable? if you look at the stats the average car on the road now is 11 years old and the average MPG a piss poor 20 simply because we have so many working poor that simply can't afford some $35K+ new car which is why I have been saying we need a "people's car" that practically anyone can afford that gets at least 40 MPG.
Now for all the bullshit about "being green" with expensive electric cars and hybrids that many can't afford imagine what a truly game changing situation you would have if you got damned near all the old clunkers off the road for vehicles that got 40MPG+? think about how many 10 to 15 year old cars or even older you see on the road every day now imagine those GONE, hell you could probably cut down gas use in the USA by over 30% simply by giving the working poor an affordable car that got good MPG!
So while I'm all for new ideas until they can make a truly fuel efficient car that can replace all the used gas guzzlers on the road I say it just won't make a big enough difference. Frankly if they would have had a people's car along with cash for clunkers you might have seen that program make a real dent, but as it is now you have too many working poor getting by with frankly horrible gas suckers just because they can't afford anything better. if we are serious about this then we need to make it easy for EVERYONE to drive green, not just those with plenty of money.
The better question would be WHY is Gateway sitting in the corner? I'd argue its because their quality and service went to shit and ran off their customers. too many are trying to play Dell's "Lets sell some cheap shit!" game and frankly it just doesn't work. Cheap shit is just that, cheap shit, and many folks don't like getting burned by a laptop or desktop that barely lasts beyond the warranty.
The last numbers I could find in chart form is 2011 which was 350 million units sold which is ANYTHING but a dead market. I'm sure someone will point out the higher number of cell phones in the chart but frankly other than iPhone I've found most folks treat those as disposable. Other than the "i" products there is pretty much ZERO brand loyalty whereas you get a good rep in the PC market and you can build some loyalty there.
While adding those other markets is a fine idea and a company should have more than a single product Apotheker was frankly an idiot for talking about exiting the PC business and there is no telling how many customers he spooked off with that stupidity. Not only are their PC sales making a solid 6-8% profit but it also helps them to sell more printers thanks to bundle deals. Funny how many think Apotheker was right, yet is IBM doing better than they were before? last I checked they were still cutting more and more from the payroll while Lenovo has been enjoying nice steady 7% profits last i checked.
Frankly its THAT attitude that is destroying American business because all act like profits should be "iMoney or bust!" when all you get is just that, bust. Sure they won't make iMoney on their PC line but profits is profits and trying to fight their way into a completely different market while killing a successful line was just a retarded as hell idea and frankly I'm not surprised that Apotheker got the boot.
Read TFA a little more carefully friend, they are keeping the CCC (Cheapo Chinese crap) and the sales guys and ditching pretty much everything else (except management I'm sure) so I'm betting the only "R&D" will be figuring out how to cut yet more corners or to make the plastic even thinner to save a buck. Man I hate to see a once proud company that made truly great, solid, and long lasting products just become another Dell "Buy some cheap shit!" junk dealer.
This is why for laptops and netbooks I've been getting Asus and Acer units for my customers, as both have been making damned good laptops and netbooks at decent prices. And if you are wanting more innovative stuff Asus has been making some nice units like the transformer.
HP was once THE company to go to, especially for notebooks. they had great service and had well built units at decent prices. But its pretty obvious by the last couple of CEOs that HP has been bitten by the same bug that has ruined other companies, that "damn everything but the quarterly earnings!" bug that causes companies to only think in the short term. Hell I wouldn't be surprised if after a couple of years of cutting they end up selling the PC division to some Chinese company with a brain, after all you don't see Lenovo bitching about "only" making 6-8% profit.
With American companies it seems to be "iMoney or bust!" while ignoring that they simply can't compete with the Apple brand. Don't get me wrong, they make good products, but Apple is as much about the name brand as anything, like Ferrari or Prada. Cutting services and support may give their stocks a short term bounce but it won't take too many "Hi my name is Peggy" crappy service incidents to run off the customer base.
Well you can with win 7 Pro, by using IE 6 in XP Mode and using IE 9 for everything else which is why i don't understand why they don't do something similar with JUST IE 6 instead of needing the full blown VM. It really shouldn't be difficult to put just IE 6 and just enough of the Windows underpinnings to support IE 6 in a VM based on an .exe that could be pushed with Group Policy.
Hell I was making single app Windows back in the late 90s and early 00s for HTPCs by simply stripping out everything that wasn't needed for the media capture and then having a batch file load the app on launch. If i could do that back then without access to the code i don't see why MSFT couldn't do something similar WITH the code.
First of all with Treewalk DNS running in a corner box i only go to each site ONCE and then from then on its cached so having my DNS records from Comodo wouldn't show much of nothing. BTW I do this not for privacy reason but for speed, taking out DNS hops really gives surfing a major kick in the ass.
Second what EXACTLY do you think I'm "leaking"? I have HTTP Referrer headers blocked,all third party content is blocked, ads are blocked and the ONLY cookies are those on a whitelist which is VERY small, less than 5 sites and since the browser is sandboxed in a much lower permission level trying to access those cookies by anyone not on the whitelist would raise a flag. I've already been to those sites that try to tell what you have or don't have based on cookies and referrer and all they can tell me is I'm on SOMETHING based on Chromium and that have have the Flash plugin, that's it.
So I don't see what data you think anybody is gonna get. All Google could tell you is that I watch the history channel on youtube and get a bunch of spam (since that's my spamdump), all Yahoo would be able to tell you is I have a bunch of REALLY clueless relatives and customers, all Bing could tell you is I like wallpapers of hot babes like Scarlet Johannson (like who doesn't?) and all Comodo could tell you is which sites i have been to one time in the past 30 days. Again if you were say the NSA, to where you could get the data from ALL of these services? then sure, but if you are the NSA you could just put a tap on the ISP and save yourself the trouble. the rest only have a small piece of the big picture, like the old parable of the blind men and the elephant.
While everyone sits here making jokes all i can think of is...why? Dear sweet lord why would you want this? are you telling me those chips in the 50c calcs are so damned expensive you couldn't use one?
Everyone seems to be missing the most obvious answer which is thus: If your general purpose CPU sucks too much power doing math then DON'T USE THE CPU TO DO MATH and instead have a math processor...duh! I have NO doubt you could build a simple ARM chip that sucks almost no power and does all the basic math functions, hell it would probably do all that your average graphing calc could do and again the ARM arch is a power sipper so no problems there.
I just don't why we have to keep reionventing the wheel. back in the day the CPU sucked for certain functions so you had an ALU to do that job, so if your CPU still sucks too much then leave the CPU for other tasks and use an ultra low power ALU for the math. Isn't it funny how these things just seem to go round and round?
Mind a suggestion? Give Vector Linux a spin. They have a supported KDE 3 (called KDE Classic) and they have several versions tailored for different uses, such as light, standard, and SOHO editions. They of course also have Live CDs so give it a spin, its nice.
Which is why I don't understand why anyone would care. Gecko is leaky and kinda buggy folks and it isn't like there aren't other nice browsers that are cross platform.
Here is one you may not of heard of but is quite nice and frankly i don't understand why more aren't using it...QTweb. Its sleek, elegant, FOSS, cross platform, has Adblock and plugin support, its even portable and runs great from a flash.
Frankly seeing some of the "Metro-ifed' mockups for the future roadmap doesn't give me much confidence in the future of Moz anyway. their numbers have been falling pretty consistently and its pretty obvious they aren't gonna listen to the users, so why care? let 'em go.
Actually the GP above you was talking about how Google knows too much about you which if you are not using Google for everything? They can't know too much about you. For anyone to build a full profile of me that would have to have Google's Gmail AND Yahoo Mail AND Bing Search AND Comodo DNS. the odds that ALL of these companies are gonna share data? non existent.
Exactly, this is like colorization. You can't recreate what wasn't recorded in the first place, all you can do is add shit on top. The funniest part? Ask teens and early 20s and they will tell you they LIKE the "sizzle" of MP3 because that is what they have grown up with. so not only are you adding shit that isn't there but the "artifacts' they are complaining about are ENJOYED by the younger generations which is the big target demographic everyone shoots for!
And whose fault is that? How many Superfund sites did We, The People get stuck with again? these corps have NO problem making shitpiles of money off these resources but when its found that they have caused serious harm they disappear and leave that to the people. Hell the NG wildcatters in my state have have already set up their exit strategies if something horrible happens by having ALL the assets and mineral rights owned by a shell corp they control while the public facing corp mearly LEASES the rights and equipment...from themselves!
I'm sorry but the corporations in this country have shown us time and time again they are nothing but socialism for the rich, all the profits are private, all the risks public. Considering the amount of pure wanton destruction they have done in the past century you honestly can't blame nobody for not trusting these assholes. After all do YOU see them setting up any funds for in case something goes horribly wrong? nope, its grab the cash and sneak out the back if shit hits the fan.
Or you can use Comodo DNS which is good about blocking malware infested sites, or Open DNS or one of the dozen or more free DNS servers out there.
If someone wants to use Google for DNS I hear that its a good service but it isn't like we don't have a wealth of choices out there. No need to go through the hassle of running your own resolver unless you just want to.