That is why I had my users on the Moz Suite back then followed by Seamonkey which a few use still. Even back in 06 one could see that most of the patches coming out were for IE 6 and the browser had a giant target painted on it.
That is one of the truly wonderful things about today in that there is plenty of choices out there. Today I give my customers a choice of Comodo Dragon (Chromium based without the phone home), Pale Moon (an offshoot of Firefox that isn't gonna use the metro UI, great for those that prefer the Fox), for older machines Kmeleon CCF Me or QTWeb, both of which are VERY fast even on older hardware. If anyone is tired of their browser they should give one of the above a try, they all have their advantages.
I'm just glad i'm not doing corporate anymore because it must truly suck ass to have to support IE 6 in this day and age.
And THAT is the $64,000 question which I haven't figured out. Hell my GF just LOVES those FB games, she has her little routine where at 7 AM every morning, whether she is working or not that day, she is on her FB playing her little games. I ask her what is appealing about them but even she can't explain it, she says "they just are".
The weird thing is i have also seen this with two other games, Age of Empires I (not II or III, just I) and The Sims. Now the Sims I can sorta get, because in a way its like a video game dollhouse. they can decorate and make this perfect little place. But AoE I? that isn't like the Sims OR the Zynga games yet my former boss would slap that on every machine in the window and sure enough it would bring in the females.
Hell I don't know, I honestly just don't get it. I watch my GF play those games and they make me think of a hamster slamming a button to get a food pellet. Maybe its the lack of real conflict in those FB games, maybe its the fact you can start and stop easily, hell if i know. All i know is I don't know of any guys playing those things but I know a LOT of females that just love them to death.
What I don't get is why MSFT doesn't just make it beyond simple to switch by offering an Intranet only IE 6 in a box. Something like a mini VM that ONLY works on the Intranet and ONLY to sites the IT guy has pre-programmed into the IE6 in a box. Because we all know its them damned IE 6 ActiveX Intranet sites that keep businesses on IE 6 and good luck getting them to spend the amount of cash it would take to replace it with an HTML 5 app.
Now i apologize if MSFT has an offering like that but I haven't seen or heard of it, the only thing I have seen is VMs for web developers to try different versions of IE with. But those all work on the web which is not what you need here. What you need here is something that will drop an icon onto any XP/Vista/7 system when pushed through GP that will ONLY go to preset Intranet sites. That way the corps wouldn't have to replace their crappy intranet sites and when the user tried to surf off the intranet a little pop up would say "We're sorry but this is only for (insert Intranet site) would you like me to launch your default browser with (insert address) added?" and that would be that.
I'd say the bigger problem was 4.-If you ACT guilty then folks will think you are. look at how long he stalled and BSed when he could have just had some copies of his birth cert printed that week and ended the whole damned thing right there. Frankly I'm starting to wonder if someone in his camp isn't trolling for the LULZ. I mean you put out a long form doc on the White House website that has obvious layers and fakeries in it? smells like trolling to me, like they WANT that shit to be the talk instead of...well the dead as a door nail economy. When even those that were against the 'birthgate' crap are like "WTF is this? 16 year olds in Photoshop do better work" it just smells like a staffer doing some trolling to me.
As for TFA the answer is simple, old Jimbo has let the deletionists and trolls take the place over. i used to help out there a lot simply because i liked the idea, information filtered via crowd sourcing into a giant easily searchable DB. While I still have my account there I haven't bother in ages simply because you simply learn certain mods "own" pages and it doesn't matter if the data there is wrong or not it can't be changed without their approval. the whole thing is totally political, with tons of infighting and ass kissing and frankly life is too short to deal with that shit.
But if they wouldn't have gotten the publicity frankly those pages would still be there as those that actually liked to help have been run off for the most part. I've seen obvious vandalism sit there for ages because nobody cares, and who can blame them? With all the deletionists and modtrolls it frankly isn't worth the damned effort anymore. Hell you can be banned there for simply asking someone to explain what they mean by notable and to give examples. Its all politics and bullshit IMHO.
Actually I would argue that Zynga more than anything else is what FB did right that G+ did wrong, why? Females. you want guys on the service you need girls to use it and i can tell you those damned Zynga games are like catnip to females. Don't ask me why, hell if i know, but I've even had women come in and choose their systems by how well they ran FB games.
And personally I'd say G+ is a perfect example of what many of us already knew, and that is "You can't just put a half assed version of the other guy's stuff out and expect your brand name to carry you home". Hell MSFT under Ballmer has pulled that same dumb move over and over AND OVER and it simply doesn't work. When there is already a well established player on the field you have to offer something BETTER than what they have or your average user simply isn't gonna care. FB had MUCH better service than MySpace which had become a bunch of spam and crap, whereas G+ doesn't really have any "killer feature" to make it better than FB and with FB owning Zynga who in turn seems to own the female casual gamer demographic? Frankly they would have to offer an amazing service that was head and shoulders above FB and it just doesn't seem like they have done that.
I predict in a year it'll be another Buzz or Wave, just another failed project.
The reason they didn't do that is they don't have access to the templates and masks. Intel makes their own CPUs in their own fabs and is pretty tight when it comes to security on their chip designs so what Loongson did was copy certain instructions, probably from leaks on older CPUs as the stuff I saw written about them has the X86 code in them roughly about the same as a P3 which is a pretty damned old design.
Basically the Chinese wanted a chip they could claim was "theirs" and theirs alone which is why they simply bought the designs for an older MIPS chip outright. Then they found out how badly it would run and how the vast majority of code out there (even Linux) is not for MIPS but X86 which is when they stole Intel microcode to put in the Dragon which is what RMS runs. Like I said kinda telling, at least to me, that a guy that constantly screams about big bad business ripping off the GPL he has no problem with himself using stolen code if it suits him.
But considering he gushes on his own website about Chavez and Castro and what utopias those places are frankly it doesn't surprise me that he doesn't mind stealing as long as its done by communists. Frankly I'm shocked he just doesn't come right out and declare himself a marxist, he made no bones that he sees Chavez and his regime as practically heaven on earth. To me it just makes him a hypocrite, claiming to be for freedom while gushing about dictatorships and claiming to be against corps stealing code from the GPL while he himself uses stolen code every damned day with the loongson.
Re:Hate to put a damper on the celebration
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FUD, total and complete FUD. You are making up scenarios that have NEVER happened to justify your position and that is classical FUD. if you can't justify your position with current data then i'm sorry but you are just piling on the FUD. Steam has been around for a decade now and not a single thing you describe has happened, not one. Your rant reminds me of the anti-BSD GPLers who come up with ever worse "doom scenarios" because nothing they have been saying has held true.
Can I back up my Steam games? Yes I can. Can i install them on any system i own? yes I can, I just can't play them on multiple systems at the same time, well guess what? A normal human can't play multiple systems at the same time! Can I crack Steam just as easily as ANY OTHER RETAIL SYSTEM OR DISC? Yes I can, infact its easier to crack a Steam game than some of the later Starforce and SecuROM systems on later games which will stick kernel hooks all over the place.
So I'm sorry but if the ONLY arguments you can come up with involve doom scenarios than you are no different than all the others spreading FUD and shilling for their causes. Either back up your statements with actual current facts or quit wasting our time with FUD.
Shame you never used 'em because Samsung drives ROCK! I have put Samsung drives in construction trailers and shop floors, places where a Seagate or WD wouldn't survive the month and the Samsungs would just keep on purring. Their EcoDrives would often score damned close to the Seagate 7200RPM in my real world tests while being almost 40 degrees cooler. Hell I liked 'em so much when Tiger had the big sale right before the flood I changed out all my drives for Samsung 1Tb and 2Tb models, truly rock solid drives.
And I'm sorry but at least in my experience if you buy Seagates over 640Gb they SUUUUUUCK! The failure rates on their 1Tb and 1.5Tb drives are just nuts. Check out Newegg or tiger and you'll see wall to wall complaints where builders bought those by the dozen and had those fail within 6 months to a year. I bet this is why a lot of the tiger kits now carry the Seagate 500gb instead of the 1Tb they used to have. Now I can't confirm this but the rumor going round is that they have been using shitty Maxtor ARM controllers they got during the buyout and that along with shitty firmware is causing the drives to crap all over themselves. All I know is I had to RMA a bunch of the 1Tb and 1.5Tb drives and frankly ended up relegating them to externals because I wouldn't trust them in new builds.
As for TFA while this is certainly cool tech I bet it'll be expensive as all hell. Anything like this is usually sold to the military where insane markups are king, kinda like how those hardware encrypted flash drives were insanely priced or had teeny tiny sizes compared to the regular drives. Its just a shame this will be crazy priced as it sounds like something that would be great for stolen laptops, just have it toast the drive if they input the wrong password too many times.
And if you want one today the Seagate 1Tb and 1.5Tb will happily kill itself and your data! For extra super duper security it will do so at a random time so it even gives you plausible deniability! What a company, so thoughtful.
Hell I'm not a big fan of Google, mainly because i don't care for their new privacy settings and how they will try to block those hooking into their stuff while at the same time whining that big content...try to block those hooking into their stuff but c'mon its a fricking rangecheck! Hell I haven't coded since the days of VB and even I know that a range check isn't exactly an earth shaking or novel idea and certainly isn't worth actually arguing a court case over. All you are doing is making sure an input falls between X and Y and if it is below X or above Y then you throw an error...that's it.
If I was Oracle I'd be wanting to know WTF is this law firm doing with my money because this isn't even FUD, its JUST STUPID. Hell what is next, they gonna use the Chewbacca defense? I would think even a non coding judge when explained what this actually does would say 'They are arguing over....that? Seriously?". Frankly if THIS is all Oracle has to bring to the table not only should the case be dismissed as a waste of the court's time, but Oracle should be fined for even bringing this shit up as this is just as lame as the asshole that sued for a billion dollars because his pants got messed up at the dry cleaners.No, that actually isn't fair as at LEAST the guy did get his pants messed up, hell this may as well be them trying to claim subtraction as IP, it is THAT stupid.
I'll be the first to admit that while I got tons of home cooked meals when I was a kid my two boys, which I raised pretty much since birth since right after my sister was diagnosed with a terminal illness and her husband couldn't take the frustration and walked away, simply didn't get that. Why? because i was totally overworked, still recovering myself from a bad wreck WHILE having to deal with my sister slowly dying and finally? I can't cook.
Honestly I REALLY can't. My GF who was nice enough to drop everything and use up all her vacation time to be with us when the end came really tried to teach me before just giving up. its probably the fact I have VERY little sense of smell and as we all know a lot of what we sense as taste is actually tied in to smell and without that frankly anything more complex than something like hamburger helper where you simply follow directions is gonna come out truly God awful.
But lucky for us the boys like your family got one good thing from their father (who last we heard had become a full blown junkie and gotten Hep C for his trouble) and that was great genes as both are slim no matter what they eat.
So that is why I have trouble condemning the poor for their actions because I know first hand all it takes is a couple of really nasty curveballs to turn all your best laid plans to absolute shit. Within a year of my sister being diagnosed I had had to pretty much give up my career that I had worked so hard to get, take a job I absolutely hated, and for the first 5 years of their life live on practically no sleep at all because when I wasn't taking care of them I was trying to do a half a dozen other things to free up more and more time for my mother to spend time with my sis before she really went downhill. Is it ANY wonder that cooking was the LAST thing on my mind?
I would argue its not that food is cheap so much as good food is expensive at least as far as the poor is concerned. You go to a poor person's house to eat and you'll see its cheap cuts of meat (which are usually the fattiest cuts) and cheap vegetables like potatoes because frankly that is what is cheap and when the economy is a corpse and so many have their heads barely above water that is what you get. Hell in my area colas are cheaper than bottled water and frankly the tap water tastes like crap, so is it any wonder they all drink it?
Then you have to look at the time factor. if you are working a shit job that wears your ass down and you come home to a hungry family you are gonna do what is fast and easy. Again that is cheap cuts of meat or quick fix dinners like hamburger helper.
You look at the time line in question and it just so happens to be the same period that more single families replaced the nuclear family and those that have both are often both working their asses off. So I'd say its a lot more than just "cheap food" that is causing this and frankly i don't even like that line of reasoning because next someone will answer "Well just add more taxes and make food more expensive" which considering we have millions doing without is that REALLY the line we would want to take?
Well I was just spelling it how it sounds, frankly the right way just looks..."wrong' and since we know the whole damned point of the distro is to be an RMS ideal GNU system its just dumb not to call a spade a spade IMHO.
Funnily enough everyone gives RMS credit for the GCC and Emacs yet both of the current versions aren't his but were forks created by devs that got tired of his BS that when he saw were supplanting his own creations he "blessed" to keep from being made irrelevant with his own former creations!
And the Loongson, just FYI, shows what RMS thinks of other people's property since the reason they can't be sold here is they infringe on Intel's copyrights and patents. look up the specs on the chips and you'll see they added Intel's X86 code to their own chip to give them a speed boost on hardware emulated X86 which is of course a no no, at least in the west. you are allowed to emulate hardware in software for interoperability but NOT allowed to just bold faced copy the hardware itself.
In the end i'll use his own words about Jobs "I won't be glad when he's dead, but I'll be glad he's gone' because frankly i think his extremism is holding back the entire open source movement and is causing more divisions and zealotry than anything else anymore. you read the man's writings and it is pretty plain to see that this has long since quit being about software and is a lot more...well cult like. I mean the man gives out a list of words AND THEIR MEANINGS TO HIM and you can only use HIS language HIS way or he won't even talk to you. I ask you, does that sound like an advocate, or a cult leader to you?
"They have over 90% of the over $1000 laptop crowd" citation please, because you have stated that on multiple occasions yet when asked repeatedly for citation you never respond. It makes it awfully hard to take anything you say seriously when you pull out a number like that without citation. I also find it frankly a little hard to swallow with both alienware and the Razr lines.
Re:Hate to put a damper on the celebration
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And WHY is that ironic? Steam is about as 'effective' a DRM as the old CD checks were, which is just enough to keep Billy Bob from just slapping the games on a flash and handing it out to his buddies but on any crack site they have cracks for the steam version of any game, just like they do for the retail box. You also don't have to be online 24/7 and moreover they actually give you something extra for your money, namely built in patching, chat, and matchmaking which makes it beyond simple for you to hop into a game with friends instead of strangers. No need to show them about IP addresses or how to add exceptions to their firewall, it all "just works".
so I don't see any irony at all friend, in fact the ONLY complaints I have about Steam is 1.-There is no easy way in their Steam lists to open a new tab in client so one can see whether the game has third party DRM or not so you pretty much have to use your browser for large lists and 2.- There isn't a way to set a checkbox on my client that will tell my friends when they try to buy me a game as a gift "This person asks that only Steam games (no third party DRM) be gifted to them". But other than those 2 little nits I have had no problem with Steam and if they ever acted like dicks (which to my knowledge they have NEVER banned anyone who wasn't cheating in game and ruining it for everyone else) it wouldn't take me 5 minutes to have every single Steam game I have cracked. Can YOU say the same about D3? or Origin? or any other system currently employed on AAA gaming?
Actually it wouldn't even be good for demos, because both the Windows appstore as well as many games on Steam have free demos as well and the steam sales would make it cheaper just to buy the game on sale than to pay for the bandwidth.
I think the BIG mistake all these 'cloud" services are making is thus: They all assume that the bandwidth costs plus the service will be less than just buying the game, yet as we have seen all the ISPs seem to be heading straight into caps and many have frankly crazy overage charges. We can be pretty positive no matter what performance tricks they use that pushing HD gaming down the pipe is gonna seriously suck some bandwidth and who is gonna want a service that will suck up all their cap in a couple of weeks and leave them screwed for the next two weeks, when they could just buy the game off Amazon or Steam and not deal with bandwidth costs?
Personally i wish their bright happy huge bandwidth future was gonna be reality, and it probably will be in Asia and parts of the EU, but here in the USA we are just getting caps. so sorry guys, I think I'll stick with Steam and Amazon and not have to worry about paying the crazy overage charges for exceeding my cap.
But gamers are, for the most part, gonna use a discrete rather than an APU and the consumers frankly don't know DDR 4 from a grilled cheese sandwich so other than a few benches I just don't see it making that big a deal. Sure the higher scores will make a nice bullet point but I have one of the E350 APUs and with 1200Mb of DDR 3 1333MHz RAM dedicated to video movies are buttery smooth and the games I play don't jerk and isn't that what matters?
I've been selling AMDs in my shop pretty exclusively since the Intel bribery and compiler scandals came out and while i thought killing AM3 was a stupid move frankly i haven't had ANY trouble selling the APUs and the reason couldn't be more simple. The simple fact is just about every APU that AMD has, even the lowly C and E series bobcats are frankly overkill for most of the jobs folks have. Hell I even sold my 17 inch laptop for one of the 12 inch AMD EEEs because i found when i'm mobile i liked having the battery life and ease of carry over the big screen and you know what? i honestly don't miss that more powerful CPU.
So while i'm sure the extra speed will do nothing but help AMD I just don't see what DDR speeds they have now hurting AMD with actual consumers. BTW for those that have C and E series APUs I recommend Brazos Tweaker which will help you drop voltages and get even greater battery life. they have settings that will work on most of the C and E series posted as well as step by step instructions. I added about an hour to mine by using it and honestly I can't "feel" any difference in performance, I just get more time.
Ya know I just have to laugh at statements like yours because while the reviewers haven't liked AMD that hasn't stopped the OEMs from gobbling up every chip they can handle. hell AMD had to slow down their desktop lines just to give more room to mobile because they kept running out! Take the Bobcats, they haven't had an update in awhile yet the OEMs are slapping them into everything from netbooks to laptops to all-in-ones as fast as they can get them, same with llano. Even the lower end Bulldozers have been selling quite briskly and the reviewers couldn't stand that chip!
What thing AMD does seem to get is to coin a phrase "Its the GPU stupid". I mean what does the average person DO with their machine? FB, webmail, YouTube videos and movies. Is there a single job on that list that even the lowest bobcat can't do? Nope. Hell I recommended to my dad to get his GF a little Acer with the C60 chip in it which is just a 1Ghz dual core with turbo and she can't stop gushing about the thing! it plays her FB games, let's her chat anywhere without being tied to the cords, she is just tickled to death with it.
While DDR 4 may give the integrated GPUs in AMD chips a little speed boost frankly they haven't been having too much trouble selling them or having them run pretty much anything you want. Don't take my word for it, look up the Youtube videos on chips like the E350 where they are playing Crysis on it. I have 8Gb of DDR 3 in mine which gives the GPU 1200Mb of system memory and while i don't often game on it i can say that the little E350 stays cool to the touch even after hours of HD video or office work.
So I don't think you have to worry about AMD friend, once they have gotten rid of the last of their stake in GloFlo they should be doing quite well with Piledriver and Bobcat II. The RAM in TFA will give it a free speed boost but the only ones who seem to care about such things are the reviewers. For everybody else as long as it does the tasks they have with good battery life they'll be quite happy.
How do you figure that? nokia was the best at only ONE thing, and that was dumbphones. Well like being the biggest maker of 8-tracks that don't help when everyone switched to a new format, in this case smartphones. Hell even Walmart has smartphones on their cheapy prepaid plans.
So I don't see how you say it was calculated. If they would have went with Android they would STILL be dead, because HTC and Samsung do Android a hell of a lot better, WebOS? Possible but it would have taken time to get it out the door and time is not on their side. Hell i don't see any choice other than the "Cash the check and Hail Mary" that Elop did that would have stopped their slow demise, their skills are simply in a format that doesn't matter anymore. they could coast for a little while longer with the dollar store cheap Tracphone style dumbphones but we can all see the writing on the wall and that market is a corpse.
Funnily enough MSFT is in the same position with ONE major difference. While desktops will never be the "big thing" that they were at least the market isn't gonna completely disappear, it'll just settle down into what we are seeing now where most don't replace until the previous one dies. hell even the gamers I know are running 2 and 3 year old quads because there just isn't a point in more powerful CPUs for most games. So most likely MSFT will be the next IBM, an old company with a mature market while Nokia will flop around for awhile until their dumbphones are dried up and then its bye bye. i just don't see how any move on their part could have changed the fact that what they were good at is no longer a viable market.
I think what he is getting at is the same thing i have been saying for ages, which is that MSFT needs to spin off their mobile and entertainment divisions instead of hamstringing them by constantly trying to tie everything into the "Windows/Office" mold.
I mean would MSFT have received this amount of backlash if "Metro Inc" released metro OS for ARM tablets and smartphones? probably not but instead they are trying to use old tricks, like their control of the desktop to force their way into the mobile market and it just isn't gonna work. Look at how they screwed the pooch with IE, now its tied more and more to which Windows OS you are using so if one wants a unified platform across Windows platforms one has to use Firefox or Chrome.
If they wanted to make it easier for these separate platforms to work together like what they did with windows streaming to the X360? Fine and dandy but they are hobbling their platforms by trying to force the Windows brand where it simply doesn't belong and are failing miserably.
I'm afraid you have #2 backwards friend, as in 2002 the FPS genre combined with the MHz wars was causing PC gaming to explode. With the new CPUs and GPUs coming out almost daily then PC devs really pushed the boundaries when it games to graphics and gameplay whereas the consoles at the time were looked at as more "toys for teens" than for serious gaming. One could argue that this is one of the reasons for the design of the original Xbox which was nothing but a highly specialized Windows gaming PC. I would even argue that MSFT letting the X360 have such a long tail has probably held back PC gaming because now as you rightly point out they develop for consoles first, but that simply wasn't the case then.
In any measure if you look at Ballmer's reign, even if you give him the Xbox as a success (which it is still debatable if they are in the black on the X360) and compare successes to failures most would say he has been a terrible CEO. Even the X360 cost them a couple of billion because he let the original be released with fatal cooling problems. Vista capable, Zune, Kin, his list of huge multimillion dollar uberfails simply outweigh the man's successes by a LARGE margin.
So I'd say by whatever metric you use simply by the huge amounts of capital he has blown on one failed venture after another should put him squarely in the top 5 worst CEOs.
Question: How is this not simply another case of the broken window fallacy? After all you are adding billions to the debt which drags down the entire economy in order to keep the status quo. If the numbers I saw are correct GM pays more per car to retired workers than to the people who actually build the things which is simply unsustainable long term. So how does adding tens of thousands in debt to every man, woman, and child in this entire country make that anything but a net loss?
After all if you wanted to end unemployment tomorrow you could just have the government pay everyone currently unemployed $50k a year to stay home but that is also not sustainable, so how does propping up a company that can't survive without bailouts simply not just postpone the inevitable?
Personally i thought those billions would have been better spent bailing out those that were in danger of losing their homes, not because they had bought rental properties or mcMansions but simply because the downturn left them with less money than before. At least with their houses paid down to a more manageable level that would have freed up money by all those homeowners and wouldn't have left so many abandoned and gutted homes all over the country. I just don't see how bailing out the car companies did anything but delay their deaths by a few years. is either company in a truly sustainable (without government assistance) position now?
RIM didn't blow billions (at least not that I'm aware of) doing one dumbass move after another. See killing their lucrative Playsforsure initiative for Zune Market, Vista being released with some serious show stopper bugs and lousy driver support, The "Vista capable" fiasco, Kin, rushing the X360 out with a billion dollar bug, paying hundreds of millions to Nokia only to hamstring them with WinPhone 7 not having a clear win 8 upgrade path, I'm sure there are others.
This is why I have said for years the Gates Borg icon should be replaced with Ballmer sticking his tongue out with a MSFT beanie because the reign of Ballmer has just been a giant clusterfuck. He seems to only have a one track mind which is stuck in "ZOMFG I want to be Apple!" mode and can't shift gears. Time and time again we have seen him snatch defeat from the jaws of victory by trying to (badly) imitate Apple and this is from someone who doesn't own a single Apple product, I'm just not blind.
Hopefully windows 8 will be the final nail in his coffin and he'll FINALLY be drummed out by the board. I would argue a big reason why even when they were having record Win 7 sales that the stock sucked is that frankly nobody has any confidence in the man. you look at his history and he has literally blown billions and has almost nothing to show for all that wasted capital but failures. i have a feeling he'll be missed about as much as the Pepsi guy is at Apple.
That would be like saying "anybody that can't rebuild an engine shouldn't drive" which is stupid. nobody can be an expert on everything.
For my customers as well as my family i recommend either Comodo Internet Security or Avast Free. Comodo is free for business OR home use but until recently needed more fiddling as it does have some pretty fine grained control, but now its default mode is just as simple as Avast, pretty much install and go. Both have sandboxing as default for the browser and both do scan before load on webpages so either one will do the trick and keep most users perfectly safe without having to know anything.
Personally I am leaning towards Comodo as Avast does pop up occasional offers for their other services, but either AV is good and AFAIK neither have had any "lets make the PC unbootable!" problems, at least as long as i have been recommending them which is a couple of years. if you have a clueless relative and want to give them Avast just use Ninite. all you have to do is send them the link and tell them to check the box, couldn't be simpler.
To quote Angry Joe in his review of Sacred II its all about the loot. The fun thing about hack and slash is being a total loot whore and trying to find the best loot. Since drops are random for the most part in most games it can take some work to get the loot but once you have some killer loot it can kick some ass.
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That is why I had my users on the Moz Suite back then followed by Seamonkey which a few use still. Even back in 06 one could see that most of the patches coming out were for IE 6 and the browser had a giant target painted on it.
That is one of the truly wonderful things about today in that there is plenty of choices out there. Today I give my customers a choice of Comodo Dragon (Chromium based without the phone home), Pale Moon (an offshoot of Firefox that isn't gonna use the metro UI, great for those that prefer the Fox), for older machines Kmeleon CCF Me or QTWeb, both of which are VERY fast even on older hardware. If anyone is tired of their browser they should give one of the above a try, they all have their advantages.
I'm just glad i'm not doing corporate anymore because it must truly suck ass to have to support IE 6 in this day and age.
And THAT is the $64,000 question which I haven't figured out. Hell my GF just LOVES those FB games, she has her little routine where at 7 AM every morning, whether she is working or not that day, she is on her FB playing her little games. I ask her what is appealing about them but even she can't explain it, she says "they just are".
The weird thing is i have also seen this with two other games, Age of Empires I (not II or III, just I) and The Sims. Now the Sims I can sorta get, because in a way its like a video game dollhouse. they can decorate and make this perfect little place. But AoE I? that isn't like the Sims OR the Zynga games yet my former boss would slap that on every machine in the window and sure enough it would bring in the females.
Hell I don't know, I honestly just don't get it. I watch my GF play those games and they make me think of a hamster slamming a button to get a food pellet. Maybe its the lack of real conflict in those FB games, maybe its the fact you can start and stop easily, hell if i know. All i know is I don't know of any guys playing those things but I know a LOT of females that just love them to death.
What I don't get is why MSFT doesn't just make it beyond simple to switch by offering an Intranet only IE 6 in a box. Something like a mini VM that ONLY works on the Intranet and ONLY to sites the IT guy has pre-programmed into the IE6 in a box. Because we all know its them damned IE 6 ActiveX Intranet sites that keep businesses on IE 6 and good luck getting them to spend the amount of cash it would take to replace it with an HTML 5 app.
Now i apologize if MSFT has an offering like that but I haven't seen or heard of it, the only thing I have seen is VMs for web developers to try different versions of IE with. But those all work on the web which is not what you need here. What you need here is something that will drop an icon onto any XP/Vista/7 system when pushed through GP that will ONLY go to preset Intranet sites. That way the corps wouldn't have to replace their crappy intranet sites and when the user tried to surf off the intranet a little pop up would say "We're sorry but this is only for (insert Intranet site) would you like me to launch your default browser with (insert address) added?" and that would be that.
I'd say the bigger problem was 4.-If you ACT guilty then folks will think you are. look at how long he stalled and BSed when he could have just had some copies of his birth cert printed that week and ended the whole damned thing right there. Frankly I'm starting to wonder if someone in his camp isn't trolling for the LULZ. I mean you put out a long form doc on the White House website that has obvious layers and fakeries in it? smells like trolling to me, like they WANT that shit to be the talk instead of...well the dead as a door nail economy. When even those that were against the 'birthgate' crap are like "WTF is this? 16 year olds in Photoshop do better work" it just smells like a staffer doing some trolling to me.
As for TFA the answer is simple, old Jimbo has let the deletionists and trolls take the place over. i used to help out there a lot simply because i liked the idea, information filtered via crowd sourcing into a giant easily searchable DB. While I still have my account there I haven't bother in ages simply because you simply learn certain mods "own" pages and it doesn't matter if the data there is wrong or not it can't be changed without their approval. the whole thing is totally political, with tons of infighting and ass kissing and frankly life is too short to deal with that shit.
But if they wouldn't have gotten the publicity frankly those pages would still be there as those that actually liked to help have been run off for the most part. I've seen obvious vandalism sit there for ages because nobody cares, and who can blame them? With all the deletionists and modtrolls it frankly isn't worth the damned effort anymore. Hell you can be banned there for simply asking someone to explain what they mean by notable and to give examples. Its all politics and bullshit IMHO.
Actually I would argue that Zynga more than anything else is what FB did right that G+ did wrong, why? Females. you want guys on the service you need girls to use it and i can tell you those damned Zynga games are like catnip to females. Don't ask me why, hell if i know, but I've even had women come in and choose their systems by how well they ran FB games.
And personally I'd say G+ is a perfect example of what many of us already knew, and that is "You can't just put a half assed version of the other guy's stuff out and expect your brand name to carry you home". Hell MSFT under Ballmer has pulled that same dumb move over and over AND OVER and it simply doesn't work. When there is already a well established player on the field you have to offer something BETTER than what they have or your average user simply isn't gonna care. FB had MUCH better service than MySpace which had become a bunch of spam and crap, whereas G+ doesn't really have any "killer feature" to make it better than FB and with FB owning Zynga who in turn seems to own the female casual gamer demographic? Frankly they would have to offer an amazing service that was head and shoulders above FB and it just doesn't seem like they have done that.
I predict in a year it'll be another Buzz or Wave, just another failed project.
The reason they didn't do that is they don't have access to the templates and masks. Intel makes their own CPUs in their own fabs and is pretty tight when it comes to security on their chip designs so what Loongson did was copy certain instructions, probably from leaks on older CPUs as the stuff I saw written about them has the X86 code in them roughly about the same as a P3 which is a pretty damned old design.
Basically the Chinese wanted a chip they could claim was "theirs" and theirs alone which is why they simply bought the designs for an older MIPS chip outright. Then they found out how badly it would run and how the vast majority of code out there (even Linux) is not for MIPS but X86 which is when they stole Intel microcode to put in the Dragon which is what RMS runs. Like I said kinda telling, at least to me, that a guy that constantly screams about big bad business ripping off the GPL he has no problem with himself using stolen code if it suits him.
But considering he gushes on his own website about Chavez and Castro and what utopias those places are frankly it doesn't surprise me that he doesn't mind stealing as long as its done by communists. Frankly I'm shocked he just doesn't come right out and declare himself a marxist, he made no bones that he sees Chavez and his regime as practically heaven on earth. To me it just makes him a hypocrite, claiming to be for freedom while gushing about dictatorships and claiming to be against corps stealing code from the GPL while he himself uses stolen code every damned day with the loongson.
FUD, total and complete FUD. You are making up scenarios that have NEVER happened to justify your position and that is classical FUD. if you can't justify your position with current data then i'm sorry but you are just piling on the FUD. Steam has been around for a decade now and not a single thing you describe has happened, not one. Your rant reminds me of the anti-BSD GPLers who come up with ever worse "doom scenarios" because nothing they have been saying has held true.
Can I back up my Steam games? Yes I can. Can i install them on any system i own? yes I can, I just can't play them on multiple systems at the same time, well guess what? A normal human can't play multiple systems at the same time! Can I crack Steam just as easily as ANY OTHER RETAIL SYSTEM OR DISC? Yes I can, infact its easier to crack a Steam game than some of the later Starforce and SecuROM systems on later games which will stick kernel hooks all over the place.
So I'm sorry but if the ONLY arguments you can come up with involve doom scenarios than you are no different than all the others spreading FUD and shilling for their causes. Either back up your statements with actual current facts or quit wasting our time with FUD.
Shame you never used 'em because Samsung drives ROCK! I have put Samsung drives in construction trailers and shop floors, places where a Seagate or WD wouldn't survive the month and the Samsungs would just keep on purring. Their EcoDrives would often score damned close to the Seagate 7200RPM in my real world tests while being almost 40 degrees cooler. Hell I liked 'em so much when Tiger had the big sale right before the flood I changed out all my drives for Samsung 1Tb and 2Tb models, truly rock solid drives.
And I'm sorry but at least in my experience if you buy Seagates over 640Gb they SUUUUUUCK! The failure rates on their 1Tb and 1.5Tb drives are just nuts. Check out Newegg or tiger and you'll see wall to wall complaints where builders bought those by the dozen and had those fail within 6 months to a year. I bet this is why a lot of the tiger kits now carry the Seagate 500gb instead of the 1Tb they used to have. Now I can't confirm this but the rumor going round is that they have been using shitty Maxtor ARM controllers they got during the buyout and that along with shitty firmware is causing the drives to crap all over themselves. All I know is I had to RMA a bunch of the 1Tb and 1.5Tb drives and frankly ended up relegating them to externals because I wouldn't trust them in new builds.
As for TFA while this is certainly cool tech I bet it'll be expensive as all hell. Anything like this is usually sold to the military where insane markups are king, kinda like how those hardware encrypted flash drives were insanely priced or had teeny tiny sizes compared to the regular drives. Its just a shame this will be crazy priced as it sounds like something that would be great for stolen laptops, just have it toast the drive if they input the wrong password too many times.
And if you want one today the Seagate 1Tb and 1.5Tb will happily kill itself and your data! For extra super duper security it will do so at a random time so it even gives you plausible deniability! What a company, so thoughtful.
Hell I'm not a big fan of Google, mainly because i don't care for their new privacy settings and how they will try to block those hooking into their stuff while at the same time whining that big content...try to block those hooking into their stuff but c'mon its a fricking rangecheck! Hell I haven't coded since the days of VB and even I know that a range check isn't exactly an earth shaking or novel idea and certainly isn't worth actually arguing a court case over. All you are doing is making sure an input falls between X and Y and if it is below X or above Y then you throw an error...that's it.
If I was Oracle I'd be wanting to know WTF is this law firm doing with my money because this isn't even FUD, its JUST STUPID. Hell what is next, they gonna use the Chewbacca defense? I would think even a non coding judge when explained what this actually does would say 'They are arguing over....that? Seriously?". Frankly if THIS is all Oracle has to bring to the table not only should the case be dismissed as a waste of the court's time, but Oracle should be fined for even bringing this shit up as this is just as lame as the asshole that sued for a billion dollars because his pants got messed up at the dry cleaners.No, that actually isn't fair as at LEAST the guy did get his pants messed up, hell this may as well be them trying to claim subtraction as IP, it is THAT stupid.
I'll be the first to admit that while I got tons of home cooked meals when I was a kid my two boys, which I raised pretty much since birth since right after my sister was diagnosed with a terminal illness and her husband couldn't take the frustration and walked away, simply didn't get that. Why? because i was totally overworked, still recovering myself from a bad wreck WHILE having to deal with my sister slowly dying and finally? I can't cook.
Honestly I REALLY can't. My GF who was nice enough to drop everything and use up all her vacation time to be with us when the end came really tried to teach me before just giving up. its probably the fact I have VERY little sense of smell and as we all know a lot of what we sense as taste is actually tied in to smell and without that frankly anything more complex than something like hamburger helper where you simply follow directions is gonna come out truly God awful.
But lucky for us the boys like your family got one good thing from their father (who last we heard had become a full blown junkie and gotten Hep C for his trouble) and that was great genes as both are slim no matter what they eat.
So that is why I have trouble condemning the poor for their actions because I know first hand all it takes is a couple of really nasty curveballs to turn all your best laid plans to absolute shit. Within a year of my sister being diagnosed I had had to pretty much give up my career that I had worked so hard to get, take a job I absolutely hated, and for the first 5 years of their life live on practically no sleep at all because when I wasn't taking care of them I was trying to do a half a dozen other things to free up more and more time for my mother to spend time with my sis before she really went downhill. Is it ANY wonder that cooking was the LAST thing on my mind?
I would argue its not that food is cheap so much as good food is expensive at least as far as the poor is concerned. You go to a poor person's house to eat and you'll see its cheap cuts of meat (which are usually the fattiest cuts) and cheap vegetables like potatoes because frankly that is what is cheap and when the economy is a corpse and so many have their heads barely above water that is what you get. Hell in my area colas are cheaper than bottled water and frankly the tap water tastes like crap, so is it any wonder they all drink it?
Then you have to look at the time factor. if you are working a shit job that wears your ass down and you come home to a hungry family you are gonna do what is fast and easy. Again that is cheap cuts of meat or quick fix dinners like hamburger helper.
You look at the time line in question and it just so happens to be the same period that more single families replaced the nuclear family and those that have both are often both working their asses off. So I'd say its a lot more than just "cheap food" that is causing this and frankly i don't even like that line of reasoning because next someone will answer "Well just add more taxes and make food more expensive" which considering we have millions doing without is that REALLY the line we would want to take?
Well I was just spelling it how it sounds, frankly the right way just looks..."wrong' and since we know the whole damned point of the distro is to be an RMS ideal GNU system its just dumb not to call a spade a spade IMHO.
Funnily enough everyone gives RMS credit for the GCC and Emacs yet both of the current versions aren't his but were forks created by devs that got tired of his BS that when he saw were supplanting his own creations he "blessed" to keep from being made irrelevant with his own former creations!
And the Loongson, just FYI, shows what RMS thinks of other people's property since the reason they can't be sold here is they infringe on Intel's copyrights and patents. look up the specs on the chips and you'll see they added Intel's X86 code to their own chip to give them a speed boost on hardware emulated X86 which is of course a no no, at least in the west. you are allowed to emulate hardware in software for interoperability but NOT allowed to just bold faced copy the hardware itself.
In the end i'll use his own words about Jobs "I won't be glad when he's dead, but I'll be glad he's gone' because frankly i think his extremism is holding back the entire open source movement and is causing more divisions and zealotry than anything else anymore. you read the man's writings and it is pretty plain to see that this has long since quit being about software and is a lot more...well cult like. I mean the man gives out a list of words AND THEIR MEANINGS TO HIM and you can only use HIS language HIS way or he won't even talk to you. I ask you, does that sound like an advocate, or a cult leader to you?
"They have over 90% of the over $1000 laptop crowd" citation please, because you have stated that on multiple occasions yet when asked repeatedly for citation you never respond. It makes it awfully hard to take anything you say seriously when you pull out a number like that without citation. I also find it frankly a little hard to swallow with both alienware and the Razr lines.
And WHY is that ironic? Steam is about as 'effective' a DRM as the old CD checks were, which is just enough to keep Billy Bob from just slapping the games on a flash and handing it out to his buddies but on any crack site they have cracks for the steam version of any game, just like they do for the retail box. You also don't have to be online 24/7 and moreover they actually give you something extra for your money, namely built in patching, chat, and matchmaking which makes it beyond simple for you to hop into a game with friends instead of strangers. No need to show them about IP addresses or how to add exceptions to their firewall, it all "just works".
so I don't see any irony at all friend, in fact the ONLY complaints I have about Steam is 1.-There is no easy way in their Steam lists to open a new tab in client so one can see whether the game has third party DRM or not so you pretty much have to use your browser for large lists and 2.- There isn't a way to set a checkbox on my client that will tell my friends when they try to buy me a game as a gift "This person asks that only Steam games (no third party DRM) be gifted to them". But other than those 2 little nits I have had no problem with Steam and if they ever acted like dicks (which to my knowledge they have NEVER banned anyone who wasn't cheating in game and ruining it for everyone else) it wouldn't take me 5 minutes to have every single Steam game I have cracked. Can YOU say the same about D3? or Origin? or any other system currently employed on AAA gaming?
Actually it wouldn't even be good for demos, because both the Windows appstore as well as many games on Steam have free demos as well and the steam sales would make it cheaper just to buy the game on sale than to pay for the bandwidth.
I think the BIG mistake all these 'cloud" services are making is thus: They all assume that the bandwidth costs plus the service will be less than just buying the game, yet as we have seen all the ISPs seem to be heading straight into caps and many have frankly crazy overage charges. We can be pretty positive no matter what performance tricks they use that pushing HD gaming down the pipe is gonna seriously suck some bandwidth and who is gonna want a service that will suck up all their cap in a couple of weeks and leave them screwed for the next two weeks, when they could just buy the game off Amazon or Steam and not deal with bandwidth costs?
Personally i wish their bright happy huge bandwidth future was gonna be reality, and it probably will be in Asia and parts of the EU, but here in the USA we are just getting caps. so sorry guys, I think I'll stick with Steam and Amazon and not have to worry about paying the crazy overage charges for exceeding my cap.
But gamers are, for the most part, gonna use a discrete rather than an APU and the consumers frankly don't know DDR 4 from a grilled cheese sandwich so other than a few benches I just don't see it making that big a deal. Sure the higher scores will make a nice bullet point but I have one of the E350 APUs and with 1200Mb of DDR 3 1333MHz RAM dedicated to video movies are buttery smooth and the games I play don't jerk and isn't that what matters?
I've been selling AMDs in my shop pretty exclusively since the Intel bribery and compiler scandals came out and while i thought killing AM3 was a stupid move frankly i haven't had ANY trouble selling the APUs and the reason couldn't be more simple. The simple fact is just about every APU that AMD has, even the lowly C and E series bobcats are frankly overkill for most of the jobs folks have. Hell I even sold my 17 inch laptop for one of the 12 inch AMD EEEs because i found when i'm mobile i liked having the battery life and ease of carry over the big screen and you know what? i honestly don't miss that more powerful CPU.
So while i'm sure the extra speed will do nothing but help AMD I just don't see what DDR speeds they have now hurting AMD with actual consumers. BTW for those that have C and E series APUs I recommend Brazos Tweaker which will help you drop voltages and get even greater battery life. they have settings that will work on most of the C and E series posted as well as step by step instructions. I added about an hour to mine by using it and honestly I can't "feel" any difference in performance, I just get more time.
Ya know I just have to laugh at statements like yours because while the reviewers haven't liked AMD that hasn't stopped the OEMs from gobbling up every chip they can handle. hell AMD had to slow down their desktop lines just to give more room to mobile because they kept running out! Take the Bobcats, they haven't had an update in awhile yet the OEMs are slapping them into everything from netbooks to laptops to all-in-ones as fast as they can get them, same with llano. Even the lower end Bulldozers have been selling quite briskly and the reviewers couldn't stand that chip!
What thing AMD does seem to get is to coin a phrase "Its the GPU stupid". I mean what does the average person DO with their machine? FB, webmail, YouTube videos and movies. Is there a single job on that list that even the lowest bobcat can't do? Nope. Hell I recommended to my dad to get his GF a little Acer with the C60 chip in it which is just a 1Ghz dual core with turbo and she can't stop gushing about the thing! it plays her FB games, let's her chat anywhere without being tied to the cords, she is just tickled to death with it.
While DDR 4 may give the integrated GPUs in AMD chips a little speed boost frankly they haven't been having too much trouble selling them or having them run pretty much anything you want. Don't take my word for it, look up the Youtube videos on chips like the E350 where they are playing Crysis on it. I have 8Gb of DDR 3 in mine which gives the GPU 1200Mb of system memory and while i don't often game on it i can say that the little E350 stays cool to the touch even after hours of HD video or office work.
So I don't think you have to worry about AMD friend, once they have gotten rid of the last of their stake in GloFlo they should be doing quite well with Piledriver and Bobcat II. The RAM in TFA will give it a free speed boost but the only ones who seem to care about such things are the reviewers. For everybody else as long as it does the tasks they have with good battery life they'll be quite happy.
How do you figure that? nokia was the best at only ONE thing, and that was dumbphones. Well like being the biggest maker of 8-tracks that don't help when everyone switched to a new format, in this case smartphones. Hell even Walmart has smartphones on their cheapy prepaid plans.
So I don't see how you say it was calculated. If they would have went with Android they would STILL be dead, because HTC and Samsung do Android a hell of a lot better, WebOS? Possible but it would have taken time to get it out the door and time is not on their side. Hell i don't see any choice other than the "Cash the check and Hail Mary" that Elop did that would have stopped their slow demise, their skills are simply in a format that doesn't matter anymore. they could coast for a little while longer with the dollar store cheap Tracphone style dumbphones but we can all see the writing on the wall and that market is a corpse.
Funnily enough MSFT is in the same position with ONE major difference. While desktops will never be the "big thing" that they were at least the market isn't gonna completely disappear, it'll just settle down into what we are seeing now where most don't replace until the previous one dies. hell even the gamers I know are running 2 and 3 year old quads because there just isn't a point in more powerful CPUs for most games. So most likely MSFT will be the next IBM, an old company with a mature market while Nokia will flop around for awhile until their dumbphones are dried up and then its bye bye. i just don't see how any move on their part could have changed the fact that what they were good at is no longer a viable market.
I think what he is getting at is the same thing i have been saying for ages, which is that MSFT needs to spin off their mobile and entertainment divisions instead of hamstringing them by constantly trying to tie everything into the "Windows/Office" mold.
I mean would MSFT have received this amount of backlash if "Metro Inc" released metro OS for ARM tablets and smartphones? probably not but instead they are trying to use old tricks, like their control of the desktop to force their way into the mobile market and it just isn't gonna work. Look at how they screwed the pooch with IE, now its tied more and more to which Windows OS you are using so if one wants a unified platform across Windows platforms one has to use Firefox or Chrome.
If they wanted to make it easier for these separate platforms to work together like what they did with windows streaming to the X360? Fine and dandy but they are hobbling their platforms by trying to force the Windows brand where it simply doesn't belong and are failing miserably.
I'm afraid you have #2 backwards friend, as in 2002 the FPS genre combined with the MHz wars was causing PC gaming to explode. With the new CPUs and GPUs coming out almost daily then PC devs really pushed the boundaries when it games to graphics and gameplay whereas the consoles at the time were looked at as more "toys for teens" than for serious gaming. One could argue that this is one of the reasons for the design of the original Xbox which was nothing but a highly specialized Windows gaming PC. I would even argue that MSFT letting the X360 have such a long tail has probably held back PC gaming because now as you rightly point out they develop for consoles first, but that simply wasn't the case then.
In any measure if you look at Ballmer's reign, even if you give him the Xbox as a success (which it is still debatable if they are in the black on the X360) and compare successes to failures most would say he has been a terrible CEO. Even the X360 cost them a couple of billion because he let the original be released with fatal cooling problems. Vista capable, Zune, Kin, his list of huge multimillion dollar uberfails simply outweigh the man's successes by a LARGE margin.
So I'd say by whatever metric you use simply by the huge amounts of capital he has blown on one failed venture after another should put him squarely in the top 5 worst CEOs.
Question: How is this not simply another case of the broken window fallacy? After all you are adding billions to the debt which drags down the entire economy in order to keep the status quo. If the numbers I saw are correct GM pays more per car to retired workers than to the people who actually build the things which is simply unsustainable long term. So how does adding tens of thousands in debt to every man, woman, and child in this entire country make that anything but a net loss?
After all if you wanted to end unemployment tomorrow you could just have the government pay everyone currently unemployed $50k a year to stay home but that is also not sustainable, so how does propping up a company that can't survive without bailouts simply not just postpone the inevitable?
Personally i thought those billions would have been better spent bailing out those that were in danger of losing their homes, not because they had bought rental properties or mcMansions but simply because the downturn left them with less money than before. At least with their houses paid down to a more manageable level that would have freed up money by all those homeowners and wouldn't have left so many abandoned and gutted homes all over the country. I just don't see how bailing out the car companies did anything but delay their deaths by a few years. is either company in a truly sustainable (without government assistance) position now?
RIM didn't blow billions (at least not that I'm aware of) doing one dumbass move after another. See killing their lucrative Playsforsure initiative for Zune Market, Vista being released with some serious show stopper bugs and lousy driver support, The "Vista capable" fiasco, Kin, rushing the X360 out with a billion dollar bug, paying hundreds of millions to Nokia only to hamstring them with WinPhone 7 not having a clear win 8 upgrade path, I'm sure there are others.
This is why I have said for years the Gates Borg icon should be replaced with Ballmer sticking his tongue out with a MSFT beanie because the reign of Ballmer has just been a giant clusterfuck. He seems to only have a one track mind which is stuck in "ZOMFG I want to be Apple!" mode and can't shift gears. Time and time again we have seen him snatch defeat from the jaws of victory by trying to (badly) imitate Apple and this is from someone who doesn't own a single Apple product, I'm just not blind.
Hopefully windows 8 will be the final nail in his coffin and he'll FINALLY be drummed out by the board. I would argue a big reason why even when they were having record Win 7 sales that the stock sucked is that frankly nobody has any confidence in the man. you look at his history and he has literally blown billions and has almost nothing to show for all that wasted capital but failures. i have a feeling he'll be missed about as much as the Pepsi guy is at Apple.
That would be like saying "anybody that can't rebuild an engine shouldn't drive" which is stupid. nobody can be an expert on everything.
For my customers as well as my family i recommend either Comodo Internet Security or Avast Free. Comodo is free for business OR home use but until recently needed more fiddling as it does have some pretty fine grained control, but now its default mode is just as simple as Avast, pretty much install and go. Both have sandboxing as default for the browser and both do scan before load on webpages so either one will do the trick and keep most users perfectly safe without having to know anything.
Personally I am leaning towards Comodo as Avast does pop up occasional offers for their other services, but either AV is good and AFAIK neither have had any "lets make the PC unbootable!" problems, at least as long as i have been recommending them which is a couple of years. if you have a clueless relative and want to give them Avast just use Ninite. all you have to do is send them the link and tell them to check the box, couldn't be simpler.
To quote Angry Joe in his review of Sacred II its all about the loot. The fun thing about hack and slash is being a total loot whore and trying to find the best loot. Since drops are random for the most part in most games it can take some work to get the loot but once you have some killer loot it can kick some ass.