Apple won't do that because 1.-They would have to deal with too much support and 2.-That would put them in MSFT country and if you have watched the moves of late, such as the lawsuit by Nokia not mentioning Apple, then you know Apple and MSFT are being friends now. Makes sense, Apple doesn't give a crap about low margin sales and those are MSFT's bread and butter, so they can take the low end with WinRT in mobile and Apple wouldn't give a shit because it will never have the rep of the iPad.
As for what happens with win 8 and XP? I think its a tempest in a teacup, MSFT will let the OEMs put win 7 on the non touch based laptops and desktops along with a Win 8 DVD if they wish to "upgrade" and then MSFT can count those as win 8 sales and save face. the fact that Win 7 has been cracked for over a year and one only needs to block a single update (which Windows helpfully hides and never mentions again) tells me what MSFT is expecting to happen, they will "wink wink" let all the mom & pop shops refurb those XP units into Win 7 units without saying a word, and they'll offer Win 7 and Win 8 for $50 just to make sure those that care about a sticker have one. I can tell you one thing they got right in Win 7 is resource management as just for shits and giggles I put win 7 on a 1.8GHz Sempron with 1.5Gb of RAM and an 80Gb HDD and it ran just fine, I even got Aero after slapping a $30 X1650 ATI card I had lying around in it.
So while you are probably right and some will switch to tablets, I personally bet that number is small. At least with my customers the pad like the netbook is a niche device they only use in certain situations while they still have a main PC in the office or den. So just like with Vista where every XP sale counted as a Vista sale because they included a 20c Vista DVD (I think I still have a pile of those somewhere in the shop, nobody wanted the damned things) so too will Win 7 keep being sold with win 8 "upgrade" discs in the box which I'm sure MSFT will spin into "We are giving the user time to switch" or some BS that will last until win 9 which will probably split winRT and WinDesktop. There will be a $50 Win 7 HP and for those on XP that don't want to spend the bux there will be former XP machines with Win 7 Pirate edition on every Craigslist for cheap.
I really think those that are betting win 8 will be another Vista seem to forget that MSFT only had a VERY OLD product to fall back on then, now with Win 7 MSFT has a product that is still "new" for many people and is well liked, so they can afford to practically give it away rather than let Linux or BSD take a hold on the low end. Its like netbooks, Vista wouldn't run so Linux had a shot when suddenly XP came back, only now they can offer Win 7 starter for say $25 and that will run on any box that ran XP no problem. As much as so many people want it to be so I seriously doubt MSFT will make the same mistake twice, it'll be win 7 on the desktop and winRT 8 on touchscreens.
Personally I don't care either way, I just built the oldest a hexacore, the youngest has a quad, I have a hexacore and the rest of the family has from duals to quads and we all have Win 7 so other than having to wipe it at the shop for Win 7 frankly it won't be no skin off my nose, hell I'd probably be rolling in cash for a year and a half as i was wiping Vista for XP. Its just a shame the Linux devs didn't listen and put out a product for the masses, but the ship has done sailed, it'll be MSFT on the desk and lap, Apple owning ARM, and what's left getting the scraps.
Ugh...so wrong I don't even know where to begin...first of all look up "The Blitz" and then tell me how they "stopped them". Sure the bombing stopped, know why? Because Hitler made the biggest bonehead move and got bogged down fighting on the east and couldn't afford to continue a long drawn out war in the west! But that doesn't change the fact they got bombed for most of the war, first conventional and then V1 and V2
Now again remember we are talking about a PLANE BASED LASER with a MAX RANGE of 300Km on solid rockets, okay? Now yes the sat will detect AFTER they have launched but there is NO WAY, unless you are seriously suggesting that we repeat the old "bear runs" of the cold war were we kept bombs at the failsafe point 24/7/365 in rotating shifts for this thing to 1.-get airborne, 2.-dash across the border, which of course will already be on full alert and have interceptors in the air so you will also have to have YOUR interceptors already in the air as well to guard this thing, 3.-Dodge ALL the AAA, SAMs, and interceptors and after all that 4.-Hit these things while they are still within range.
So I'm sorry friend but this thing is just a money pit and security theater, nothing more. the number of circumstances that would have to go just right and in the right order to get this thing to target borders on the ridiculous. it reminds me of those early laser tests where they told them before time what direction they would come from, the heading, the speed, the altitude, IRL your enemy isn't gonna be so retarded as to tell you all of that!
Real wars just don't work like that and this thing is just another money pit prezzie for the MIC. Frankly the money could be spent on anything and get a better deal, be it more planes, better radar stations, more radar stations, hell the ONLY way something like this could reasonably work is space based and we can't do that without breaking a dozen treaties and risking the very conflict this stupid thing is supposed to prevent. But if you think you can get the enemy to tell you when its gonna launch, only do so on a day with clear weather and leave a corridor open so you can get this thing to target, which remember is in a 737 and therefor doesn't dodge worth a shit? Then yeah it might work, but I think you'd have a better chance of knocking it down by launching flying pigs than by getting this turkey to work.
I think I have figured out why MSFT and Apple are suddenly friends and its a lot of little things coming together but above all its a common enemy...Google.
Now that MSFT has bowed out of the media player market by killing Zune there is really only one place that MSFT and Apple really are in competition is the X86 market and looking at Apple under Cook with the way updates to the line have been getting anemic and they are running off pros by dumbing down products like FCP I honestly believe cook is gonna take Apple out of that market. Makes sense as Intel killed the Nvidia chipsets and its getting harder and harder to keep the line trendy with Intel whipping out new chips, its just not a big money maker compared to the i line of products. So I think they will keep a few bottom of the line units for another year or two and then bow out, declaring the iPad the new mac.
Then you have to look at what Apple and MSFT have had as of late, with Apple taking the high margin sales and MSFT taking the low? I don't think apple has a problem with that, they have never wanted low margin sales. They know even with MSFT getting into tablets and smart phones what they will see, business oriented with major fuckups in UI design but that hardware is cheaper so the low rent market will go for it, again not a market Apple really cares about.
But then here comes Google...ya know, even if I don't personally use or care for a product I WILL give credit where credit is due and Google threw a BIG monkey wrench right into the nice game Apple and MSFT were playing. You see Apple sells hardware, MSFT software, and Google's model is neither and it pisses with both companies niches. Google gives away Android and does all the work so MSFT can't sell cheap copies to OEMs like they usually do, and since Google is making its money on Google ads and services it doesn't care what kind of hardware you put it on so you are seeing both expensive and cheap android units, and of course those more high end units are cutting into Apple turf. If Apple plays the same game with Google they'll have to update their lines more often as all these new Android pads get faster and faster chips and bigger and bigger graphics, which with Tegra out there that is a worry, because Nvidia is cooking up some pretty powerful chips.
So frankly I suspect we'll be seeing more and more of this as we go along. Apple doesn't care about MSFT and the low end market, MSFT doesn't really have any products being marketed to the same demographic Apple owns so no real reason to hate each other and BOTH companies would like to "fucking kill Google" with Jobs going so far as to say he'd spend his entire fortune to nuke Android.
But if I were Google it wouldn't be the lawsuits that would be worrying me, it'd be the one place where MSFT and Apple can royally fuck Google, and that is content. One serious blind spot Google has always had has been content, after all they thought they could just snatch content like they snatch web pages in the search engine with GoogleTV and quickly got the banhammer on their device. This is one area where both Apple and MSFT have also been particularly strong, with MSFT making deals for content for Windows internet TV and X360 and Apple of course with iTunes.
So while the lawsuits are more drawn out if I was Google I'd be busting my hump signing deals with content providers left and right, because who would want an Android device if it only has YouTube? The fact we haven't seen Google doing this is worrisome, and Google would do well to remember the rule about sleeping giants. If MSFT and Apple are playing nice that is a hell of a lot of capital between them for signing content and if everyone is distracted by the lawsuits that could give Apple and MSFT just the time they need to split ARM like they did x86.
"All hail the one true God!" you DO know that is what you sound like, yes? this is why i separate FOSS advocates from FOSSies, because just like Moonies FOSSies are batshit. Look at yourself, you are equating MSFT owning something with the selling of an immortal soul...batshit! If MSFT owns these there is NO WAY IN HELL they would launch a direct assault on Linux, hell they have contributed enough to the kernel for Hyper-V in the past 3 years to put them in the top 5 so it simply isn't in their interests. Hell SUSE wouldn't even have a pulse right now if MSFT didn't keep buying hundreds of millions of SUSE licenses so they can bundle SUSE VMs with WinServer contracts.
so give it up loony tunes, your worst nightmare has come to pass, MSFT has figured out how to make money off of you. They'll just keep bundling SUSE VMs with WinServer to make it a better deal for the megacorps and will keep right on ignoring you, hell Ballmer doesn't even rant about you anymore, he is too busy worrying about Apple and Google to give a rat's ass about Linux. game over, pack up and go home, don't forget to hit the lights on your way out,mmmkay?
Nope it is EXTREMELY rare for the losing party to have to pay shit, and since you have tons of ambulance chasers willing to work on a contingency basis, aka "We get a cut only if you win" that is why many here call it "lawsuit lotto" because like the lotto it costs the person VERY little to play and can net them millions. Of course the ones that DO pay are minorities who won't get hired for fear of lawsuit lotto, stores who bump the hell out of security for fear of the fake slip and fallers looking for lawsuit lotto, pretty much everyone BUT the one actually starting the spin at the lawsuit lotto wheel pays.
NOW do you see why i say we're fucked in the USA? if I was starting a new business it would be in China, too much BS and risk here.
You've obviously never had to deal with someone who has a mental illness, because as someone who has I can tell you with their already diminished mental capacity frankly it wouldn't be hard to feed on their already powerful paranoia to get them to do what you want. After all to them it wouldn't BE terrorism, it would be fighting back against those that have attacked you first. it doesn't matter that the "attack" is only in their mind, hell it can be as slight as someone bumping into them on the street, but you have to remember there are a LOT of people out there with bad wiring in their brains that are undiagnosed and while functional frankly wouldn't take much to push them into full blown crazy.
He is probably talking about the fact that if they are non white you WILL be hit by a "You're racist!" lawsuit which it doesn't matter whether it is successful or not you WILL have to defend yourself against it. Its just another ugly reality in a lawsuit happy country with too many ambulance chasers that it really don't take much to get someone to play lawsuit lotto anymore. I have talked to owners of companies that privately confided in me they are afraid to hire certain races, not because they harbor any kind of ill will or racism, but because the last time they did and fired a worker who wasn't pulling their weight they had to deal with lawsuit lotto. this is also why they won't try for government contracts because of quotas and the fear they will be stuck dealing with workers they are afraid to let go for fear of spending a year or more dealing with a lawsuit lotto.
In the end it is hard not to look at the situation and not decide that the USA is doomed, you have "free trade" with countries that let you dump toxic waste out the back door or let workers be exposed to hazards we would never be allowed to get away with and rightly so, we have plenty of uneducated or undereducated workers and a ton of lawyers looking to make a buck with more cranked out every year, oh and a congress that spends like drunken sailors no matter who you vote for while giving their buddies "free" money. Things just don't look good folks, not good at all.
The airlines did it so they could dump the retirement benefits they had agreed to onto the US taxpayer which of course saved them a shitload of money. it was a nice scam, get the employees to agree to all these cuts in return for benefits and then don't actually provide the benefits. As for IBM? They are just showing why the USA is a corpse, they are shedding as many USA jobs as they can because you can hire someone in India and China for a pittance compared to a US worker.
This is why I have been saying for years FREE TRADE IS A LIE because it is impossible to have free trade with a country that has practically zero worker or environmental regulations. it would be like putting your HS football team against the Denver Broncos and then paying the refs to look the other way on fouls. Even if your team played their ass off the other guy has so many advantages, in this case they can have unsafe work conditions, no overtime, dump toxic waste in the ditch, that there is simply no way to compete.
So while the MSM lies to us about "jobless recovery" which is newspeak for "The rich are doing VERY well, aren't you happy?" the reality is if you go to the flyover states and drive through their business districts they look like "Escape From New York" with endless empty factories and abandoned buildings. For the first time ever I have had several businesses that I work with file bankruptcy and close shop, not because they were wasting capital or running debts, but because they could see the writing on the wall and realized it was impossible to compete. A few sold their assets and then retired, a few other moved to mexico, but the one thing I heard over and over was "I just can't compete with those that don't have any regulations" and its a fact. Free trade is a lie, it benefits the 1% while destroying the country and its time we made isolationism and nationalism the policy. Do you think India and China would put up with this kind of crap? They would shut down their borders first.
But the bigger question is would they? Or would they simply buy exemptions for themselves? After all it would allow the "giants" of software to essential gain a cartel like control over all software in the USA, and would kill any competition inside the USA dead. Don't forget these are multinational corporations, so this would give them one market locked up while they continued any research overseas, wouldn't hurt them any. who it would hurt is the little guys and as we have seen time and time again those are the ones whose voices are rarely heard in DC.
So I wish I shared your optimism but I'd worry that they'd either buy a bill that would label them exempt or they would sign cross licensing agreements and form consortiums like MPEG-LA.
Actually you would probably be better off if it WAS Microsoft, as from the sounds of those names they are venture capitalists, aka vultures. MSFT would be leery of an outright lawsuit going after Linux, after all they just got off the hook on antitrust and they sure as hell wouldn't want to have several governments looking at them closely again, but venture capitalists are gonna go for the money PERIOD. After all those corporate raiding types have a rep slightly below leeches anyway so they won't give a shit if there is cash involved.
Of course there is even bigger problems than who owns the old Novell rights and that is this: If this stands you won't be able to do jack shit unless you are one of the "big boys' or working for them. after all they'll be quick to sign cross licensing agreements to keep this from becoming mutually assured destruction, same as even when they were tied up in a lawsuit neither Intel or AMD tried to rescind on their cross licensing of X86, but only the old guard with big bux will be able to play because without enough weight to get your own agreement you'd be sued to death. that would mean you could probably count the corps on two hands..Apple, Google, MSFT, Oracle, IBM, Amazon, it would be a "billionaire boys club" and nobody else would be invited. Scary thought. Any venture capitalists show up with copyrights i'm sure one of the big boys will buy them out to put more weapons in their warchest.
Now does anybody doubt that I'm right when i said the west will be deader than Dixie thanks to all the "IP" minefields and the east will rise to take our place? The copyright and patent minefields are already so damned thick with many things you'd be better off building in China and if they put western 150+ year copyrights on APIs? Give it up chuck, software development here will grind to a halt. The same as the USA built off the "stolen IP" of the UK and Europe to build themselves into an empire during the industrial revolution so too will China and India do the same to us while our own IP laws bury us in lawsuits.
Not to mention you'll at most catch absolute morons who at their best would simply win a Darwin Award because the kind of bozos these "stings" catch are frankly the same gullible dipshits that fall for 419 scams and other stupidity.
It reminds me of the total waste of time a buddy at the state crime lab does all day searching PCs of social retards instead of actually catching child molesters. He says day after day he sees the same shit that has been floating around the net since the days of USENET but it would take a lot of money to have them actually hunt for child molesters, not to mention it would probably cross state lines so the prosecutor wouldn't get credit, so instead they spend their days on the net trolling for fat losers that he says always end up being some maladjusted porn addict that wouldn't know what to do with anyone, much less a kid, if you threw them into a pit of 'em.
Nope this is just another case of something the government is damned good at, and that is the appearance of doing SOMETHING even if that something actually is as useless as moving a rock from the left side of a field only to move it back to the right the next day. its pointless, a waste of money, and doesn't catch the actual threats but hey, the next time a real threat shows up and smacks them they can always say "hey we were doing something!" and CYA so they don't get fired. Our tax dollars at work ladies and gentlemen, just another complete waste of time and money. Surprised?
Well it just shows that war never changes. When my mother was little she used to help take care of my great great grandfather as he was in his late 90s when she was a child and he fought in the civil war. He was a rebel but not because he believed in slavery, in fact he never owned a slave, it was Sherman burning as he went that got him involved. But what struck me was how alike both of their stories were in some respects. Both great great grandfather and my grandfather said it wasn't the bullets that scared them, with both it was the cannons that gave them fear. With great great grandfather according to mom he said it was the "whistling" sound, they would use nails, chains, anything they could stuff down the barrel and it would make this whistling sound and of course what a chain shot out of a cannon did to a human body was just horrible, and with grandfather it was the PAK weapons because he said they made this roar, like some monster, and when they hit it was all red mist and doll pieces. Anyway i just thought that was interesting and of course when I found out mom had heard great great grandfather's stories I wanted to hear them too and thought it was amazing that a century later and it was the same thing causing both men fear.
So to get a feel for your subject matter take a look at the weapons the GIs faced, especially the PAKs and MGs which were the terror weapons of their day. Also look at their day to day lives, because for the grunts at the front it was just nuts. I mean can you imagine trying to eat while shells are going off, or having to learn to smoke with your head down at night because the coal would give you away to a sniper? just nuts. Anyway good luck on your story, and remember that for every Patton or Rommel there were a million grunts like my granddad, just ordinary guys trying to stay alive.
That is why frankly the Linux community confuses the fuck out of me. i mean so much effort is wasted on the desktop, and the desktop is dead, its flatline, MSFT will be the next IBM stuck with a mature platform that only gets replaced when the previous one breaks.
But if there was EVER a chance to get Linux into the mainstream smartphones and tablets is it! Its obvious many of the handset guys are worried about Google, especially with them buying Motorola, MSFT is of course stuck at the hip with Nokia, and Apple sure ain't selling iOS to anybody, so here is your chance guys. Take one of your low resources DEs like LXDE, make it touch friendly, and place it on a stable platform with long term staying power like Debian. Then cook up a repo with an appstore style front end, hell base it on click 'n run, that's nice and friendly, and you'll be in business!
Because it looks like the big three are starting to get too big for their britches and this is one area where people aren't gonna give a shit about running some old Windows programs, as long as you got plenty of apps. Well with source code available you should have no problem porting apps to ARM and you already have examples of the apps folks want, cute little games like Wenoth and Tux Racer, a nice media player in VLC, and lightweight office apps like Abiword. this looks like a chance for some small group to get a shot at getting some share and its obvious from the posts here the geeks will love it and push the hell out of it. Hell I'm a Windows guy and I'd buy it, because i'd know I wouldn't get stuck with an unsupported device 3 minutes after i unpack it.
So here is your chance guys, pick up some cheap hardware from China (plenty of nice KIRF iPhone and iPad style devices there you can get cheap) slap a nice Debian based OS on it and sell baby sell! You start building a little buzz and moving some units I bet all those makers that don't want to deal with the big three will take a look, and if nothing else I bet you'll have no problem selling every unit you can put out. hell you can even talk to the GOG guys about some cross promotion and having a version of their DOS games for your device, DOSBox has an ARM port right?
Thanks for the link, nice to know the same ones that bought the last congress critter which we threw out bought the current congress critter. And folks wonder why i say voting is pointless? Hell the only difference between the two is the previous one took more lawyer money and the new one more banker money, but the big names are the same.
Uhhh...no yourself, since you obviously either didn't read or understand the link provided. the issue was NOT air supremacy but whether or not Britain could assure its people that they wouldn't be bombed. And then, same as now, that answer is NO. It is no because with an ICBM using solid fuel frankly you wouldn't know the enemy was gonna attack until the first missiles have already left the pad and by then you are SOL. Sure if they are throwing something about as sophisticated as a Scud you could shoot it down, but hell you could use a Patriot to shoot a Scud.
With an ICBM unless your enemy is so damned retarded they say "We will attack you tomorrow at 2 PM" you simply wouldn't have enough time to 1.-Get these planes into the air, 2.-Dash across the border, 3.-Dodge all the AAA, and reach the silos in time to hit them.
So again nobody is talking about "Air Supremacy" because frankly if you have that already YOU DON'T NEED THE STUPID LASER as you could just drop shitloads of bombs onto the sites with B-52s! No the whole point of this entire stupid laser program is stopping first strikes which unless you attack first (therefor not making anything the enemy does a first strike but a retaliation) then its just not gonna work, because by the time you know the enemy has decided to attack the first missiles have already launched.
I have a feeling that too many are banking on Win 8 biting MSFT in the ass when in reality it will just be Vista all over again. remember what MSFT did when that turned out to be a stinker? it just quietly kept XP on the shelves. I don't know if you caught it or not but win 7 had its EOL raised for ALL versions to Apr 2020 recently so even some of the guys at MSFT don't think Win 8 is gonna fly.
I bet there is something else you don't know, something that MSFT has been keeping WAY on the down low but all the pirate sites have already gotten wind of...psst...Win 7 copy protection has been obliterated for over a year now, and it looks like there is nothing being done about it! That is why you look on any Craigslist you'll see $100 PCs with $300 Win 7 Ultimate on them, because some pirates are tarded and not smart enough to realize putting a $300 OS on a $100 box is obvious piracy. But the rest will just be getting all these XP boxes with win 7 HP which BTW the pirate edition gets FULL updates now! MSFT says "It doesn't want pirated Windows spreading worms" but we all know the score, they are worried when XP dies that all those millions of boxes will go elsewhere. I predict a few months before XP goes EOL you'll see "XP Upgrade Specials" offered by MSFT, most likely Win 7 and 8 HP at $50. At $50 a pop nobody will care about learning a new OS when they can just stick with Windows for less than going to see a 3D movie for 4 nowadays.
And while I agree with you that PC-BSD is a nice OS, the problem is frankly the insane rate of hardware releases and trying to keep up. what PC-BSD is someone to reach out to the hardware manufacturers and show them they can write once and use for years with them like they can with Windows, but until you can get one or more major OEMs to at least make a token offering I just don't see the momentum. that is one thing I will give to the FOSSies, they will bitch their living asses off at OEMs like Dell until they throw a couple of units at them to get them to stop blogging, the BSD guys are just too nice and polite for their own good.
As for Apple? mark these words friend and mark them well...Apple out of the PC business within 5 years. They have already stopped refreshing the Mac pro line on any kind of reasonable timetable and all but ran off the Hollywood pros by turning FCP into iMovie II, and I believe this is a part of a bigger strategy by Cook. You look at his movies before and after becoming head of Apple and he was buying the living hell out of all the chips used in its ARM devices, Intel? Practically ignored. telling is the fact they didn't even attempt to strong arm Intel to allow other chipsets even though they knew that the Intel GPUs just wouldn't cut it, why? In the past they used threats of going to AMD to get Intel to bend and AMD has a nice 4 core APU in Liano that DOES have killer graphics, yet not a peep, again why?
Because Cook is gonna abandon the Mac line and stick with the uber high profits of the consumer devices where they practically own the market, that's why. He sees the price of PCs is going nowhere but down, hell you can buy $400 laptops that have the same or better power than a nice Macbook had just 2 years ago so to keep ahead of the curve would take a shitload of work, or he can just quietly exit that downward spiral for a market where his brand is king, really its a no brainer. Sure the old Mac guys will bitch but so what? they are maybe 4% of the product line and as i pointed out it will cost more and more to keep Apple at the top, especially with Intel making sure its just them and AMD in the chipset business.
So what i truly believe is MSFT will "wink wink" at piracy and/or offer a dirt cheap Windows home to keep those XP boxes running MSFT software, Apple will leave the flatline X86 market to Windows, and ARM will be split between Google which will own the low end and Apple which will own the high. Linux and BSD will keep a nice niche in servers and embedded and MSFT will become the new IBM, owners of a market that frankly won'
Meh don't worry little canuck, just as the UK went all big brother and made us in the USA feel better so too will our pathetic congress critters that frankly are able to blow more money than Charlie Sheen on a coke binge at a porn convention will just keep printing the money until the whole shell game shits all over itself and the US dollar makes Zimbabwe money look good and then you'll just be so damned happy you don't have to pull your SUV by horseback to really give a shit about some stinky old law.
Hell if its one thing we can learn from each other it is that ALL of the western governments are about as useless as tits on a boar hog and so damned corrupt they'd sell their mama for a bribe, so just grab all you can for you and yours because the excrement will be hitting the bladed cooling device. I figure the USA as you know it know will be gone by 2020 when our debt will be...what? 500 times the GDP of the planet or so? of course by then the MAFIAA will have passed laws so that if you fart and it sounds like a note in the western scale you owe one of them a check, but hey What can ya do, they got Tomahawks and sacks of money and you got shotguns and a quickly inflating away paycheck, not exactly a fair fight friend.
Well I was recently informed that MATE was due to mint so I will be the first to admit being mistaken and give credit where credit is due. I probably should have used CentOS as an example since they are a classic example of a "leech" in that they USED to buy RHEL for their hardware devices that they sold but then figured it was cheaper to rip out the copyrights and sell their hardware with RH without actually having to pay for it, therefor a classic leech.
But in the end, and i hope you do see this and agree, the home user market simply won't accept what many take for granted in the Linux world. the whole hunting forums for fixes, often having to use Bash to apply said fixes, the need to tweak said fixes because the broken driver model is so damned picky that if a fix is designed for version B rev C firmware D and you have version B rev D firmware G the damned thing won't work, and of course that isn't counting the placeholder help files, really shitty wireless subsystem, graphics, especially anything that involves X, being total shit. I mean I have seen Linux crap itself just because I had a web page and a video at the same time, and I haven't seen that kind of crap with Windows since Win9X! it wasn't just me either, look up the head of OSNews who wrote a really nice article on why he found X Server to be shit.
The problem is that just like in party politics the fringe have taken over the tent. point out ANY of these problems and watch how quickly they mass to attack. I have actually had FOSSies argue up and down to me that I should teach, on my own time without compensation mind you, my customers to "embrace the power of CLI" like its the God damned force! And for what? What do they gain? The freedom to tinker, something they will NEVER use? The "fun" of having drivers break every 6 months and having to have a second unit so they can Google for fixes when the first breaks?
In the end the reality they refuse to accept and will sling FUD all day trying to disprove, is that for the vast majority Windows runs problem free. I have customers that are on the same XP install 8 years later with ZERO bugs or problems, simply by having a good free AV (Avast or Comodo both work well in this regard) and a teeny tiny bit of common sense like not opening strange emails, which frankly webmail has eliminated as a threat for most anyway. in its current form to use a/. car analogy Linux on the desktop is like that rusting dodge you see in a field somewhere. IF you spend the time restoring it, learning all its quirks, and are willing to spend a LOT of time under the hood? Sure it'll make a decent car, you may even be able to turn it into a hot rod. But the VAST majority have NO desire to do all that bullshit and just want something that works OOTB and more importantly KEEPS WORKING which sadly does NOT describe Linux with its shite on a crusty roll driver situation.
I would never wish ill upon him but frankly as long as Torvalds is in charge things will NEVER get any better because he will never allow an ABI, simple as that, and the current model ONLY works on servers, and only then because the hardware for many of the subsystems is practically ancient (like I said many servers still use ATI Rage chips for video) and the few new items are supported by companies spending millions to keep their drivers functional. With the razor thin margins of desktops that simply won't happen so without an ABI so companies can "write once, use for years" it will stay completely pointless and a non starter. Like I said a single driver fuckup can easily cost me more than Windows Home, and every suggestion I have seen, such as buy support (Minimum $200 a year), only buy hardware specifically listed as supported (Lists are often out of date, supported today does NOT mean working tomorrow, and workstation quality gear prices most out of the market) or supporting the fixes myself (home users won't buy support contracts so I would go bankrupt in a year) are ALL completely unacceptable.
But what we need is NOT more of the money pit fighters like F-22 and F-35 (which is already up to a trillion over lifetime) but a fighter we can afford to use en masse like the Stealth Eagle which we can have cranked off the assembly line for $100 million VS the conservative 240 million plus for the F-35. The wiki lists the flyaway cost of the F-22 at 150 million but considering the problems we have had with it (not to mention the USAF not wanting to deploy them to the ME because of how expensive they are) I'd say that is a pretty conservative estimation.
You are right that are airframes are getting old but our increased effectiveness of our missiles and the skill of our pilots means we can get MUCH better bang for the buck by simply have more of our battle tested and proven designs built. We need more F-15s, F-16s, F18s, and personally I'd like to see more Warthogs built as well because once you achieve air superiority those hogs do serious damage to armored vehicles and soft targets which will be the primary threat after the aircraft are taken down, not to mention they give our boys on the ground a plane that can stay in the area for long loiter times and bring hellish firepower to bear at a moments notice.
Look we ALL know what this stupid laser boondoggle is, alright? Its another MIC circlejerk where the corps cut some fat checks to bribe...err..I mean "support the re-election" of some key congress critters and in return they piss tons of OUR money away on yet another useless POS that probably will never even do half of what its supporters claim. Much better when we are broke as a damned joke to spend that money wisely on proven tech that can be delivered on time and on budget, and that is what the teen series represent.
Those who learn nothing from history will be doomed to repeat it..the bomber will always get through so the only thing one can reasonably do is make sure that everyone knows that the one that launches will be living in a quiet neighborhood for about the next 10,000 years.
Wouldn't make sense as a thin client Nethead, as you can get E350s in a thin case for less than the cost of a chip alone which only uses 18w and has more than enough power to be a thin OR a fat client. Look around, there are several E350s that are small enough to bolt onto a monitor using VESA mounts and again the whole smash costs less than the chip for this which lets be reasonable, a thin client isn't gonna need a Core chip as all the processing heavy lifting is done on the server. Hell I've built several of the E350s for office boxes and even as fat clients the lack of needing cooling fans and low power draw make them excellent office units.
Nope the only place i can think of that you might need Core power heavy lifting would be car computers, where you want it to function like a full blown HTPC while on the road. Well that and if you have an office that does a lot of CAD I could see these having enough power to do the heavy lifting but in every other niche that thin and light does they could have went with an Atom and it wouldn't have mattered except by lowering the price.
BTW that is one niche where AMD does have a clear advantage, as nothing Intel has sips power like those 18w Brazos chips while still having enough muscle to be used as a day to day computer without feeling gipped. maybe if the rumors are true that Intel will be introducing a 22nm out of order Atom with a decent built in GPU, but I believe those are scheduled for 2014 at the earliest so if one wants to build a mini for thin clients, office boxes, hell I've built HTPCs out of the E350 and they do 1080p nicely with full acceleration for most formats and a PCIe slot for an external GPU if you desire. Nope this unit is just too highly priced for a thin client.
Caps are 36Gb a month here friend (25Gb a month DSL) for residential so every Gb counts. I am lucky I got grandfathered in so I can often go 10-15Gb over and not get hit with the 1.50 per Gb charge but I have NO doubt if I switched to Vonage that leeway would disappear overnight. BTW you better get ready for it as the rumor is the other cablecos are looking to see how much of a shitfit people have here, which sadly isn't much because guess what? the cableco is offering all kinds of discount for THEIR services like video on demand which surprise! Doesn't count against the cap. Netflix already made a deal to host a local cache so they don't count either.
So look upon me and despair, for I am your future. they will simply bundle the living hell out of their services (along with looong contracts, currently to not pay $150+ a month one has to sign a 2 year contract) and have caps nasty enough to "steer" you in whatever direction they desire. It sucks but I have elderly parents and can't just move away.
Not to mention you'd have to know when the missiles are gonna be rolled out and fired and assume you would get plenty of warning about this when as we all know NK is an unstable regime with only the generals willingness to put up with "great commander' or whatever the little fat fucker calls himself keeping the leader in power. if they build the launcher for the new system underground (which would be the most logical scenario as it doesn't tip off your enemies when you are readying them for launch) then you would most likely at best have a few minutes to hit the things. Since this unit was meant to hit them ONLY on the way up and ONLY at 300km and that was IF they could get it to work as planned more likely this turkey would be less effective than just spamming the area with drones and hoping you could ram them into missiles.
But there is a bigger question here folks: Who is getting the cash and hookers to push this turkey? There must be some pretty big checks being written to the right people to get something pushed which is so obviously a failwhale. We need bloggers (since the MSM is too busy sucking big business dicks) to go pouring over campaign finance reports and connecting the dots to show which congressmen have sold us out this week and for how many pieces of silver. To me THAT is the bigger story here, not another B-1 style money pit.
That is why I have just given up. I no longer download distros and even block linux articles from showing up on/. because i just tired of dealing with the crazy. things are NOT getting better, in fact with the DEs being gutted and pulseaudio if anything things are more unstable than they were even 5 years ago!
That's why you ought to try Win 7, i got into Linux when the crapfest that was Vista came out but frankly i never had as many bugs with Vista as i did with Linux, but 7 is as stable as a rock and purrs like a kitten, be it on my cheap ass $350 netbook or my hexacore gaming PC it "just works" without crashes or bugs or hassle. Hell for shits and giggles I even stuck in on a 1.8GHz Sempron with 1.5Gb of RAM just to see how it runs and you know what? it runs quite well, I just don't have Aero (which i turn off anyway) but other than Aero its smooth and responsive.
But as long as you are on XP you might want to check out Comodo Internet Security along with Ninite, both are free (I'd give you the link to CIS but the URL is crazy long) and I use these along with Comodo Dragon on my XP boxes I sell and frankly not a single bug yet. the nice thing about CIS is it will sandbox the browser of your choice and scan all pages before load so that you don't have to worry about any malware links, even if you are on XP.
But this is why i have given up even attempting to discuss anything with them anymore, they just won't listen. last time i loaded up one of the Linux articles it was nothing but a giant groupthink circle jerk, with everyone trying to top each other in the crazy dept. But as long as nobody will stand up as a group and tell the devs that the itch scratching BS is over then things will never get any better, only worse.
You are right nobody will do the work but i think its much worse than that, i mean look at how many help files are just CLI lists or "to do" placeholders? without any monetary motivations the devs don't listen to anyone, and with so many of the FOSSies pushing out the FOSS advocates nobody will ever call them out over it. i mean look at how many here worship RMS and he's a fricking squatter at MIT that doesn't even use the Internet! I mean how do you get through to people that will actually listen to and deify a guy that thinks its okay to squat on a campus and even worse pull off his shoes and socks ON STAGE and eat some toe funk?
if you want to keep trying to talk to them Barbara go right ahead, but as you saw with that one you posted the chapter and verse on copyright law for only to have him continue to argue black is white its like trying to explain evolution to someone that believes Noah rode a dinosaur, you just can't penetrate the dogma. All they will do is tune you out and keep spouting their religious beliefs. kinda sad that free software now is treated like religion, but frankly the nutters have taken over the tent and all you can do is pack up and move on before they make you a nutter too.
And those with WMC can just fire up Internet TV. I rarely watch TV but when I get a hankering for some tube I can fire that up and get tons of shows hassle free. I'm watching Star Trek the animated series right now, gotta love the Shat!
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Apple won't do that because 1.-They would have to deal with too much support and 2.-That would put them in MSFT country and if you have watched the moves of late, such as the lawsuit by Nokia not mentioning Apple, then you know Apple and MSFT are being friends now. Makes sense, Apple doesn't give a crap about low margin sales and those are MSFT's bread and butter, so they can take the low end with WinRT in mobile and Apple wouldn't give a shit because it will never have the rep of the iPad.
As for what happens with win 8 and XP? I think its a tempest in a teacup, MSFT will let the OEMs put win 7 on the non touch based laptops and desktops along with a Win 8 DVD if they wish to "upgrade" and then MSFT can count those as win 8 sales and save face. the fact that Win 7 has been cracked for over a year and one only needs to block a single update (which Windows helpfully hides and never mentions again) tells me what MSFT is expecting to happen, they will "wink wink" let all the mom & pop shops refurb those XP units into Win 7 units without saying a word, and they'll offer Win 7 and Win 8 for $50 just to make sure those that care about a sticker have one. I can tell you one thing they got right in Win 7 is resource management as just for shits and giggles I put win 7 on a 1.8GHz Sempron with 1.5Gb of RAM and an 80Gb HDD and it ran just fine, I even got Aero after slapping a $30 X1650 ATI card I had lying around in it.
So while you are probably right and some will switch to tablets, I personally bet that number is small. At least with my customers the pad like the netbook is a niche device they only use in certain situations while they still have a main PC in the office or den. So just like with Vista where every XP sale counted as a Vista sale because they included a 20c Vista DVD (I think I still have a pile of those somewhere in the shop, nobody wanted the damned things) so too will Win 7 keep being sold with win 8 "upgrade" discs in the box which I'm sure MSFT will spin into "We are giving the user time to switch" or some BS that will last until win 9 which will probably split winRT and WinDesktop. There will be a $50 Win 7 HP and for those on XP that don't want to spend the bux there will be former XP machines with Win 7 Pirate edition on every Craigslist for cheap.
I really think those that are betting win 8 will be another Vista seem to forget that MSFT only had a VERY OLD product to fall back on then, now with Win 7 MSFT has a product that is still "new" for many people and is well liked, so they can afford to practically give it away rather than let Linux or BSD take a hold on the low end. Its like netbooks, Vista wouldn't run so Linux had a shot when suddenly XP came back, only now they can offer Win 7 starter for say $25 and that will run on any box that ran XP no problem. As much as so many people want it to be so I seriously doubt MSFT will make the same mistake twice, it'll be win 7 on the desktop and winRT 8 on touchscreens.
Personally I don't care either way, I just built the oldest a hexacore, the youngest has a quad, I have a hexacore and the rest of the family has from duals to quads and we all have Win 7 so other than having to wipe it at the shop for Win 7 frankly it won't be no skin off my nose, hell I'd probably be rolling in cash for a year and a half as i was wiping Vista for XP. Its just a shame the Linux devs didn't listen and put out a product for the masses, but the ship has done sailed, it'll be MSFT on the desk and lap, Apple owning ARM, and what's left getting the scraps.
Ugh...so wrong I don't even know where to begin...first of all look up "The Blitz" and then tell me how they "stopped them". Sure the bombing stopped, know why? Because Hitler made the biggest bonehead move and got bogged down fighting on the east and couldn't afford to continue a long drawn out war in the west! But that doesn't change the fact they got bombed for most of the war, first conventional and then V1 and V2
Now again remember we are talking about a PLANE BASED LASER with a MAX RANGE of 300Km on solid rockets, okay? Now yes the sat will detect AFTER they have launched but there is NO WAY, unless you are seriously suggesting that we repeat the old "bear runs" of the cold war were we kept bombs at the failsafe point 24/7/365 in rotating shifts for this thing to 1.-get airborne, 2.-dash across the border, which of course will already be on full alert and have interceptors in the air so you will also have to have YOUR interceptors already in the air as well to guard this thing, 3.-Dodge ALL the AAA, SAMs, and interceptors and after all that 4.-Hit these things while they are still within range.
So I'm sorry friend but this thing is just a money pit and security theater, nothing more. the number of circumstances that would have to go just right and in the right order to get this thing to target borders on the ridiculous. it reminds me of those early laser tests where they told them before time what direction they would come from, the heading, the speed, the altitude, IRL your enemy isn't gonna be so retarded as to tell you all of that!
Real wars just don't work like that and this thing is just another money pit prezzie for the MIC. Frankly the money could be spent on anything and get a better deal, be it more planes, better radar stations, more radar stations, hell the ONLY way something like this could reasonably work is space based and we can't do that without breaking a dozen treaties and risking the very conflict this stupid thing is supposed to prevent. But if you think you can get the enemy to tell you when its gonna launch, only do so on a day with clear weather and leave a corridor open so you can get this thing to target, which remember is in a 737 and therefor doesn't dodge worth a shit? Then yeah it might work, but I think you'd have a better chance of knocking it down by launching flying pigs than by getting this turkey to work.
I think I have figured out why MSFT and Apple are suddenly friends and its a lot of little things coming together but above all its a common enemy...Google.
Now that MSFT has bowed out of the media player market by killing Zune there is really only one place that MSFT and Apple really are in competition is the X86 market and looking at Apple under Cook with the way updates to the line have been getting anemic and they are running off pros by dumbing down products like FCP I honestly believe cook is gonna take Apple out of that market. Makes sense as Intel killed the Nvidia chipsets and its getting harder and harder to keep the line trendy with Intel whipping out new chips, its just not a big money maker compared to the i line of products. So I think they will keep a few bottom of the line units for another year or two and then bow out, declaring the iPad the new mac.
Then you have to look at what Apple and MSFT have had as of late, with Apple taking the high margin sales and MSFT taking the low? I don't think apple has a problem with that, they have never wanted low margin sales. They know even with MSFT getting into tablets and smart phones what they will see, business oriented with major fuckups in UI design but that hardware is cheaper so the low rent market will go for it, again not a market Apple really cares about.
But then here comes Google...ya know, even if I don't personally use or care for a product I WILL give credit where credit is due and Google threw a BIG monkey wrench right into the nice game Apple and MSFT were playing. You see Apple sells hardware, MSFT software, and Google's model is neither and it pisses with both companies niches. Google gives away Android and does all the work so MSFT can't sell cheap copies to OEMs like they usually do, and since Google is making its money on Google ads and services it doesn't care what kind of hardware you put it on so you are seeing both expensive and cheap android units, and of course those more high end units are cutting into Apple turf. If Apple plays the same game with Google they'll have to update their lines more often as all these new Android pads get faster and faster chips and bigger and bigger graphics, which with Tegra out there that is a worry, because Nvidia is cooking up some pretty powerful chips.
So frankly I suspect we'll be seeing more and more of this as we go along. Apple doesn't care about MSFT and the low end market, MSFT doesn't really have any products being marketed to the same demographic Apple owns so no real reason to hate each other and BOTH companies would like to "fucking kill Google" with Jobs going so far as to say he'd spend his entire fortune to nuke Android.
But if I were Google it wouldn't be the lawsuits that would be worrying me, it'd be the one place where MSFT and Apple can royally fuck Google, and that is content. One serious blind spot Google has always had has been content, after all they thought they could just snatch content like they snatch web pages in the search engine with GoogleTV and quickly got the banhammer on their device. This is one area where both Apple and MSFT have also been particularly strong, with MSFT making deals for content for Windows internet TV and X360 and Apple of course with iTunes.
So while the lawsuits are more drawn out if I was Google I'd be busting my hump signing deals with content providers left and right, because who would want an Android device if it only has YouTube? The fact we haven't seen Google doing this is worrisome, and Google would do well to remember the rule about sleeping giants. If MSFT and Apple are playing nice that is a hell of a lot of capital between them for signing content and if everyone is distracted by the lawsuits that could give Apple and MSFT just the time they need to split ARM like they did x86.
"All hail the one true God!" you DO know that is what you sound like, yes? this is why i separate FOSS advocates from FOSSies, because just like Moonies FOSSies are batshit. Look at yourself, you are equating MSFT owning something with the selling of an immortal soul...batshit! If MSFT owns these there is NO WAY IN HELL they would launch a direct assault on Linux, hell they have contributed enough to the kernel for Hyper-V in the past 3 years to put them in the top 5 so it simply isn't in their interests. Hell SUSE wouldn't even have a pulse right now if MSFT didn't keep buying hundreds of millions of SUSE licenses so they can bundle SUSE VMs with WinServer contracts.
so give it up loony tunes, your worst nightmare has come to pass, MSFT has figured out how to make money off of you. They'll just keep bundling SUSE VMs with WinServer to make it a better deal for the megacorps and will keep right on ignoring you, hell Ballmer doesn't even rant about you anymore, he is too busy worrying about Apple and Google to give a rat's ass about Linux. game over, pack up and go home, don't forget to hit the lights on your way out,mmmkay?
Nope it is EXTREMELY rare for the losing party to have to pay shit, and since you have tons of ambulance chasers willing to work on a contingency basis, aka "We get a cut only if you win" that is why many here call it "lawsuit lotto" because like the lotto it costs the person VERY little to play and can net them millions. Of course the ones that DO pay are minorities who won't get hired for fear of lawsuit lotto, stores who bump the hell out of security for fear of the fake slip and fallers looking for lawsuit lotto, pretty much everyone BUT the one actually starting the spin at the lawsuit lotto wheel pays.
NOW do you see why i say we're fucked in the USA? if I was starting a new business it would be in China, too much BS and risk here.
You've obviously never had to deal with someone who has a mental illness, because as someone who has I can tell you with their already diminished mental capacity frankly it wouldn't be hard to feed on their already powerful paranoia to get them to do what you want. After all to them it wouldn't BE terrorism, it would be fighting back against those that have attacked you first. it doesn't matter that the "attack" is only in their mind, hell it can be as slight as someone bumping into them on the street, but you have to remember there are a LOT of people out there with bad wiring in their brains that are undiagnosed and while functional frankly wouldn't take much to push them into full blown crazy.
He is probably talking about the fact that if they are non white you WILL be hit by a "You're racist!" lawsuit which it doesn't matter whether it is successful or not you WILL have to defend yourself against it. Its just another ugly reality in a lawsuit happy country with too many ambulance chasers that it really don't take much to get someone to play lawsuit lotto anymore. I have talked to owners of companies that privately confided in me they are afraid to hire certain races, not because they harbor any kind of ill will or racism, but because the last time they did and fired a worker who wasn't pulling their weight they had to deal with lawsuit lotto. this is also why they won't try for government contracts because of quotas and the fear they will be stuck dealing with workers they are afraid to let go for fear of spending a year or more dealing with a lawsuit lotto.
In the end it is hard not to look at the situation and not decide that the USA is doomed, you have "free trade" with countries that let you dump toxic waste out the back door or let workers be exposed to hazards we would never be allowed to get away with and rightly so, we have plenty of uneducated or undereducated workers and a ton of lawyers looking to make a buck with more cranked out every year, oh and a congress that spends like drunken sailors no matter who you vote for while giving their buddies "free" money. Things just don't look good folks, not good at all.
The airlines did it so they could dump the retirement benefits they had agreed to onto the US taxpayer which of course saved them a shitload of money. it was a nice scam, get the employees to agree to all these cuts in return for benefits and then don't actually provide the benefits. As for IBM? They are just showing why the USA is a corpse, they are shedding as many USA jobs as they can because you can hire someone in India and China for a pittance compared to a US worker.
This is why I have been saying for years FREE TRADE IS A LIE because it is impossible to have free trade with a country that has practically zero worker or environmental regulations. it would be like putting your HS football team against the Denver Broncos and then paying the refs to look the other way on fouls. Even if your team played their ass off the other guy has so many advantages, in this case they can have unsafe work conditions, no overtime, dump toxic waste in the ditch, that there is simply no way to compete.
So while the MSM lies to us about "jobless recovery" which is newspeak for "The rich are doing VERY well, aren't you happy?" the reality is if you go to the flyover states and drive through their business districts they look like "Escape From New York" with endless empty factories and abandoned buildings. For the first time ever I have had several businesses that I work with file bankruptcy and close shop, not because they were wasting capital or running debts, but because they could see the writing on the wall and realized it was impossible to compete. A few sold their assets and then retired, a few other moved to mexico, but the one thing I heard over and over was "I just can't compete with those that don't have any regulations" and its a fact. Free trade is a lie, it benefits the 1% while destroying the country and its time we made isolationism and nationalism the policy. Do you think India and China would put up with this kind of crap? They would shut down their borders first.
But the bigger question is would they? Or would they simply buy exemptions for themselves? After all it would allow the "giants" of software to essential gain a cartel like control over all software in the USA, and would kill any competition inside the USA dead. Don't forget these are multinational corporations, so this would give them one market locked up while they continued any research overseas, wouldn't hurt them any. who it would hurt is the little guys and as we have seen time and time again those are the ones whose voices are rarely heard in DC.
So I wish I shared your optimism but I'd worry that they'd either buy a bill that would label them exempt or they would sign cross licensing agreements and form consortiums like MPEG-LA.
Actually you would probably be better off if it WAS Microsoft, as from the sounds of those names they are venture capitalists, aka vultures. MSFT would be leery of an outright lawsuit going after Linux, after all they just got off the hook on antitrust and they sure as hell wouldn't want to have several governments looking at them closely again, but venture capitalists are gonna go for the money PERIOD. After all those corporate raiding types have a rep slightly below leeches anyway so they won't give a shit if there is cash involved.
Of course there is even bigger problems than who owns the old Novell rights and that is this: If this stands you won't be able to do jack shit unless you are one of the "big boys' or working for them. after all they'll be quick to sign cross licensing agreements to keep this from becoming mutually assured destruction, same as even when they were tied up in a lawsuit neither Intel or AMD tried to rescind on their cross licensing of X86, but only the old guard with big bux will be able to play because without enough weight to get your own agreement you'd be sued to death. that would mean you could probably count the corps on two hands..Apple, Google, MSFT, Oracle, IBM, Amazon, it would be a "billionaire boys club" and nobody else would be invited. Scary thought. Any venture capitalists show up with copyrights i'm sure one of the big boys will buy them out to put more weapons in their warchest.
Now does anybody doubt that I'm right when i said the west will be deader than Dixie thanks to all the "IP" minefields and the east will rise to take our place? The copyright and patent minefields are already so damned thick with many things you'd be better off building in China and if they put western 150+ year copyrights on APIs? Give it up chuck, software development here will grind to a halt. The same as the USA built off the "stolen IP" of the UK and Europe to build themselves into an empire during the industrial revolution so too will China and India do the same to us while our own IP laws bury us in lawsuits.
Not to mention you'll at most catch absolute morons who at their best would simply win a Darwin Award because the kind of bozos these "stings" catch are frankly the same gullible dipshits that fall for 419 scams and other stupidity.
It reminds me of the total waste of time a buddy at the state crime lab does all day searching PCs of social retards instead of actually catching child molesters. He says day after day he sees the same shit that has been floating around the net since the days of USENET but it would take a lot of money to have them actually hunt for child molesters, not to mention it would probably cross state lines so the prosecutor wouldn't get credit, so instead they spend their days on the net trolling for fat losers that he says always end up being some maladjusted porn addict that wouldn't know what to do with anyone, much less a kid, if you threw them into a pit of 'em.
Nope this is just another case of something the government is damned good at, and that is the appearance of doing SOMETHING even if that something actually is as useless as moving a rock from the left side of a field only to move it back to the right the next day. its pointless, a waste of money, and doesn't catch the actual threats but hey, the next time a real threat shows up and smacks them they can always say "hey we were doing something!" and CYA so they don't get fired. Our tax dollars at work ladies and gentlemen, just another complete waste of time and money. Surprised?
Well it just shows that war never changes. When my mother was little she used to help take care of my great great grandfather as he was in his late 90s when she was a child and he fought in the civil war. He was a rebel but not because he believed in slavery, in fact he never owned a slave, it was Sherman burning as he went that got him involved. But what struck me was how alike both of their stories were in some respects. Both great great grandfather and my grandfather said it wasn't the bullets that scared them, with both it was the cannons that gave them fear. With great great grandfather according to mom he said it was the "whistling" sound, they would use nails, chains, anything they could stuff down the barrel and it would make this whistling sound and of course what a chain shot out of a cannon did to a human body was just horrible, and with grandfather it was the PAK weapons because he said they made this roar, like some monster, and when they hit it was all red mist and doll pieces. Anyway i just thought that was interesting and of course when I found out mom had heard great great grandfather's stories I wanted to hear them too and thought it was amazing that a century later and it was the same thing causing both men fear.
So to get a feel for your subject matter take a look at the weapons the GIs faced, especially the PAKs and MGs which were the terror weapons of their day. Also look at their day to day lives, because for the grunts at the front it was just nuts. I mean can you imagine trying to eat while shells are going off, or having to learn to smoke with your head down at night because the coal would give you away to a sniper? just nuts. Anyway good luck on your story, and remember that for every Patton or Rommel there were a million grunts like my granddad, just ordinary guys trying to stay alive.
That is why frankly the Linux community confuses the fuck out of me. i mean so much effort is wasted on the desktop, and the desktop is dead, its flatline, MSFT will be the next IBM stuck with a mature platform that only gets replaced when the previous one breaks.
But if there was EVER a chance to get Linux into the mainstream smartphones and tablets is it! Its obvious many of the handset guys are worried about Google, especially with them buying Motorola, MSFT is of course stuck at the hip with Nokia, and Apple sure ain't selling iOS to anybody, so here is your chance guys. Take one of your low resources DEs like LXDE, make it touch friendly, and place it on a stable platform with long term staying power like Debian. Then cook up a repo with an appstore style front end, hell base it on click 'n run, that's nice and friendly, and you'll be in business!
Because it looks like the big three are starting to get too big for their britches and this is one area where people aren't gonna give a shit about running some old Windows programs, as long as you got plenty of apps. Well with source code available you should have no problem porting apps to ARM and you already have examples of the apps folks want, cute little games like Wenoth and Tux Racer, a nice media player in VLC, and lightweight office apps like Abiword. this looks like a chance for some small group to get a shot at getting some share and its obvious from the posts here the geeks will love it and push the hell out of it. Hell I'm a Windows guy and I'd buy it, because i'd know I wouldn't get stuck with an unsupported device 3 minutes after i unpack it.
So here is your chance guys, pick up some cheap hardware from China (plenty of nice KIRF iPhone and iPad style devices there you can get cheap) slap a nice Debian based OS on it and sell baby sell! You start building a little buzz and moving some units I bet all those makers that don't want to deal with the big three will take a look, and if nothing else I bet you'll have no problem selling every unit you can put out. hell you can even talk to the GOG guys about some cross promotion and having a version of their DOS games for your device, DOSBox has an ARM port right?
Thanks for the link, nice to know the same ones that bought the last congress critter which we threw out bought the current congress critter. And folks wonder why i say voting is pointless? Hell the only difference between the two is the previous one took more lawyer money and the new one more banker money, but the big names are the same.
Uhhh...no yourself, since you obviously either didn't read or understand the link provided. the issue was NOT air supremacy but whether or not Britain could assure its people that they wouldn't be bombed. And then, same as now, that answer is NO. It is no because with an ICBM using solid fuel frankly you wouldn't know the enemy was gonna attack until the first missiles have already left the pad and by then you are SOL. Sure if they are throwing something about as sophisticated as a Scud you could shoot it down, but hell you could use a Patriot to shoot a Scud.
With an ICBM unless your enemy is so damned retarded they say "We will attack you tomorrow at 2 PM" you simply wouldn't have enough time to 1.-Get these planes into the air, 2.-Dash across the border, 3.-Dodge all the AAA, and reach the silos in time to hit them.
So again nobody is talking about "Air Supremacy" because frankly if you have that already YOU DON'T NEED THE STUPID LASER as you could just drop shitloads of bombs onto the sites with B-52s! No the whole point of this entire stupid laser program is stopping first strikes which unless you attack first (therefor not making anything the enemy does a first strike but a retaliation) then its just not gonna work, because by the time you know the enemy has decided to attack the first missiles have already launched.
I have a feeling that too many are banking on Win 8 biting MSFT in the ass when in reality it will just be Vista all over again. remember what MSFT did when that turned out to be a stinker? it just quietly kept XP on the shelves. I don't know if you caught it or not but win 7 had its EOL raised for ALL versions to Apr 2020 recently so even some of the guys at MSFT don't think Win 8 is gonna fly.
I bet there is something else you don't know, something that MSFT has been keeping WAY on the down low but all the pirate sites have already gotten wind of...psst...Win 7 copy protection has been obliterated for over a year now, and it looks like there is nothing being done about it! That is why you look on any Craigslist you'll see $100 PCs with $300 Win 7 Ultimate on them, because some pirates are tarded and not smart enough to realize putting a $300 OS on a $100 box is obvious piracy. But the rest will just be getting all these XP boxes with win 7 HP which BTW the pirate edition gets FULL updates now! MSFT says "It doesn't want pirated Windows spreading worms" but we all know the score, they are worried when XP dies that all those millions of boxes will go elsewhere. I predict a few months before XP goes EOL you'll see "XP Upgrade Specials" offered by MSFT, most likely Win 7 and 8 HP at $50. At $50 a pop nobody will care about learning a new OS when they can just stick with Windows for less than going to see a 3D movie for 4 nowadays.
And while I agree with you that PC-BSD is a nice OS, the problem is frankly the insane rate of hardware releases and trying to keep up. what PC-BSD is someone to reach out to the hardware manufacturers and show them they can write once and use for years with them like they can with Windows, but until you can get one or more major OEMs to at least make a token offering I just don't see the momentum. that is one thing I will give to the FOSSies, they will bitch their living asses off at OEMs like Dell until they throw a couple of units at them to get them to stop blogging, the BSD guys are just too nice and polite for their own good.
As for Apple? mark these words friend and mark them well...Apple out of the PC business within 5 years. They have already stopped refreshing the Mac pro line on any kind of reasonable timetable and all but ran off the Hollywood pros by turning FCP into iMovie II, and I believe this is a part of a bigger strategy by Cook. You look at his movies before and after becoming head of Apple and he was buying the living hell out of all the chips used in its ARM devices, Intel? Practically ignored. telling is the fact they didn't even attempt to strong arm Intel to allow other chipsets even though they knew that the Intel GPUs just wouldn't cut it, why? In the past they used threats of going to AMD to get Intel to bend and AMD has a nice 4 core APU in Liano that DOES have killer graphics, yet not a peep, again why?
Because Cook is gonna abandon the Mac line and stick with the uber high profits of the consumer devices where they practically own the market, that's why. He sees the price of PCs is going nowhere but down, hell you can buy $400 laptops that have the same or better power than a nice Macbook had just 2 years ago so to keep ahead of the curve would take a shitload of work, or he can just quietly exit that downward spiral for a market where his brand is king, really its a no brainer. Sure the old Mac guys will bitch but so what? they are maybe 4% of the product line and as i pointed out it will cost more and more to keep Apple at the top, especially with Intel making sure its just them and AMD in the chipset business.
So what i truly believe is MSFT will "wink wink" at piracy and/or offer a dirt cheap Windows home to keep those XP boxes running MSFT software, Apple will leave the flatline X86 market to Windows, and ARM will be split between Google which will own the low end and Apple which will own the high. Linux and BSD will keep a nice niche in servers and embedded and MSFT will become the new IBM, owners of a market that frankly won'
Meh don't worry little canuck, just as the UK went all big brother and made us in the USA feel better so too will our pathetic congress critters that frankly are able to blow more money than Charlie Sheen on a coke binge at a porn convention will just keep printing the money until the whole shell game shits all over itself and the US dollar makes Zimbabwe money look good and then you'll just be so damned happy you don't have to pull your SUV by horseback to really give a shit about some stinky old law.
Hell if its one thing we can learn from each other it is that ALL of the western governments are about as useless as tits on a boar hog and so damned corrupt they'd sell their mama for a bribe, so just grab all you can for you and yours because the excrement will be hitting the bladed cooling device. I figure the USA as you know it know will be gone by 2020 when our debt will be...what? 500 times the GDP of the planet or so? of course by then the MAFIAA will have passed laws so that if you fart and it sounds like a note in the western scale you owe one of them a check, but hey What can ya do, they got Tomahawks and sacks of money and you got shotguns and a quickly inflating away paycheck, not exactly a fair fight friend.
Well I was recently informed that MATE was due to mint so I will be the first to admit being mistaken and give credit where credit is due. I probably should have used CentOS as an example since they are a classic example of a "leech" in that they USED to buy RHEL for their hardware devices that they sold but then figured it was cheaper to rip out the copyrights and sell their hardware with RH without actually having to pay for it, therefor a classic leech.
But in the end, and i hope you do see this and agree, the home user market simply won't accept what many take for granted in the Linux world. the whole hunting forums for fixes, often having to use Bash to apply said fixes, the need to tweak said fixes because the broken driver model is so damned picky that if a fix is designed for version B rev C firmware D and you have version B rev D firmware G the damned thing won't work, and of course that isn't counting the placeholder help files, really shitty wireless subsystem, graphics, especially anything that involves X, being total shit. I mean I have seen Linux crap itself just because I had a web page and a video at the same time, and I haven't seen that kind of crap with Windows since Win9X! it wasn't just me either, look up the head of OSNews who wrote a really nice article on why he found X Server to be shit.
The problem is that just like in party politics the fringe have taken over the tent. point out ANY of these problems and watch how quickly they mass to attack. I have actually had FOSSies argue up and down to me that I should teach, on my own time without compensation mind you, my customers to "embrace the power of CLI" like its the God damned force! And for what? What do they gain? The freedom to tinker, something they will NEVER use? The "fun" of having drivers break every 6 months and having to have a second unit so they can Google for fixes when the first breaks?
In the end the reality they refuse to accept and will sling FUD all day trying to disprove, is that for the vast majority Windows runs problem free. I have customers that are on the same XP install 8 years later with ZERO bugs or problems, simply by having a good free AV (Avast or Comodo both work well in this regard) and a teeny tiny bit of common sense like not opening strange emails, which frankly webmail has eliminated as a threat for most anyway. in its current form to use a /. car analogy Linux on the desktop is like that rusting dodge you see in a field somewhere. IF you spend the time restoring it, learning all its quirks, and are willing to spend a LOT of time under the hood? Sure it'll make a decent car, you may even be able to turn it into a hot rod. But the VAST majority have NO desire to do all that bullshit and just want something that works OOTB and more importantly KEEPS WORKING which sadly does NOT describe Linux with its shite on a crusty roll driver situation.
I would never wish ill upon him but frankly as long as Torvalds is in charge things will NEVER get any better because he will never allow an ABI, simple as that, and the current model ONLY works on servers, and only then because the hardware for many of the subsystems is practically ancient (like I said many servers still use ATI Rage chips for video) and the few new items are supported by companies spending millions to keep their drivers functional. With the razor thin margins of desktops that simply won't happen so without an ABI so companies can "write once, use for years" it will stay completely pointless and a non starter. Like I said a single driver fuckup can easily cost me more than Windows Home, and every suggestion I have seen, such as buy support (Minimum $200 a year), only buy hardware specifically listed as supported (Lists are often out of date, supported today does NOT mean working tomorrow, and workstation quality gear prices most out of the market) or supporting the fixes myself (home users won't buy support contracts so I would go bankrupt in a year) are ALL completely unacceptable.
Lets face it, no matte
But what we need is NOT more of the money pit fighters like F-22 and F-35 (which is already up to a trillion over lifetime) but a fighter we can afford to use en masse like the Stealth Eagle which we can have cranked off the assembly line for $100 million VS the conservative 240 million plus for the F-35. The wiki lists the flyaway cost of the F-22 at 150 million but considering the problems we have had with it (not to mention the USAF not wanting to deploy them to the ME because of how expensive they are) I'd say that is a pretty conservative estimation.
You are right that are airframes are getting old but our increased effectiveness of our missiles and the skill of our pilots means we can get MUCH better bang for the buck by simply have more of our battle tested and proven designs built. We need more F-15s, F-16s, F18s, and personally I'd like to see more Warthogs built as well because once you achieve air superiority those hogs do serious damage to armored vehicles and soft targets which will be the primary threat after the aircraft are taken down, not to mention they give our boys on the ground a plane that can stay in the area for long loiter times and bring hellish firepower to bear at a moments notice.
Look we ALL know what this stupid laser boondoggle is, alright? Its another MIC circlejerk where the corps cut some fat checks to bribe...err..I mean "support the re-election" of some key congress critters and in return they piss tons of OUR money away on yet another useless POS that probably will never even do half of what its supporters claim. Much better when we are broke as a damned joke to spend that money wisely on proven tech that can be delivered on time and on budget, and that is what the teen series represent.
Those who learn nothing from history will be doomed to repeat it..the bomber will always get through so the only thing one can reasonably do is make sure that everyone knows that the one that launches will be living in a quiet neighborhood for about the next 10,000 years.
Wouldn't make sense as a thin client Nethead, as you can get E350s in a thin case for less than the cost of a chip alone which only uses 18w and has more than enough power to be a thin OR a fat client. Look around, there are several E350s that are small enough to bolt onto a monitor using VESA mounts and again the whole smash costs less than the chip for this which lets be reasonable, a thin client isn't gonna need a Core chip as all the processing heavy lifting is done on the server. Hell I've built several of the E350s for office boxes and even as fat clients the lack of needing cooling fans and low power draw make them excellent office units.
Nope the only place i can think of that you might need Core power heavy lifting would be car computers, where you want it to function like a full blown HTPC while on the road. Well that and if you have an office that does a lot of CAD I could see these having enough power to do the heavy lifting but in every other niche that thin and light does they could have went with an Atom and it wouldn't have mattered except by lowering the price.
BTW that is one niche where AMD does have a clear advantage, as nothing Intel has sips power like those 18w Brazos chips while still having enough muscle to be used as a day to day computer without feeling gipped. maybe if the rumors are true that Intel will be introducing a 22nm out of order Atom with a decent built in GPU, but I believe those are scheduled for 2014 at the earliest so if one wants to build a mini for thin clients, office boxes, hell I've built HTPCs out of the E350 and they do 1080p nicely with full acceleration for most formats and a PCIe slot for an external GPU if you desire. Nope this unit is just too highly priced for a thin client.
Caps are 36Gb a month here friend (25Gb a month DSL) for residential so every Gb counts. I am lucky I got grandfathered in so I can often go 10-15Gb over and not get hit with the 1.50 per Gb charge but I have NO doubt if I switched to Vonage that leeway would disappear overnight. BTW you better get ready for it as the rumor is the other cablecos are looking to see how much of a shitfit people have here, which sadly isn't much because guess what? the cableco is offering all kinds of discount for THEIR services like video on demand which surprise! Doesn't count against the cap. Netflix already made a deal to host a local cache so they don't count either.
So look upon me and despair, for I am your future. they will simply bundle the living hell out of their services (along with looong contracts, currently to not pay $150+ a month one has to sign a 2 year contract) and have caps nasty enough to "steer" you in whatever direction they desire. It sucks but I have elderly parents and can't just move away.
Not to mention you'd have to know when the missiles are gonna be rolled out and fired and assume you would get plenty of warning about this when as we all know NK is an unstable regime with only the generals willingness to put up with "great commander' or whatever the little fat fucker calls himself keeping the leader in power. if they build the launcher for the new system underground (which would be the most logical scenario as it doesn't tip off your enemies when you are readying them for launch) then you would most likely at best have a few minutes to hit the things. Since this unit was meant to hit them ONLY on the way up and ONLY at 300km and that was IF they could get it to work as planned more likely this turkey would be less effective than just spamming the area with drones and hoping you could ram them into missiles.
But there is a bigger question here folks: Who is getting the cash and hookers to push this turkey? There must be some pretty big checks being written to the right people to get something pushed which is so obviously a failwhale. We need bloggers (since the MSM is too busy sucking big business dicks) to go pouring over campaign finance reports and connecting the dots to show which congressmen have sold us out this week and for how many pieces of silver. To me THAT is the bigger story here, not another B-1 style money pit.
That is why I have just given up. I no longer download distros and even block linux articles from showing up on /. because i just tired of dealing with the crazy. things are NOT getting better, in fact with the DEs being gutted and pulseaudio if anything things are more unstable than they were even 5 years ago!
That's why you ought to try Win 7, i got into Linux when the crapfest that was Vista came out but frankly i never had as many bugs with Vista as i did with Linux, but 7 is as stable as a rock and purrs like a kitten, be it on my cheap ass $350 netbook or my hexacore gaming PC it "just works" without crashes or bugs or hassle. Hell for shits and giggles I even stuck in on a 1.8GHz Sempron with 1.5Gb of RAM just to see how it runs and you know what? it runs quite well, I just don't have Aero (which i turn off anyway) but other than Aero its smooth and responsive.
But as long as you are on XP you might want to check out Comodo Internet Security along with Ninite, both are free (I'd give you the link to CIS but the URL is crazy long) and I use these along with Comodo Dragon on my XP boxes I sell and frankly not a single bug yet. the nice thing about CIS is it will sandbox the browser of your choice and scan all pages before load so that you don't have to worry about any malware links, even if you are on XP.
But this is why i have given up even attempting to discuss anything with them anymore, they just won't listen. last time i loaded up one of the Linux articles it was nothing but a giant groupthink circle jerk, with everyone trying to top each other in the crazy dept. But as long as nobody will stand up as a group and tell the devs that the itch scratching BS is over then things will never get any better, only worse.
You are right nobody will do the work but i think its much worse than that, i mean look at how many help files are just CLI lists or "to do" placeholders? without any monetary motivations the devs don't listen to anyone, and with so many of the FOSSies pushing out the FOSS advocates nobody will ever call them out over it. i mean look at how many here worship RMS and he's a fricking squatter at MIT that doesn't even use the Internet! I mean how do you get through to people that will actually listen to and deify a guy that thinks its okay to squat on a campus and even worse pull off his shoes and socks ON STAGE and eat some toe funk?
if you want to keep trying to talk to them Barbara go right ahead, but as you saw with that one you posted the chapter and verse on copyright law for only to have him continue to argue black is white its like trying to explain evolution to someone that believes Noah rode a dinosaur, you just can't penetrate the dogma. All they will do is tune you out and keep spouting their religious beliefs. kinda sad that free software now is treated like religion, but frankly the nutters have taken over the tent and all you can do is pack up and move on before they make you a nutter too.
And those with WMC can just fire up Internet TV. I rarely watch TV but when I get a hankering for some tube I can fire that up and get tons of shows hassle free. I'm watching Star Trek the animated series right now, gotta love the Shat!