This is also why voting is now pointless, as the extreme amount of money required to even get into congress assures that anyone who makes it to that level will have already had to have sold out simply to get enough cash to get the job. As a history buff once noted "Originally a congressional post was to be about as simple and cheap as getting a slot on a town council" but the influence of money has made the entire system simply too corrupt for honesty to survive in. this is why while many will talk about how evil Wall street is none will actually do anything significant to them, as it would be biting the hand that feeds.
so really all one can do is grab as much as you can for you and yours and wait for the inevitable collapse. The amount of corruption is just too deep, the amount of influence too powerful, anyone with eyes can see we are headed towards a global economic meltdown but the stopping of this would cause pain to both rich and poor and thanks to bribery the rich will never tolerate this so we keep right on driving towards the cliff. all we can do now is try to protect our own as best we can and wait for the collapse, there really is nothing else the public can do.
I have set up several machines using 2gb and 3Gb with a 64bit OS for future proofing and can tell you that you can see the difference thanks to the 64 bit registers. Although personally with RAM as cheap as it is anybody would have to be nuts to hamstring performance by going with less than 4gb of RAM, especially if you are planning to use it as a desktop replacement. hell even my netbook has 8gb simply because the upgrade was so cheap it was rather pointless to go less.
Now since i don't know your budget i'll just give you a couple of suggestions, if money is not tight an i5 with an SSD as an i5 is currently the sweet spot on the Intel side when it comes to price/performance whereas if money is tighter then go for an AMD A6 or A8 again with an SSD. For what you are wanting to do the SSD along with plenty of RAM will give you the biggest performance increase, something like this with an SSD in place of the HDD would probably be the best bang for the buck.
Actually I've found during socket change is usually the best time to buy on both Intel and AMD as the previous socket units drop like a stone and you can get some crazy deals. I recently built my oldest a Thuban X6 and after MIRs I got the whole shebang for $460 with an HD4850 AND Win 7 home throw in, and that is for a machine with 6 cores, a 640gb HDD, 8Gb of RAM, and a 24x DVD burner.
Lets be honest folks, the games and programs simply haven't kept up with the cores so any of the units on the market today will be more than plenty for the vast majority of tasks and a good hexacore or quad sold today should last you easily until 2020 barring some new "killer app" unless you are literally pounding the living hell out of the CPU but if he was doing that he wouldn't still be on a Core2. So unless you must have the absolute bleeding edge waiting for a socket change can save you serious cash while giving you some pretty nice performance bumps.
Funny enough what I am seeing in all the B&M stores is NOT Liano but Bobcat. the power usage of Bobcat is better while having graphics powerful enough you can play L4D at 1366x768 which is what most laptops are coming with anyway. the problem right now for AMD isn't Intel so much as it is AMD, they put too much faith in bulldozer and its a turkey and by killing Thuban they gave away a lot of the low end desktop market to pentiums. the nice thing about Thuban is they could simply switch off cores and fill the Deneb slots and those with bad cache could fill the Athlon slot so they were getting close to 100% yield. Liano is nothing but the Phenom II Stars core with a GPU jammed on and while Phenom II makes a decent desktop its lousy in mobile.
Frankly they should have instead been putting serious resources into Bobcat instead of killing its next version Krishna. 4 to 6 Bobcat cores with a midrange GPU integrated would have been a kick ass mobile chip but now if they can't fix faildozer they really have nothing in the pipeline to replace it and as much as I like Brazos they can't coast on 1.65Ghz dual cores for much longer without either a decent speed bump or more cores. Lets be honest, bulldozer is a dud and what's worse is that MSFT has already said the fixes to the scheduler won't come until win 8 so any machine running Win 7 will be crippled if it runs a BD design. Intel can just coast at this time and work on power and GPU speed bumps simply because AMD's last CEO sucked and left them in a bad state, with no real successor to Stars.
C++ is how old now? C? Java? Hell even.NET is no spring chicken. Frankly only the "fad language of the week" is gonna actually be very new and if all they care about is fad languages then i doubt its gonna be a good place for long term employment anyway.
But all the truly impressive programmers I've met, the ones where their code is damned near perfect in its elegance and function, were working in C, C++, or one of the other frankly 'old timer" languages. Sure if your only goal is to generate enough buzz to get bought out? Then the language of the week might be for you, but those working on stuff that really lasts at least from what i have seen are always working in one of the mature languages.
Except you then do follow ups on the poll and you'll find a LARGE amount of the positives had touch screen interfaces, be it tablets or touch screen monitors. but how many of the PCs being sold today actually HAVE a touch screen interface? last numbers I saw had it at less than 4%, and if you remove POS and kiosks that number quickly drops to less than 1%.
So you have an OS that is designed to be its most effective with an interface that is on less than 1% of units sold, and MSFT is deluding themselves if they think in such a cutthroat market, where Dell and HP make on average $8 on their low end units (which are the biggest sellers BTW) that these companies are gonna eat the cost of a touch screen and the consumer sure as hell isn't gonna buy a touch screen when a 17 inch 1366x768 touch screen cost $300 and a 24 inch 1080p costs less than $150.
You may be right on the mobile front, maybe they can scratch out a niche. but watching users on desktops and non touch screen laptops what i found was this is pretty typical and nothing frustrates a user more than feeling lost. Frankly if they don't boost the living hell out of the tutorials and tooltips I can easily see it bombing hard on desktops and laptops which is MSFT's bread and butter. All I know is i have a ton of customers already that have already said they won't be going to Win 8 PERIOD, with many going so far as to buy future proof units so they can skip it entirely. Frankly I didn't even see that kind of backlash with Vista as many were curious and honestly excited...until they ran into a bug that bit them in the ass. But selling this OS without MUCH more and deeper instruction is a mistake IMHO but we'll see who is right come Jan 2013.
This brings up a question I have been wanting to ask, and since i'm sure this article is full of hardware guys maybe someone here can answer...how low CAN you go before electron leakage makes it no longer worth it? I mean the whole reason we went multicores is both Intel and AMD hit a MHZ wall, where even slight increases equaled tons of extra power and heat, so are we approaching that with shrinkage? If not, how far do you think we can continue to shrink before we end up with it just not worth it?
Frankly I never thought we'd get as low as we did, I mean you can have a multicore now that fits on your thumbnail which is just incredible, but Intel as well as GloFlo and TSMC have all been having trouble with these latest shrinks...are we about to the end of the line? Where can we go next? We don't really need more cores, most of the quads i build frankly spend most of their time twiddling their thumbs because people simply don't have enough tasks to keep these monster chips filled, and if we can't shrink, what's left? I suppose you could do like AMD and make more powerful integrated GPUs but even that quickly ramps up the heat and power, so i honestly don't see where they can go after this.
Well there HAS been some innovation, just not much. Intel finally accepted that truly piss poor graphics simply won't cut it (although I still wouldn't consider them great, they are a lot better than say the 945 shitpiles they used to push) and of course what AMD is doing is showing a shift in direction, pairing more minimal CPUs like Bobcat with a much more powerful GPU.
And THAT to me is the real question we are gonna see answered in the next couple of years, is the GPU or CPU more important in mobile? the interesting thing is both Intel and AMD has chosen a different side of the debate and they both have interesting points. AMD believes that with A/V and gaming the push should be on the GPU which on the consumer side makes sense as the home users are much more likely to be watching HD movies than say working a large spreadsheet while Intel believes that with an uber powerful CPU the GPU frankly doesn't have to be that great and they too have a point as many of the jobs the GPU does can be done by the CPU if it has enough cycles.
Personally I believe what we are gonna end up with is a split, with AMD taking the home users who are more price sensitive and more multimedia heavy while Intel takes the workstation and business users who are more likely to be doing CPU heavy tasks. I have been noticing this trend in the B&M stores where all the consumer machines, both desktop and laptop, are AMD Fusion whereas the business section is dominated by Core based laptops.
But in any case the next couple of years will be interesting to watch. I just hope AMD is able to keep a horse in the race as we have seen in the past how terrible a monopoly is on a market and the whole Intel tick/tock strategy didn't really come about until they got worried about the Athlon. Intel can afford to coast for the most part and simply concentrate on lowering the power of what they already have as there hasn't been a "killer app" that has needed more power in quite awhile, whereas AMD has a real turkey with bulldozer and the moron that killed Thuban left them with no real alternatives other than bobcat so if they don't either come out with a new design or fix faildozer they could end up toast.
All I know is as a system builder when i can't get any more socket AM3 chips I'll be going to Intel, bulldozer really is a bad chip, as bad if not worse than Phenom I. Its too expensive, its a bunch of triples and quads with hardware accelerated hyperthreading they are having to sell as hexas and octos because of how high the chips cost to make, and the performance actually improves when you kill hyperthreading. As much as I love competition anyone with eyes can see even an Intel dual Sandy frankly curb stomps bulldozer and i'm sure ivy will just make that beat down even more obvious. Congrats Intel designers, you have a killer design on your hands.
But you have to admit its nice to see the little guys that meant so much to so many actually get recognized. I remember how in the late 90s-early 00s all you would ever hear about on computing history was MSFT and Apple, maybe a little IBM. But many of us didn't have IBM or Mac money when we were kids so its nice to see Sinclair, Commodore, Tandy, Atari, BBC Micro, all the little guys that started so many of us down the road to a lifetime of computing.
So while i never got to own a Sinclair (Like you I had a VIC) I'm sure that those that had the Sinclair enjoyed much time with it and love computers to this day thanks to it. So happy BDay Sinclair, here's to you and all the little guys that started us on the road of computing.
As I said with the TRS while I'd love to be a teen again frankly i wouldn't trade our childhood for the teens of today with all these locked down cell phones and tablets, the teens of today I doubt will get a love of tinkering and tweaking that we got from our little guys.
Well then this will probably blow your mind, i'm about as leftist as they come and I think that we should use part of the savings from getting rid of our overcharging underperforming MIC and use it to...gasp! give our soldiers a 25% pay increase across the board! its just shameful that we can spend a trillion dollars on a turkey like the F35 (when the Russians can whip off SU27s for 35 million, MiG 29s for 30 mil, and MiG 31s for 60 mil) while many of the men risking their lives have families on food stamps!
But our entire military and MIC budgeting system is horribly broken. My grandfather used to come back from the base with loads of brand new stuff, how? Did he steal it? nope because they had to "blow the budget" to keep from having it cut the next year so they'd throw out brand new tools, radios, hell one year they threw out every chair and sofa on the entire base, even though most were less than a year old! and then of course we have the contractors that can blow billions jerking us along and even if the contract is eventually canceled they have clauses written so they get paid a cancelling fee, even when it is THEIR FAULT because they never did the fucking job!
But that is why i think we need to go back to the way it was pre WWII and for most of WWI itself, where we put out a spec and if and ONLY if they came up to us with a working prototype that fit the spec AND the price listed in the spec would we buy. By doing it this way we had serious competition because the one with the best design and prototype won, no stringing us along with some half baked idea that in practice simply doesn't work. mark my words the F35 will be exactly like the F22, only a handful made at some insane price per bird and it'll be kept away from the front just because of how much one of them costs. hell even the Navy has quietly given up on it and is in talks to buy more F-18s and there is talk of giving the green light to the Stealth Eagle to cover the role the F35 would have fulfilled. in the end it will be a trillion we couldn't afford pissed down a rat hole while the MIC enjoys golden shitters and $1000 hookers.
This would be correct IF they had "WinRT Enterprise" but they don't. Since they do not the most likely conclusion is what I have been saying since the Dev preview which is Win 8 is a "Hail Mary" because they are getting curb stomped by Android and Apple in the mobile space and come hell or high water they are kicking that sucker out for the Xmas season.
Personally with all the hatred I've seen from customers trying the consumer preview in my shop I think its not gonna matter WHAT CPU you slap this turkey on its gonna bomb. In the end MSFT really only has TWO choices, 1.-Spin off the mobile division so they can get out from under the legacy of Windows and can sink or swim with Metro OS, or 2.-Accept that they are the new IBM and while making buttloads o' cash will never be the top of the heap again like they were in the 90s.
What we are seeing with MSFT is the same thing we've seen with dozens of once successful companies that got blindsided by new tech. You have a lame CEO who was coasting on past success and assumed that success would last forever, you have a company that is too slow and too large to nimbly react to changing trends, and you have changes in technology that have stopped their endless upward profits, specifically the facts that once PCs hit multicore there haven't been any real "killer apps" to drive new purchases and unlike the "MHz Wars" that MSFT got so rich off of the PC has reached a plateau where the tasks the vast majority have can easily be done on a cheap netbook or even a 5 year old laptop while at the same time the two year contracts and rapid advances in mobile tech have made cell phones and tablets the new MHz Wars where people will go through 4 or 5 phones in the time it takes them to retire a single desktop.
So I'd say the solution is obvious, since they are simply too large and bloated to even listen to their beta testers they need to spin off mobile so it can be nimble and change without going through the whole bloated bureaucratic mess or simply accept they will never own mobile like they do the desktop and kick back and enjoy the money. But rushing out a half ass WinRT while at the same time taking a big crap on desktop users just shows how lost and behind the curve Ballmer really is IMHO. He honestly think he can shove out a half baked product and the MSFT name will carry them. Well come Oct I bet he gets a rude awakening as that strategy didn't work for WinPhone 7 and all the strategy will do with Win 8 is cause a Vista style backlash.
That's why I never understood the complaints. Sure i personally would prefer if MSFT kept that $50 Win 7 Home deal but the simple fact is the vast majority will get Windows on their new PC and the PC itself will be positively ancient before it runs out of being supported. Take my nettop for example, its a circa 2004 Sempron 1.8GHz with 1.5Gb of RAM. That machine is now 8 years old, every single thing about it is horribly out of date, the CPU socket, RAM, even the HDD interface is more than 2 generations behind the curve yet the XP Home on it is STILL supported and will be for another 2 fricking years! and just for shits and giggles i took a spare drive and popped Win 7 on it and guess what? it runs just fine!
So while there are plenty of things to complain about with MSFT support is NOT one of them. Now that they have announced that ALL versions of Windows will get mandatory 10 years support just like the business versions frankly any PC you have that lasts long enough to be EOLed by MSFT is gonna be a real dinosaur, which is why I can't believe the short support cycles on Macs. 5 years? Hell that's Core2Duos with DDR 2 RAM, nothing ancient or unusable about that.
Exactly! my first real taste of computing was tweaking accounting programs for my dad on a Trash and being able to get magazines and actually understand the guts really helped me to appreciate the wonders of those little guys, so I asked for and got a VIC for Xmas the year they came out (1982? God it was so long ago. thank the Federation for the Shat commercial because my mom was a Sci/Fi lover and that swayed her) and a lifetime love of computing was born.
While others sat there staring at their NES and SNES I went from the VIC to a C64 to getting a steal on an IBM that was running the original OS/2, I went through a good dozen OSes, probably just as many different kinds of CPUs (I even had a Cyrix and a WinChip for awhile, remember those?) and through it all had a blast and it can all be traced back to the Trash and the VIC giving me something I could actually control and manipulate instead of blinding consuming.
so lets give credit where credit is due and celebrate the little guys of computing. sadly it looks like we are gonna get to see what happens when the little guys don't exist as the rise of locked down pads and phones seems to be creating a whole generation of little consumers, that all just take what they get without question and have no desire to know anything about it or how it works. As much as I'd enjoy being 20 again I really wouldn't trade my experiences for theirs, their tech may be more powerful but they have zero control.
But what everyone seems to be forgetting is there are several resources there that are quite valuable to whomever controls them so like it or not somebody is gonna step in and try to control the region and the easiest way to do that is bribes of whatever they desire or require. its like that old George Carlin bit about how those in power don't want a populace smart enough to question, just smart enough to work and let's face it your population can be pretty fucking stupid and still work in a mine.
While I agree 100% that education is the answer its gonna be damned hard to push that agenda when there are several superpowers that want those resources. lets be honest folks, all the resources that were easy to get to, the "low hanging fruit" as it were? just about gone. Africa was ignored for the most part simply because it was a war torn disease ridden mess and there were easier sources of materials to acquire but those days are over and as we have seen with all the moves by China in that region in the last few years the superpowers are waking up to the fact that Africa has been largely untapped. As much as i'd like to think we'd help our fellow man several thousand years of history tells me more likely we'll just exploit the hell out of the place until there is nothing left to exploit and if we can keep them in line with a few trinkets or bags of rice? Well then that's what will happen.
The whole thing has gotten batshit thanks to the insane amount of money flowing through the pentagon and military industrial complex. Have you seen the F35 rock video? look it up and LYAO because, yeah, a project that so badly over budget it will be the most expensive weapon system in the history of the planet needs...a rock video.
We need to trash the entire system and start over if bullshit like rock videos and "InfoOps" actually gets paid for with tax dollars. The whole system has gotten so spoiled from drowning in cash that any lame ass idea gets green lighted, what we need is to go back to the way it was pre WWII, where we simply put out a spec and don't buy shit until someone brings a product that meets the spec.
But the reason we see contractors pulling shit like this is the simple fact the only thing our MIC knows how to do anymore is pad expense accounts. if they were coming in on time and on budget frankly they wouldn't have any need to cover up their dirty dealing with horseshit like this.
But then you are right back to it only taking a single mistake, say someone mistaking miles for kilometers, and you've just had an accident that makes every man made disaster in history look like stubbing your toe.
in the end its real simple folks...if you have no real way to stop it if something goes wrong, you REALLY shouldn't fuck with it until you do.
Hey what was wrong with the Trash 80? Not everybody had Apple money back then ya know. I had both the Trash and the VIC (Remember the Shatner commercial, complete with beam in?) and frankly they were great little machines for the time. Sure they weren't that powerful but then again a $10 cell phone is more powerful than the biggest computers were back then.
I think we would all do good to remember that the Trash, VIC, C64, BBC Micro and Sinclair changed a lot of folks lives and gave them a lifetime love of computing. Just think how different the world would be if those little guys never came out? if the only computers for sale in the 80s cost thousands of dollars? it would probably be a lot more empty place, with a lot less programs, tinkering, and DIYers out there.
Funny that your UID is "MSoftsucks" when you have run smack dab into the arrogance of the FOSS community. This is why I gave up on Linux as a whole, i would point out a problem that would be trivial in mac or Windows and either get told what an idiot I must be for not spending two hours in CLI working around the problem or to get told "You don't need that" which is what you got told with base. Well if base is so fucking pointless, why include it? Why waste man hours on a tool that in the same breath you say is pointless?
This is why FOSS breaks down, because like communism there simply is no motivation to make thing better. if the developer likes things the way they are, even if its a bigger PITA for everyone else? tough shit its not changing. look at how VLC still can't pause a video by clicking on it, something every other player has done since the fricking 90s. But the devs don't care, to them its not important, so it never gets fixed.
Say what you want about MSFT but at least the public CAN influence the direction. people hated Vista so they went in and fixed what people hated and came out with Win 7, i believe we'll see the same thing with Win 8. Look at what you cited, Access. MSFT has spent millions continually improving Access because people like you have found it a useful tool for business. Can't fault you there, i myself have used VB+Access on occasion and when one has a small job that needs doing involving a DB there is no easier tool out there. But with FOSS short of hiring an entire development team and forking it yourself as you got to see they simply won't listen. They see no problem with YOU wasting a ton of time in a tool that is much bigger in scope than what you require so tough, it ain't getting fixed.
Ultimately the devs I've dealt with in FOSS treat users with very thinly veiled contempt. they only care about scratching THEIR itches and if it works for you? Fine, if not? don't care. As a wise old linux admin that gave up on the desktop for a Mac told me "Its always 80% there and it NEVER gets any better. the devs get a new itch to scratch and things get tossed and new bugs piled on top of old, but it never gets any closer to being feature complete" and I think he really nailed it. For most of us the cost of Windows or Office is negligible compared to the hours of frustration we'd deal with trying to use the FOSS alternative. My time is a minimum of $35 an hour, at that rate less than 3 hours worth of BS has paid for Windows and another 2 has paid for Office and like you trying to fight tools like Base simply aren't worth the money saved.
Not to mention we already know how to build devices that last, its simply cheaper (and more likely to generate more sales) if you "design for the dump" but with a little care even average electronics can last quite a while. my laptop from 07 is still going last i heard, as is the laptop i had in 2010, the netbook I have now since i'm happy with both the performance and form factor should easily last me 5 to 7 years, possibly more, with simply a little thought and common sense when it comes to carrying it.
So there is no reason, other than carelessness or the desire to "keep up with the joneses" to replace your devices annually. With a little thought and care i could see a tablet lasting 5 years which I'm sure would be a pretty big win on the ecology front.
That wouldn't matter either and here is why: If you change whatever official is in there the global PTB will simply throw a few bribes to the right ones and take what you have by force, so even voting with your dollars is no longer relevant, see "Too big to fail" as an example.
Frankly the only real course of action left is to grab as much as you can for you and yours and wait for the whole rotten structure to collapse. As both sides continue to spend like drunken sailors the collapse is inevitable now, the only question is how long it will take and what will come after. Will it be fascism, communism, el presidente style dictatorships? Who knows but its pretty obvious that at this point the global elite have concentrated too much wealth for the peoples of any nation to stand up to them, all one can do is protect one's own as much as you can and wait for the whole rotten thing to burn.
That is why I would recommend No One Lives Forever I & II as challenges filled with laughs is hard for batshit "1 million moms" types to bitch about and I dare you not to get a big old smile the first time you plant a kitty bomb and watch what happens when a bad guy finds it "Oh look, what a cute little kitty...fsst BOOM!" he he he.
Wow...10.5 was released in 2007 and its ALREADY unsupported according to the wiki? damn maybe folks shouldn't have marked the AC a troll that made the joke about buying a new Mac every year. I thought the big selling point on the Mac was how "high quality" Macs were? Yet the support drops after less than 5 years? I guess that's why I never really got into macs, i just don't get it.
As for TFA can we FINALLY acknowledge and admit that what the windows guys have been saying all these years is true, that you become a big enough target and you WILL get malware? After all we've seen this with both Apple and Linux with Android, and frankly it should have been incredibly obvious with just a moment's thought. I mean where do Windows viruses come from? Well since Vista made running as a limited user mandatory the vast majority I've seen has been PEBKAC, so how can switching OSes magically turn a PEBKAC user into an admin? Answer...it can't and that was the point.
In the end one can't escape the simple fact that ALL OSes are extremely complex collections of very advanced programs and as we all know the more advanced something is the easier it is for a clueless person to break it. Sadly in this case the clueless user was Apple for not pushing out the bog standard version of Java and instead insisting on rolling their own, which would have been fine if it could do so VERY quickly but instead the apple version of java fell farther and farther behind the mainstream. At that point a major attack was inevitable, the only question was when.
If I was a paranoid person i'd have to wonder if this wasn't by design, after all who would fault Apple if they restricted or outright banned Java as a security risk now? Of course Java like Flash allows one to run web based apps which bypasses the appstore which Apple has sunk so much into so a pessimist might say that Apple wants java to go the way of flash and what better way than to remove it to better protect the user?
Uhhh..we actually didn't have any way to know then because we hadn't reached 25 MPH but thanks to a guy that detached a retina for science we know pretty much EXACTLY what the human body can take and at what point you'll have serious damage. this is why we use see combat pilots in battle they flip over before diving because the human body tolerates positive Gs much better than negative.
So sure if you start out really slow and build up very gradually? Then even the fat guy in front of you in line at the Wendy's could handle a ride in the thing, its just a question of how long that build up and slow down would take and would it be worth the fuel. Considering how much gas the Concorde blew through i'm thinking probably not practical.
What I don't get is why didn't they just buy or build their own? its not like Google doesn't have assloads of money. the only thing that I can come up with is just like MSFT tried to do in the 90s they tried to take advantage of all the experience that developers have with Java without bothering to actually get the rights to do so.
But you are right that I don't see how even the fanboys can be for Google when there are literally piles of emails saying "We aren't doing clean room" We should get a license" "We are on shaky ground here" etc. Either the employees at Google knew what they were doing was seriously iffy or all those writers of emails didn't have a clue what they were talking about....ya know, the logic just doesn't really hold up. If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck...its probably not a moose, no matter how much you want it to be one.
Actually I would say it should be looked upon as a more fundamental question which is this: Should email be treated as a letter, or as a text message?
The problem with treating emails like a letter is simply people don't think about emails like they do about a letter, probably because it is so trivial to send. With a letter one has to take the time and consolidate their thoughts, write them down, fold it up, put in the envelope etc, whereas with emails they are treated with no more thought most of the time than a LOLCat.
I just have to wonder how many times companies will be bitchslapped by emails like this before they either simply don't allow emails or have them disposed of quickly. because unless you can somehow get your employees to treat emails with the gravitas of a formal letter they will just keep biting you right in the ass.
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This is also why voting is now pointless, as the extreme amount of money required to even get into congress assures that anyone who makes it to that level will have already had to have sold out simply to get enough cash to get the job. As a history buff once noted "Originally a congressional post was to be about as simple and cheap as getting a slot on a town council" but the influence of money has made the entire system simply too corrupt for honesty to survive in. this is why while many will talk about how evil Wall street is none will actually do anything significant to them, as it would be biting the hand that feeds.
so really all one can do is grab as much as you can for you and yours and wait for the inevitable collapse. The amount of corruption is just too deep, the amount of influence too powerful, anyone with eyes can see we are headed towards a global economic meltdown but the stopping of this would cause pain to both rich and poor and thanks to bribery the rich will never tolerate this so we keep right on driving towards the cliff. all we can do now is try to protect our own as best we can and wait for the collapse, there really is nothing else the public can do.
I have set up several machines using 2gb and 3Gb with a 64bit OS for future proofing and can tell you that you can see the difference thanks to the 64 bit registers. Although personally with RAM as cheap as it is anybody would have to be nuts to hamstring performance by going with less than 4gb of RAM, especially if you are planning to use it as a desktop replacement. hell even my netbook has 8gb simply because the upgrade was so cheap it was rather pointless to go less.
Now since i don't know your budget i'll just give you a couple of suggestions, if money is not tight an i5 with an SSD as an i5 is currently the sweet spot on the Intel side when it comes to price/performance whereas if money is tighter then go for an AMD A6 or A8 again with an SSD. For what you are wanting to do the SSD along with plenty of RAM will give you the biggest performance increase, something like this with an SSD in place of the HDD would probably be the best bang for the buck.
Actually I've found during socket change is usually the best time to buy on both Intel and AMD as the previous socket units drop like a stone and you can get some crazy deals. I recently built my oldest a Thuban X6 and after MIRs I got the whole shebang for $460 with an HD4850 AND Win 7 home throw in, and that is for a machine with 6 cores, a 640gb HDD, 8Gb of RAM, and a 24x DVD burner.
Lets be honest folks, the games and programs simply haven't kept up with the cores so any of the units on the market today will be more than plenty for the vast majority of tasks and a good hexacore or quad sold today should last you easily until 2020 barring some new "killer app" unless you are literally pounding the living hell out of the CPU but if he was doing that he wouldn't still be on a Core2. So unless you must have the absolute bleeding edge waiting for a socket change can save you serious cash while giving you some pretty nice performance bumps.
Funny enough what I am seeing in all the B&M stores is NOT Liano but Bobcat. the power usage of Bobcat is better while having graphics powerful enough you can play L4D at 1366x768 which is what most laptops are coming with anyway. the problem right now for AMD isn't Intel so much as it is AMD, they put too much faith in bulldozer and its a turkey and by killing Thuban they gave away a lot of the low end desktop market to pentiums. the nice thing about Thuban is they could simply switch off cores and fill the Deneb slots and those with bad cache could fill the Athlon slot so they were getting close to 100% yield. Liano is nothing but the Phenom II Stars core with a GPU jammed on and while Phenom II makes a decent desktop its lousy in mobile.
Frankly they should have instead been putting serious resources into Bobcat instead of killing its next version Krishna. 4 to 6 Bobcat cores with a midrange GPU integrated would have been a kick ass mobile chip but now if they can't fix faildozer they really have nothing in the pipeline to replace it and as much as I like Brazos they can't coast on 1.65Ghz dual cores for much longer without either a decent speed bump or more cores. Lets be honest, bulldozer is a dud and what's worse is that MSFT has already said the fixes to the scheduler won't come until win 8 so any machine running Win 7 will be crippled if it runs a BD design. Intel can just coast at this time and work on power and GPU speed bumps simply because AMD's last CEO sucked and left them in a bad state, with no real successor to Stars.
C++ is how old now? C? Java? Hell even .NET is no spring chicken. Frankly only the "fad language of the week" is gonna actually be very new and if all they care about is fad languages then i doubt its gonna be a good place for long term employment anyway.
But all the truly impressive programmers I've met, the ones where their code is damned near perfect in its elegance and function, were working in C, C++, or one of the other frankly 'old timer" languages. Sure if your only goal is to generate enough buzz to get bought out? Then the language of the week might be for you, but those working on stuff that really lasts at least from what i have seen are always working in one of the mature languages.
Except you then do follow ups on the poll and you'll find a LARGE amount of the positives had touch screen interfaces, be it tablets or touch screen monitors. but how many of the PCs being sold today actually HAVE a touch screen interface? last numbers I saw had it at less than 4%, and if you remove POS and kiosks that number quickly drops to less than 1%.
So you have an OS that is designed to be its most effective with an interface that is on less than 1% of units sold, and MSFT is deluding themselves if they think in such a cutthroat market, where Dell and HP make on average $8 on their low end units (which are the biggest sellers BTW) that these companies are gonna eat the cost of a touch screen and the consumer sure as hell isn't gonna buy a touch screen when a 17 inch 1366x768 touch screen cost $300 and a 24 inch 1080p costs less than $150.
You may be right on the mobile front, maybe they can scratch out a niche. but watching users on desktops and non touch screen laptops what i found was this is pretty typical and nothing frustrates a user more than feeling lost. Frankly if they don't boost the living hell out of the tutorials and tooltips I can easily see it bombing hard on desktops and laptops which is MSFT's bread and butter. All I know is i have a ton of customers already that have already said they won't be going to Win 8 PERIOD, with many going so far as to buy future proof units so they can skip it entirely. Frankly I didn't even see that kind of backlash with Vista as many were curious and honestly excited...until they ran into a bug that bit them in the ass. But selling this OS without MUCH more and deeper instruction is a mistake IMHO but we'll see who is right come Jan 2013.
This brings up a question I have been wanting to ask, and since i'm sure this article is full of hardware guys maybe someone here can answer...how low CAN you go before electron leakage makes it no longer worth it? I mean the whole reason we went multicores is both Intel and AMD hit a MHZ wall, where even slight increases equaled tons of extra power and heat, so are we approaching that with shrinkage? If not, how far do you think we can continue to shrink before we end up with it just not worth it?
Frankly I never thought we'd get as low as we did, I mean you can have a multicore now that fits on your thumbnail which is just incredible, but Intel as well as GloFlo and TSMC have all been having trouble with these latest shrinks...are we about to the end of the line? Where can we go next? We don't really need more cores, most of the quads i build frankly spend most of their time twiddling their thumbs because people simply don't have enough tasks to keep these monster chips filled, and if we can't shrink, what's left? I suppose you could do like AMD and make more powerful integrated GPUs but even that quickly ramps up the heat and power, so i honestly don't see where they can go after this.
Well there HAS been some innovation, just not much. Intel finally accepted that truly piss poor graphics simply won't cut it (although I still wouldn't consider them great, they are a lot better than say the 945 shitpiles they used to push) and of course what AMD is doing is showing a shift in direction, pairing more minimal CPUs like Bobcat with a much more powerful GPU.
And THAT to me is the real question we are gonna see answered in the next couple of years, is the GPU or CPU more important in mobile? the interesting thing is both Intel and AMD has chosen a different side of the debate and they both have interesting points. AMD believes that with A/V and gaming the push should be on the GPU which on the consumer side makes sense as the home users are much more likely to be watching HD movies than say working a large spreadsheet while Intel believes that with an uber powerful CPU the GPU frankly doesn't have to be that great and they too have a point as many of the jobs the GPU does can be done by the CPU if it has enough cycles.
Personally I believe what we are gonna end up with is a split, with AMD taking the home users who are more price sensitive and more multimedia heavy while Intel takes the workstation and business users who are more likely to be doing CPU heavy tasks. I have been noticing this trend in the B&M stores where all the consumer machines, both desktop and laptop, are AMD Fusion whereas the business section is dominated by Core based laptops.
But in any case the next couple of years will be interesting to watch. I just hope AMD is able to keep a horse in the race as we have seen in the past how terrible a monopoly is on a market and the whole Intel tick/tock strategy didn't really come about until they got worried about the Athlon. Intel can afford to coast for the most part and simply concentrate on lowering the power of what they already have as there hasn't been a "killer app" that has needed more power in quite awhile, whereas AMD has a real turkey with bulldozer and the moron that killed Thuban left them with no real alternatives other than bobcat so if they don't either come out with a new design or fix faildozer they could end up toast.
All I know is as a system builder when i can't get any more socket AM3 chips I'll be going to Intel, bulldozer really is a bad chip, as bad if not worse than Phenom I. Its too expensive, its a bunch of triples and quads with hardware accelerated hyperthreading they are having to sell as hexas and octos because of how high the chips cost to make, and the performance actually improves when you kill hyperthreading. As much as I love competition anyone with eyes can see even an Intel dual Sandy frankly curb stomps bulldozer and i'm sure ivy will just make that beat down even more obvious. Congrats Intel designers, you have a killer design on your hands.
But you have to admit its nice to see the little guys that meant so much to so many actually get recognized. I remember how in the late 90s-early 00s all you would ever hear about on computing history was MSFT and Apple, maybe a little IBM. But many of us didn't have IBM or Mac money when we were kids so its nice to see Sinclair, Commodore, Tandy, Atari, BBC Micro, all the little guys that started so many of us down the road to a lifetime of computing.
So while i never got to own a Sinclair (Like you I had a VIC) I'm sure that those that had the Sinclair enjoyed much time with it and love computers to this day thanks to it. So happy BDay Sinclair, here's to you and all the little guys that started us on the road of computing.
As I said with the TRS while I'd love to be a teen again frankly i wouldn't trade our childhood for the teens of today with all these locked down cell phones and tablets, the teens of today I doubt will get a love of tinkering and tweaking that we got from our little guys.
Well then this will probably blow your mind, i'm about as leftist as they come and I think that we should use part of the savings from getting rid of our overcharging underperforming MIC and use it to...gasp! give our soldiers a 25% pay increase across the board! its just shameful that we can spend a trillion dollars on a turkey like the F35 (when the Russians can whip off SU27s for 35 million, MiG 29s for 30 mil, and MiG 31s for 60 mil) while many of the men risking their lives have families on food stamps!
But our entire military and MIC budgeting system is horribly broken. My grandfather used to come back from the base with loads of brand new stuff, how? Did he steal it? nope because they had to "blow the budget" to keep from having it cut the next year so they'd throw out brand new tools, radios, hell one year they threw out every chair and sofa on the entire base, even though most were less than a year old! and then of course we have the contractors that can blow billions jerking us along and even if the contract is eventually canceled they have clauses written so they get paid a cancelling fee, even when it is THEIR FAULT because they never did the fucking job!
But that is why i think we need to go back to the way it was pre WWII and for most of WWI itself, where we put out a spec and if and ONLY if they came up to us with a working prototype that fit the spec AND the price listed in the spec would we buy. By doing it this way we had serious competition because the one with the best design and prototype won, no stringing us along with some half baked idea that in practice simply doesn't work. mark my words the F35 will be exactly like the F22, only a handful made at some insane price per bird and it'll be kept away from the front just because of how much one of them costs. hell even the Navy has quietly given up on it and is in talks to buy more F-18s and there is talk of giving the green light to the Stealth Eagle to cover the role the F35 would have fulfilled. in the end it will be a trillion we couldn't afford pissed down a rat hole while the MIC enjoys golden shitters and $1000 hookers.
This would be correct IF they had "WinRT Enterprise" but they don't. Since they do not the most likely conclusion is what I have been saying since the Dev preview which is Win 8 is a "Hail Mary" because they are getting curb stomped by Android and Apple in the mobile space and come hell or high water they are kicking that sucker out for the Xmas season.
Personally with all the hatred I've seen from customers trying the consumer preview in my shop I think its not gonna matter WHAT CPU you slap this turkey on its gonna bomb. In the end MSFT really only has TWO choices, 1.-Spin off the mobile division so they can get out from under the legacy of Windows and can sink or swim with Metro OS, or 2.-Accept that they are the new IBM and while making buttloads o' cash will never be the top of the heap again like they were in the 90s.
What we are seeing with MSFT is the same thing we've seen with dozens of once successful companies that got blindsided by new tech. You have a lame CEO who was coasting on past success and assumed that success would last forever, you have a company that is too slow and too large to nimbly react to changing trends, and you have changes in technology that have stopped their endless upward profits, specifically the facts that once PCs hit multicore there haven't been any real "killer apps" to drive new purchases and unlike the "MHz Wars" that MSFT got so rich off of the PC has reached a plateau where the tasks the vast majority have can easily be done on a cheap netbook or even a 5 year old laptop while at the same time the two year contracts and rapid advances in mobile tech have made cell phones and tablets the new MHz Wars where people will go through 4 or 5 phones in the time it takes them to retire a single desktop.
So I'd say the solution is obvious, since they are simply too large and bloated to even listen to their beta testers they need to spin off mobile so it can be nimble and change without going through the whole bloated bureaucratic mess or simply accept they will never own mobile like they do the desktop and kick back and enjoy the money. But rushing out a half ass WinRT while at the same time taking a big crap on desktop users just shows how lost and behind the curve Ballmer really is IMHO. He honestly think he can shove out a half baked product and the MSFT name will carry them. Well come Oct I bet he gets a rude awakening as that strategy didn't work for WinPhone 7 and all the strategy will do with Win 8 is cause a Vista style backlash.
That's why I never understood the complaints. Sure i personally would prefer if MSFT kept that $50 Win 7 Home deal but the simple fact is the vast majority will get Windows on their new PC and the PC itself will be positively ancient before it runs out of being supported. Take my nettop for example, its a circa 2004 Sempron 1.8GHz with 1.5Gb of RAM. That machine is now 8 years old, every single thing about it is horribly out of date, the CPU socket, RAM, even the HDD interface is more than 2 generations behind the curve yet the XP Home on it is STILL supported and will be for another 2 fricking years! and just for shits and giggles i took a spare drive and popped Win 7 on it and guess what? it runs just fine!
So while there are plenty of things to complain about with MSFT support is NOT one of them. Now that they have announced that ALL versions of Windows will get mandatory 10 years support just like the business versions frankly any PC you have that lasts long enough to be EOLed by MSFT is gonna be a real dinosaur, which is why I can't believe the short support cycles on Macs. 5 years? Hell that's Core2Duos with DDR 2 RAM, nothing ancient or unusable about that.
Exactly! my first real taste of computing was tweaking accounting programs for my dad on a Trash and being able to get magazines and actually understand the guts really helped me to appreciate the wonders of those little guys, so I asked for and got a VIC for Xmas the year they came out (1982? God it was so long ago. thank the Federation for the Shat commercial because my mom was a Sci/Fi lover and that swayed her) and a lifetime love of computing was born.
While others sat there staring at their NES and SNES I went from the VIC to a C64 to getting a steal on an IBM that was running the original OS/2, I went through a good dozen OSes, probably just as many different kinds of CPUs (I even had a Cyrix and a WinChip for awhile, remember those?) and through it all had a blast and it can all be traced back to the Trash and the VIC giving me something I could actually control and manipulate instead of blinding consuming.
so lets give credit where credit is due and celebrate the little guys of computing. sadly it looks like we are gonna get to see what happens when the little guys don't exist as the rise of locked down pads and phones seems to be creating a whole generation of little consumers, that all just take what they get without question and have no desire to know anything about it or how it works. As much as I'd enjoy being 20 again I really wouldn't trade my experiences for theirs, their tech may be more powerful but they have zero control.
But what everyone seems to be forgetting is there are several resources there that are quite valuable to whomever controls them so like it or not somebody is gonna step in and try to control the region and the easiest way to do that is bribes of whatever they desire or require. its like that old George Carlin bit about how those in power don't want a populace smart enough to question, just smart enough to work and let's face it your population can be pretty fucking stupid and still work in a mine.
While I agree 100% that education is the answer its gonna be damned hard to push that agenda when there are several superpowers that want those resources. lets be honest folks, all the resources that were easy to get to, the "low hanging fruit" as it were? just about gone. Africa was ignored for the most part simply because it was a war torn disease ridden mess and there were easier sources of materials to acquire but those days are over and as we have seen with all the moves by China in that region in the last few years the superpowers are waking up to the fact that Africa has been largely untapped. As much as i'd like to think we'd help our fellow man several thousand years of history tells me more likely we'll just exploit the hell out of the place until there is nothing left to exploit and if we can keep them in line with a few trinkets or bags of rice? Well then that's what will happen.
The whole thing has gotten batshit thanks to the insane amount of money flowing through the pentagon and military industrial complex. Have you seen the F35 rock video? look it up and LYAO because, yeah, a project that so badly over budget it will be the most expensive weapon system in the history of the planet needs...a rock video.
We need to trash the entire system and start over if bullshit like rock videos and "InfoOps" actually gets paid for with tax dollars. The whole system has gotten so spoiled from drowning in cash that any lame ass idea gets green lighted, what we need is to go back to the way it was pre WWII, where we simply put out a spec and don't buy shit until someone brings a product that meets the spec.
But the reason we see contractors pulling shit like this is the simple fact the only thing our MIC knows how to do anymore is pad expense accounts. if they were coming in on time and on budget frankly they wouldn't have any need to cover up their dirty dealing with horseshit like this.
But then you are right back to it only taking a single mistake, say someone mistaking miles for kilometers, and you've just had an accident that makes every man made disaster in history look like stubbing your toe.
in the end its real simple folks...if you have no real way to stop it if something goes wrong, you REALLY shouldn't fuck with it until you do.
Hey what was wrong with the Trash 80? Not everybody had Apple money back then ya know. I had both the Trash and the VIC (Remember the Shatner commercial, complete with beam in?) and frankly they were great little machines for the time. Sure they weren't that powerful but then again a $10 cell phone is more powerful than the biggest computers were back then.
I think we would all do good to remember that the Trash, VIC, C64, BBC Micro and Sinclair changed a lot of folks lives and gave them a lifetime love of computing. Just think how different the world would be if those little guys never came out? if the only computers for sale in the 80s cost thousands of dollars? it would probably be a lot more empty place, with a lot less programs, tinkering, and DIYers out there.
Funny that your UID is "MSoftsucks" when you have run smack dab into the arrogance of the FOSS community. This is why I gave up on Linux as a whole, i would point out a problem that would be trivial in mac or Windows and either get told what an idiot I must be for not spending two hours in CLI working around the problem or to get told "You don't need that" which is what you got told with base. Well if base is so fucking pointless, why include it? Why waste man hours on a tool that in the same breath you say is pointless?
This is why FOSS breaks down, because like communism there simply is no motivation to make thing better. if the developer likes things the way they are, even if its a bigger PITA for everyone else? tough shit its not changing. look at how VLC still can't pause a video by clicking on it, something every other player has done since the fricking 90s. But the devs don't care, to them its not important, so it never gets fixed.
Say what you want about MSFT but at least the public CAN influence the direction. people hated Vista so they went in and fixed what people hated and came out with Win 7, i believe we'll see the same thing with Win 8. Look at what you cited, Access. MSFT has spent millions continually improving Access because people like you have found it a useful tool for business. Can't fault you there, i myself have used VB+Access on occasion and when one has a small job that needs doing involving a DB there is no easier tool out there. But with FOSS short of hiring an entire development team and forking it yourself as you got to see they simply won't listen. They see no problem with YOU wasting a ton of time in a tool that is much bigger in scope than what you require so tough, it ain't getting fixed.
Ultimately the devs I've dealt with in FOSS treat users with very thinly veiled contempt. they only care about scratching THEIR itches and if it works for you? Fine, if not? don't care. As a wise old linux admin that gave up on the desktop for a Mac told me "Its always 80% there and it NEVER gets any better. the devs get a new itch to scratch and things get tossed and new bugs piled on top of old, but it never gets any closer to being feature complete" and I think he really nailed it. For most of us the cost of Windows or Office is negligible compared to the hours of frustration we'd deal with trying to use the FOSS alternative. My time is a minimum of $35 an hour, at that rate less than 3 hours worth of BS has paid for Windows and another 2 has paid for Office and like you trying to fight tools like Base simply aren't worth the money saved.
Not to mention we already know how to build devices that last, its simply cheaper (and more likely to generate more sales) if you "design for the dump" but with a little care even average electronics can last quite a while. my laptop from 07 is still going last i heard, as is the laptop i had in 2010, the netbook I have now since i'm happy with both the performance and form factor should easily last me 5 to 7 years, possibly more, with simply a little thought and common sense when it comes to carrying it.
So there is no reason, other than carelessness or the desire to "keep up with the joneses" to replace your devices annually. With a little thought and care i could see a tablet lasting 5 years which I'm sure would be a pretty big win on the ecology front.
That wouldn't matter either and here is why: If you change whatever official is in there the global PTB will simply throw a few bribes to the right ones and take what you have by force, so even voting with your dollars is no longer relevant, see "Too big to fail" as an example.
Frankly the only real course of action left is to grab as much as you can for you and yours and wait for the whole rotten structure to collapse. As both sides continue to spend like drunken sailors the collapse is inevitable now, the only question is how long it will take and what will come after. Will it be fascism, communism, el presidente style dictatorships? Who knows but its pretty obvious that at this point the global elite have concentrated too much wealth for the peoples of any nation to stand up to them, all one can do is protect one's own as much as you can and wait for the whole rotten thing to burn.
That is why I would recommend No One Lives Forever I & II as challenges filled with laughs is hard for batshit "1 million moms" types to bitch about and I dare you not to get a big old smile the first time you plant a kitty bomb and watch what happens when a bad guy finds it "Oh look, what a cute little kitty...fsst BOOM!" he he he.
Wow...10.5 was released in 2007 and its ALREADY unsupported according to the wiki? damn maybe folks shouldn't have marked the AC a troll that made the joke about buying a new Mac every year. I thought the big selling point on the Mac was how "high quality" Macs were? Yet the support drops after less than 5 years? I guess that's why I never really got into macs, i just don't get it.
As for TFA can we FINALLY acknowledge and admit that what the windows guys have been saying all these years is true, that you become a big enough target and you WILL get malware? After all we've seen this with both Apple and Linux with Android, and frankly it should have been incredibly obvious with just a moment's thought. I mean where do Windows viruses come from? Well since Vista made running as a limited user mandatory the vast majority I've seen has been PEBKAC, so how can switching OSes magically turn a PEBKAC user into an admin? Answer...it can't and that was the point.
In the end one can't escape the simple fact that ALL OSes are extremely complex collections of very advanced programs and as we all know the more advanced something is the easier it is for a clueless person to break it. Sadly in this case the clueless user was Apple for not pushing out the bog standard version of Java and instead insisting on rolling their own, which would have been fine if it could do so VERY quickly but instead the apple version of java fell farther and farther behind the mainstream. At that point a major attack was inevitable, the only question was when.
If I was a paranoid person i'd have to wonder if this wasn't by design, after all who would fault Apple if they restricted or outright banned Java as a security risk now? Of course Java like Flash allows one to run web based apps which bypasses the appstore which Apple has sunk so much into so a pessimist might say that Apple wants java to go the way of flash and what better way than to remove it to better protect the user?
Uhhh..we actually didn't have any way to know then because we hadn't reached 25 MPH but thanks to a guy that detached a retina for science we know pretty much EXACTLY what the human body can take and at what point you'll have serious damage. this is why we use see combat pilots in battle they flip over before diving because the human body tolerates positive Gs much better than negative.
So sure if you start out really slow and build up very gradually? Then even the fat guy in front of you in line at the Wendy's could handle a ride in the thing, its just a question of how long that build up and slow down would take and would it be worth the fuel. Considering how much gas the Concorde blew through i'm thinking probably not practical.
What I don't get is why didn't they just buy or build their own? its not like Google doesn't have assloads of money. the only thing that I can come up with is just like MSFT tried to do in the 90s they tried to take advantage of all the experience that developers have with Java without bothering to actually get the rights to do so.
But you are right that I don't see how even the fanboys can be for Google when there are literally piles of emails saying "We aren't doing clean room" We should get a license" "We are on shaky ground here" etc. Either the employees at Google knew what they were doing was seriously iffy or all those writers of emails didn't have a clue what they were talking about....ya know, the logic just doesn't really hold up. If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck...its probably not a moose, no matter how much you want it to be one.
Actually I would say it should be looked upon as a more fundamental question which is this: Should email be treated as a letter, or as a text message?
The problem with treating emails like a letter is simply people don't think about emails like they do about a letter, probably because it is so trivial to send. With a letter one has to take the time and consolidate their thoughts, write them down, fold it up, put in the envelope etc, whereas with emails they are treated with no more thought most of the time than a LOLCat.
I just have to wonder how many times companies will be bitchslapped by emails like this before they either simply don't allow emails or have them disposed of quickly. because unless you can somehow get your employees to treat emails with the gravitas of a formal letter they will just keep biting you right in the ass.