See this is why I love LMAO at the FOSSies, they are so "There is but one true god!" they can't even think, like how you at the very first sentence threw an insult and then dared to get butthurt when i slapped your dumb ass down.
You want some fresh bitch slapping? Be careful what you wish for FOSSie, how about a nice kernel exploit? Or how about the guy that wrote EEEBuntu saying Ubuntu sucks which considering they are the current savior of Linux kinda tells you something. But why don't you say "Use Distro X" and then have the balls to name the X so i can show its just as big a POS, huh? As for why the older ones? frankly everyone has stop giving a fuck about your OS, you aren't even newsworthy anymore really. Now its all Win 7&8, OSX&iOS, and of course Android which just shows what happens when a company bitch slaps the community and takes it away from them, why it actually fucking runs!
How sad that even with a bug spreading through OSX there are writers pointing out that's no reason to torture yourself with Linux , after all even a virus ridden OSX actually runs which is more than most distros LOL! But hey, you can always tell them they can fix it otherwise they don't need that right? LOL! And I noticed you just couldn't fricking resist screaming "Nigger!" which in FOSSie is done by screaming PaidMicrosoftShill, hey you think you could throw in one more FOSSie cliche please? Then I'll have a FOSSie Flush ROFL!
But if you didn't have cliches and your pathetic attempts at insults why then you might have to have an independent thought and realize what everybody knows that even when MSFT put out a universally reviled OS you STILL got curb stomped, does that give you ANY clues? or all they all brainwashed by those black choppers that have been following you? Hell when the Chinese were given the choice of your "free OS" or pirating Windows they chose the latter even if it meant staying on XP and using IE fricking 6, LOL! Does that ring ANY bells? A smart person would say "what are we doing wrong the other guy is doing right?" but a FOSSie who is just like a Moonie in that they blindly follow, instead says "Its all a conspiracy! They are all shills keeping the masses from true salvation!" and then you wonder why we all laugh at you because you DON'T Listen, you DON'T learn, and Torvalds could take a big steaming dump and hand it to you and you'd thank him for his generous gift. So enjoy that fresh bitchslapping loony, enjoy the fact that the world really doesn't care...but I do, I enjoy slapping you, it makes me feel all warm and fuzzy.
Oh and Microsoft doesn't need shills, they have YOU. Its batshit loony tunes like YOU that make the entire community look like retarded basement trolls, its YOU that gives everyone the fodder for all the "Linux is for lusers" jokes, because you sound like a religious whacko. Frankly all any Microsoft or Apple rep has to do is show posts like yours and say 'you would want you company de
Nice to see i'm not the only one. I mean if it is a complex subject how is one supposed to argue for or against something with the space of a tweet? Frankly i think the whole tweet thing is helping to make discussions into basically "it roxorz" or "it suxorz" because that is all you can really fit.
And I guess i'm not good at explaining what i'm suggesting as you are getting the wrong idea. I am NOT suggesting that unemployment be tied to these things but what I AM suggesting is this: You have all these people that are already unemployed. We know that unemployment breeds crime, it hurts people's self esteem and ability to get a job, and it causes real hardship...so why not put these people to work? Giving them a job they can be proud of, something they could show to their children and say "I helped to build this" would be better than just having them sitting at home with a knot in their gut wondering if the unemployment will run out before they get another job, don't you think?
I just think by setting realistic goals, unlike this electric car nonsense which as another poster wrote is like saying one could build a 747 in 1906 if you threw enough money at it, but instead to take a resource we already have that is going to waste, all these unemployed workers, and instead utilizing them to do jobs that really need to be done. I will admit you can call me a little biased since i have walked across bridges that my grandfather helped to build in the WPA but I truly think these goals are obtainable with what we have NOW.
Just as i believe a "people's car" with a price that can be reached with the technology we have and a MPG goal that can be obtained without any new technologies having to be invented, could truly change this country for the better. the last report I read said the average age of a car on the road in this country now is 11 years and the average MPG is barely 20. Now imagine if suddenly everyone is driving 40MPG cars because anyone can afford them? Not to mention I have no doubt like with the Model T we would see entire new industries spring up to customize these new vehicles which would also help our unemployment situation.
So I'm not saying tie one to the other, what I am saying is we have all these jobs that need doing, we have all these people that need work, why not put them together? I think we can all agree our infrastructure needs a major overhaul anyway and we are falling behind on broadband compared to other nations, so why not instead of paying people to sit and worry we do something about this? And when it is all over if there is still major unemployment at LEAST you will have fixed what is broken and this new infrastructure and telecommunications grid will encourage other companies and countries to give the USA a second look. And who knows how many industries that we can't even imagine would spring up from a nationwide fiber to the neighborhood system? after all look what happened when we took the Ma Bell monopoly away, suddenly we had faxes and wireless phones and this system we are typing on now!
Uhhh...If you are Mr Peres, why don't you have an account instead of posting AC? After all both Eric Raymond and even Linus Torvalds has accounts, even if Linus naturally hasn't got the time to use his much.
Now for my other question, since you are basically snatching the data from a binary blob which i'm sure is full of proprietary code, after all if it wasn't they could just FOSS the thing, do you worry about DMCA? i know that AMD can't release full specs on their GPUs because protected path isn't theirs and would break DMCA and since Nvidia cards i'm sure have protected path as well do you have to worry about legal ramifications? or have you set up the project in some place that doesn't recognize software patents?
If you ARE Mr Peres I would like to say I admire your guts, frankly I wouldn't want to go within 100 yards of anything to do with video as long as all these crazy patents and lawsuits are going on. And how about hardware acceleration of video? How can you do that without ending up in the whole H.26x patent minefield?
Frankly I think its a shame that such questions even have to be asked as while i have no problems with proprietary software and use both FOSS and proprietary software every day i do NOT support software patents but as long as that minefield exists I am curious how you intend to approach feature parity with the blob driver without stepping into the whole patent mess since one of the big uses of GPUs is video processing and that's patented up the wazoo.
Sorry I didn't elaborate but I have been accused of making posts too long so i try to shorten my responses. what i meant was not ONLY for the WPA to be running FTTH, and as i said even FTTN would be a huge improvement in MANY areas, but there is so much infrastructure that can be made a thousand times better. just look at our roads and bridges, many are from Ike's time. We have also seen there IS a way to build a road so it will really last, just look at the Autobahn, but you have to lay a really solid foundation and build up.
I think we can use a modern WPA to truly transform this country into the vision that many of us were shown as kids in the 60s, with truly modern roads that don't break easily, could have embedded sensors for future driverless cars, bridges replaced with better designs, and of course by building FTTH or FTTN depending on the size of the area to help bring tele-education and telecommute to the masses.
As a final change I would toss this electric car nonsense as the battery tech isn't there yet and instead build a true "people's car" which would be both a 2 door and 4 door model that had a 4 cyl and gets 40MPG for less than $10k. We would then offer a cash for clunkers style program so that all the working poor could trade in those old gas hogs for a much better vehicle for the environment.
with these changes I think we could lick unemployment and modernize our country for the future while at the same time lowering our dependence on gas from overseas and at the same time actually creating jobs for all those out of work. sadly though it requires vision and will, two things our politicians seem to have little to none of ATM.
I don't know exactly what he is trying to "fix for me" but I think I would have been pointing this bug out a little more loudly if I had actually gotten malware SPERM, not to mention that PC wouldn't have been wiped but killed with fire.
Riiiight. Urban America, or as many of us call it "Welcome to the jungle, we got fun and games". Did you ever stop to think that in most of America the cities are divided into the insanely rich gated communities and the places where you need to strap BPVs to your car like in Predator II? That kind of attitude might work in Asia but in the USA you are either rich enough to live in a gated community or you can go to bed to the sound of gunfire.
Which shows it isn't the OS or the hardware, its the networks. i have to wonder if the whole "buffer problem" we've been reading about here is about to hit the tipping point as it seems like everything now has big fat buffers built in and as we know the Internet model simply wasn't designed for having large buffers throw the timing all to hell.
Personally I think it is high time we use an old solution to fix a new problem...bring back the WPA. a lot of our bandwidth problems would disappear if we had nationwide FTTH or at least fiber to the neighborhood. It seems like a great way to put all those sitting at home on unemployment to work and you build it right and just as many bridges built by the WPA in rural areas still work fine so too could a well built fiber network last us for ages. this would also give us the benefits of new businesses springing up to make use of this new resource and finally kill the duopolies that have been hamstringing growth in so many areas of the country because the lines would be open to competition.
I truly believe if we don't do something radical like bring back the WPA we will end up staying on the short bus to the info superhighway because the corps can make more money by throttling and cherry picking than by actually growing their businesses and in our short sighted corp climate the quarterly reports are all that matters. i know that even though my home town has grown by more than a third neither the cable nor DSL has moved an inch in a good decade or more. They would rather just add caps and sit on the big wads of money than actually add new customers. If we don't change this situation we are gonna end up being left behind so its high time we put those unemployed to work building us a new broadband infrastructure.
Oh look, its a FOSSie, aka basement troll. How's the koolaid, is it cherry? You want some links on breakage? be careful what you wish for, because you just might get it and that is showing that one of the largest OEMs on the planet can't keep your craptastic OS running without having to do their own fricking fork!
And how about that "great" Linux security that is supposed to be why we should put up with all this horseshit? Get ready, heretheycome! Kinda makes that koolaid just a little bitter now, don't it? Now why would anybody care when they could get a Mac or Win 7 and not deal with all this lies and horseshit?
BTW if you'd like a little more food for thought, what OS was 3 of the 4 CAs running that were compromised? takea lookand see. Maybe they just had bad configs? Surely someone with knowledge would be safe right? Guess again and its not a flukeby any means.
Sorry, forgot I was on a geek site and was thinking like a normal instead of a geek. I meant steals MY focus and blows my flow all to shit. I mean here I am, working on something complex when suddenly bling! "Hi just FYI but blah blah blah" pops up which drags my focus instantly away from what I was doing and there goes my groove which if you are dealing with something important can be bad.
Nothing worse than working on a real PITA problem in a remote session and while working on the machine AND listening to the customer try to describe the problem in normal terms and you having to translate that in your head to useful info and you start to have an idea form that you may know exactly where to go if maybe this is set incorrect and...bing! WTF? Get out of my damned face you stupid popup! Now where was I?....FUCK!
The only way i know to describe what I'm talking about is imagine you are juggling while riding a skateboard, concentrating your ass off and everything is going good when...some asshole yells EXCUSE ME! as he walks a good 40 feet away. Whether you can truly blame him for your faceplant 4 seconds later is debatable but the fact that you were doing just fine before motormouth popped off is not and in both cases the info was pointless and a waste of my energy. The popup simply can't know whether I'm busy or not, whether to leave me alone or not, whereas the progress bar I control and I can look at on MY timescale and NOT its.
While that is a pretty good idea there is an even worse bug in FF that they need to address because I'm sure other bad guys will pick up on it and that is the Yahoo porn bug. I call it a porn bug because its seen most often on porn video sites but I've been told the trick is showing up at other places so maybe its starting to spread and the sad part is it ought to be trivial to stop. This is how it works:
Target A uses FF to surf a porn video site. While the video is playing FF is sent a hidden iFrame that loads the yahoo login, FF logs the target in and then everyone in their address book gets porn and malware spam links. This gets around many of the spam filters because its from a non blacklisted account and they don't send more than one or two emails per targeted address and having received a couple from those that were hit it looks like it may be taking random sentences from somewhere (maybe another hidden iFrame?) to get past the filters and look like a legit email.
The fix seems pretty obvious and I honestly don't know why mozilla hasn't done so. All one would have to do is prompt the user on install or upgrade to put a master password on their password store and here is the key have it only ask ONCE per session and no means do not ask again for the session because after telling my users to put a master password they immediately started screaming that it made FF unusable so I put a master password on mine and...wow. it will bug the ever loving shit out of you with constant asking for the master password! I was getting 4 or 5 requests for the master password on just regular sites which tells me that the current password design sucks ass if so many see you are running FF and try to hit it.
So while i'm glad they are working on the autoplay problem I'd say user passwords being threatened is just as big if not bigger and really hope they do something about this in future releases. Since I had a machine I was gonna wipe anyway I decided to cook up a couple of phony Yahoo accounts (along with a phony Gmail and Hotmail) and test this for myself and can say that at least as far as i could tell this bug ONLY affects FF and Yahoo, not Gmail or Hotmail, and not Dragon, Opera, Safari, QTWeb, or Chrome. So I'd say if you have a user or family member that uses yahoo as a primary email you might want to switch them to another browser until they get that fixed. Oh and NO I did NOT test IE because after they refused to backport to XP which is still supported i officially wrote off IE. If you have to replace a supported OS just to stay current on the fricking browser then its no longer a functional choice IMHO.
Oh and since someone always seems to ask the version number the one I tested was i believe 8, FF has been spinning through version numbers so fast lately its hard to keep up and I don't have the time to rerun this test every time a browser has a new release. If someone wants to run the test again its pretty easy, you'll need 1 fake yahoo account along with either another fake yahoo or gmail or hotmail in the address book of the fake yahoo so the bug has an email to send spam to. Then simply start clicking on random porn vids, xHamster or youPorn, any of the major porn sites will do. If the bug is still active you'll see strangely worded spam go to your target account from the yahoo account and that's how you know its still active. Like I said i just don't have the time so after trying several browsers i switched my users and family over to Comodo Dragon since it had both ABP and low rights mode. Since the switch no more strange porn spams so I'd say it was a successful switch.
uhhh... Because those are irritating as fuck and steal focus away from what you were actually USING and thus break your flow? one of my big requests is to get rid of any and all pop ups because they annoy the living shit out of people! If I'm doing something complicated the LAST thing I need is some stupid app popping shit up right in the damned middle of things throwing my concentration all to hell.
Why is that? Even the little netbooks now have HDMI and most monitors can be flipped to portrait mode. So it seems to me that if you need portrait view you can have it AND have a better view for multimedia. Frankly with LCDs being so cheap I don't see why anybody wouldn't just pick up a cheap second monitor and flip it. with GPUs capable of running multiple screens and everything having HDMI its easier than ever before to just have it both ways. Certainly cheaper to do it this way than find one of the handful of units still made in 4x3.
Question: do you think the masses would pay...oh say 45% more for their devices to change that? Considering I've seen 1366x768 in everything from 10 inch and 12 inch netbooks to 15 and even a few 17 inch laptops i have to think that the yields at that particular resolution (as well as 1600x900 which also seems to be incredibly popular) are extremely high which of course lowers the cost.
In the end the consumers can always buy the different resolution devices and the market will change to follow their lead but from the looks of TFA people seem to be happy with 1366, 1600, and 1920. As someone that owns a 12 inch that is 1366 i can see why, it works great for me for websurfing, games, and video.If given the choice of a say 1280x1024 or the 1366x768 and the 1280 would cost $100 more? No way i'd have taken it over the 1366 and from the looks of TFA for once i'm part of the majority as it looks like everyone feels the same.
I'm typing this on a circa 2004 Sempron that was traded in by a customer that I decided to keep because it makes a great nettop. its the same install, that is 8 years with ZERO driver or program breakage. and nooo, it doesn't have any "super sekret magic invisible" malware because this customer followed my advice and practiced basic safe computing, like not downloading crap programs from dodgy sources or opening email attachements. So how much more solid do you need? I had a customer last week that JUST NOW retired his Win2K box, it was still running great but he finally replaced the program that was holding him onto XP. I built that box for him in Aug 2000 and the Win2K is STILL running, he just demoted it to being the controller for a laser cutter.
as a long term Linux advocate told me when I asked why he was going to buy a Mac "Its not getting better. things get 80% there and then someone gets an itch and its all thrown out and they start over, its just never getting any closer to finished" and sadly he is correct. I hate to wish ill on anyone and truly hope he lives a long life but i have a feeling that after Torvalds breathes his last they will quietly put in an ABI (because the religious argument doesn't hold as many ALREADY only offer binary blobs, so having a broken driver subsystem obviously isn't forcing them to follow the GPL way) and people will be amazed when so many problems just disappear. Until then I can say its just not a usable system for consumers, its just not there.
Exactly! Even becoming a good troubleshooter takes years of experience because one has to realize and follow a methodology that goes from the most basic to the most complex step by step by step, yet people think someone like me can just walk in to a broken network and magically flip a switch and instantly find which node has failed, what is causing a strain on the network, or where the bottlenecks are.
Now take that up to 11 with a system that is literally tens of thousands of times more complex, where thousands upon thousands of programs and subsystems are gonna be interacting with this code in ways most will have NEVER even thought about until the whole thing comes crashing down. i may disagree with a lot of the reasoning behind what Torvalds does as far as direction but I'd be the first one to say that he is one of only a handful ON THE ENTIRE PLANET that can do that particular job. you are talking about millions of lines of code in and of itself, not counting how all of that is gonna interaction with millions of lines of code that isn't under your control...wow. the mind boggles at how truly complex of a system we are talking about.
Which just makes what the FOSSies try to claim even more of a farce, that just because you have a "C for dummies" book and have written some little text editor you can then step into Torvalds shoes and actually maintain the Linux kernel AND create truly robust patches capable of plugging holes written by black hats AND do this without completely crippling the system. Again its source code and NOT pixie dust, one has to be intimately familiar with the material AND the interactions before even attempting such a delicate operation. And the whole "hire someone to do it" is even more of a farce because the handful of guys capable of doing that work can charge more than the most expensive lawyers and what's more they WILL get it, because THAT level of skill and experience is just as rare and just as highly prized as a top level brain surgeon!
But lets be honest swalve, its a total handwaving asspull is what it is. its a cheap totally bullshit excuse to handwave away those that point out that they have NO choice but to constantly deal with breakage because to keep a Linux system under support with the frankly insane pace of development you have to be dealing with upgrades pretty damned constantly. I mean look at what we have seen in just the last 3 years, the entire audio subsystem has been ripped out, both major DEs shitcanned and started over and a hell of a lot of the graphics and wireless subsystems are either being majorly overhauled or in the process of being replaced.
Having the code doesn't magically erase all that, nor does it give one the skills to magically fix all those system when a major change breaks something that was critical to you. this is even why companies that have large Linux webserver farms will have Windows on the desktop, because with ten years MINIMUM support you can deploy and then not worry about it until the hardware fails if you so desire. Just now am I seeing the great XP dieoff start to gain steam with tons of older P4s coming in as SMBs get new systems. hell the one i'm typing this on is a circa 2004 Sempron that was traded in that I decided to keep as a nettop and its still running the same XP that it was deployed with! That is over 8 years on the same OS with ZERO broken programs or drivers. frankly i would love the hell out of it if you could get that kind of time out of a Linux system but frankly if anything its going the other way, with length of support getting shorter for most distros. this is fine if your tme costs nothing and you enjoy tweaking and fiddling with the OS but if you need that machine to "just work' its a fricking nightmare.
Trying to say that doesn't matter just because you have the source code is like handing someone a pile of aluminum and saying that surely they can repair that busted 707, after all they have all the resources right there, right?
Question: Why would you run the HD5550 at home when the HD4850 is only $53? I mean you look at the numbers and the HD4850 just curb stomps the HD5550 and geeks has them brand new for $53 and has had them at that price for ages. Until the 58xx and 68xx drop down to sub $70 I'll be recommending the HD4850s as they really do crank out the graphics. BTW this is the same model both myself and both of my boys have and i can tell you they are GREAT cards, they accelerate just about any major format of video, play games with plenty of detail, the amount of raw power you get with those cards is just nuts.
So if you are running crazy resolutions like that you'd probably be happier with the HD4850 as having 800 stream processors and a 256bit pipe you can keep that baby pretty well pumping when it comes to graphics.
Downloads and transfers for one thing. i'll often have the download and transfer window open to one side of the screen so while i'm working on the main problem a customer is having i can see how the driver updates for their system are coming along and make sure they have transferred to their machine and are ready to go when i'm done fixing the error. After all one doesn't have to know exactly to the second when it is done, only that the files are being transferred and when they are complete and with a progress bar that is something one can just skim.
Actually that is the resolution of my 12 inch netbook (A EEE 1215B which i highly recommend if someone wants a really nice netbook) and for websurfing and pretty much any other task i can think to do with a portable its perfectly fine and THAT I would say if the point. i would bet my last dollar the reason you are seeing 1366 beat 1024 is that the vast majority of netbooks and midsize laptops use this resolution and the masses have spoken, price trumps higher definition in a portable device.
If you want a bigger desktop? can't really blame you, i use a nice 22 inch 1600x900 that was given to me as a thank you from a customer, but for portables 1366x768 really does seem to be the sweet spot. i watch movies and the picture is clear and crisp, i surf the web and the text is fine, same as with chat, and lets be honest folks in the end most aren't gonna pay a huge markup for a slightly higher def. in my case i couldn't pay for a higher def if i had wanted to because at 12 inches, which was the size I required after trying all the different netbooks and laptops that came through my door, there simply are not any other choices, its 1366x768 or...well go buy a much larger and less portable unit.
So if what i have seen my customers ask for and buy the 3 major resolutions for the foreseeable future is gonna be 1366x768 which is most netbooks and 15 inch laptops, 1600x900 which is what the majority of 20-24 inch desktop monitors are coming in as well as many of the 17 inch laptops, and finally 1920x1080 because that is what the HDTVs as well as the midrange monitors and laptops come in at.
I'd say i hope you like one of those 3 because looking at tiger and newegg those units that don't fit into one of those three resolutions tend to be crazy priced. personally i love my 1215B, 1366x768 and all. its light, gets great battery life, and i have no trouble with text or video. if it ain't broke?
And I know who would be PERFECT to partner with Google on it...Valve. Can you imagine the delicious taste of win for Google if they partnered with Valve and had a Steam box that played all of Steam's games with a full blown Google web app experience in it? Videos through YouTube, Google docs, search, AND it would give Google the way into social media that they want by tying G+ into Steam chat so you could take it to the next level.
I've been running Windows PCs since Win 3.x but if Google and Valve were to come out with something like that? say an AMD Liano based HTPC/Gaming console based on Steam and having everything easy peasy? I'd jump on that in a New York minute and i bet a HUGE number of folks would as well. and with a pair of juggernauts like Google and Valve they could further partner with AMD to cross advertise and get some serious economies of scale so they could probably have the price point down to $199. That thing would fly off the shelves!
Thank you, and your case is a PERFECT example if you don't mind me elaborating..Here you are stuck with machines you can't upgrade even though you are in an enterprise environment with i'm sure VERY qualified admins that get paid damned good money and know how to do a step by step troubleshoot, yet you simply can't afford the downtime.
But here is why i get so much hatred from the loonie section of the FOSS gallery, because i speak for the consumers. now if YOU, a qualified admin with i'm sure years of experience, can't upgrade because the breakage would cost too much downtime and loss of functionality....what about the consumers who don't have your skillset? who in the FOSS community speaks for them? sadly nobody which is why i get such hate.
To steal a line from FMJ the FOSSie section has completely deluded themselves into thinking "Inside every Suzy the checkout girl is a C coder or Bash programmer just waiting to get out!" and that is complete and total horseshit. The average consumer, the ones they will HAVE TO GET if they are gonna ever end up anything more than a geeker toy like Haiku,1.- simply do NOT have the skillset to do a step by step troubleshoot, 2.- many do NOT have a completely separate computer (which would have to be running Windows or OSX if you think this thing through logically, because if say the upgrade from Ubuntu leapin Lizard to maniac monkey broke one computer it can just as easily break two) with which to "Google for fixes" for when the upgrade craps all over them, 3.-Do NOT have the intimate knowledge required to even hunt the forums for fixes, because thanks to Torvalds unstable as hell driver model you often have to be VERY specific when it comes to make/rev/firmware of the device broken, and finally 4.-Do NOT have the ability to dissect the code that is given to them because unlike the total lie the crazy section pushes you often HAVE to "tweak" said fixes because they were written for hardware A, rev B, firmware C and you have hardware C, rev G, firmware R and again the slightest thing off and it isn't gonna do shit! Hell a single spelling error or not starting or ending the copypasta in just the perfect spot can shit all over the thing!
So I'm sorry but Linux is completely unusable by a good 90% of the population. i often get bitched at by the FOSSies because i refuse to carry their product in my shop but the only damned way their OS will "work" is if I give away free lifetime support AND keep a bunch of spares on hand so they can have a loaner while i wait the sometimes two weeks or more before a fix to a particular piece of hardware is even released!
And I apologize for the length but i'm just so damned tired of hypocrites and lies and that sums up the FOSSie section of Linux in a nutshell. you get told that its ready for the masses but when you point out that even simple things like keeping the OS in a supported state equals constant breakage you get informed you should give away lifetime support (thus destroying my business for their religious cause) or "buy a supported version and supported hardware" which means $400 a year for RHEL plus a workstation which just priced out the entire customer base, and for what? What do i gain? What does the customer gain? More work, more cost, less functionality. Give me a Linux that costs less than Windows and gives me 10 years of support like Windows and then you'll have a chance. otherwise i have machines that are 8+ years old in the field that run beautifully on WinXP and I have no doubt this copy of Win 7 I installed in Oct 09 will be running just as nicely in 2020 no matter how many updates MSFT comes out with. THAT is what matters to consumers, not some 'free as in freedom" sense of smug.
And hey with a scalpel I'm qualified to be your heart surgeon...right? I mean that IS what you are basically saying, because we aren't talking about some fart app here we are talking about the literal heart of an extremely complex operating system and you just acted like it would be trivial just to DIY. Hell even RMS couldn't write his own kernel and you expect Joe average to pull off a major rewrite? And do you have ANY idea how much it would cost to hire a qualified kernel developer to do your own custom rewrite? Might as well say you can fly down to Redmond in your Lear jet and bitchslap the sweaty monkey with your solid diamond dildo until he agrees to keep supporting XP.
If I was Linus personally i'd be pissed as hell that so many like you think what he does is so damned trivial that just because you have the code you could kick him to the curb. you'd be DAMNED lucky if the number of guys that are truly qualified to do that job is even in the triple digits and they sure as hell won't be working for you. hell guys with those skills are practically the rock stars of coding and have top paying jobs and headhunters trying to steal them away..
To use a/. car analogy just because I hand you the blueprints to a Ferrari and hand you a couple of tons of raw steel does NOT man you will be able to actually build a Ferrari or even be able to rebuild one that has been dropped off a cliff. Remember folks its source code NOT pixie dust.
That's because our cartels frankly own the US gov and sadly are buying more govs overseas as well. No need to worry about that pesky "will of the people thing" if you just buy off whomever wins.
BTW does this mean we can FINALLY put that whole "do no evil" thing right next to "think different" and whatever lame ass slogan MSFT has which i can't even think of? I mean Google DID buy out Motorola, correct? that was allowed to happen right? which would mean we now have all three major players trolling with patents, Apple, Google AND MSFT which means any damned way you go you are getting screwed.
Oh and on a final note allow me to say a big fat "I told you so!" because i did, I told you so. I said everybody better be nice and put up with Flash while we got together and told Apple and MSFT to stick it with H.264 and not to support HTML V5 until they made a free codec as the baseline, be it Theora or WebM. I warned you that if you thought Flash was a bad thing you hadn't seen nothing because H.264 was patent hell and now look.
Mark my words if the big three have their way its gonna be RMV and WMV all over again. I don't care if H.26x is so damned beautiful a format technically it shits rainbows there are literally thousands of patents making H.264 a clusterfuck of epic scale and according to the Wiki the earliest it'll leave the minefield is 2027 which of course long before then we'll have H.265 and we'll be screwed again.
MPG 2 is about to expire soon isn't it? maybe we should tell the big 3 to piss off and just use MPG 2. After all it'll play on anything, you can get a good picture with it and i bet with a little work it can be made even better. This is one case where as shocking as it may be I'm with RMS, you don't want the web media locked behind a shitload of patents mucking things up.
So you sir are actually gonna stand here and say Obama DIDN'T support warrantless wiretapping, kill an American without a trial, sign in NDAA, etc? Can I have some of the magic pixie dust you are smoking? the one that lets you magically ignore the man's record? And the ONLY thing horrible about is that its true, you can look up any fact he posted you like and find the figures.
Like it or not sir YOU get to choose between a man that has lied and supported every single evil thing Dubya did, in fact went farther than Dubya every chance he got, or get to vote for a guy that actually thinks people losing their jobs and homes makes for a funny joke!
Whether you like it or not by voting for either you WILL be supporting evil, not even the lesser evil, just two different flavors of evil. its Coke VS Pepsi.
You want a nice machine that can run Linux? try the Asus EEE netbooks. they already have Expressgate which is an embedded Linux that has its own button and launches in 6 second from a cold start and gives you tons of apps and from what i've read the AMD APU based ones have been supported by ubuntu since 10.04 and i'm sure most of the other distros have support as well. I lug my all over the place and get 6 and a half hours on Win 7 and a little over 8 under Expressgate, i'd probably get longer but i like playing with all their multimedia stuff.
I've had customers get burned thinking Sony still meant quality so I've had several VIAO units and tearing into them i can tell you they are caca, no better than your average Dell consumer unit, just a little more shiny, a hell of a lot of bloatware, and a truly batshit price. Sony is going down for precisely that reason, they have let the quality go to shit while trying to still charge quality money. if you want a good laptop that will run Linux at a good price Asus, Acer, and HP business can all do that job and unlike Sony actually have decent build quality.
Besides the entire line is moot because if the community thinks they can do better then bring ReactOS up to snuff and there you go! Someone has already done a lot of the early work FOR you, all you have to do is bring it the rest of the way! Then you will truly have a FOSS XP for one and all.
But of course that work is gonna be hard as hell and nobody wants to do it, hence it don't get done. Does ANYONE here think being handed the entire XP codebase would magically make fixing bugs in that huge damned maze of code any easier than just starting over with ReactOS? After all ReactOS doesn't have backwards compatibility going back damned near to DOS built in, isn't gonna have to deal with all this old depreciated crap like.NET 1.0, frankly what this guy is saying might as well be "Just give us XP for free and we'll throw magic pixie dust and make it all better!" which of course is nuts. hell it would probably take the community the better part of a decade just to come to grip with all that damned code and the interactions.
for a perfect example of why the community would be better off using its limited resources on ReactOS just look at LO. I'm sure those guys would tell you they still have a loong way to go to modernize it and bring it up to a more modular design and we are talking about a single program with legacy cruft! In just the system32 folder on my XP nettop you are looking at 256 subfolders containing 6694 files...and that is just one folder...does anyone have any idea how long it would take just to get up to speed on that one folder? Checking the windows folder you are looking at 19, 537 files and 2524 folders. By the time the community, even if they got even say 10% the funding of a Red hat would probably take a good decade just to figure out what interacted with what and how! Now try to fix bugs before they were completely pwned AND trying to learn all those interactions...If you want XP FOSS users you have ReactOS, spend your time there.
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See this is why I love LMAO at the FOSSies, they are so "There is but one true god!" they can't even think, like how you at the very first sentence threw an insult and then dared to get butthurt when i slapped your dumb ass down.
You want some fresh bitch slapping? Be careful what you wish for FOSSie, how about a nice kernel exploit? Or how about the guy that wrote EEEBuntu saying Ubuntu sucks which considering they are the current savior of Linux kinda tells you something. But why don't you say "Use Distro X" and then have the balls to name the X so i can show its just as big a POS, huh? As for why the older ones? frankly everyone has stop giving a fuck about your OS, you aren't even newsworthy anymore really. Now its all Win 7&8, OSX&iOS, and of course Android which just shows what happens when a company bitch slaps the community and takes it away from them, why it actually fucking runs!
How sad that even with a bug spreading through OSX there are writers pointing out that's no reason to torture yourself with Linux , after all even a virus ridden OSX actually runs which is more than most distros LOL! But hey, you can always tell them they can fix it otherwise they don't need that right? LOL! And I noticed you just couldn't fricking resist screaming "Nigger!" which in FOSSie is done by screaming PaidMicrosoftShill, hey you think you could throw in one more FOSSie cliche please? Then I'll have a FOSSie Flush ROFL!
But if you didn't have cliches and your pathetic attempts at insults why then you might have to have an independent thought and realize what everybody knows that even when MSFT put out a universally reviled OS you STILL got curb stomped, does that give you ANY clues? or all they all brainwashed by those black choppers that have been following you? Hell when the Chinese were given the choice of your "free OS" or pirating Windows they chose the latter even if it meant staying on XP and using IE fricking 6, LOL! Does that ring ANY bells? A smart person would say "what are we doing wrong the other guy is doing right?" but a FOSSie who is just like a Moonie in that they blindly follow, instead says "Its all a conspiracy! They are all shills keeping the masses from true salvation!" and then you wonder why we all laugh at you because you DON'T Listen, you DON'T learn, and Torvalds could take a big steaming dump and hand it to you and you'd thank him for his generous gift. So enjoy that fresh bitchslapping loony, enjoy the fact that the world really doesn't care...but I do, I enjoy slapping you, it makes me feel all warm and fuzzy.
Oh and Microsoft doesn't need shills, they have YOU. Its batshit loony tunes like YOU that make the entire community look like retarded basement trolls, its YOU that gives everyone the fodder for all the "Linux is for lusers" jokes, because you sound like a religious whacko. Frankly all any Microsoft or Apple rep has to do is show posts like yours and say 'you would want you company de
Nice to see i'm not the only one. I mean if it is a complex subject how is one supposed to argue for or against something with the space of a tweet? Frankly i think the whole tweet thing is helping to make discussions into basically "it roxorz" or "it suxorz" because that is all you can really fit.
And I guess i'm not good at explaining what i'm suggesting as you are getting the wrong idea. I am NOT suggesting that unemployment be tied to these things but what I AM suggesting is this: You have all these people that are already unemployed. We know that unemployment breeds crime, it hurts people's self esteem and ability to get a job, and it causes real hardship...so why not put these people to work? Giving them a job they can be proud of, something they could show to their children and say "I helped to build this" would be better than just having them sitting at home with a knot in their gut wondering if the unemployment will run out before they get another job, don't you think?
I just think by setting realistic goals, unlike this electric car nonsense which as another poster wrote is like saying one could build a 747 in 1906 if you threw enough money at it, but instead to take a resource we already have that is going to waste, all these unemployed workers, and instead utilizing them to do jobs that really need to be done. I will admit you can call me a little biased since i have walked across bridges that my grandfather helped to build in the WPA but I truly think these goals are obtainable with what we have NOW.
Just as i believe a "people's car" with a price that can be reached with the technology we have and a MPG goal that can be obtained without any new technologies having to be invented, could truly change this country for the better. the last report I read said the average age of a car on the road in this country now is 11 years and the average MPG is barely 20. Now imagine if suddenly everyone is driving 40MPG cars because anyone can afford them? Not to mention I have no doubt like with the Model T we would see entire new industries spring up to customize these new vehicles which would also help our unemployment situation.
So I'm not saying tie one to the other, what I am saying is we have all these jobs that need doing, we have all these people that need work, why not put them together? I think we can all agree our infrastructure needs a major overhaul anyway and we are falling behind on broadband compared to other nations, so why not instead of paying people to sit and worry we do something about this? And when it is all over if there is still major unemployment at LEAST you will have fixed what is broken and this new infrastructure and telecommunications grid will encourage other companies and countries to give the USA a second look. And who knows how many industries that we can't even imagine would spring up from a nationwide fiber to the neighborhood system? after all look what happened when we took the Ma Bell monopoly away, suddenly we had faxes and wireless phones and this system we are typing on now!
Uhhh...If you are Mr Peres, why don't you have an account instead of posting AC? After all both Eric Raymond and even Linus Torvalds has accounts, even if Linus naturally hasn't got the time to use his much.
Now for my other question, since you are basically snatching the data from a binary blob which i'm sure is full of proprietary code, after all if it wasn't they could just FOSS the thing, do you worry about DMCA? i know that AMD can't release full specs on their GPUs because protected path isn't theirs and would break DMCA and since Nvidia cards i'm sure have protected path as well do you have to worry about legal ramifications? or have you set up the project in some place that doesn't recognize software patents?
If you ARE Mr Peres I would like to say I admire your guts, frankly I wouldn't want to go within 100 yards of anything to do with video as long as all these crazy patents and lawsuits are going on. And how about hardware acceleration of video? How can you do that without ending up in the whole H.26x patent minefield?
Frankly I think its a shame that such questions even have to be asked as while i have no problems with proprietary software and use both FOSS and proprietary software every day i do NOT support software patents but as long as that minefield exists I am curious how you intend to approach feature parity with the blob driver without stepping into the whole patent mess since one of the big uses of GPUs is video processing and that's patented up the wazoo.
Sorry I didn't elaborate but I have been accused of making posts too long so i try to shorten my responses. what i meant was not ONLY for the WPA to be running FTTH, and as i said even FTTN would be a huge improvement in MANY areas, but there is so much infrastructure that can be made a thousand times better. just look at our roads and bridges, many are from Ike's time. We have also seen there IS a way to build a road so it will really last, just look at the Autobahn, but you have to lay a really solid foundation and build up.
I think we can use a modern WPA to truly transform this country into the vision that many of us were shown as kids in the 60s, with truly modern roads that don't break easily, could have embedded sensors for future driverless cars, bridges replaced with better designs, and of course by building FTTH or FTTN depending on the size of the area to help bring tele-education and telecommute to the masses.
As a final change I would toss this electric car nonsense as the battery tech isn't there yet and instead build a true "people's car" which would be both a 2 door and 4 door model that had a 4 cyl and gets 40MPG for less than $10k. We would then offer a cash for clunkers style program so that all the working poor could trade in those old gas hogs for a much better vehicle for the environment.
with these changes I think we could lick unemployment and modernize our country for the future while at the same time lowering our dependence on gas from overseas and at the same time actually creating jobs for all those out of work. sadly though it requires vision and will, two things our politicians seem to have little to none of ATM.
I don't know exactly what he is trying to "fix for me" but I think I would have been pointing this bug out a little more loudly if I had actually gotten malware SPERM, not to mention that PC wouldn't have been wiped but killed with fire.
Riiiight. Urban America, or as many of us call it "Welcome to the jungle, we got fun and games". Did you ever stop to think that in most of America the cities are divided into the insanely rich gated communities and the places where you need to strap BPVs to your car like in Predator II? That kind of attitude might work in Asia but in the USA you are either rich enough to live in a gated community or you can go to bed to the sound of gunfire.
Which shows it isn't the OS or the hardware, its the networks. i have to wonder if the whole "buffer problem" we've been reading about here is about to hit the tipping point as it seems like everything now has big fat buffers built in and as we know the Internet model simply wasn't designed for having large buffers throw the timing all to hell.
Personally I think it is high time we use an old solution to fix a new problem...bring back the WPA. a lot of our bandwidth problems would disappear if we had nationwide FTTH or at least fiber to the neighborhood. It seems like a great way to put all those sitting at home on unemployment to work and you build it right and just as many bridges built by the WPA in rural areas still work fine so too could a well built fiber network last us for ages. this would also give us the benefits of new businesses springing up to make use of this new resource and finally kill the duopolies that have been hamstringing growth in so many areas of the country because the lines would be open to competition.
I truly believe if we don't do something radical like bring back the WPA we will end up staying on the short bus to the info superhighway because the corps can make more money by throttling and cherry picking than by actually growing their businesses and in our short sighted corp climate the quarterly reports are all that matters. i know that even though my home town has grown by more than a third neither the cable nor DSL has moved an inch in a good decade or more. They would rather just add caps and sit on the big wads of money than actually add new customers. If we don't change this situation we are gonna end up being left behind so its high time we put those unemployed to work building us a new broadband infrastructure.
Oh look, its a FOSSie, aka basement troll. How's the koolaid, is it cherry? You want some links on breakage? be careful what you wish for, because you just might get it and that is showing that one of the largest OEMs on the planet can't keep your craptastic OS running without having to do their own fricking fork!
This is why a decade old Windows beat the shit out of Linux on netbooks or how ASUS has given up on your bullshit or how about Walmart running away from linux as fast as it can? want some more? Nice thing about having the truth on your side instead of religious dogma, i can do this alllll day long! How about you actually have the balls to celebrate getting a whole 1% market share while you are actually lower than JavaME and there is a whole website dedicated To your bullshit and excuses
And how about that "great" Linux security that is supposed to be why we should put up with all this horseshit? Get ready, here they come! Kinda makes that koolaid just a little bitter now, don't it? Now why would anybody care when they could get a Mac or Win 7 and not deal with all this lies and horseshit?
BTW if you'd like a little more food for thought, what OS was 3 of the 4 CAs running that were compromised? take a look and see. Maybe they just had bad configs? Surely someone with knowledge would be safe right? Guess again and its not a fluke by any means.
Sorry, forgot I was on a geek site and was thinking like a normal instead of a geek. I meant steals MY focus and blows my flow all to shit. I mean here I am, working on something complex when suddenly bling! "Hi just FYI but blah blah blah" pops up which drags my focus instantly away from what I was doing and there goes my groove which if you are dealing with something important can be bad.
Nothing worse than working on a real PITA problem in a remote session and while working on the machine AND listening to the customer try to describe the problem in normal terms and you having to translate that in your head to useful info and you start to have an idea form that you may know exactly where to go if maybe this is set incorrect and...bing! WTF? Get out of my damned face you stupid popup! Now where was I?....FUCK!
The only way i know to describe what I'm talking about is imagine you are juggling while riding a skateboard, concentrating your ass off and everything is going good when...some asshole yells EXCUSE ME! as he walks a good 40 feet away. Whether you can truly blame him for your faceplant 4 seconds later is debatable but the fact that you were doing just fine before motormouth popped off is not and in both cases the info was pointless and a waste of my energy. The popup simply can't know whether I'm busy or not, whether to leave me alone or not, whereas the progress bar I control and I can look at on MY timescale and NOT its.
While that is a pretty good idea there is an even worse bug in FF that they need to address because I'm sure other bad guys will pick up on it and that is the Yahoo porn bug. I call it a porn bug because its seen most often on porn video sites but I've been told the trick is showing up at other places so maybe its starting to spread and the sad part is it ought to be trivial to stop. This is how it works:
Target A uses FF to surf a porn video site. While the video is playing FF is sent a hidden iFrame that loads the yahoo login, FF logs the target in and then everyone in their address book gets porn and malware spam links. This gets around many of the spam filters because its from a non blacklisted account and they don't send more than one or two emails per targeted address and having received a couple from those that were hit it looks like it may be taking random sentences from somewhere (maybe another hidden iFrame?) to get past the filters and look like a legit email.
The fix seems pretty obvious and I honestly don't know why mozilla hasn't done so. All one would have to do is prompt the user on install or upgrade to put a master password on their password store and here is the key have it only ask ONCE per session and no means do not ask again for the session because after telling my users to put a master password they immediately started screaming that it made FF unusable so I put a master password on mine and...wow. it will bug the ever loving shit out of you with constant asking for the master password! I was getting 4 or 5 requests for the master password on just regular sites which tells me that the current password design sucks ass if so many see you are running FF and try to hit it.
So while i'm glad they are working on the autoplay problem I'd say user passwords being threatened is just as big if not bigger and really hope they do something about this in future releases. Since I had a machine I was gonna wipe anyway I decided to cook up a couple of phony Yahoo accounts (along with a phony Gmail and Hotmail) and test this for myself and can say that at least as far as i could tell this bug ONLY affects FF and Yahoo, not Gmail or Hotmail, and not Dragon, Opera, Safari, QTWeb, or Chrome. So I'd say if you have a user or family member that uses yahoo as a primary email you might want to switch them to another browser until they get that fixed. Oh and NO I did NOT test IE because after they refused to backport to XP which is still supported i officially wrote off IE. If you have to replace a supported OS just to stay current on the fricking browser then its no longer a functional choice IMHO.
Oh and since someone always seems to ask the version number the one I tested was i believe 8, FF has been spinning through version numbers so fast lately its hard to keep up and I don't have the time to rerun this test every time a browser has a new release. If someone wants to run the test again its pretty easy, you'll need 1 fake yahoo account along with either another fake yahoo or gmail or hotmail in the address book of the fake yahoo so the bug has an email to send spam to. Then simply start clicking on random porn vids, xHamster or youPorn, any of the major porn sites will do. If the bug is still active you'll see strangely worded spam go to your target account from the yahoo account and that's how you know its still active. Like I said i just don't have the time so after trying several browsers i switched my users and family over to Comodo Dragon since it had both ABP and low rights mode. Since the switch no more strange porn spams so I'd say it was a successful switch.
uhhh... Because those are irritating as fuck and steal focus away from what you were actually USING and thus break your flow? one of my big requests is to get rid of any and all pop ups because they annoy the living shit out of people! If I'm doing something complicated the LAST thing I need is some stupid app popping shit up right in the damned middle of things throwing my concentration all to hell.
Why is that? Even the little netbooks now have HDMI and most monitors can be flipped to portrait mode. So it seems to me that if you need portrait view you can have it AND have a better view for multimedia. Frankly with LCDs being so cheap I don't see why anybody wouldn't just pick up a cheap second monitor and flip it. with GPUs capable of running multiple screens and everything having HDMI its easier than ever before to just have it both ways. Certainly cheaper to do it this way than find one of the handful of units still made in 4x3.
Question: do you think the masses would pay...oh say 45% more for their devices to change that? Considering I've seen 1366x768 in everything from 10 inch and 12 inch netbooks to 15 and even a few 17 inch laptops i have to think that the yields at that particular resolution (as well as 1600x900 which also seems to be incredibly popular) are extremely high which of course lowers the cost.
In the end the consumers can always buy the different resolution devices and the market will change to follow their lead but from the looks of TFA people seem to be happy with 1366, 1600, and 1920. As someone that owns a 12 inch that is 1366 i can see why, it works great for me for websurfing, games, and video.If given the choice of a say 1280x1024 or the 1366x768 and the 1280 would cost $100 more? No way i'd have taken it over the 1366 and from the looks of TFA for once i'm part of the majority as it looks like everyone feels the same.
I'm typing this on a circa 2004 Sempron that was traded in by a customer that I decided to keep because it makes a great nettop. its the same install, that is 8 years with ZERO driver or program breakage. and nooo, it doesn't have any "super sekret magic invisible" malware because this customer followed my advice and practiced basic safe computing, like not downloading crap programs from dodgy sources or opening email attachements. So how much more solid do you need? I had a customer last week that JUST NOW retired his Win2K box, it was still running great but he finally replaced the program that was holding him onto XP. I built that box for him in Aug 2000 and the Win2K is STILL running, he just demoted it to being the controller for a laser cutter.
as a long term Linux advocate told me when I asked why he was going to buy a Mac "Its not getting better. things get 80% there and then someone gets an itch and its all thrown out and they start over, its just never getting any closer to finished" and sadly he is correct. I hate to wish ill on anyone and truly hope he lives a long life but i have a feeling that after Torvalds breathes his last they will quietly put in an ABI (because the religious argument doesn't hold as many ALREADY only offer binary blobs, so having a broken driver subsystem obviously isn't forcing them to follow the GPL way) and people will be amazed when so many problems just disappear. Until then I can say its just not a usable system for consumers, its just not there.
Exactly! Even becoming a good troubleshooter takes years of experience because one has to realize and follow a methodology that goes from the most basic to the most complex step by step by step, yet people think someone like me can just walk in to a broken network and magically flip a switch and instantly find which node has failed, what is causing a strain on the network, or where the bottlenecks are.
Now take that up to 11 with a system that is literally tens of thousands of times more complex, where thousands upon thousands of programs and subsystems are gonna be interacting with this code in ways most will have NEVER even thought about until the whole thing comes crashing down. i may disagree with a lot of the reasoning behind what Torvalds does as far as direction but I'd be the first one to say that he is one of only a handful ON THE ENTIRE PLANET that can do that particular job. you are talking about millions of lines of code in and of itself, not counting how all of that is gonna interaction with millions of lines of code that isn't under your control...wow. the mind boggles at how truly complex of a system we are talking about.
Which just makes what the FOSSies try to claim even more of a farce, that just because you have a "C for dummies" book and have written some little text editor you can then step into Torvalds shoes and actually maintain the Linux kernel AND create truly robust patches capable of plugging holes written by black hats AND do this without completely crippling the system. Again its source code and NOT pixie dust, one has to be intimately familiar with the material AND the interactions before even attempting such a delicate operation. And the whole "hire someone to do it" is even more of a farce because the handful of guys capable of doing that work can charge more than the most expensive lawyers and what's more they WILL get it, because THAT level of skill and experience is just as rare and just as highly prized as a top level brain surgeon!
But lets be honest swalve, its a total handwaving asspull is what it is. its a cheap totally bullshit excuse to handwave away those that point out that they have NO choice but to constantly deal with breakage because to keep a Linux system under support with the frankly insane pace of development you have to be dealing with upgrades pretty damned constantly. I mean look at what we have seen in just the last 3 years, the entire audio subsystem has been ripped out, both major DEs shitcanned and started over and a hell of a lot of the graphics and wireless subsystems are either being majorly overhauled or in the process of being replaced.
Having the code doesn't magically erase all that, nor does it give one the skills to magically fix all those system when a major change breaks something that was critical to you. this is even why companies that have large Linux webserver farms will have Windows on the desktop, because with ten years MINIMUM support you can deploy and then not worry about it until the hardware fails if you so desire. Just now am I seeing the great XP dieoff start to gain steam with tons of older P4s coming in as SMBs get new systems. hell the one i'm typing this on is a circa 2004 Sempron that was traded in that I decided to keep as a nettop and its still running the same XP that it was deployed with! That is over 8 years on the same OS with ZERO broken programs or drivers. frankly i would love the hell out of it if you could get that kind of time out of a Linux system but frankly if anything its going the other way, with length of support getting shorter for most distros. this is fine if your tme costs nothing and you enjoy tweaking and fiddling with the OS but if you need that machine to "just work' its a fricking nightmare.
Trying to say that doesn't matter just because you have the source code is like handing someone a pile of aluminum and saying that surely they can repair that busted 707, after all they have all the resources right there, right?
Question: Why would you run the HD5550 at home when the HD4850 is only $53? I mean you look at the numbers and the HD4850 just curb stomps the HD5550 and geeks has them brand new for $53 and has had them at that price for ages. Until the 58xx and 68xx drop down to sub $70 I'll be recommending the HD4850s as they really do crank out the graphics. BTW this is the same model both myself and both of my boys have and i can tell you they are GREAT cards, they accelerate just about any major format of video, play games with plenty of detail, the amount of raw power you get with those cards is just nuts.
So if you are running crazy resolutions like that you'd probably be happier with the HD4850 as having 800 stream processors and a 256bit pipe you can keep that baby pretty well pumping when it comes to graphics.
Downloads and transfers for one thing. i'll often have the download and transfer window open to one side of the screen so while i'm working on the main problem a customer is having i can see how the driver updates for their system are coming along and make sure they have transferred to their machine and are ready to go when i'm done fixing the error. After all one doesn't have to know exactly to the second when it is done, only that the files are being transferred and when they are complete and with a progress bar that is something one can just skim.
Actually that is the resolution of my 12 inch netbook (A EEE 1215B which i highly recommend if someone wants a really nice netbook) and for websurfing and pretty much any other task i can think to do with a portable its perfectly fine and THAT I would say if the point. i would bet my last dollar the reason you are seeing 1366 beat 1024 is that the vast majority of netbooks and midsize laptops use this resolution and the masses have spoken, price trumps higher definition in a portable device.
If you want a bigger desktop? can't really blame you, i use a nice 22 inch 1600x900 that was given to me as a thank you from a customer, but for portables 1366x768 really does seem to be the sweet spot. i watch movies and the picture is clear and crisp, i surf the web and the text is fine, same as with chat, and lets be honest folks in the end most aren't gonna pay a huge markup for a slightly higher def. in my case i couldn't pay for a higher def if i had wanted to because at 12 inches, which was the size I required after trying all the different netbooks and laptops that came through my door, there simply are not any other choices, its 1366x768 or...well go buy a much larger and less portable unit.
So if what i have seen my customers ask for and buy the 3 major resolutions for the foreseeable future is gonna be 1366x768 which is most netbooks and 15 inch laptops, 1600x900 which is what the majority of 20-24 inch desktop monitors are coming in as well as many of the 17 inch laptops, and finally 1920x1080 because that is what the HDTVs as well as the midrange monitors and laptops come in at.
I'd say i hope you like one of those 3 because looking at tiger and newegg those units that don't fit into one of those three resolutions tend to be crazy priced. personally i love my 1215B, 1366x768 and all. its light, gets great battery life, and i have no trouble with text or video. if it ain't broke?
And I know who would be PERFECT to partner with Google on it...Valve. Can you imagine the delicious taste of win for Google if they partnered with Valve and had a Steam box that played all of Steam's games with a full blown Google web app experience in it? Videos through YouTube, Google docs, search, AND it would give Google the way into social media that they want by tying G+ into Steam chat so you could take it to the next level.
I've been running Windows PCs since Win 3.x but if Google and Valve were to come out with something like that? say an AMD Liano based HTPC/Gaming console based on Steam and having everything easy peasy? I'd jump on that in a New York minute and i bet a HUGE number of folks would as well. and with a pair of juggernauts like Google and Valve they could further partner with AMD to cross advertise and get some serious economies of scale so they could probably have the price point down to $199. That thing would fly off the shelves!
Thank you, and your case is a PERFECT example if you don't mind me elaborating..Here you are stuck with machines you can't upgrade even though you are in an enterprise environment with i'm sure VERY qualified admins that get paid damned good money and know how to do a step by step troubleshoot, yet you simply can't afford the downtime. But here is why i get so much hatred from the loonie section of the FOSS gallery, because i speak for the consumers. now if YOU, a qualified admin with i'm sure years of experience, can't upgrade because the breakage would cost too much downtime and loss of functionality....what about the consumers who don't have your skillset? who in the FOSS community speaks for them? sadly nobody which is why i get such hate.
To steal a line from FMJ the FOSSie section has completely deluded themselves into thinking "Inside every Suzy the checkout girl is a C coder or Bash programmer just waiting to get out!" and that is complete and total horseshit. The average consumer, the ones they will HAVE TO GET if they are gonna ever end up anything more than a geeker toy like Haiku,1.- simply do NOT have the skillset to do a step by step troubleshoot, 2.- many do NOT have a completely separate computer (which would have to be running Windows or OSX if you think this thing through logically, because if say the upgrade from Ubuntu leapin Lizard to maniac monkey broke one computer it can just as easily break two) with which to "Google for fixes" for when the upgrade craps all over them, 3.-Do NOT have the intimate knowledge required to even hunt the forums for fixes, because thanks to Torvalds unstable as hell driver model you often have to be VERY specific when it comes to make/rev/firmware of the device broken, and finally 4.-Do NOT have the ability to dissect the code that is given to them because unlike the total lie the crazy section pushes you often HAVE to "tweak" said fixes because they were written for hardware A, rev B, firmware C and you have hardware C, rev G, firmware R and again the slightest thing off and it isn't gonna do shit! Hell a single spelling error or not starting or ending the copypasta in just the perfect spot can shit all over the thing!
So I'm sorry but Linux is completely unusable by a good 90% of the population. i often get bitched at by the FOSSies because i refuse to carry their product in my shop but the only damned way their OS will "work" is if I give away free lifetime support AND keep a bunch of spares on hand so they can have a loaner while i wait the sometimes two weeks or more before a fix to a particular piece of hardware is even released!
And I apologize for the length but i'm just so damned tired of hypocrites and lies and that sums up the FOSSie section of Linux in a nutshell. you get told that its ready for the masses but when you point out that even simple things like keeping the OS in a supported state equals constant breakage you get informed you should give away lifetime support (thus destroying my business for their religious cause) or "buy a supported version and supported hardware" which means $400 a year for RHEL plus a workstation which just priced out the entire customer base, and for what? What do i gain? What does the customer gain? More work, more cost, less functionality. Give me a Linux that costs less than Windows and gives me 10 years of support like Windows and then you'll have a chance. otherwise i have machines that are 8+ years old in the field that run beautifully on WinXP and I have no doubt this copy of Win 7 I installed in Oct 09 will be running just as nicely in 2020 no matter how many updates MSFT comes out with. THAT is what matters to consumers, not some 'free as in freedom" sense of smug.
And hey with a scalpel I'm qualified to be your heart surgeon...right? I mean that IS what you are basically saying, because we aren't talking about some fart app here we are talking about the literal heart of an extremely complex operating system and you just acted like it would be trivial just to DIY. Hell even RMS couldn't write his own kernel and you expect Joe average to pull off a major rewrite? And do you have ANY idea how much it would cost to hire a qualified kernel developer to do your own custom rewrite? Might as well say you can fly down to Redmond in your Lear jet and bitchslap the sweaty monkey with your solid diamond dildo until he agrees to keep supporting XP.
If I was Linus personally i'd be pissed as hell that so many like you think what he does is so damned trivial that just because you have the code you could kick him to the curb. you'd be DAMNED lucky if the number of guys that are truly qualified to do that job is even in the triple digits and they sure as hell won't be working for you. hell guys with those skills are practically the rock stars of coding and have top paying jobs and headhunters trying to steal them away..
To use a /. car analogy just because I hand you the blueprints to a Ferrari and hand you a couple of tons of raw steel does NOT man you will be able to actually build a Ferrari or even be able to rebuild one that has been dropped off a cliff. Remember folks its source code NOT pixie dust.
That's because our cartels frankly own the US gov and sadly are buying more govs overseas as well. No need to worry about that pesky "will of the people thing" if you just buy off whomever wins.
BTW does this mean we can FINALLY put that whole "do no evil" thing right next to "think different" and whatever lame ass slogan MSFT has which i can't even think of? I mean Google DID buy out Motorola, correct? that was allowed to happen right? which would mean we now have all three major players trolling with patents, Apple, Google AND MSFT which means any damned way you go you are getting screwed.
Oh and on a final note allow me to say a big fat "I told you so!" because i did, I told you so. I said everybody better be nice and put up with Flash while we got together and told Apple and MSFT to stick it with H.264 and not to support HTML V5 until they made a free codec as the baseline, be it Theora or WebM. I warned you that if you thought Flash was a bad thing you hadn't seen nothing because H.264 was patent hell and now look.
Mark my words if the big three have their way its gonna be RMV and WMV all over again. I don't care if H.26x is so damned beautiful a format technically it shits rainbows there are literally thousands of patents making H.264 a clusterfuck of epic scale and according to the Wiki the earliest it'll leave the minefield is 2027 which of course long before then we'll have H.265 and we'll be screwed again.
MPG 2 is about to expire soon isn't it? maybe we should tell the big 3 to piss off and just use MPG 2. After all it'll play on anything, you can get a good picture with it and i bet with a little work it can be made even better. This is one case where as shocking as it may be I'm with RMS, you don't want the web media locked behind a shitload of patents mucking things up.
So you sir are actually gonna stand here and say Obama DIDN'T support warrantless wiretapping, kill an American without a trial, sign in NDAA, etc? Can I have some of the magic pixie dust you are smoking? the one that lets you magically ignore the man's record? And the ONLY thing horrible about is that its true, you can look up any fact he posted you like and find the figures.
Like it or not sir YOU get to choose between a man that has lied and supported every single evil thing Dubya did, in fact went farther than Dubya every chance he got, or get to vote for a guy that actually thinks people losing their jobs and homes makes for a funny joke!
Whether you like it or not by voting for either you WILL be supporting evil, not even the lesser evil, just two different flavors of evil. its Coke VS Pepsi.
You want a nice machine that can run Linux? try the Asus EEE netbooks. they already have Expressgate which is an embedded Linux that has its own button and launches in 6 second from a cold start and gives you tons of apps and from what i've read the AMD APU based ones have been supported by ubuntu since 10.04 and i'm sure most of the other distros have support as well. I lug my all over the place and get 6 and a half hours on Win 7 and a little over 8 under Expressgate, i'd probably get longer but i like playing with all their multimedia stuff.
I've had customers get burned thinking Sony still meant quality so I've had several VIAO units and tearing into them i can tell you they are caca, no better than your average Dell consumer unit, just a little more shiny, a hell of a lot of bloatware, and a truly batshit price. Sony is going down for precisely that reason, they have let the quality go to shit while trying to still charge quality money. if you want a good laptop that will run Linux at a good price Asus, Acer, and HP business can all do that job and unlike Sony actually have decent build quality.
Besides the entire line is moot because if the community thinks they can do better then bring ReactOS up to snuff and there you go! Someone has already done a lot of the early work FOR you, all you have to do is bring it the rest of the way! Then you will truly have a FOSS XP for one and all.
But of course that work is gonna be hard as hell and nobody wants to do it, hence it don't get done. Does ANYONE here think being handed the entire XP codebase would magically make fixing bugs in that huge damned maze of code any easier than just starting over with ReactOS? After all ReactOS doesn't have backwards compatibility going back damned near to DOS built in, isn't gonna have to deal with all this old depreciated crap like .NET 1.0, frankly what this guy is saying might as well be "Just give us XP for free and we'll throw magic pixie dust and make it all better!" which of course is nuts. hell it would probably take the community the better part of a decade just to come to grip with all that damned code and the interactions.
for a perfect example of why the community would be better off using its limited resources on ReactOS just look at LO. I'm sure those guys would tell you they still have a loong way to go to modernize it and bring it up to a more modular design and we are talking about a single program with legacy cruft! In just the system32 folder on my XP nettop you are looking at 256 subfolders containing 6694 files...and that is just one folder...does anyone have any idea how long it would take just to get up to speed on that one folder? Checking the windows folder you are looking at 19, 537 files and 2524 folders. By the time the community, even if they got even say 10% the funding of a Red hat would probably take a good decade just to figure out what interacted with what and how! Now try to fix bugs before they were completely pwned AND trying to learn all those interactions...If you want XP FOSS users you have ReactOS, spend your time there.