USB hard drives are damned cheap and Win 7 has a backup software built in and that is as simple as "clicky clicky, next next next" so there really isn't much excuse for not having backups anymore. All I have to do is tell my customers "If this PC was to disappear tomorrow, poof, with ALL the stuff that was on it, would you lose anything you couldn't replace?" to get them to see how much stuff they have on their PCs they really care about.
I tell them to use a defense in depth which is really quite easy to do, use USB HDDs for their basic backups with DVDs and the cloud used for those things like pictures that are really important to them with the DVDs stored somewhere offsite like a family member or friend's place. Hell DVDs are so cheap this kind of backup costs practically nothing and there are plenty of places they can upload and store small things like pictures for free.
A perfect example of how well this works is a customer who had a fire last year, even though his house and the PC in it were burnt to the ground because he took my advice and was swapping USB HDDs once a week with his dad so they would both have offsite backups he only lost 4 days worth of stuff and even that didn't include anything important as he had gotten into the habit of uploading photos when he downloaded them onto his PC. He simply came by the shop with the USB HDD from his dad's, told me what happened, and in less than 4 hours we had him back to exactly how he was before on a new PC, with all his stuff back in its place and nothing he cared about lost.
So PLEASE stress how important multiple forms of backups are to your friends and relatives, as there is nothing more heartbreaking than to tell some girl those pictures of her dead mother are most likely gone forever because her laptop got trashed and she didn't have backups.
But how many games can YOU play in a day? that is the real question as if you look at Steam right now they literally have hundreds of games in their under $10 and under $5 sections and that isn't counting midweek madness sales, weekend sales, and all the different holiday sales. this last Xmas i loaded up on games for me and the boys and the amount of games i got was just nuts, deals like the entire F.E.A.R series WITH the DLC for $7, Just Cause II again with ALL the DLC for $6 Butcher Bay AND Dark Athena for $5,the entire HL2 series for $10, we ended up with so many games that here it is Apr and I still haven't had a chance to play through them all!
The problem is without used games the consoles take AGES for the prices to drop while the PC you can buy tons of games for under $20 less than 3 months after release. Also the PC users don't get assraped on MP like the consoles, I fired up Half life 1 DM the other day and there were still plenty of people playing on plenty of servers, EA on the other hand pulls the plug on their games MP after barely a year. Every way you look at it the consoles are just a bad deal, in fact the only advantage I'd argue they have is they are currently cheap but of course with a new console release even that advantage goes away. Meanwhile you can go to someone like me and for $450 have a pretty badass PC built that will game as well as do anything else you could possibly want, and that unit will last you for years and years with nothing more than the occasional $60 GPU upgrade.
Sorry friend, Adobe killed those too. Mark my words and mark them well, all those that are celebrating the "death of flash"? Boy are YOU gonna be buttfucked.
You see Adobe was paying for YOUR H.264 license fees, guess who is gonna pay for that now? That would be nobody, that's who. And mark my words MPEG-LA is gonna make SCO look like the Care Bears, in fact if the rumors are true they will be able to pretty much lock anybody but the big three, Apple, Google, and MSFT, out of Internet content, how? DRM. Rumor is H.265 will support protected path and HDMI which means it'll be a DMCA violation if you even attempt to reverse engineer it.
So mark my words, Google WILL end up "pulling a TiVo" when it comes to Android, because if it don't they won't be able to play H.265 videos on their phones. Apple and MSFT of course won't care, they'll pay their $699 license fee, so who does that leave out in the cold? Why that would be Linux, which nobody is gonna want if it can't play the latest videos.
To me the sad part is it could have been avoided if all those supposedly "pro freedom" website developers would have stood up to Apple and said "We are NOT gonna support your devices until you support a FOSS codec as a baseline standard" but instead everyone saw the crazy money iShiny users were spending and went apeshit. Now you watch, within 5 years articles will be saying "What happened? Why did the web end up locked down to a three way split?" and it will simply be because everyone was stupid, they turned on the company that did not care if you distributed and even didn't give a shit if you made a FOSS knockoff, and instead embraced a company made of patent trolling, simply because the great and powerful Jobs said it will be thus.
You can put a piece of paper through a shredder but if the shredder ONLY has that piece of paper and i have the time i can put that paper back together, so does that mean you didn't actually shred it? what we really need is different words here, erased VS erased and possibly recontructable would probably be better descriptions.
What Windows does when you format is erase the Master File Table or MFT. Once the MFT is gone NTFS and the OS above it simply can't find any former files because without a pointer to tell them what and where a file is then it simply doesn't exist. Now of course we all know there are tools that can recover by doing a scan of the actual drive bit by bit (I prefer Recuva myself) but considering the fact that all one has to do is a standard overwrite by zeroes which can be done quite quickly and that even relatively simple encryption would make a file hell to repair on a formatted drive it really doesn't make much sense. I can't comment on the X360 but I do know Win 7 uses encryption for its caches like Readyboost so i don't see why it wouldn't do the same for any GFWL cache as the OS already has an API for encryption that should be pretty trivial to call. Even XP has NTFS file encryption so there really is no reason why they should have it unencrypted and if it turns out this is true someone needs a good firing.
How EXACTLY is this flamebait? he provided the link to the response from MSFT who says their software doesn't store locally so we have one saying A and another saying B, so logically one would suggest that waiting until we had a separate source test and verify the findings would be the best course of action. Or does a post not count if it isn't following the correct groupthink? Last I checked the banner read "News For Nerds" not "self affirming circlejerking" ala Faux news and MSNBC. The only compliant i can see with his post is that frankly it shouldn't have needed to be made in the first place as timothy should have had the reply in TFS.
Gotta love how the Black Panthers came out for getting YT for shooting those poor helpless Colombian drug dealers that was robbing the place. How come nobody calls them what they are, which is a bunch of militant racists? I don't know about anyone else but I'm REALLY getting tired of this "minorities can't be racist" horseshit and the liberal "if you cower and beg maybe they'll let you live, just don't fight back" cowardice.
What is wrong with a 9mm Hi-Point? Low recoil and frankly anybody who has spent just 30 minutes shooting one can write their name with the thing as its low recoil and lack of a very loud report takes a lot of what makes people lousy shots away which is of course the way they flinch. While a shotgun works fine too, in fact most of the LOL in my area usually have one filled with rock salt, an easy to use 9mm is IMHO just as good a self defense weapon. hell if the US military says it is good enough for them it ought to be good enough for you although personally i always liked the 1911 45 ACP but of course i wouldn't want say my GF trying to shoot that.
That is why you need a MOM...Mean Old Mutt. Don't go for that overbred crap, go to the local shelter and you'll find plenty of 'em that will be damned good security. my ma's place was constantly getting gas stolen as well as any easy to carry items and she was at her wits end and starting to get scared. As luck would have it what would be scavenging in the ditch as i was visiting but an obviously part wolf MOM. I said "Hell there is you answer ma...hey there buddy, want a burger?" and the kids quickly gave him the name of Jackie.
Old Jackie didn't take long at all to decide that was HIS property and to learn which humans was allowed and which humans weren't and sure enough not 2 weeks later I get called out by ma, when I get there she is feeding Jackie a big plate of eggs with bacon bits. When i asked what was going on one of the kids held up a piece of bloody jeans and said "Whoever that gas thief was they screamed REAL good when old Jackie tore into them!" and when ma got out there she saw old Jackie chasing down some punk who jumped in an old hoopty and tore out of there and she found a gas can that wasn't hers.
Sadly old Jackie passed away a couple of years back, one day he just got up and wandered off into the woods, never to return. I'd seen that behavior before with part wolves, its like they know its time and they just go find a tree somewhere and lay down under it and die, but lucky for us old Jackie had given us a couple of pups with a stray female so now we have Chubs, which looks like his wolf daddy mixed with a rottweiler.
So get ya a mean old mutt, pups are too willing to please to be good against strangers, a mature mutt can be VERY territorial and will learn its place DAMNED quick and if you get a stray or one from the shelters they are damned grateful to have a home. Give 'em a little TLC, along with some scraps and rewards when they do well and watch how quickly that dog learns its job. If you need advice on breeds anything with wolf, collie, or sheppard is a good place to start. I've talked to cop buddies and been told how many times they've dealt with idiots that were too fucking stupid to back down from a gun but they STFU and obeyed when faced with a dog, staring at a mess of fur and fangs is primal whereas they act like they are Chuck Norris when they see a gun, so if you want a gun that's fine but a mean old mutt makes for a better first line of defense IMHO.
Riiight, because the average user is gonna know the difference between SDRAM and DDR, and know whether they have DDR 1/2/3 and know how to disconnect a bunch of crap to even get TO the sticks in the average mini-tower. this would be like saying "You better know how to change your own spark plugs because otherwise you deserved to get ripped off by mechanics". How about "Scummy businesses should go under" instead? At any of the shops i worked at if they found you pocketing parts or scanning drives for data to steal then YOU WOULD BE FIRED and the fact that they are NOT fired at Worst buy just shows what a shitty store it is. I could have worked on a thousand pedos computers but you know what? I'll never know because I DON'T SNOOP OR STEAL so if it isn't on the desktop or in the Windows folder than i have no clue. in fact i never open My Documents unless i'm specifically asked by the owner to back it up and even then i'm not opening the folders, just copying them to back up media.
I really hate this whole "blame the victim" mentality and a lot of this shit could be prevented if that kind of attitude would DIAF. Should I be robbed if i don't know how to change out the wiring in my apt? of course not, so why should someone be robbed simply for paying for a service? I have been building, fixing, and selling computers since before there even was a Windows and i can happily say i haven't copied a damned thing that a customer didn't tell me to copy, nor removed a single part that the customer didn't tell me to replace. I even ask permission to put old parts in the parts bin if they come to me for an upgrade, even though the answer is always 'What would i want the old one for?" because as far as i'm concerned its their property until they tell me what they want done with it, even if they are having it replaced.
That is why I advise everyone to avoid these ripoff chains like worst buy if you need work done and ask around about your local mom&pop shops. there is nearly always two or more in ANY town and you'll quickly find which one has the best rep. There are still some of us who actually take pride in our work and nothing makes me happier than handing a new PC that was built to be the perfect system for a customer or taking what they thought was gonna break them to get fixed and hand it to them running like new. These days having a PC go down is for many like losing their car or their phone, it really hampers their entire life which is why I do my damnedest to make sure the customer has something that will never need to come back to me again. i may not get as much business from repeats as those guys that hand them an unpatched PC without even an AV, but the word of mouth more than makes up for it.
A friend of mine did the same thing with one of those Walmart pre paid smartphones. Got a really nice Android phone for $129 and liked it so much he went and got one for his wife the very next week. The phone works great, apps run nice, and he only pays $45 a month for unlimited everything including web which is about half what he was paying under contract. After hearing his experiences i got one of those phones with the slide out keyboard for the oldest (he's a texting maniac) and i have to say its been pretty hassle free and a hell of a lot cheaper than the plans around here. Like you as soon as my termination fee isn't nuts it'll be goodbye contract, I mean why bother with the hassles and high prices?
Dude not being able to count? That's just sad. Windows 2000- released 1999, windows 7 supported until Apr 2020. 2020 - 1999 = 21 years. BTW this also counts against the server editions as well i just didn't bother to count them as i mainly work with consumers and haven't messed with server since 2K3.
The point still stands that with a SINGLE CD I can cover 21 years of Windows, both desktop and server, with ZERO more effort on my part. there is a REASON why every. single. operating. system EXCEPT for Linux has an ABI, Solaris, BSD, OSX, Windows, hell even OS/2 has an ABI. Do you know the REAL reason why Linux doesn't have an ABI? A combination of RELIGION and ego. you see there is a religious component of Linux, the followers of RMS, that believe "ZOMFG if we made things easy they might give us binary blobs ZOMFG!" while ignoring the simple fact that THEY ARE ALREADY GIVING YOU BLOBS and having an ABI isn't gonna magically turn a company to "the dark side" of FOSS or whatever crazy framework RMS uses now to describe it, and ego because in 1993 Torvalds said he would never need an ABI to make things "just work". Considering he was a kid his arrogance was understandable but its been nearly 20 years, time to smell the fail.
But please, don't take MY word for it, look up ANY arguments you can find against an ABI. What you'll find is a single argument frequently posted by a RELIGIOUS FOSS ADVOCATE, which you can tell its based on religion and NOT logic as in his post he even goes so far as to say "And i hope those that use binary blobs have their drivers broken constantly!" thus proving he does NOT care about the users or the OS for that matter but ONLY about his religious agenda. Frankly I would argue that the religious element of FOSS hurts it more than anything, as they are the Rev Wrights of the group that make the whole thing look like a bunch of nutters, kinda like how we all believe animals shouldn't be abused but then PETA comes out with "Save the sea kittens!" and sends back the whole movement 30 years.
Because i can buy AAA titles all day off of Steam for less than $20, often less than $10? Anybody who pays $60 for a game that is so hamstringed by DRM is frankly insane. This kind of stupid shit is why I'm glad i just finished converting my kids over to Steam off the consoles. Now instead of $60 a game (more like $90 when you figure in the DLC that more and more games are having locked onto the discs) my boys get their games for $10-$20, often WITH the DLC, and those nice new PCs (one with an AMD quad, the other AMD Hexacore, both with HD4850s) they can not only play games and watch video but do their schoolwork, chat, play against each other over the LAN or meet up with me in Steam for a match, oh and with solid caps they'll easily last until 2020 and probably beyoond with nothing but a $60 GPU upgrade in a year or two.
As we have seen with the Vita (sales have dropped more than 72% since launch) people are getting tired of overpriced DRM in a box. All they are doing is slitting their own throats and they are welcome to it as the cheap multicores and TVs all having HDMI more and more of my customers are switching to HTPCs. they are cheap, do so much more than gaming, and with wireless controllers play games with better graphics and better responsiveness than the consoles. All i have to do is show folks how I can play a game AND have a chat session open AND rip a DVD and all at the same time and its frankly an easy sale. Valve has it right with Steam, make it easy, simple, and cheap. The new consoles will take tow of those three away, so let them rot.
Why does that not surprise me? I went into a Best Buy a few months back (it was the same one where my oldest actually got a good deal on a laptop) and surprise surprise! All the guys that had been there and knew WTF they were talking about was replaced by fresh hires whose favorite word was "Uuuhhh". these corps are a classic example of "penny wise and pound foolish" as they'll fire the guys that actually can do the job because they won't work for minimum wage and replace them with glorified checkout girls that have ZERO knowledge and skill and will more likely fuck things up or just give out blatantly wrong information.
And finally let us not forget the other reason why Worst buy deserves to die, the Geek Squad or as my last boss called them "thieving monkeys" for all the stolen data and parts and broken gear. I can't count the number of times i was brought a PC where geek squad had "worked" on it first and had to tell the customer he/she had been robbed, that RAM sticks were missing (sometimes ripped out), that some expensive graphics card that was originally in the unit was replaced by some old POS they had stuck in the slot, or how their large HDD had suddenly become some 80Gb that was several years older than the PC. In every case the managers were all "pics or STFU" and a friend that worked there for a few weekends for extra Xmas cash quit in disgust because more than half the guys there had USB HDDs and would run batch files looking for MP3s and videos, if you wonder why Worst Buy catches pedos now you know, its batch files looking for *.jpg, *.avi, *.etc. in fact i met my current GF because she was having trouble with her PC after she took it in for a cleaning following a fire. this PC was an emachines clearly labeled as having 2Gb of RAM yet when i opened it I found a single 256Mb stick.
So it really doesn't surprise me they are going under, they fired all the good workers that could actually help you, put in a bunch of clueless salespeople that are under orders to pile on the extra BS like extended warranties and pushing gamer rigs onto LOL, and filling GS with sticky fingers or those that simply don't have a damned clue about even basic PC troubleshooting. Maybe if enough of these bad stores go under we'll get a few good stores, but considering the current "screw everything but the quarterly report!" attitude probably not.
But THAT work is given to private contractors who promptly hire illegals because Jose will work for $4 an hour with ZERO benefits and if Jose gets hurt he just gets fired, no workman's comp there. it has sadly gotten so common i have seen teens playing a game they call "scatter" where they will set off an airhorn which sounds like a siren or slam a car door real loud and yell "Immigra!" and laugh as the illegals scatter like deer. i have watched it happen, construction sites become ghost towns in less than 2 minutes, just disgusting.
Never underestimate the greed of the pigs at the top, never. When many tech jobs have 300 guys apply for every opening while Ballmer screams for more H1-Bs? When you see construction zones and will see a sea of Mexicans and a single white foreman? Over and over again I'm reminded of the words of Lenin "A capitalist will happily sell you the rope you intend to hang him with" and its true, their greed blinds them to the world around them so completely they can't even see they are sowing future riots and destruction with their piggish ways. hell when the most likely choice for republican presidential candidate admits that illegals does his lawn and nobody even makes a big deal out of it you know how badly its gotten for the average American that just wants to work.
What features would those be? i thought I'd miss features when I switched to Comodo Dragon, but it has ALL my extensions, hell it has even better security features than FF, such as support for Low Rights Mode, the option of using Comodo SecureDNS for malware and phishing protection, and it uses less CPU and memory and unlike FF when i close tabs my memory actually goes down.
Now I keep Pale Moon on hand for when i run into one of the VERY few sites that don't play nice with Chromium browsers and the rest of the time i'm in Dragon. I still keep a copy of FF, ESR on my old XP box and the latest on my 6 core, and i keep them updated and try them every time a new version comes out HOPING things will change, that FF will become light and nimble even on netbooks and nettops like it USED to be. Sadly though IMHO when Chrome came out it was like the Moz devs lost their damned minds and became so focused on Chrome they forgot what mattered was making the best FIREFOX and not a Chrome ripoff. in a way it reminds me of MSFT who lost THEIR damned minds when the iPad came out and have now deluded themselves that everyone from stock brokers to sally homemaker is gonna go pay triple the price for a touchscreen monitor so they can "experience the wonder" of having a cell phone on the desktop.
Its damned sad to see a company become so target locked on a competitor they can't see the forests for the trees but frankly ever since Chrome starting gaining share its been all downhill for FF.
Excuse #209-"Ur doin it wrong" notice how to a militant with a perception bubble it is NEVER the fault of the OS, ever? Hell they even used Excuse #209 on the Ubuntu battery problem right up until canonical admitted that yes, they were suffering from serious power usage problems.
Linux is known for a lot of things but good wireless drivers? Not one of them. trying Linux on dozens of different makes and models that have come through my shop I've found with Linux what works OOTB will work just fine, but the parts that do NOT work OOTB? Give it up chuck, you might as well not bother as it'll be nothing but frustration. if it doesn't have sound, if it doesn't have wireless, you better just learn to live without because it is nothing but an exercise in pain, because one thing about Linux is it is never halfway, either it works brilliantly or you are SOL. Sadly on laptops unless you specifically buy a Linux laptop (and even then only from certain vendors, because even Dell has to run their own repos because the standard drivers don't work) then it really is a crapshoot. like it or not all the hardware has Windows drivers, with linux it may or may not, they may be up to date or may not, they may work with the newest kernel or may not, that is just the way it is friend.
Not to mention there are drivers where it would be completely impossible to open completely because it would be a violation of DMCA, like the HDMI and protected path parts of the graphics drivers. Like it or not until you can get the content owners to give up on lock in and DRM (Ha! Fat chance) then you'll just have to accept that binary blobs and proprietary drivers are here to stay. I'm sure i'll get the standard religious rant against it but to me this just proves why you need an ABI for drivers, so that they can simply write to the ABI and then it doesn't matter what else gets changed or updated as it'll all "just work".
I mean how many damned driver rewrites has the average driver needed because of changes in the underlying guts? hate them all you want but if I was an ODM i'd only bother with Windows drivers as it only takes FOUR, count 'em, four drivers to cover 20 years of Windows.1.- Win2K/XP/2K3 32bit, 2.-XP X64/2K3 X64, 3.-Vista/7/8 32 bit, 4.-Vista/7/8 64 bit. With those 4 drivers i would have Windows covered from 1999-2020, no more work, no more hassles, just ship it. The reason you can't give consumers something that would be easy like penguins on the boxes is because what works on Ubuntu leapin lizards may NOT work on Ubuntu maniac monkey and frankly that is just nuts. you should NOT have to keep a team of devs on full time or throw your company at the mercy of some kernel dev that may or may not give a crap about your hardware just to make it work on Linux, that is just crazy. FOSS is all about choice, right? so have an ABI and then those that don't want to use it? don't have to! Nothing stopping them from giving the code or the specs or doing things the old way, just as there is nothing stopping anyone from running GNUSense to be 100% "4 freedoms compliant" if that is your thing.
No way we'd go that far with China, our corporate masters are too addicted to the massive profits they get by dumping their toxic waste out the back doors of their plants in China and the people are too addicted to CCC, aka Cheapo Chinese Crap.
I'd say the bigger question is WHAT THE FUCK are they doing with plans for our planes detailed enough they can crank out knockoff parts? Have we REALLY gotten as bad as Huckabee said and our military can't run without CCC either? I mean if we are just gonna have parts cranked out by potential enemies we might as well say fuck it and offer a first come first serve arms deal to anybody with cash. this is just sad man, we can't even keep our shit together enough to keep any hack with a Chinese plant from cranking out F15 parts, that's fucking pathetic, just pathetic.
I think that what you say WAS true, but we are rapidly approaching a point in time where their sending jobs overseas simply won't matter as it is quickly getting to the point where the machine simply does it better. it reminds me of the old story of John Henry, it didn't matter in the end that he killed himself to beat the steam hammer because the hammer could keep right on going while he laid down and died. I mean have you seen the smart road layer they are working on? Uses GPS and lays down a freeway by itself. or look at smart servers, with load balancing and the ability to detect when a part is failing, soon those admins will be replaced by parts monkeys that just come by to replace a dead part while the machines do the work.
And THAT is the problem, imagine Star Trek only with the top 10% demanding money for everything but no way for those other 90% to actually earn it. hell I'd argue in some ways we are already there, if you removed the social programs and the subsidized "make work" like all the jobs we end up paying out food stamps and other benefits for because the corps can't/won't pay a living wage you'd probably be looking at close to 40% unemployment. A man that can't do anything more than manual labor can VERY easily starve to death in the USA, simply because with the combo of automation and illegals that will work for a few bucks an hour you'll be lucky if you can feed yourself. I know this is true because i have a neighbor downstairs that lives in a crackerbox apt yet has to share the space with someone on disability just so he don't end up homeless, and that is with him busting his ass and taking every hour he can get and even trying to get a second job. I also worry about it happening to me one day as I make a decent living selling and fixing PCs now, but how long before everything is backed up in the cloud and PCs become as disposable as a cell phone?
In the end if we look throughout history with each new tech MORE jobs were created due to increased demand...until now. For the first time we are seeing technology that doesn't make the humans work better but replaces the human completely. I'd argue the ONLY reason they are sending to third world hellholes is because they ARE third world hellholes and thus can pollute, but what if we all got together and stopped this from happening? I'd argue that what would happen would NOT be increased jobs for us, but simply more robots. They use humans now because in shitholes like China they can dump toxic waste out the backdoor and I'd argue THAT and NOT the cheap labor is the driving force. But within 20 years as populations increase and demand for drinkable water and edible food increases that kind of waste will be put to a screeching halt and then what you'll see is robotic factories as far as the eye can see.
Personally I think it will end with violent revolution, probably in our lifetimes. When the education and stock market bubbles burst you'll see our young going straight from the college to the breadlines and with the top 10% being filled with greedy Randian douchebags who have zero compassion you WILL see violent conflict, i'd say its inevitable. Short of a plague (whether by accident or purposely introduced by the greedy fucks in power) that seriously thins the herd you simply have waaay more people than you have labor that needs doing. last i checked the average IQ in this country was 102 and falling, what do you do with these people? They aren't gonna become rocket scientists, hell we wouldn't need that many rocket scientists even if you could magically train them that high, and people just aren't gonna go crawl off and starve like in the 30s, not when there are stores to loot. Personally i think we will end up with some form of socialism, where population is regulated, possibly by something in the water, and people are paid to basically fuck off and do whatever, but to get to that point there is gonna be some nasty battles as the greedy pigs at the top fight to their last breaths to hang onto every last cent. Did you know that more
Glad i'm not the only one that doesn't want to play Dance Dance Revolution just to check his email.
Re:Unfortunately that doesn't work all the time
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Open Source Payday
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I just don't understand why so many act like you are a baby killer if you want to actually get paid for your hard work, I mean they act like all programmers should just starve rather than get paid to fix the busted shitters. As Apr 2014 approaches I've been looking long and hard for a distro that will actually "just work" for all these off lease office boxes that are coming through my door and so far have found ZERO that will work, and it all comes down to 3 problems nobody is willing to fix: 1.-updates/upgrades breaking drivers, even for the bog standard hardware and not having an easy way to roll things back if there is a problem, 2.-lousy docs that are at best a sparse list of CLI commands with little to no explanation and at worst a "to do" placeholder, and 3.-programs not sticking to the UI conventions of the DE so the whole thing feels slapdash.
Sadly all three of those are classic busted shitters as fixing them will be long, boring, thankless work so they don't get done. One can be fixed with regression testing or a new driver model, two can be fixed by hiring actual document writers that know how to write easy to follow help files, and three can be fixed by having a standards committee that helps ensure that programs follow UI conventions. But none of these things will be done for free, because they are lousy jobs. No dev is gonna jump through the hoop to stick to a UI convention if he isn't getting a cent for doing so and is happy with things as they are, messing with the guts is ALWAYS headache inducing and a PITA, and writing good helpful help files is NOT easy which is why guys get paid damned good money to write them.
but it sounds like we are 100% in agreement, we are just coming from different sides of the fence. you the programming side and me as the voice of the consumer. While I wish there was more FOSS I could hand out to my customers frankly as you said there are plenty of "diamonds in the rough" but that roughness throws my customers who then get frustrated and move on. little things like VLC not stopping playback by clicking on the video, or the lack of a "find drivers" button. I just wish the community could see how much better things could truly be if you let devs devote themselves full time to making FOSS and Linux the best of class, but sadly I doubt as long as RMS has a pulse will that ever happen, too many listen to him and the man is just too militant.
Ya know, I really am starting to wonder if it really isn't "economic warfare" when it comes to the Chinese. We seem to have forgotten since Nixon that there were and still are some seriously hard line Maoists in the top of the Chinese government and what better way to destroy an enemy than crush him without ever firing a shot? I have to say if it IS war then they surely qualify for the title of "Magnificent Bastards" as they found our weakness, in this case for cheap technocrap, and are exploiting the living hell out of it. at this rate in 5 years, hell maybe even now, they could invade Africa and we wouldn't be able to say shit for fear of having our supply cut off. Damned smart move China, damned smart.
You are also forgetting that most of those that got those big "green" checks were FOTP, or "friends of the president" where they had given money to the president's campaign and got huge payouts in return. I'm sure the left will have a shitfit that i pointed it out but I had a shitfit when dubya gave out no bid contracts and other payoff and i sure as hell ain't gonna let it slide just because they have a "D" beside their name on the ballot. for more information just look up " Solyndra tip of iceberg" and you'll find plenty of articles on left AND right leaning sites which is why i didn't pick one, I figure those that don't trust right leaning sites can read it on a left site and vice versa.
I think the bigger question, one that I truly believe is rapidly approaching is this: What do we do when capitalism no longer works for the majority? Thanks to technology and automation we are quickly reaching a point where the masses simply can't trade the sweat off their brow for capital because their labor simply isn't needed. What we are seeing is an "education bubble" getting ready to burst because we have told everyone "The key is education!" when all that leads to is musical chairs where fewer and fewer get a seat. We have nearly a half a billion people in the USA and we could probably get by quite well on 100 million, what do we do with the rest? We have tons of people that simply can't be educated any higher, you can't take someone with an IQ of 102 and make them into a rocket scientist you know, so what do we do with them? Before a man that couldn't be educated any farther could work in a factory but those are all gone, and I'd argue the ONLY reason China has that work is because they are willing to subsidize and will work in poisonous and hazardous environments that are frankly shameful.
Lets face the facts folks, capitalism is gonna go the way of every other ism VERY soon, as it is the top 10% hold more than 90% of the wealth of this country and that number keeps climbing, so for many the system already doesn't work. Also you and I are already paying for "Make work" jobs for the poor like Walmart, who now gives new employees a training video on how to get on food stamps, and fast food jobs. Does anyone truly believe that if Walmart and the fast food joints had to pay a living wage that the majority of those jobs wouldn't end up automated? Don't need a person to stack shelves or make a burger, hell I'd argue that with the limited menu fast food joint like Mickey D there would probably be less waste if the whole thing was done by assembly line anyway.
So in the end we can block China (which I do agree with, only because the toxins they are spewing is bad for everyone and can now be picked up on the west coast so all we are doing is exporting pollution, NOT lowering it) and fight for those "green" jobs but in the end i think we are simply on borrowed time. never before in our history, or the history of the world for that matter, has technology reached the point one can replace a person completely over simply helping him work more efficiently, now instead of like we saw at the auto plants where the machines could help them work faster the machine completely can replace the worker and a plant that used to employ thousands can be run by a couple of guys. so what now? Take away the reproductive rights of the poor? make work? Put them in camps? Minorities are already looking at close to 30% unemployment and the white folks won't be far behind, so what now? I wish I had the answer but I don't, but I have the feeling those Arab springs were just the beginning as the poor isn't just gonna go crawl off into a corner to starve like in the 30s.
Won't work and here is why: There is NO way for them to "prove' how much a game has or hasn't been downloaded so they'll just use "PPT math" which we have seen the insane numbers they have pulled out of their ass in the past, the "billions and billions" as if even 40% of those people would have bought it at all if they couldn't download it. Because P2P is this "phantom menace" they can simply say "If the console game sold X then the PC game MUST sell X+Y since there are more PCs out there" and there really isn't anyway to argue with their "math". I mean what do you count? TPB? Fastrack? emule? the thing one isn't supposed to say that rhymes with fusemet? Hell I've not downloaded a single song from the RIAA, and neither has anyone i know as we either buy a used CD or even better buy from local artists but you don't see the boycott of RIAA doing any good do you?
The simple fact is they have a "heads i win, tails you lose" situation going where you either buy it or you're a pirate, that's it. you listen to those execs and their feces doesn't have an odor so you MUST be a filthy pirate if you don't buy their "Call of Warfare, Gears of Killzone with extra expensive DLC" because by God everything they do is perfect!
Don't just NOT buy those games but please DO buy similar games that don't screw you on the DRM, hell there are plenty on Steam and GOG that don't require any extra BS. Sadly if all you do is don't buy they will use PPT math to say the lost sales were all pirates which will justify their getting even more SOPA/PIPA style laws passed, whereas if we can say "Look at the games which didn't have the extra crap and look at their sales" then it will be much harder to blame it on piracy.
And please tell everyone you know to avoid such DRM garbage, and send them links to videos like this (warning language NSFW but who can blame him) and tell them that just because it don't bite you in the ass TODAY it very well could tomorrow. hell use me as an example, I've HAD to pirate damned near every game i bought before 2009, why? Because I switched to a 64 bit OS and their &^%^&%$ DRM doesn't work on 64 bit OSes! What is worse is there are many games with certain DRM (Starforce and SecurROM cough cough) that will FUCK YOUR PC UP HARD because it will try to jam their 32bit kernel hooks into your 64bit OS. With the rise of 64bit into the mainstream you'd be amazed how many "My PC is acting all weird and crashy" I've traced back to them installing some older game.
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USB hard drives are damned cheap and Win 7 has a backup software built in and that is as simple as "clicky clicky, next next next" so there really isn't much excuse for not having backups anymore. All I have to do is tell my customers "If this PC was to disappear tomorrow, poof, with ALL the stuff that was on it, would you lose anything you couldn't replace?" to get them to see how much stuff they have on their PCs they really care about.
I tell them to use a defense in depth which is really quite easy to do, use USB HDDs for their basic backups with DVDs and the cloud used for those things like pictures that are really important to them with the DVDs stored somewhere offsite like a family member or friend's place. Hell DVDs are so cheap this kind of backup costs practically nothing and there are plenty of places they can upload and store small things like pictures for free.
A perfect example of how well this works is a customer who had a fire last year, even though his house and the PC in it were burnt to the ground because he took my advice and was swapping USB HDDs once a week with his dad so they would both have offsite backups he only lost 4 days worth of stuff and even that didn't include anything important as he had gotten into the habit of uploading photos when he downloaded them onto his PC. He simply came by the shop with the USB HDD from his dad's, told me what happened, and in less than 4 hours we had him back to exactly how he was before on a new PC, with all his stuff back in its place and nothing he cared about lost.
So PLEASE stress how important multiple forms of backups are to your friends and relatives, as there is nothing more heartbreaking than to tell some girl those pictures of her dead mother are most likely gone forever because her laptop got trashed and she didn't have backups.
But how many games can YOU play in a day? that is the real question as if you look at Steam right now they literally have hundreds of games in their under $10 and under $5 sections and that isn't counting midweek madness sales, weekend sales, and all the different holiday sales. this last Xmas i loaded up on games for me and the boys and the amount of games i got was just nuts, deals like the entire F.E.A.R series WITH the DLC for $7, Just Cause II again with ALL the DLC for $6 Butcher Bay AND Dark Athena for $5,the entire HL2 series for $10, we ended up with so many games that here it is Apr and I still haven't had a chance to play through them all!
The problem is without used games the consoles take AGES for the prices to drop while the PC you can buy tons of games for under $20 less than 3 months after release. Also the PC users don't get assraped on MP like the consoles, I fired up Half life 1 DM the other day and there were still plenty of people playing on plenty of servers, EA on the other hand pulls the plug on their games MP after barely a year. Every way you look at it the consoles are just a bad deal, in fact the only advantage I'd argue they have is they are currently cheap but of course with a new console release even that advantage goes away. Meanwhile you can go to someone like me and for $450 have a pretty badass PC built that will game as well as do anything else you could possibly want, and that unit will last you for years and years with nothing more than the occasional $60 GPU upgrade.
Sorry friend, Adobe killed those too. Mark my words and mark them well, all those that are celebrating the "death of flash"? Boy are YOU gonna be buttfucked.
You see Adobe was paying for YOUR H.264 license fees, guess who is gonna pay for that now? That would be nobody, that's who. And mark my words MPEG-LA is gonna make SCO look like the Care Bears, in fact if the rumors are true they will be able to pretty much lock anybody but the big three, Apple, Google, and MSFT, out of Internet content, how? DRM. Rumor is H.265 will support protected path and HDMI which means it'll be a DMCA violation if you even attempt to reverse engineer it.
So mark my words, Google WILL end up "pulling a TiVo" when it comes to Android, because if it don't they won't be able to play H.265 videos on their phones. Apple and MSFT of course won't care, they'll pay their $699 license fee, so who does that leave out in the cold? Why that would be Linux, which nobody is gonna want if it can't play the latest videos.
To me the sad part is it could have been avoided if all those supposedly "pro freedom" website developers would have stood up to Apple and said "We are NOT gonna support your devices until you support a FOSS codec as a baseline standard" but instead everyone saw the crazy money iShiny users were spending and went apeshit. Now you watch, within 5 years articles will be saying "What happened? Why did the web end up locked down to a three way split?" and it will simply be because everyone was stupid, they turned on the company that did not care if you distributed and even didn't give a shit if you made a FOSS knockoff, and instead embraced a company made of patent trolling, simply because the great and powerful Jobs said it will be thus.
You can put a piece of paper through a shredder but if the shredder ONLY has that piece of paper and i have the time i can put that paper back together, so does that mean you didn't actually shred it? what we really need is different words here, erased VS erased and possibly recontructable would probably be better descriptions.
What Windows does when you format is erase the Master File Table or MFT. Once the MFT is gone NTFS and the OS above it simply can't find any former files because without a pointer to tell them what and where a file is then it simply doesn't exist. Now of course we all know there are tools that can recover by doing a scan of the actual drive bit by bit (I prefer Recuva myself) but considering the fact that all one has to do is a standard overwrite by zeroes which can be done quite quickly and that even relatively simple encryption would make a file hell to repair on a formatted drive it really doesn't make much sense. I can't comment on the X360 but I do know Win 7 uses encryption for its caches like Readyboost so i don't see why it wouldn't do the same for any GFWL cache as the OS already has an API for encryption that should be pretty trivial to call. Even XP has NTFS file encryption so there really is no reason why they should have it unencrypted and if it turns out this is true someone needs a good firing.
How EXACTLY is this flamebait? he provided the link to the response from MSFT who says their software doesn't store locally so we have one saying A and another saying B, so logically one would suggest that waiting until we had a separate source test and verify the findings would be the best course of action. Or does a post not count if it isn't following the correct groupthink? Last I checked the banner read "News For Nerds" not "self affirming circlejerking" ala Faux news and MSNBC. The only compliant i can see with his post is that frankly it shouldn't have needed to be made in the first place as timothy should have had the reply in TFS.
Gotta love how the Black Panthers came out for getting YT for shooting those poor helpless Colombian drug dealers that was robbing the place. How come nobody calls them what they are, which is a bunch of militant racists? I don't know about anyone else but I'm REALLY getting tired of this "minorities can't be racist" horseshit and the liberal "if you cower and beg maybe they'll let you live, just don't fight back" cowardice.
What is wrong with a 9mm Hi-Point? Low recoil and frankly anybody who has spent just 30 minutes shooting one can write their name with the thing as its low recoil and lack of a very loud report takes a lot of what makes people lousy shots away which is of course the way they flinch. While a shotgun works fine too, in fact most of the LOL in my area usually have one filled with rock salt, an easy to use 9mm is IMHO just as good a self defense weapon. hell if the US military says it is good enough for them it ought to be good enough for you although personally i always liked the 1911 45 ACP but of course i wouldn't want say my GF trying to shoot that.
That is why you need a MOM...Mean Old Mutt. Don't go for that overbred crap, go to the local shelter and you'll find plenty of 'em that will be damned good security. my ma's place was constantly getting gas stolen as well as any easy to carry items and she was at her wits end and starting to get scared. As luck would have it what would be scavenging in the ditch as i was visiting but an obviously part wolf MOM. I said "Hell there is you answer ma...hey there buddy, want a burger?" and the kids quickly gave him the name of Jackie.
Old Jackie didn't take long at all to decide that was HIS property and to learn which humans was allowed and which humans weren't and sure enough not 2 weeks later I get called out by ma, when I get there she is feeding Jackie a big plate of eggs with bacon bits. When i asked what was going on one of the kids held up a piece of bloody jeans and said "Whoever that gas thief was they screamed REAL good when old Jackie tore into them!" and when ma got out there she saw old Jackie chasing down some punk who jumped in an old hoopty and tore out of there and she found a gas can that wasn't hers.
Sadly old Jackie passed away a couple of years back, one day he just got up and wandered off into the woods, never to return. I'd seen that behavior before with part wolves, its like they know its time and they just go find a tree somewhere and lay down under it and die, but lucky for us old Jackie had given us a couple of pups with a stray female so now we have Chubs, which looks like his wolf daddy mixed with a rottweiler.
So get ya a mean old mutt, pups are too willing to please to be good against strangers, a mature mutt can be VERY territorial and will learn its place DAMNED quick and if you get a stray or one from the shelters they are damned grateful to have a home. Give 'em a little TLC, along with some scraps and rewards when they do well and watch how quickly that dog learns its job. If you need advice on breeds anything with wolf, collie, or sheppard is a good place to start. I've talked to cop buddies and been told how many times they've dealt with idiots that were too fucking stupid to back down from a gun but they STFU and obeyed when faced with a dog, staring at a mess of fur and fangs is primal whereas they act like they are Chuck Norris when they see a gun, so if you want a gun that's fine but a mean old mutt makes for a better first line of defense IMHO.
Riiight, because the average user is gonna know the difference between SDRAM and DDR, and know whether they have DDR 1/2/3 and know how to disconnect a bunch of crap to even get TO the sticks in the average mini-tower. this would be like saying "You better know how to change your own spark plugs because otherwise you deserved to get ripped off by mechanics". How about "Scummy businesses should go under" instead? At any of the shops i worked at if they found you pocketing parts or scanning drives for data to steal then YOU WOULD BE FIRED and the fact that they are NOT fired at Worst buy just shows what a shitty store it is. I could have worked on a thousand pedos computers but you know what? I'll never know because I DON'T SNOOP OR STEAL so if it isn't on the desktop or in the Windows folder than i have no clue. in fact i never open My Documents unless i'm specifically asked by the owner to back it up and even then i'm not opening the folders, just copying them to back up media.
I really hate this whole "blame the victim" mentality and a lot of this shit could be prevented if that kind of attitude would DIAF. Should I be robbed if i don't know how to change out the wiring in my apt? of course not, so why should someone be robbed simply for paying for a service? I have been building, fixing, and selling computers since before there even was a Windows and i can happily say i haven't copied a damned thing that a customer didn't tell me to copy, nor removed a single part that the customer didn't tell me to replace. I even ask permission to put old parts in the parts bin if they come to me for an upgrade, even though the answer is always 'What would i want the old one for?" because as far as i'm concerned its their property until they tell me what they want done with it, even if they are having it replaced.
That is why I advise everyone to avoid these ripoff chains like worst buy if you need work done and ask around about your local mom&pop shops. there is nearly always two or more in ANY town and you'll quickly find which one has the best rep. There are still some of us who actually take pride in our work and nothing makes me happier than handing a new PC that was built to be the perfect system for a customer or taking what they thought was gonna break them to get fixed and hand it to them running like new. These days having a PC go down is for many like losing their car or their phone, it really hampers their entire life which is why I do my damnedest to make sure the customer has something that will never need to come back to me again. i may not get as much business from repeats as those guys that hand them an unpatched PC without even an AV, but the word of mouth more than makes up for it.
A friend of mine did the same thing with one of those Walmart pre paid smartphones. Got a really nice Android phone for $129 and liked it so much he went and got one for his wife the very next week. The phone works great, apps run nice, and he only pays $45 a month for unlimited everything including web which is about half what he was paying under contract. After hearing his experiences i got one of those phones with the slide out keyboard for the oldest (he's a texting maniac) and i have to say its been pretty hassle free and a hell of a lot cheaper than the plans around here. Like you as soon as my termination fee isn't nuts it'll be goodbye contract, I mean why bother with the hassles and high prices?
Dude not being able to count? That's just sad. Windows 2000- released 1999, windows 7 supported until Apr 2020. 2020 - 1999 = 21 years. BTW this also counts against the server editions as well i just didn't bother to count them as i mainly work with consumers and haven't messed with server since 2K3.
The point still stands that with a SINGLE CD I can cover 21 years of Windows, both desktop and server, with ZERO more effort on my part. there is a REASON why every. single. operating. system EXCEPT for Linux has an ABI, Solaris, BSD, OSX, Windows, hell even OS/2 has an ABI. Do you know the REAL reason why Linux doesn't have an ABI? A combination of RELIGION and ego. you see there is a religious component of Linux, the followers of RMS, that believe "ZOMFG if we made things easy they might give us binary blobs ZOMFG!" while ignoring the simple fact that THEY ARE ALREADY GIVING YOU BLOBS and having an ABI isn't gonna magically turn a company to "the dark side" of FOSS or whatever crazy framework RMS uses now to describe it, and ego because in 1993 Torvalds said he would never need an ABI to make things "just work". Considering he was a kid his arrogance was understandable but its been nearly 20 years, time to smell the fail.
But please, don't take MY word for it, look up ANY arguments you can find against an ABI. What you'll find is a single argument frequently posted by a RELIGIOUS FOSS ADVOCATE, which you can tell its based on religion and NOT logic as in his post he even goes so far as to say "And i hope those that use binary blobs have their drivers broken constantly!" thus proving he does NOT care about the users or the OS for that matter but ONLY about his religious agenda. Frankly I would argue that the religious element of FOSS hurts it more than anything, as they are the Rev Wrights of the group that make the whole thing look like a bunch of nutters, kinda like how we all believe animals shouldn't be abused but then PETA comes out with "Save the sea kittens!" and sends back the whole movement 30 years.
Because i can buy AAA titles all day off of Steam for less than $20, often less than $10? Anybody who pays $60 for a game that is so hamstringed by DRM is frankly insane. This kind of stupid shit is why I'm glad i just finished converting my kids over to Steam off the consoles. Now instead of $60 a game (more like $90 when you figure in the DLC that more and more games are having locked onto the discs) my boys get their games for $10-$20, often WITH the DLC, and those nice new PCs (one with an AMD quad, the other AMD Hexacore, both with HD4850s) they can not only play games and watch video but do their schoolwork, chat, play against each other over the LAN or meet up with me in Steam for a match, oh and with solid caps they'll easily last until 2020 and probably beyoond with nothing but a $60 GPU upgrade in a year or two.
As we have seen with the Vita (sales have dropped more than 72% since launch) people are getting tired of overpriced DRM in a box. All they are doing is slitting their own throats and they are welcome to it as the cheap multicores and TVs all having HDMI more and more of my customers are switching to HTPCs. they are cheap, do so much more than gaming, and with wireless controllers play games with better graphics and better responsiveness than the consoles. All i have to do is show folks how I can play a game AND have a chat session open AND rip a DVD and all at the same time and its frankly an easy sale. Valve has it right with Steam, make it easy, simple, and cheap. The new consoles will take tow of those three away, so let them rot.
Why does that not surprise me? I went into a Best Buy a few months back (it was the same one where my oldest actually got a good deal on a laptop) and surprise surprise! All the guys that had been there and knew WTF they were talking about was replaced by fresh hires whose favorite word was "Uuuhhh". these corps are a classic example of "penny wise and pound foolish" as they'll fire the guys that actually can do the job because they won't work for minimum wage and replace them with glorified checkout girls that have ZERO knowledge and skill and will more likely fuck things up or just give out blatantly wrong information.
And finally let us not forget the other reason why Worst buy deserves to die, the Geek Squad or as my last boss called them "thieving monkeys" for all the stolen data and parts and broken gear. I can't count the number of times i was brought a PC where geek squad had "worked" on it first and had to tell the customer he/she had been robbed, that RAM sticks were missing (sometimes ripped out), that some expensive graphics card that was originally in the unit was replaced by some old POS they had stuck in the slot, or how their large HDD had suddenly become some 80Gb that was several years older than the PC. In every case the managers were all "pics or STFU" and a friend that worked there for a few weekends for extra Xmas cash quit in disgust because more than half the guys there had USB HDDs and would run batch files looking for MP3s and videos, if you wonder why Worst Buy catches pedos now you know, its batch files looking for *.jpg, *.avi, *.etc. in fact i met my current GF because she was having trouble with her PC after she took it in for a cleaning following a fire. this PC was an emachines clearly labeled as having 2Gb of RAM yet when i opened it I found a single 256Mb stick.
So it really doesn't surprise me they are going under, they fired all the good workers that could actually help you, put in a bunch of clueless salespeople that are under orders to pile on the extra BS like extended warranties and pushing gamer rigs onto LOL, and filling GS with sticky fingers or those that simply don't have a damned clue about even basic PC troubleshooting. Maybe if enough of these bad stores go under we'll get a few good stores, but considering the current "screw everything but the quarterly report!" attitude probably not.
But THAT work is given to private contractors who promptly hire illegals because Jose will work for $4 an hour with ZERO benefits and if Jose gets hurt he just gets fired, no workman's comp there. it has sadly gotten so common i have seen teens playing a game they call "scatter" where they will set off an airhorn which sounds like a siren or slam a car door real loud and yell "Immigra!" and laugh as the illegals scatter like deer. i have watched it happen, construction sites become ghost towns in less than 2 minutes, just disgusting.
Never underestimate the greed of the pigs at the top, never. When many tech jobs have 300 guys apply for every opening while Ballmer screams for more H1-Bs? When you see construction zones and will see a sea of Mexicans and a single white foreman? Over and over again I'm reminded of the words of Lenin "A capitalist will happily sell you the rope you intend to hang him with" and its true, their greed blinds them to the world around them so completely they can't even see they are sowing future riots and destruction with their piggish ways. hell when the most likely choice for republican presidential candidate admits that illegals does his lawn and nobody even makes a big deal out of it you know how badly its gotten for the average American that just wants to work.
What features would those be? i thought I'd miss features when I switched to Comodo Dragon, but it has ALL my extensions, hell it has even better security features than FF, such as support for Low Rights Mode, the option of using Comodo SecureDNS for malware and phishing protection, and it uses less CPU and memory and unlike FF when i close tabs my memory actually goes down.
Now I keep Pale Moon on hand for when i run into one of the VERY few sites that don't play nice with Chromium browsers and the rest of the time i'm in Dragon. I still keep a copy of FF, ESR on my old XP box and the latest on my 6 core, and i keep them updated and try them every time a new version comes out HOPING things will change, that FF will become light and nimble even on netbooks and nettops like it USED to be. Sadly though IMHO when Chrome came out it was like the Moz devs lost their damned minds and became so focused on Chrome they forgot what mattered was making the best FIREFOX and not a Chrome ripoff. in a way it reminds me of MSFT who lost THEIR damned minds when the iPad came out and have now deluded themselves that everyone from stock brokers to sally homemaker is gonna go pay triple the price for a touchscreen monitor so they can "experience the wonder" of having a cell phone on the desktop.
Its damned sad to see a company become so target locked on a competitor they can't see the forests for the trees but frankly ever since Chrome starting gaining share its been all downhill for FF.
Excuse #209-"Ur doin it wrong" notice how to a militant with a perception bubble it is NEVER the fault of the OS, ever? Hell they even used Excuse #209 on the Ubuntu battery problem right up until canonical admitted that yes, they were suffering from serious power usage problems.
Linux is known for a lot of things but good wireless drivers? Not one of them. trying Linux on dozens of different makes and models that have come through my shop I've found with Linux what works OOTB will work just fine, but the parts that do NOT work OOTB? Give it up chuck, you might as well not bother as it'll be nothing but frustration. if it doesn't have sound, if it doesn't have wireless, you better just learn to live without because it is nothing but an exercise in pain, because one thing about Linux is it is never halfway, either it works brilliantly or you are SOL. Sadly on laptops unless you specifically buy a Linux laptop (and even then only from certain vendors, because even Dell has to run their own repos because the standard drivers don't work) then it really is a crapshoot. like it or not all the hardware has Windows drivers, with linux it may or may not, they may be up to date or may not, they may work with the newest kernel or may not, that is just the way it is friend.
Not to mention there are drivers where it would be completely impossible to open completely because it would be a violation of DMCA, like the HDMI and protected path parts of the graphics drivers. Like it or not until you can get the content owners to give up on lock in and DRM (Ha! Fat chance) then you'll just have to accept that binary blobs and proprietary drivers are here to stay. I'm sure i'll get the standard religious rant against it but to me this just proves why you need an ABI for drivers, so that they can simply write to the ABI and then it doesn't matter what else gets changed or updated as it'll all "just work".
I mean how many damned driver rewrites has the average driver needed because of changes in the underlying guts? hate them all you want but if I was an ODM i'd only bother with Windows drivers as it only takes FOUR, count 'em, four drivers to cover 20 years of Windows.1.- Win2K/XP/2K3 32bit, 2.-XP X64/2K3 X64, 3.-Vista/7/8 32 bit, 4.-Vista/7/8 64 bit. With those 4 drivers i would have Windows covered from 1999-2020, no more work, no more hassles, just ship it. The reason you can't give consumers something that would be easy like penguins on the boxes is because what works on Ubuntu leapin lizards may NOT work on Ubuntu maniac monkey and frankly that is just nuts. you should NOT have to keep a team of devs on full time or throw your company at the mercy of some kernel dev that may or may not give a crap about your hardware just to make it work on Linux, that is just crazy. FOSS is all about choice, right? so have an ABI and then those that don't want to use it? don't have to! Nothing stopping them from giving the code or the specs or doing things the old way, just as there is nothing stopping anyone from running GNUSense to be 100% "4 freedoms compliant" if that is your thing.
No way we'd go that far with China, our corporate masters are too addicted to the massive profits they get by dumping their toxic waste out the back doors of their plants in China and the people are too addicted to CCC, aka Cheapo Chinese Crap.
I'd say the bigger question is WHAT THE FUCK are they doing with plans for our planes detailed enough they can crank out knockoff parts? Have we REALLY gotten as bad as Huckabee said and our military can't run without CCC either? I mean if we are just gonna have parts cranked out by potential enemies we might as well say fuck it and offer a first come first serve arms deal to anybody with cash. this is just sad man, we can't even keep our shit together enough to keep any hack with a Chinese plant from cranking out F15 parts, that's fucking pathetic, just pathetic.
I think that what you say WAS true, but we are rapidly approaching a point in time where their sending jobs overseas simply won't matter as it is quickly getting to the point where the machine simply does it better. it reminds me of the old story of John Henry, it didn't matter in the end that he killed himself to beat the steam hammer because the hammer could keep right on going while he laid down and died. I mean have you seen the smart road layer they are working on? Uses GPS and lays down a freeway by itself. or look at smart servers, with load balancing and the ability to detect when a part is failing, soon those admins will be replaced by parts monkeys that just come by to replace a dead part while the machines do the work.
And THAT is the problem, imagine Star Trek only with the top 10% demanding money for everything but no way for those other 90% to actually earn it. hell I'd argue in some ways we are already there, if you removed the social programs and the subsidized "make work" like all the jobs we end up paying out food stamps and other benefits for because the corps can't/won't pay a living wage you'd probably be looking at close to 40% unemployment. A man that can't do anything more than manual labor can VERY easily starve to death in the USA, simply because with the combo of automation and illegals that will work for a few bucks an hour you'll be lucky if you can feed yourself. I know this is true because i have a neighbor downstairs that lives in a crackerbox apt yet has to share the space with someone on disability just so he don't end up homeless, and that is with him busting his ass and taking every hour he can get and even trying to get a second job. I also worry about it happening to me one day as I make a decent living selling and fixing PCs now, but how long before everything is backed up in the cloud and PCs become as disposable as a cell phone?
In the end if we look throughout history with each new tech MORE jobs were created due to increased demand...until now. For the first time we are seeing technology that doesn't make the humans work better but replaces the human completely. I'd argue the ONLY reason they are sending to third world hellholes is because they ARE third world hellholes and thus can pollute, but what if we all got together and stopped this from happening? I'd argue that what would happen would NOT be increased jobs for us, but simply more robots. They use humans now because in shitholes like China they can dump toxic waste out the backdoor and I'd argue THAT and NOT the cheap labor is the driving force. But within 20 years as populations increase and demand for drinkable water and edible food increases that kind of waste will be put to a screeching halt and then what you'll see is robotic factories as far as the eye can see.
Personally I think it will end with violent revolution, probably in our lifetimes. When the education and stock market bubbles burst you'll see our young going straight from the college to the breadlines and with the top 10% being filled with greedy Randian douchebags who have zero compassion you WILL see violent conflict, i'd say its inevitable. Short of a plague (whether by accident or purposely introduced by the greedy fucks in power) that seriously thins the herd you simply have waaay more people than you have labor that needs doing. last i checked the average IQ in this country was 102 and falling, what do you do with these people? They aren't gonna become rocket scientists, hell we wouldn't need that many rocket scientists even if you could magically train them that high, and people just aren't gonna go crawl off and starve like in the 30s, not when there are stores to loot. Personally i think we will end up with some form of socialism, where population is regulated, possibly by something in the water, and people are paid to basically fuck off and do whatever, but to get to that point there is gonna be some nasty battles as the greedy pigs at the top fight to their last breaths to hang onto every last cent. Did you know that more
Glad i'm not the only one that doesn't want to play Dance Dance Revolution just to check his email.
I just don't understand why so many act like you are a baby killer if you want to actually get paid for your hard work, I mean they act like all programmers should just starve rather than get paid to fix the busted shitters. As Apr 2014 approaches I've been looking long and hard for a distro that will actually "just work" for all these off lease office boxes that are coming through my door and so far have found ZERO that will work, and it all comes down to 3 problems nobody is willing to fix: 1.-updates/upgrades breaking drivers, even for the bog standard hardware and not having an easy way to roll things back if there is a problem, 2.-lousy docs that are at best a sparse list of CLI commands with little to no explanation and at worst a "to do" placeholder, and 3.-programs not sticking to the UI conventions of the DE so the whole thing feels slapdash.
Sadly all three of those are classic busted shitters as fixing them will be long, boring, thankless work so they don't get done. One can be fixed with regression testing or a new driver model, two can be fixed by hiring actual document writers that know how to write easy to follow help files, and three can be fixed by having a standards committee that helps ensure that programs follow UI conventions. But none of these things will be done for free, because they are lousy jobs. No dev is gonna jump through the hoop to stick to a UI convention if he isn't getting a cent for doing so and is happy with things as they are, messing with the guts is ALWAYS headache inducing and a PITA, and writing good helpful help files is NOT easy which is why guys get paid damned good money to write them.
but it sounds like we are 100% in agreement, we are just coming from different sides of the fence. you the programming side and me as the voice of the consumer. While I wish there was more FOSS I could hand out to my customers frankly as you said there are plenty of "diamonds in the rough" but that roughness throws my customers who then get frustrated and move on. little things like VLC not stopping playback by clicking on the video, or the lack of a "find drivers" button. I just wish the community could see how much better things could truly be if you let devs devote themselves full time to making FOSS and Linux the best of class, but sadly I doubt as long as RMS has a pulse will that ever happen, too many listen to him and the man is just too militant.
Ya know, I really am starting to wonder if it really isn't "economic warfare" when it comes to the Chinese. We seem to have forgotten since Nixon that there were and still are some seriously hard line Maoists in the top of the Chinese government and what better way to destroy an enemy than crush him without ever firing a shot? I have to say if it IS war then they surely qualify for the title of "Magnificent Bastards" as they found our weakness, in this case for cheap technocrap, and are exploiting the living hell out of it. at this rate in 5 years, hell maybe even now, they could invade Africa and we wouldn't be able to say shit for fear of having our supply cut off. Damned smart move China, damned smart.
You are also forgetting that most of those that got those big "green" checks were FOTP, or "friends of the president" where they had given money to the president's campaign and got huge payouts in return. I'm sure the left will have a shitfit that i pointed it out but I had a shitfit when dubya gave out no bid contracts and other payoff and i sure as hell ain't gonna let it slide just because they have a "D" beside their name on the ballot. for more information just look up " Solyndra tip of iceberg" and you'll find plenty of articles on left AND right leaning sites which is why i didn't pick one, I figure those that don't trust right leaning sites can read it on a left site and vice versa.
I think the bigger question, one that I truly believe is rapidly approaching is this: What do we do when capitalism no longer works for the majority? Thanks to technology and automation we are quickly reaching a point where the masses simply can't trade the sweat off their brow for capital because their labor simply isn't needed. What we are seeing is an "education bubble" getting ready to burst because we have told everyone "The key is education!" when all that leads to is musical chairs where fewer and fewer get a seat. We have nearly a half a billion people in the USA and we could probably get by quite well on 100 million, what do we do with the rest? We have tons of people that simply can't be educated any higher, you can't take someone with an IQ of 102 and make them into a rocket scientist you know, so what do we do with them? Before a man that couldn't be educated any farther could work in a factory but those are all gone, and I'd argue the ONLY reason China has that work is because they are willing to subsidize and will work in poisonous and hazardous environments that are frankly shameful.
Lets face the facts folks, capitalism is gonna go the way of every other ism VERY soon, as it is the top 10% hold more than 90% of the wealth of this country and that number keeps climbing, so for many the system already doesn't work. Also you and I are already paying for "Make work" jobs for the poor like Walmart, who now gives new employees a training video on how to get on food stamps, and fast food jobs. Does anyone truly believe that if Walmart and the fast food joints had to pay a living wage that the majority of those jobs wouldn't end up automated? Don't need a person to stack shelves or make a burger, hell I'd argue that with the limited menu fast food joint like Mickey D there would probably be less waste if the whole thing was done by assembly line anyway.
So in the end we can block China (which I do agree with, only because the toxins they are spewing is bad for everyone and can now be picked up on the west coast so all we are doing is exporting pollution, NOT lowering it) and fight for those "green" jobs but in the end i think we are simply on borrowed time. never before in our history, or the history of the world for that matter, has technology reached the point one can replace a person completely over simply helping him work more efficiently, now instead of like we saw at the auto plants where the machines could help them work faster the machine completely can replace the worker and a plant that used to employ thousands can be run by a couple of guys. so what now? Take away the reproductive rights of the poor? make work? Put them in camps? Minorities are already looking at close to 30% unemployment and the white folks won't be far behind, so what now? I wish I had the answer but I don't, but I have the feeling those Arab springs were just the beginning as the poor isn't just gonna go crawl off into a corner to starve like in the 30s.
Won't work and here is why: There is NO way for them to "prove' how much a game has or hasn't been downloaded so they'll just use "PPT math" which we have seen the insane numbers they have pulled out of their ass in the past, the "billions and billions" as if even 40% of those people would have bought it at all if they couldn't download it. Because P2P is this "phantom menace" they can simply say "If the console game sold X then the PC game MUST sell X+Y since there are more PCs out there" and there really isn't anyway to argue with their "math". I mean what do you count? TPB? Fastrack? emule? the thing one isn't supposed to say that rhymes with fusemet? Hell I've not downloaded a single song from the RIAA, and neither has anyone i know as we either buy a used CD or even better buy from local artists but you don't see the boycott of RIAA doing any good do you?
The simple fact is they have a "heads i win, tails you lose" situation going where you either buy it or you're a pirate, that's it. you listen to those execs and their feces doesn't have an odor so you MUST be a filthy pirate if you don't buy their "Call of Warfare, Gears of Killzone with extra expensive DLC" because by God everything they do is perfect!
Don't just NOT buy those games but please DO buy similar games that don't screw you on the DRM, hell there are plenty on Steam and GOG that don't require any extra BS. Sadly if all you do is don't buy they will use PPT math to say the lost sales were all pirates which will justify their getting even more SOPA/PIPA style laws passed, whereas if we can say "Look at the games which didn't have the extra crap and look at their sales" then it will be much harder to blame it on piracy.
And please tell everyone you know to avoid such DRM garbage, and send them links to videos like this (warning language NSFW but who can blame him) and tell them that just because it don't bite you in the ass TODAY it very well could tomorrow. hell use me as an example, I've HAD to pirate damned near every game i bought before 2009, why? Because I switched to a 64 bit OS and their &^%^&%$ DRM doesn't work on 64 bit OSes! What is worse is there are many games with certain DRM (Starforce and SecurROM cough cough) that will FUCK YOUR PC UP HARD because it will try to jam their 32bit kernel hooks into your 64bit OS. With the rise of 64bit into the mainstream you'd be amazed how many "My PC is acting all weird and crashy" I've traced back to them installing some older game.