Citation please? Because everything I've seen on Metro is that pretty much everything that doesn't run on ARM got thrown under a bus and i just don't see how you are gonna get DirectX, an API designed for killer graphics above battery life, to run on your average ARM tablet or even one of the midrange units. More likely each GPU will have a VERY customized OpenGL ES for their highly proprietary chip designs. In a way ARM now reminds me of PCs in the 80s, where nobody was really compatible with anybody and if you didn't code for the EXACT hardware the penalty was too great to make your game worth playing.
And THAT my dear friends, along with the video i posted earlier showing how average users can't find a damned thing on metro, is why its gonna fail. lets be honest folks, metro is an insult, its whole purpose is to "trick" developers to write for WOA and anyone with a tiny bit of common sense can see that the whole premise simply doesn't work. ARM is low power above all and its IPC is worse than even Atom, much less Bobcat or a normal AMD or Intel CPU, yet they are trying to get devs to swallow they can "write once, use everywhere" when you are talking about arches THAT dissimilar? Are they stoned? Either the ARM version will suck a battery dry so fast it will make your head swim or it'll be using so little of the hardware because it was designed for WOA that it'll be like some fart app on the PC.
in the end we ALL know what it really is and I'm sure any dev worth his salt can see the truth as well. Win 8 is a Hail Mary by MSFT who refuse to accept they have lost the mobile wars to Android and iOS so they are gonna take a giant shit all over their flagship product in an attempt to buy into the ARM market. But we all know this simply won't work, what sells people on windows is exactly what so many geeks hate about Windows, and that is backwards compatibility and the bazillion legacy programs everybody has. Since there is no way to emulate X86 on ARM without ending up with something about the speed of a 486 MSFT has simply reversed their earlier trend of making winMo look like a mini desktop and instead made the desktop into a maxi cell phone. Both routes are completely full of fail and if I had the extra cash I'd be shorting MSFT the week of the launch as I bet it bombs HARD.
Hey now! Marking that poor AC as troll, that ain't right! You know how hard it is in this day and age to come up with new curse combos? Hell between prime time TV and rappers we haven't had any new combos in ages! I for one am happy to a new combo, "chuckle fuck" and will even be happy to give it its first definition "Chuckle Fuck: A goofy bastard you just want to smack the shit out of. eg "If that damned chuckle fuck don't get out of my way i'm gonna pimp slap his dumb ass". So thank you Mr AC, for adding a new combination to our lexicon of curse words, its appreciated.
You are forgetting about the pollution friend. We can already detect the pollution from China on the US west coast and by moving production to a country where you can just burn or toss the industrial waste into a river makes things worse for EVERYBODY. It really doesn't help to lower usage of fossil fuels if the way they are being made is environmentally unsustainable, all we are doing is buying a little time at the expense of land that will be uninhabitable. Considering the size of the Chinese military making more of their land unusable is probably be a BAD idea.
You monster! What kind of man are you? Don't you care about the environment? Do you have ANY idea how long it takes one of those tofu eating tree huggers to degrade? Use a flame thrower powered by natural gas, its clean AND it gets rid of the bodies! Sheesh, kids these days, always with the guns when killing it with fire has been good enough for thousands of years.
Put an ad on your local Craigslist saying you want 24 inch or better CRTs, there are plenty of those out there and most normal folks frankly can't tell the difference in color anyway. I know that when i switched to LCD other than the LCD was a little brighter and a lot less hot I didn't really notice, but then again having trouble seeing colors runs in the family;-)
The problem with your theory is you are probably doing more environmental damage thanks to the amount of power you are pissing away. The average LCD uses around 30 watts and the 20 inch CRT I recently gave away used over 130 watts, and the Pentium 4 is even worse, it never really used low power states worth a crap and the added heat meant more fans to cool it and more AC to keep the room from being heated by the P4 whereas my AMD 6 core barely gets above room temp for basic tasks like web surfing and my new Asrock board turns off half the phases when you are idling if you so desire thus lowering the power even more. In fact out of all the old gear that has passed through my shop the only thing I have hung on to is a socket 754 Sempron which i'm typing this on now, its practically silent and is low enough power it doesn't put out any real heat and makes a great nettop.
I bet if you were to invest in a kill-a-watt you'd find that old gear you are saving from the dump is blowing through more power than a new midrange gamer PC. The real pushing of power efficiency has only been in the last 4 years or so and netburst especially was a real power hog, the SUV of chips.
Try to find a consumer netbook or laptop at that resolution. I wanted a 12 inch netbook, handling plenty of units for customers i found that was the "sweet spot" for me as far as weight/size/portability goes. Easy to carry as a tablet, 6 hours on a 6 cell, and the keyboard isn't too cramped like on the 10 inches. But I had to get 1366x768 simply because that is the ONLY choice I could find at the form factor i wanted. hell look at the 15 inches its the same, and you don't get any higher rez until you hit 17 inchers which are all 1600x900 just like the popular 20 and 22 inch monitors.
Everyone here says its because they can stick the "HD" sticker on it but I disagree, I think they like having the bullet point but with LCD manufacturing its always been about cost and I bet my last buck you talk to the LCD manufacturers and they'll tell you those 2 resolutions are the easiest to do without a bunch of failed pixels. I bet it all comes down to yields and those two resolutions are giving the highest yields so that is what they are pushing. After all if it was just HD then somebody out there would sell laptops at slightly higher resolutions so they could claim their units are "Beyond HD" but with nobody pushing anything higher for the consumer segment I bet its just not giving them the yields they want to justify selling them for anything but high end units where the markup can make up for the units that go straight from the assembly line to the garbage from stuck pixels/dead pixels. Maybe we'll get lucky and OLED will have higher sweet spots on their runs.
Bimbo Newton Crosby, this isn't so much that the customer is "choosing" this resolution as it is the LCD manufacturers have decided that this is THE resolution for all the 12 inch and 15 inch, and all the 17 inchers have settled on 1600x900. Since folks are gaga over laptops for some reason and you can get new 15 inchers for $399 no wonder their little chart says that size is the most popular. Still won't stop the stench of fail that is Windows 8.
Anybody else notice they quietly changed the EOL for Vista Home to 2017 and for Win 7 Home to 2020? I have a feeling the closer Win 8 gets to release the stronger that "Oh shit WTF are we doing?" feeling is getting and they are hoping that if they fail (I'd argue when) that Win 7 will save them. Maybe so but I can't picture the shareholders being too happy about a billion plus blown on another Vista bomb. Man I hope this gets ballmer fired, never before have I so wanted to see someone get a pink slip but he makes the Apple Pepsi CEO look like Jobs for all the flailing and dumb directions he has taken the company. And lets be honest folks, when normal users (which I've shown it to over 200 myself) end up like this when they use your FLAGSHIP PRODUCT? You are so full of fail it is beyond epic, its into mythical.
BTW I'd like to make a minor apology to the Ubuntu guys, yes your new UI sucks but compared to Win 8 its a God damned masterpiece. I thought for sure nothing could top the suck of Unity but now I have to give the Ubuntu devs credit, at least Unity is consistent and discoverable, Win 8 is just a fucking mess. It TWO different UIs jarringly jammed together with no rhyme or reason, NO hints or pop ups or clues to tell you what to do or where to go, its fucking awful. I have run every beta since Win2K and other than the old Dell dual core i have set up in the shop to let customers play with Win 8 I will NOT run Win 8, two weeks fighting that bitch is enough. Whereas before i needed to learn enough to work on it I can already tell that like Vista the only "work" I'll be doing on win 8 is removing it. Who the fuck thought have a touch designed UI as the MAIN UI on a NON TOUCH desktop or laptop was a smart idea? So I apologize Ubuntu guys, yours is NOT the worst UI I've ever seen, not by a long shot.
If it were just for drop phones then they wouldn't give a shit WHAT kind of phone it was, any phone would do, but that is not the case. the simple fact that they are targeting ONLY the high end phones shows that they are being stolen for resale which means the carriers are partially responsible since if they couldn't reactivate the phone there would be no incentive. This would be like any DMV letting you tag any car with ZERO proof its yours, anyone with a brain would see that car thefts would skyrocket in such a situation, same thing here. A phone is only useful if it can actually hook to the network, they all have the network equivalent of serial numbers, kill the market you kill the incentive.
Lets cut the BS folks, these aren't just some purse snatchings here, these people are being put in the hospital and at least one in the morgue, all for something the carriers have the power to stop. I smell class action.
That is why I switched my kids to Walmart phones and as soon as my contract is up its adios to my phone for a Walmart phone. Got my oldest a nice phone with a flip out keyboard (he insisted as he is a texting maniac) for $69 with a free month and the charge is $45 a month unlimited everything. So $69+($45x11) = $564 which is really not bad considering he lives on the phone. For myself i hate texting and don't use the phone for anything but calls so the $20 plan ought to be fine for me and the phones are something like $14. Plus if you are the type that has to have a nice smartphone? they have a really nice Android one for $129 and again no contracts. One of my friends picked one up and I have to say its fast, nice screen, good battery life, its a nice phone.
Because filing a false police report is a crime and can get you some time? If the person goes to the trouble to 1.-go to the police, 2.-file a police report listing the item as stolen, and 3.-contacting the carrier WITH the police? Well I'd say there is a pretty damned good chance the phone is stolen.
I still have a B&W PPC Mac in my closet, damned if I know what to do with it but I just can't bare to throw such a lovely design away. Sadly it won't work with a USB to PS/2 adapter and my nice KVM is PS/2 so I can't run it or I would drive it now and then as panther is really nice on it. Those designs really were works of art, just a damned shame they don't make such lovely cases anymore. Meh maybe one of these days I'll slap that Pentium D board I have in the closet in it and make a Hackentosh out of it.
Sorry but you will be hit by the caps UNLESS you use the monopoly's service, sorry. Oh and the way they bundle I can't even tell them to keep the basic cable which i don't want (and don't even own a TV) because it will cost MORE to not have it! Oh and as for "make them pay" how about nationalizing the lines because they committed MASSIVE fraud because we already paid 200 BILLION for nationwide high speed and all we got was a low rez Goatse.
So I don't know what fantasy island you are living on but in the flyover states you have ONE teleco and ONE cableco and you vill NOT use the competitors unless you want to be bitchslapped. Know what my cap is? Its 70Gb and I got lucky as I was grandfathered in, the new residential caps are 36GB! lets see you use Vonage on THAT Beeeotch, oh and just FYI but they don't even bother to give you ANY way to measure usage, they just silently hit you with $1.50 per Gb if you go over, fun huh?
Ya know, being a musician that has lived many years on the wrong side of the tracks I've known, been friends with, and even had hookers for neighbors and ya know what? never met a slave. met one hooking to get her sleazebag BF off a meth charge, met a few hooking for their coke habits, never actually met a slave. While I'm sure that happens in third world hellholes that is the thing about third world hellholes in that EVERYTHING happens in third world hellholes because...well they are third world hellholes. Just because you can buy an 8 year old in bumfuckistan doesn't mean all hookers are slave ya know.
Well that is like saying communism would be perfect if they simply implemented it as was designed but IRL both systems have been corrupted. Your theory just doesn't hold because IRL there are NO "owners" of ShitC, its just a bunch of employees of this mythical corp that can be burned on a second's notice. Thanks to the way laws of incorporation have been set up the system rewards such behavior since they can have much lower costs than the competition due to the fact there is ZERO risk for them. I have seen this happen several times, they run up huge bills and make a big mess and then if anyone comes looking to sue the corp is burned and the next day the players are all working at ShitD. Since the only "assets" ShitC has is the stationary and any profits are filtered through shell corps there is literally nobody but phantoms to chase after, the whole thing is like a giant three card monty.
Because its business 101, if you sell a product that requires a device to use and nobody is buying the device you have a SERIOUS problem! They should have went about it like DVD which was originally a PC data format and THEN got used for movies, but instead Sony, who frankly hasn't done anything right since becoming a media company IMHO, screwed the pooch in not realizing that for the majority an up-sampled DVD was "good enough". If internal BD burners were $25 a piece and blanks 50c I'd probably have BD players all over the place and would be happy to buy their BD movies but their prices are just too high so i use DVD for long term storage of things I'm not gonna need any time soon and USB HDDs for things I might need or want to manipulate.
In the end the stupidity that is screwing these media companies IMHO is the same stupidity that screwed the record companies before them, and that is not accepting the Valve model, in "Make it cheap, make it easy, make it simple". I mean they put all these DRM hoops, does it stop pirates? hell does it even slow them down? HELL NO in fact you will have BD rips often before the release date! So if it doesn't stop the pirates what DOES it do? Why piss off the consumers, that's what! It reminds me of how the record companies tried to push DRM laden WMA files that were a royal PITA to deal with, would often not let you access them because some key got screwed up, and would kill the battery on your PMP like it was nothing while the pirated MP3 files? they worked perfectly.
What I want is some company like Amazon or Google to come in and pimp slap their dumb asses and give me what I want! There is NO logical reason why I can't go to Amazon, whip out my CC, and buy the latest movie in.avi or.mkv format so I can play it on my dad's media tank but instead i'm supposed to 1.-Buy DVD, 2.-wait for DVD to get here, 3.-Illegally rip DVD to usable format, 4.-transfer usable file to media tank or I can just 1.-Get file through BT....hmmmm...now which of these sounds easier to you?
Its business 101, give the customer what they want or they will go somewhere else. I would argue that piracy and black markets are simply the market saying you are not offering the product that the consumer wants at a price they are willing to pay.
I'm sorry, have we met? Hi, this is the United States, land o' monopoly! In my area you want a cell there is AT&T and...well that's it. if you drive 25 miles to the south you can use Verizon but who wants to drive 25 miles just to use their phone? Sadly here in the USA for those that are not from here we usually have ONE teleco and ONE cableco and that it is, there is NO choice and NO competition and the companies pay a shitload in bribes...err i mean "campaign contributions" to make sure nobody mentions those socialist words like "free market" or the dreaded phrase "open up the lines" because removing the ability for a corporation to bleed customers wallets by lock in and fee jacking, why that would just be un American!
Dude, go download a copy of OS/2 Warp and fire up a VM and then realize when it was out you were in the Win95 era and be prepared to just have your mind blown. when Windows was 'LOL two programs at the same time? just try it and I'll BSOD your ass" I could run nearly a dozen apps on a meager 16Mb of RAM and when I maxed that old box out to 32Mb of RAM it was just insane, i could be running a dozen programs AND watching a video and it would NEVER freeze or hang or BSOD, it just wouldn't. you might crash an app but the OS was a fricking tank, just solid as steel.
As another poster it was Win2K that finally got me off because when I was handed a copy of Win2K pro in 99 it was obvious the writing was on the wall for OS/2, the apps simply weren't there and even IBM wasn't really pushing it or supporting it It was a damned shame too as it truly was a thing of beauty, just a solid stable multitasking monster. i shudder to think what OS/2 would be able to do in an era of hexacores and 8Gb+ of RAM. I could probably mix a 64 track song with a dozen effects a track WHILE surfing AND having messenging AND running a video to inspire me. it really was THAT awesome at multitasking.
What i had high hopes for and am probably REALLY dating myself was co-processing, remember that? Hoe the promise was sockets that would let you drop just about any chip? Imagine a machine where you could have a 6 core X86 AND a cell chip AND a GPU with 800+ cores AND custom ARM chips for DSPs and have them ALL be able to interact on a super high speed interconnect like hypertransport. Then you could literally customize the machine for ANY task simply by adding the right chip to it.
I have to agree though on ARM, I just don't get it. pretty much the only thing it has going for it is power, and even the lowest end bobcat chip can stomp it in IPC, much less a more powerful CULV like the Intel i series. I'd rather carry my 3 pound netbook with a brazos dual core where I can get serious work done at decent performance with 6 hours of battery than sit all day with those extremely limited ARM chips. Hell on most of those units you turn on something like Wifi and you can watch the battery life just go to shit and any kind of heavy lifting and the battery is toasty. What is sad to me is they are having to add all these DSPs for thing like HD video which not only eat into the battery life but are SEVERELY limited in function! Its not like my Brazos unit where I can use it for HD or for gaming or even use it as a GP-GPU with OpenCL, nope its this proprietary as hell limited function chips that can only do one thing and that's it. I just don't get it, the screen is too small, the battery life is too lousy if you aren't doing EXACTLY what they have tested for, zero customization, all proprietary, to me this whole "ARM revolution" is one big meh.
Or they'll just do what the NG wildcatters do in my state which is "the shell game' and goes like this: Set up a corp to own ALL the things you find valuable, mineral rights, hell even the office furniture and then LEASE them to yourself through a shell corp, will call them shitcorp or shitc for short. then when you get in trouble for dumping or causing a quake or what have you and people and the businesses you screwed come looking to sue you burn shitc and then simple make a NEW shell corp called...oh we'll say shitd. Since all the things worth having were never owned by shitc in the first place there is nothing to sue for, unless you want some shitc office stationary or something, and they walk away with the profits and just do the same shell game all over again.
If you want proof why the entire corporate system is just fucking evil now its shit like the above, they have screwed countless people in my home state by doing that trick which lets them have ZERO responsibilities folks, they don't have to worry about pollution or tearing shit up or destroying the land because its all 100% consequence free! No how many do you think are gonna care about what they do to the environment if it costs them absolutely nothing if they ignore the rules and hundreds of thousands if not millions to follow them?
Uhhh...business? WTF? No seriously WTF man? Apple has made it VERY clear they don't give a flying shit about business, they killed off their server line and turned FCP into iMovie. There is ZERO in the Apple line that can compete with the total control and ease of use of WinServer + GPOs+AD+Exchange+Sharepoint, NOTHING. Not even close. Hell I could teach my 19 year old in less than 3 weeks how to run 50 units using the above with ZERO effort, the whole thing is turnkey simple. Finally you are forgetting that in business its the APPS which are NOT written for Apple. in a way its the same reason Linux can't get traction, as the business world is filled to the brim with one off apps and billions of dollars in data tied up in funky formats that are hell to get your stuff back out of.
Dude you'd have better odds targeting the consumer market for Apple than you would business as you wouldn't be dealing with all the entrenchment. This is why I predict Win 7 will never quit being sold for businesses, even when Win 8 comes out, because it gives businesses a way to keep all their old apps (XP Mode) while giving them something familiar and safe. remember friend there is NOTHING more conservative than American businesses, so "thinking different" just doesn't come into play. To get the business world to switch they would have to either have Bootcamp installed across the board (thus making it more expensive than Windows) or have VMs set up for everyone (Which with MSFT's VM licensing makes it again more expensive than Windows) with no real gain for the business because their apps aren't apple native and probably never will be. There just isn't really a selling point for Apple in the business market, which is why the Apple server went nowhere.
Like it or not friend there simply isn't a compelling business reason to run apple products, you are bringing all the incompatibility of Unix with higher costs than Windows and no real benefits because the integration products simply aren't there. like it or not MSFT isn't going anywhere in the business world, in fact I'd argue they are the new IBM and will be locked into the wintel x86 market just as Apple is the hot consumer brand.
Hell I'd give props for that for being old school enough to remember what it was like back in the days of the 8.3 at least. But lets be honest the "M$" bit is part of a more insidious disease the guys at TMRepos have named "Voldemort Syndrome" where Linux crazies find themselves incapable of typing ANYTHING but "That other OS" or "M$" like a sekret M$ Ninja is gonna jump out from under their bed and make them run WinME if they write "that which must not be named". Think I'm bullshitting? Go over to LinuxInsider and look up anything written by Pogson as he is a perfect example, we also have pretty much anything written by Oakgrove here. they are simply incapable of writing MS or MSFT, or MSoft or your cute Micros~1, its like brain damage or something and makes the whole community look batshit.
Sadly this is why I came up with the phrase "FOSSies" to separate FOSS users and developers, which are usually smart and knowledgeable folks, from the total batshit that seems to have taken over a portion of the FOSS community. In a way it reminds me of how the republican party got jacked in the 80s by the religious whackos that pushed out the fiscal conservatives and libertarians so that now we actually have a ME policy written based on a single line written on a sheep's ass 1800 years ago that says a guy that been dead over 2000 years needs a certain race to valet park his fluffy cloud.
because in both cases you have all differing opinions and voices of reason drowned out by slobbering zealots that scream louder, act ruder, and basically treat everything as a crusade. Part of this I blame on RMS who if anything has become more militant (and more than a little batshit, what with eating toe funk on stage and all) in his old age who constantly frames EVERY damned argument as a "good VS evil" religious battle but in the end if the saner voices don't stand up they risk being drowned out just as you won't find a Barry Goldwater conservative within a hundred miles of a neocon tent.
What I don't get is why iFanbois have such a hard time accepting a HELL of a lot of their buzz is branding and marketing. Not saying they don't build good products, because they do, but while Air Jordan is a nice shoe it ain't the leather that causes fistfights on release day, its the brand. Hell be happy, your favorite company has a brand like Prada and Porsche that people will pay assraping prices for that half eaten Apple logo.
Jobs spent most of his life devoted to building that brand into one of the most recognizable on the planet, right up there with Coca Cola and Disney so just accept it, okay? I mean you don't see Ferrari owners going "Waah but its a good value for the money waah!" because guess what? its not. Its a bad ass uberpowerful exotic which you are damned well gonna pay for that power and just because the telecos are willing to eat billions in subsidies in the hopes of using an Apple device to lock customers into multiyear contracts so that Joe the plumber can have an iPhone doesn't magically make them priced for the masses, it just means the cost of the actual device is hidden.
but in the end it all comes down to branding and I sincerely doubt you'd see the lines or selling out you see with something like the iPad if it weren't for every celeb on the planet being seen with one. Apple is "hip" and "cool" and "THE" thing to have so people want one. Jobs spent years building that up and to just ignore it ignores the man's life's work. Is that REALLY what you want to do? To belittle what was arguably one of the best marketing men in history? Give the man the credit he is due folks, by the time the man checked out his company was the most wealthy on the planet and his products went from being at death's door and looked down upon when he came back to being THE elite brand and the man was able to do that in less than a decade. give the guy his props.
Its just someone who bought the brand trying to cash in, is anyone surprised?
I'll get hate for saying this but here goes: you will NEVER see anything like the Amiga ever again so give it up, okay? We are talking about a machine filled to the brim with custom designed chips with a custom built OS to run on top of it. To build something with THAT level of customization today would probably cost north of 100 million and would virtually guarantee that Windows would never run on it which would be the kiss of death due to the lack of apps. Now with Linux providing plenty of source code one could compile custom versions of many apps but again that would raise the price and today you either race to the bottom (MSFT) or you have enough brand loyalty and cool factor to allow one to charge high prices (Apple) and sadly Amiga would have neither today.
Lets face it guys what made Amiga so fucking cool was back then one could actually afford to breadboard an entirely new chip design and hire enough coders to build an entire OS just to squeeze every drop of power you could out of those chips. Hell theoretically you could do that today, can you imagine an OS that was built mostly in ASM to squeeze every last drop of power out of say an AMD 6 core and 7950 GPU? It would be so insanely fast and powerful it would make everything else look like bad jokes! But unlike when the Amiga came out PCs today are so damned overpowered that frankly it doesn't matter how much bloat and bling MSFT and Apple add to their OSes as we have cycles to spare everywhere. We have multicores hitting crazy speeds, assloads of RAM, and GPUs with hundreds of stream processors. That is the exact polar opposite to what we had when the Amiga was released, where machines were lucky if they had enough oomph to run a GUI at all and slow was pretty much taken for granted. All that customization made Amiga so damned much faster than everyone else it was just insane, it was a multitasking monster in the days of shitty single tasking DOS.
Look, I can understand why there are some geeks that secretly pray for the return of Amiga, I really do. I hung onto OS/2 for waaay longer than i should hoping and praying IBM would get their head out of their ass and market it right, but they didn't know what to do with it and totally killed it, same thing here. Commodore was a "cheap prices above all" kind of company and Amiga was this expensive badass ubercomputer that they really didn't have a damned clue how to sell and corporate stupidity killed it. But as much as we'd like to go and hit the reset button, as much as many of us wish it would have ended up Apple VS MSFT VS OS/2 VS Amiga, sadly things didn't work out that way. so let the old gal rest in peace, she had a good run, was ahead of her time, but that time is past. Companies like this just trying to ring a few more pennies out of the property are just a sad cash in, hoping there are enough geeks with money and a bad case of nostalgia they can make a quick buck.
How about this, I want to donate to a cause that my boss doesn't believe in and could get me fired? or that I want to donate to a group that goes against 3 letter agencies and don't want to end up on a watchlist? There are plenty of things the government may not like that are perfectly legal, look at those brave librarians that stood up to the FBI that wanted names and addresses of anybody who had read books like "The catcher in the rye" because it fit some shrink's profile?
I say fuck big bro, if I can't carry cash i'll find something else to barter with because I will NOT give a second by second account of what I am doing and where just some jack booted asshole can get a woody over all the power they have.
Uhhh...wouldn't that be a trademark and NOT a patent? I mean i'm sure any patents they had for John Deere tractors ran out long ago but because john Deere is a trademark i still can't make a John Deere tractor. i bet Roundup is a trademark as is Roundup ready.
As for the clueless above that are saying "What is the big deal if a few weeds become roundup resistant? let me answer with just one word...Kudzu. Weeds are damned hard to kill as it is, and can grow damned near anywhere so taking away another weapon in our fight against invasive species is a BAD idea with a capital BAD. You don't know what destructive is until you see that shit take over an area, houses, cars, fields, soon that is ALL there is and with it come the big ass snakes and soon the whole area is just unfit for anything. its like how we wasted most of our antibiotics on fattening up livestock and now that we actually need them we are truly fucked. But hey, as long as Monsanto makes a God like profit, right?
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Citation please? Because everything I've seen on Metro is that pretty much everything that doesn't run on ARM got thrown under a bus and i just don't see how you are gonna get DirectX, an API designed for killer graphics above battery life, to run on your average ARM tablet or even one of the midrange units. More likely each GPU will have a VERY customized OpenGL ES for their highly proprietary chip designs. In a way ARM now reminds me of PCs in the 80s, where nobody was really compatible with anybody and if you didn't code for the EXACT hardware the penalty was too great to make your game worth playing.
And THAT my dear friends, along with the video i posted earlier showing how average users can't find a damned thing on metro, is why its gonna fail. lets be honest folks, metro is an insult, its whole purpose is to "trick" developers to write for WOA and anyone with a tiny bit of common sense can see that the whole premise simply doesn't work. ARM is low power above all and its IPC is worse than even Atom, much less Bobcat or a normal AMD or Intel CPU, yet they are trying to get devs to swallow they can "write once, use everywhere" when you are talking about arches THAT dissimilar? Are they stoned? Either the ARM version will suck a battery dry so fast it will make your head swim or it'll be using so little of the hardware because it was designed for WOA that it'll be like some fart app on the PC.
in the end we ALL know what it really is and I'm sure any dev worth his salt can see the truth as well. Win 8 is a Hail Mary by MSFT who refuse to accept they have lost the mobile wars to Android and iOS so they are gonna take a giant shit all over their flagship product in an attempt to buy into the ARM market. But we all know this simply won't work, what sells people on windows is exactly what so many geeks hate about Windows, and that is backwards compatibility and the bazillion legacy programs everybody has. Since there is no way to emulate X86 on ARM without ending up with something about the speed of a 486 MSFT has simply reversed their earlier trend of making winMo look like a mini desktop and instead made the desktop into a maxi cell phone. Both routes are completely full of fail and if I had the extra cash I'd be shorting MSFT the week of the launch as I bet it bombs HARD.
Hey now! Marking that poor AC as troll, that ain't right! You know how hard it is in this day and age to come up with new curse combos? Hell between prime time TV and rappers we haven't had any new combos in ages! I for one am happy to a new combo, "chuckle fuck" and will even be happy to give it its first definition "Chuckle Fuck: A goofy bastard you just want to smack the shit out of. eg "If that damned chuckle fuck don't get out of my way i'm gonna pimp slap his dumb ass". So thank you Mr AC, for adding a new combination to our lexicon of curse words, its appreciated.
You are forgetting about the pollution friend. We can already detect the pollution from China on the US west coast and by moving production to a country where you can just burn or toss the industrial waste into a river makes things worse for EVERYBODY. It really doesn't help to lower usage of fossil fuels if the way they are being made is environmentally unsustainable, all we are doing is buying a little time at the expense of land that will be uninhabitable. Considering the size of the Chinese military making more of their land unusable is probably be a BAD idea.
You monster! What kind of man are you? Don't you care about the environment? Do you have ANY idea how long it takes one of those tofu eating tree huggers to degrade? Use a flame thrower powered by natural gas, its clean AND it gets rid of the bodies! Sheesh, kids these days, always with the guns when killing it with fire has been good enough for thousands of years.
Put an ad on your local Craigslist saying you want 24 inch or better CRTs, there are plenty of those out there and most normal folks frankly can't tell the difference in color anyway. I know that when i switched to LCD other than the LCD was a little brighter and a lot less hot I didn't really notice, but then again having trouble seeing colors runs in the family ;-)
The problem with your theory is you are probably doing more environmental damage thanks to the amount of power you are pissing away. The average LCD uses around 30 watts and the 20 inch CRT I recently gave away used over 130 watts, and the Pentium 4 is even worse, it never really used low power states worth a crap and the added heat meant more fans to cool it and more AC to keep the room from being heated by the P4 whereas my AMD 6 core barely gets above room temp for basic tasks like web surfing and my new Asrock board turns off half the phases when you are idling if you so desire thus lowering the power even more. In fact out of all the old gear that has passed through my shop the only thing I have hung on to is a socket 754 Sempron which i'm typing this on now, its practically silent and is low enough power it doesn't put out any real heat and makes a great nettop.
I bet if you were to invest in a kill-a-watt you'd find that old gear you are saving from the dump is blowing through more power than a new midrange gamer PC. The real pushing of power efficiency has only been in the last 4 years or so and netburst especially was a real power hog, the SUV of chips.
Try to find a consumer netbook or laptop at that resolution. I wanted a 12 inch netbook, handling plenty of units for customers i found that was the "sweet spot" for me as far as weight/size/portability goes. Easy to carry as a tablet, 6 hours on a 6 cell, and the keyboard isn't too cramped like on the 10 inches. But I had to get 1366x768 simply because that is the ONLY choice I could find at the form factor i wanted. hell look at the 15 inches its the same, and you don't get any higher rez until you hit 17 inchers which are all 1600x900 just like the popular 20 and 22 inch monitors.
Everyone here says its because they can stick the "HD" sticker on it but I disagree, I think they like having the bullet point but with LCD manufacturing its always been about cost and I bet my last buck you talk to the LCD manufacturers and they'll tell you those 2 resolutions are the easiest to do without a bunch of failed pixels. I bet it all comes down to yields and those two resolutions are giving the highest yields so that is what they are pushing. After all if it was just HD then somebody out there would sell laptops at slightly higher resolutions so they could claim their units are "Beyond HD" but with nobody pushing anything higher for the consumer segment I bet its just not giving them the yields they want to justify selling them for anything but high end units where the markup can make up for the units that go straight from the assembly line to the garbage from stuck pixels/dead pixels. Maybe we'll get lucky and OLED will have higher sweet spots on their runs.
Bimbo Newton Crosby, this isn't so much that the customer is "choosing" this resolution as it is the LCD manufacturers have decided that this is THE resolution for all the 12 inch and 15 inch, and all the 17 inchers have settled on 1600x900. Since folks are gaga over laptops for some reason and you can get new 15 inchers for $399 no wonder their little chart says that size is the most popular. Still won't stop the stench of fail that is Windows 8.
Anybody else notice they quietly changed the EOL for Vista Home to 2017 and for Win 7 Home to 2020? I have a feeling the closer Win 8 gets to release the stronger that "Oh shit WTF are we doing?" feeling is getting and they are hoping that if they fail (I'd argue when) that Win 7 will save them. Maybe so but I can't picture the shareholders being too happy about a billion plus blown on another Vista bomb. Man I hope this gets ballmer fired, never before have I so wanted to see someone get a pink slip but he makes the Apple Pepsi CEO look like Jobs for all the flailing and dumb directions he has taken the company. And lets be honest folks, when normal users (which I've shown it to over 200 myself) end up like this when they use your FLAGSHIP PRODUCT? You are so full of fail it is beyond epic, its into mythical.
BTW I'd like to make a minor apology to the Ubuntu guys, yes your new UI sucks but compared to Win 8 its a God damned masterpiece. I thought for sure nothing could top the suck of Unity but now I have to give the Ubuntu devs credit, at least Unity is consistent and discoverable, Win 8 is just a fucking mess. It TWO different UIs jarringly jammed together with no rhyme or reason, NO hints or pop ups or clues to tell you what to do or where to go, its fucking awful. I have run every beta since Win2K and other than the old Dell dual core i have set up in the shop to let customers play with Win 8 I will NOT run Win 8, two weeks fighting that bitch is enough. Whereas before i needed to learn enough to work on it I can already tell that like Vista the only "work" I'll be doing on win 8 is removing it. Who the fuck thought have a touch designed UI as the MAIN UI on a NON TOUCH desktop or laptop was a smart idea? So I apologize Ubuntu guys, yours is NOT the worst UI I've ever seen, not by a long shot.
If it were just for drop phones then they wouldn't give a shit WHAT kind of phone it was, any phone would do, but that is not the case. the simple fact that they are targeting ONLY the high end phones shows that they are being stolen for resale which means the carriers are partially responsible since if they couldn't reactivate the phone there would be no incentive. This would be like any DMV letting you tag any car with ZERO proof its yours, anyone with a brain would see that car thefts would skyrocket in such a situation, same thing here. A phone is only useful if it can actually hook to the network, they all have the network equivalent of serial numbers, kill the market you kill the incentive.
Lets cut the BS folks, these aren't just some purse snatchings here, these people are being put in the hospital and at least one in the morgue, all for something the carriers have the power to stop. I smell class action.
That is why I switched my kids to Walmart phones and as soon as my contract is up its adios to my phone for a Walmart phone. Got my oldest a nice phone with a flip out keyboard (he insisted as he is a texting maniac) for $69 with a free month and the charge is $45 a month unlimited everything. So $69+($45x11) = $564 which is really not bad considering he lives on the phone. For myself i hate texting and don't use the phone for anything but calls so the $20 plan ought to be fine for me and the phones are something like $14. Plus if you are the type that has to have a nice smartphone? they have a really nice Android one for $129 and again no contracts. One of my friends picked one up and I have to say its fast, nice screen, good battery life, its a nice phone.
Because filing a false police report is a crime and can get you some time? If the person goes to the trouble to 1.-go to the police, 2.-file a police report listing the item as stolen, and 3.-contacting the carrier WITH the police? Well I'd say there is a pretty damned good chance the phone is stolen.
I still have a B&W PPC Mac in my closet, damned if I know what to do with it but I just can't bare to throw such a lovely design away. Sadly it won't work with a USB to PS/2 adapter and my nice KVM is PS/2 so I can't run it or I would drive it now and then as panther is really nice on it. Those designs really were works of art, just a damned shame they don't make such lovely cases anymore. Meh maybe one of these days I'll slap that Pentium D board I have in the closet in it and make a Hackentosh out of it.
Sorry but you will be hit by the caps UNLESS you use the monopoly's service, sorry. Oh and the way they bundle I can't even tell them to keep the basic cable which i don't want (and don't even own a TV) because it will cost MORE to not have it! Oh and as for "make them pay" how about nationalizing the lines because they committed MASSIVE fraud because we already paid 200 BILLION for nationwide high speed and all we got was a low rez Goatse.
So I don't know what fantasy island you are living on but in the flyover states you have ONE teleco and ONE cableco and you vill NOT use the competitors unless you want to be bitchslapped. Know what my cap is? Its 70Gb and I got lucky as I was grandfathered in, the new residential caps are 36GB! lets see you use Vonage on THAT Beeeotch, oh and just FYI but they don't even bother to give you ANY way to measure usage, they just silently hit you with $1.50 per Gb if you go over, fun huh?
Ya know, being a musician that has lived many years on the wrong side of the tracks I've known, been friends with, and even had hookers for neighbors and ya know what? never met a slave. met one hooking to get her sleazebag BF off a meth charge, met a few hooking for their coke habits, never actually met a slave. While I'm sure that happens in third world hellholes that is the thing about third world hellholes in that EVERYTHING happens in third world hellholes because...well they are third world hellholes. Just because you can buy an 8 year old in bumfuckistan doesn't mean all hookers are slave ya know.
Well that is like saying communism would be perfect if they simply implemented it as was designed but IRL both systems have been corrupted. Your theory just doesn't hold because IRL there are NO "owners" of ShitC, its just a bunch of employees of this mythical corp that can be burned on a second's notice. Thanks to the way laws of incorporation have been set up the system rewards such behavior since they can have much lower costs than the competition due to the fact there is ZERO risk for them. I have seen this happen several times, they run up huge bills and make a big mess and then if anyone comes looking to sue the corp is burned and the next day the players are all working at ShitD. Since the only "assets" ShitC has is the stationary and any profits are filtered through shell corps there is literally nobody but phantoms to chase after, the whole thing is like a giant three card monty.
Because its business 101, if you sell a product that requires a device to use and nobody is buying the device you have a SERIOUS problem! They should have went about it like DVD which was originally a PC data format and THEN got used for movies, but instead Sony, who frankly hasn't done anything right since becoming a media company IMHO, screwed the pooch in not realizing that for the majority an up-sampled DVD was "good enough". If internal BD burners were $25 a piece and blanks 50c I'd probably have BD players all over the place and would be happy to buy their BD movies but their prices are just too high so i use DVD for long term storage of things I'm not gonna need any time soon and USB HDDs for things I might need or want to manipulate.
In the end the stupidity that is screwing these media companies IMHO is the same stupidity that screwed the record companies before them, and that is not accepting the Valve model, in "Make it cheap, make it easy, make it simple". I mean they put all these DRM hoops, does it stop pirates? hell does it even slow them down? HELL NO in fact you will have BD rips often before the release date! So if it doesn't stop the pirates what DOES it do? Why piss off the consumers, that's what! It reminds me of how the record companies tried to push DRM laden WMA files that were a royal PITA to deal with, would often not let you access them because some key got screwed up, and would kill the battery on your PMP like it was nothing while the pirated MP3 files? they worked perfectly.
What I want is some company like Amazon or Google to come in and pimp slap their dumb asses and give me what I want! There is NO logical reason why I can't go to Amazon, whip out my CC, and buy the latest movie in .avi or .mkv format so I can play it on my dad's media tank but instead i'm supposed to 1.-Buy DVD, 2.-wait for DVD to get here, 3.-Illegally rip DVD to usable format, 4.-transfer usable file to media tank or I can just 1.-Get file through BT....hmmmm...now which of these sounds easier to you?
Its business 101, give the customer what they want or they will go somewhere else. I would argue that piracy and black markets are simply the market saying you are not offering the product that the consumer wants at a price they are willing to pay.
"Don't be an ATT customer."
I'm sorry, have we met? Hi, this is the United States, land o' monopoly! In my area you want a cell there is AT&T and ...well that's it. if you drive 25 miles to the south you can use Verizon but who wants to drive 25 miles just to use their phone? Sadly here in the USA for those that are not from here we usually have ONE teleco and ONE cableco and that it is, there is NO choice and NO competition and the companies pay a shitload in bribes...err i mean "campaign contributions" to make sure nobody mentions those socialist words like "free market" or the dreaded phrase "open up the lines" because removing the ability for a corporation to bleed customers wallets by lock in and fee jacking, why that would just be un American!
Dude, go download a copy of OS/2 Warp and fire up a VM and then realize when it was out you were in the Win95 era and be prepared to just have your mind blown. when Windows was 'LOL two programs at the same time? just try it and I'll BSOD your ass" I could run nearly a dozen apps on a meager 16Mb of RAM and when I maxed that old box out to 32Mb of RAM it was just insane, i could be running a dozen programs AND watching a video and it would NEVER freeze or hang or BSOD, it just wouldn't. you might crash an app but the OS was a fricking tank, just solid as steel.
As another poster it was Win2K that finally got me off because when I was handed a copy of Win2K pro in 99 it was obvious the writing was on the wall for OS/2, the apps simply weren't there and even IBM wasn't really pushing it or supporting it It was a damned shame too as it truly was a thing of beauty, just a solid stable multitasking monster. i shudder to think what OS/2 would be able to do in an era of hexacores and 8Gb+ of RAM. I could probably mix a 64 track song with a dozen effects a track WHILE surfing AND having messenging AND running a video to inspire me. it really was THAT awesome at multitasking.
What i had high hopes for and am probably REALLY dating myself was co-processing, remember that? Hoe the promise was sockets that would let you drop just about any chip? Imagine a machine where you could have a 6 core X86 AND a cell chip AND a GPU with 800+ cores AND custom ARM chips for DSPs and have them ALL be able to interact on a super high speed interconnect like hypertransport. Then you could literally customize the machine for ANY task simply by adding the right chip to it.
I have to agree though on ARM, I just don't get it. pretty much the only thing it has going for it is power, and even the lowest end bobcat chip can stomp it in IPC, much less a more powerful CULV like the Intel i series. I'd rather carry my 3 pound netbook with a brazos dual core where I can get serious work done at decent performance with 6 hours of battery than sit all day with those extremely limited ARM chips. Hell on most of those units you turn on something like Wifi and you can watch the battery life just go to shit and any kind of heavy lifting and the battery is toasty. What is sad to me is they are having to add all these DSPs for thing like HD video which not only eat into the battery life but are SEVERELY limited in function! Its not like my Brazos unit where I can use it for HD or for gaming or even use it as a GP-GPU with OpenCL, nope its this proprietary as hell limited function chips that can only do one thing and that's it. I just don't get it, the screen is too small, the battery life is too lousy if you aren't doing EXACTLY what they have tested for, zero customization, all proprietary, to me this whole "ARM revolution" is one big meh.
Or they'll just do what the NG wildcatters do in my state which is "the shell game' and goes like this: Set up a corp to own ALL the things you find valuable, mineral rights, hell even the office furniture and then LEASE them to yourself through a shell corp, will call them shitcorp or shitc for short. then when you get in trouble for dumping or causing a quake or what have you and people and the businesses you screwed come looking to sue you burn shitc and then simple make a NEW shell corp called...oh we'll say shitd. Since all the things worth having were never owned by shitc in the first place there is nothing to sue for, unless you want some shitc office stationary or something, and they walk away with the profits and just do the same shell game all over again.
If you want proof why the entire corporate system is just fucking evil now its shit like the above, they have screwed countless people in my home state by doing that trick which lets them have ZERO responsibilities folks, they don't have to worry about pollution or tearing shit up or destroying the land because its all 100% consequence free! No how many do you think are gonna care about what they do to the environment if it costs them absolutely nothing if they ignore the rules and hundreds of thousands if not millions to follow them?
Uhhh...business? WTF? No seriously WTF man? Apple has made it VERY clear they don't give a flying shit about business, they killed off their server line and turned FCP into iMovie. There is ZERO in the Apple line that can compete with the total control and ease of use of WinServer + GPOs+AD+Exchange+Sharepoint, NOTHING. Not even close. Hell I could teach my 19 year old in less than 3 weeks how to run 50 units using the above with ZERO effort, the whole thing is turnkey simple. Finally you are forgetting that in business its the APPS which are NOT written for Apple. in a way its the same reason Linux can't get traction, as the business world is filled to the brim with one off apps and billions of dollars in data tied up in funky formats that are hell to get your stuff back out of.
Dude you'd have better odds targeting the consumer market for Apple than you would business as you wouldn't be dealing with all the entrenchment. This is why I predict Win 7 will never quit being sold for businesses, even when Win 8 comes out, because it gives businesses a way to keep all their old apps (XP Mode) while giving them something familiar and safe. remember friend there is NOTHING more conservative than American businesses, so "thinking different" just doesn't come into play. To get the business world to switch they would have to either have Bootcamp installed across the board (thus making it more expensive than Windows) or have VMs set up for everyone (Which with MSFT's VM licensing makes it again more expensive than Windows) with no real gain for the business because their apps aren't apple native and probably never will be. There just isn't really a selling point for Apple in the business market, which is why the Apple server went nowhere.
Like it or not friend there simply isn't a compelling business reason to run apple products, you are bringing all the incompatibility of Unix with higher costs than Windows and no real benefits because the integration products simply aren't there. like it or not MSFT isn't going anywhere in the business world, in fact I'd argue they are the new IBM and will be locked into the wintel x86 market just as Apple is the hot consumer brand.
Hell I'd give props for that for being old school enough to remember what it was like back in the days of the 8.3 at least. But lets be honest the "M$" bit is part of a more insidious disease the guys at TMRepos have named "Voldemort Syndrome" where Linux crazies find themselves incapable of typing ANYTHING but "That other OS" or "M$" like a sekret M$ Ninja is gonna jump out from under their bed and make them run WinME if they write "that which must not be named". Think I'm bullshitting? Go over to LinuxInsider and look up anything written by Pogson as he is a perfect example, we also have pretty much anything written by Oakgrove here. they are simply incapable of writing MS or MSFT, or MSoft or your cute Micros~1, its like brain damage or something and makes the whole community look batshit.
Sadly this is why I came up with the phrase "FOSSies" to separate FOSS users and developers, which are usually smart and knowledgeable folks, from the total batshit that seems to have taken over a portion of the FOSS community. In a way it reminds me of how the republican party got jacked in the 80s by the religious whackos that pushed out the fiscal conservatives and libertarians so that now we actually have a ME policy written based on a single line written on a sheep's ass 1800 years ago that says a guy that been dead over 2000 years needs a certain race to valet park his fluffy cloud.
because in both cases you have all differing opinions and voices of reason drowned out by slobbering zealots that scream louder, act ruder, and basically treat everything as a crusade. Part of this I blame on RMS who if anything has become more militant (and more than a little batshit, what with eating toe funk on stage and all) in his old age who constantly frames EVERY damned argument as a "good VS evil" religious battle but in the end if the saner voices don't stand up they risk being drowned out just as you won't find a Barry Goldwater conservative within a hundred miles of a neocon tent.
What I don't get is why iFanbois have such a hard time accepting a HELL of a lot of their buzz is branding and marketing. Not saying they don't build good products, because they do, but while Air Jordan is a nice shoe it ain't the leather that causes fistfights on release day, its the brand. Hell be happy, your favorite company has a brand like Prada and Porsche that people will pay assraping prices for that half eaten Apple logo.
Jobs spent most of his life devoted to building that brand into one of the most recognizable on the planet, right up there with Coca Cola and Disney so just accept it, okay? I mean you don't see Ferrari owners going "Waah but its a good value for the money waah!" because guess what? its not. Its a bad ass uberpowerful exotic which you are damned well gonna pay for that power and just because the telecos are willing to eat billions in subsidies in the hopes of using an Apple device to lock customers into multiyear contracts so that Joe the plumber can have an iPhone doesn't magically make them priced for the masses, it just means the cost of the actual device is hidden.
but in the end it all comes down to branding and I sincerely doubt you'd see the lines or selling out you see with something like the iPad if it weren't for every celeb on the planet being seen with one. Apple is "hip" and "cool" and "THE" thing to have so people want one. Jobs spent years building that up and to just ignore it ignores the man's life's work. Is that REALLY what you want to do? To belittle what was arguably one of the best marketing men in history? Give the man the credit he is due folks, by the time the man checked out his company was the most wealthy on the planet and his products went from being at death's door and looked down upon when he came back to being THE elite brand and the man was able to do that in less than a decade. give the guy his props.
Its just someone who bought the brand trying to cash in, is anyone surprised?
I'll get hate for saying this but here goes: you will NEVER see anything like the Amiga ever again so give it up, okay? We are talking about a machine filled to the brim with custom designed chips with a custom built OS to run on top of it. To build something with THAT level of customization today would probably cost north of 100 million and would virtually guarantee that Windows would never run on it which would be the kiss of death due to the lack of apps. Now with Linux providing plenty of source code one could compile custom versions of many apps but again that would raise the price and today you either race to the bottom (MSFT) or you have enough brand loyalty and cool factor to allow one to charge high prices (Apple) and sadly Amiga would have neither today.
Lets face it guys what made Amiga so fucking cool was back then one could actually afford to breadboard an entirely new chip design and hire enough coders to build an entire OS just to squeeze every drop of power you could out of those chips. Hell theoretically you could do that today, can you imagine an OS that was built mostly in ASM to squeeze every last drop of power out of say an AMD 6 core and 7950 GPU? It would be so insanely fast and powerful it would make everything else look like bad jokes! But unlike when the Amiga came out PCs today are so damned overpowered that frankly it doesn't matter how much bloat and bling MSFT and Apple add to their OSes as we have cycles to spare everywhere. We have multicores hitting crazy speeds, assloads of RAM, and GPUs with hundreds of stream processors. That is the exact polar opposite to what we had when the Amiga was released, where machines were lucky if they had enough oomph to run a GUI at all and slow was pretty much taken for granted. All that customization made Amiga so damned much faster than everyone else it was just insane, it was a multitasking monster in the days of shitty single tasking DOS.
Look, I can understand why there are some geeks that secretly pray for the return of Amiga, I really do. I hung onto OS/2 for waaay longer than i should hoping and praying IBM would get their head out of their ass and market it right, but they didn't know what to do with it and totally killed it, same thing here. Commodore was a "cheap prices above all" kind of company and Amiga was this expensive badass ubercomputer that they really didn't have a damned clue how to sell and corporate stupidity killed it. But as much as we'd like to go and hit the reset button, as much as many of us wish it would have ended up Apple VS MSFT VS OS/2 VS Amiga, sadly things didn't work out that way. so let the old gal rest in peace, she had a good run, was ahead of her time, but that time is past. Companies like this just trying to ring a few more pennies out of the property are just a sad cash in, hoping there are enough geeks with money and a bad case of nostalgia they can make a quick buck.
How about this, I want to donate to a cause that my boss doesn't believe in and could get me fired? or that I want to donate to a group that goes against 3 letter agencies and don't want to end up on a watchlist? There are plenty of things the government may not like that are perfectly legal, look at those brave librarians that stood up to the FBI that wanted names and addresses of anybody who had read books like "The catcher in the rye" because it fit some shrink's profile?
I say fuck big bro, if I can't carry cash i'll find something else to barter with because I will NOT give a second by second account of what I am doing and where just some jack booted asshole can get a woody over all the power they have.
Uhhh...wouldn't that be a trademark and NOT a patent? I mean i'm sure any patents they had for John Deere tractors ran out long ago but because john Deere is a trademark i still can't make a John Deere tractor. i bet Roundup is a trademark as is Roundup ready.
As for the clueless above that are saying "What is the big deal if a few weeds become roundup resistant? let me answer with just one word...Kudzu. Weeds are damned hard to kill as it is, and can grow damned near anywhere so taking away another weapon in our fight against invasive species is a BAD idea with a capital BAD. You don't know what destructive is until you see that shit take over an area, houses, cars, fields, soon that is ALL there is and with it come the big ass snakes and soon the whole area is just unfit for anything. its like how we wasted most of our antibiotics on fattening up livestock and now that we actually need them we are truly fucked. But hey, as long as Monsanto makes a God like profit, right?