Its been ages since i messed with Linux, but just off the top of my head unzip it and if its program code you use make to compile and install? Again its been more than half a decade, not much use for tarballs in Windows.
As for HR old Glenn called them "The source of pain and suffering, the eternal cockblockers" and I had to agree, it was like bizarro world dealing with those people. logic, rational thought, none of these things exist when dealing with HR. I think half the chest pains I suffered doing corporate IT was caused by HR, the other half by PHB middle managers. Those cheap bastards would nickel and dime you to death, get themselves rewarded for "saving the company money" and then made sure they were well away from there when their penny pinching caused the whole system to fall over and die. hell its no wonder we are getting our asses kicked by China and India, our corporate culture just breeds dumbasses like mushrooms.
No I think YOU missed the point friend, the developers of the web, these supposed bastions of freedom and FOSS sold their asses like Bangkok whores to Jobs and the iShiny and are now gonna get punked for it, which is EXACTLY what i said would happen. I said that they should support Flash because Adobe was paying the h.264 license for them, and I said they should tell Jobs to go fuck himself until the iShiny supported a FOSS codec as a bare minimum like WebM or Theora.
In the end what will happen is because the future (hell the present) is CONSUMERS in 50 foot flaming neon FOSS is going the way of the 8 track except in servers where MSFT charges too high a price to compete. Google WILL TiVo Android, because once H.265 hits they won't have a choice unless they strip out all the video parts and just give you a broken mess because H.265 WILL have DRM. Oh and before anyone says "X264" that codec is ILLEGAL in any country that signed Berne, that covers pretty much the entire western world. Before the patents on H.264 expire they'll have H.265 which will give MPEG-LA control for another 30 years, Apple, Google, and MSFT will pay their license fees, and FOSS won't be able to play 90%+ of the content that is out there.
And finally don't forget that Mozilla's crazy scheme counts on MPEG-LA selling them a license that in their entire history they have NEVER sold, a license that covers not only the one buying it but those downstream AND those that modify AND those that redistribute. What if MPEG-LA tell them to fuck off, that they won't sell them a license like that? or that if Mozilla wants to license the entire FOSS community they can pay for the entire community, say 4 billion dollars? After all MPEG-LA owns it, they can charge what they want. i have a feeling MPEG-LA is gonna tell Moz to go fuck off and they are gonna be dead within 5 years. In the end pick your poison, Apple, Google with a locked Android, or MSFT. The web will be their property NOT yours friend, and I believe...yes i told you so. So if you'll excuse me I have to do the dance of smug superiority over how incredibly right my rightness was.
But who thinks this is a GOOD idea? anyone? Bueller? I am starting to think that some of these "geniuses" are nothing but VERY lucky hacks. take George Lucas, did you know he wanted to make Indy 3 in a haunted house? or make C3P0 a slimy used car salesman in the original Star Wars? Or that Luke's original name was something like "Rex Starkiller"? I have a feeling these guys are just hacks that luck out in they get people to work with them that take the one or two good germs of ideas they have and get rid of all the schlock and shape it into something good. Problem is when Lucas became rich and famous he got rid of those that said 'That's a fucking stupid idea George" and replaced them with yes men and then you get The Phantom Menace.
While I'm sure most here have seen them for the few that haven't watch the the Plinkett reviews and pay close attention to the looks on the faces of those around him during the behind the scenes. George will come up with some lame idea and they just smile or let out a really half ass fake laugh and you can see if you look at their eyes they are thinking "WTF? why isn't anyone saying anything? this is a joke, right? Are we being punked?" but nobody has the balls to say anything. I bet Bay is the same way, I bet he could announce that 'Here is the setup, the TMNT are created when Donald Trump gets exposed to radioactive lettuce which gives him a MASSIVE case of the runs and the shit travels through the pipes (which we'll follow with 3D camera work) where it lands in a sewer pipe on some pet store turtles that were flushed down a different crapper, its brilliant!" and everyone gets a queasy look and goes "Wow, that is a great idea Michael, you're the best!"
Exactly who cares if they get a tax break if a great hospital like St Jude's gets a check? BTW another great one that people should think of donating to is AR Children's Hospital, they give tons of excellent care to kids, especially those with cancer and heart disease. I worked there hired gun putting in Pikasis units and it broke my fucking heart to see all these happy kids playing in these huge playsets and seeing how fucked up they were and knowing most were gonna die. i told the nurses there they were truly incredible people, no way i could do that daily. I'll never forget little Maria, about 8 years old with a permanent smile on her face. she liked to hand me the wrenches while I worked and would point stuff out because she couldn't talk with the giant trache in her throat. Poor little thing.
Nope because after all Google is free but they are still paying their $699 license fee. Can I say "told ya so" now? because i did, i told you so over and over that this is EXACTLY what would happen. All the FOSS zealots with their perception bubbles were 'Yay flash is dead!" and I said 'hey dumbass, you are cheering the death of a company that NEVER bitched if you redistributed, and even let you come up with a knockoff! And finally guess who was paying that $699 license fee for you? that would be Adobe".
But you reap what you sow and you WILL pay what you owe, you cheered the death of flash and then sat on your collective asses as it got replaced by the new SCO who will make sure all those cock smoking teabaggers pay their $699 license fee. In fact now that SCO is defunct I propose the $699 fee meme be officially assigned to MPEG-LA, who will slap you with a lawsuit if you don't pay your fee even faster than Mcbride would have.
The sad part is this COULD have been different, you COULD have stood up as developers and refused to support the iShiny unless it got support for Theora or WebM and refused to have anything to do with HTML V5 until it had a FOSS codec as minimum supported....but you didn't. You sold out, you went for the iShiny with dreams of appstores and iMoney. Well judas you made your bed, hope you find it comfy. Who's laughing now? Oh right, that would be Apple, Google, and MSFT. Final prediction Android locked with code signing or eFuses in less than 2 years, because H.265 will have DRM and it'll be a DMCA violation to support it without protected path. Google knew this, why do you think they've been treating GPL V3 as the black death, never to touch Android?
Game, set, and match FOSS. Now you either change your license so you can charge, take a hell of a hit to pay the $699 license fee for ALL of those downstream, or get locked out the web, your choice. But don't say i didn't tell ya so, because i most certainly did.
That is why my old VB teacher used to laugh his butt off when someone tried to copy another's code because as he put it 'programming is one of the few areas where you can't just copy and memorize and BS your way through it because if you don't know why and how the pieces go together you might as well be copying gibberish".
Once this little 19 year old kid tried to pass my code off as his, which of course he took one look and gave him an F. When the kid said 'How do you know that HE didn't rip off ME?" after Mike got done laughing he put the code in question on the projector and said "class do you notice anything....funny...about this?" and one of the kids popped up "Why are the lines numbered and what is a GOTO?" and he said "You see young ones waaaay back in the olden days PCs didn't have GUIs and they all ran a dialect of a language called BASIC which VB is descended from. Whomever wrote this HAS to be at least in their mid to late 30s to have even had one of these machines and...." he turned to me with his head cocked and said 'Atari or Commodore?' and when I said "VIC20, how did you know that?" he laughed and said 'It looked like Atari or Commodore code, VERY good on resources but about as elegant as a chainsaw. works good though"
But the problem with actually hiring someone who BSed their way through is that while they look good on paper you are gonna waste time thinking you have a decent worker when in reality what you have is more clueless than the average secretary, a real fish out of water. So you end up wasting time giving them a few tasks which they half ass or fuck up before realizing they are useless and that is time you are never gonna get back. I don't know how many headaches old Glenn had or how many times he had to give up having a vacation because the HR dept would give him some "Linux guru" for him to train and it would turn out they'd memorized just enough to get some cert and when you gave them an actual problem to solve they would try to BS their way through and royally fuck shit up.
But sadly you SHOULD be scared of them as one of the reasons i quit doing corporate is all the HR depts were switching to these "employee management" software that they would just scan resumes for buzzwords and it would spit out the "most likely" candidates which were nearly always paper tigers. Both Glenn and I would get so damned frustrated when HR refused to listen and would pass up somebody really good because the software didn't spit them out. didn't matter that they could do nearly any IT job, that they were sharp and had good troubleshooting skills, hard workers, nope all that matters was what the program told them. And sadly these programs reward paper tigers over good guys that have spent their time actually learning instead of piling on certs. So we'd end up having to go through a half a dozen paper tigers that just wore us down and didn't help for shit and when they would FINALLY say "Well maybe we should give that guy you recommended a call" he'd already be working somewhere else. I swear it was like being trapped in an episode of Dilbert.
You seem to think the market is about logic when its not, its about trends and flows and feelings. Hell as another pointed out it was already the biggest corp on the planet at $450 a share, now its over $600, that's 25% right there. Just you watch the positive buzz from this will send them up 20% on the stock price.
Win2K was nice, win 7 was nice, XP was Fisher price but easily switched and XP X64 was built like a tank and again easy to skin. if you want to talk fugly though then lets talk metro, the half assed "Its a desktop, its a tablet, its half of one and half the other and neither really works!" which has to be the stupidest damned UI since MS Bob. I mean do you see Apple making iOS the new mac OSX? Nope they are working on making the APPS work on both because hey! That actually makes sense. I swear MSFT and so many of the other UI developers are stuck with the cargo cult mindset where they THINK they understand a thing but in reality they are just aping the most obvious layer which which just gives you a "kinda sorta but not really" half assed design. And can we find the fucknuts that came up with the bright idea that ALL OSes should be fucking cell phones and throw them under a bus, please?
The sad part is they have a couple of really good products they just don't have a fucking clue what to do with them. they should push back Windows 8 for another 2 years to give Windows 7 time to be adopted by businesses and they should go back to having the consumer and business desktop be two different things. no business is gonna want the social bling bling fucking trainwreck that is Metro as a business OS, they should spin off metro into an OS strictly for ARM and X86 tablets and phones and leave Windows for the desktop. But frankly win 7 is damned good, winPhone 7 is nice, they just don't have a single original thought on what to do with either. in a way it reminds me of the clusterfuck that was HP and WebOS, where you have this really nice thing but a company so lame they couldn't sell porn in a prison.
This is why as soon as his new laptop gets here (found him a sweet AMD quad for $430) I'm gonna be setting up Win 7 WMC for my dad. Hell other than the country channel (Rural TV or whatever its called) he doesn't watch anything that can't be had on the net or is built into WMC like NCIS and CSI and frankly the net version not only has a better picture over the sat but less ads as well. the nice thing is I can slap him a cheap USB cap card if he wants in it and when he is home it'll work like a DVR and record his favorite shows and just let him skip commercials. i tried setting up the DVR for him that came with the sat but ever since the TiVo case they have fucked the UI up so bad an old guy like my dad simply can't get the hang of it whereas Win 7 WMC is as simple as "Right click>>record series" and it'll record ONLY those episodes of NCIS and CSI that he hasn't already recorded.
i'm gonna have to look into whether Hulu Plus gets those new shows like NCIS because if it does i bet we can just cancel his sat because there really isn't anything he watches on it anymore other than those shows. once i got him a media tank (Nbox HD for the living room, highly recommend them) and loaded all his action movies onto it frankly the sat just sits there sucking money and between the constant commercials and how quickly they start showing reruns he is getting seriously sick of it.
This is a serious problem in IT from what I saw working corporate and the bitch is while I have seen jobs where book smarts can get you through IT is NOT one of those. With IT you have software AND hardware AND networking AND OSes AND mobile AND wireless AND security AND policies AND how all these things fit together leaves pretty much nothing BUT curveballs that rote memorization simply won't prepare you for. and then of course there is the fact that the book smart are really unsure of themselves and will get kowtowed by PHBs real easy and that can be a disaster. my old server buddy Glenn ended up being drug before the regional head because he was being threatened with being fired for insubordination. His crime? "You have NO RIGHT to tell me who I can speak to! You will give me my email from Melissa RIGHT THIS MINUTE!" That's right, some fat dateless PHB had convinced himself the Melissa bug was some hot babe sending him pictures. When Glenn was brought before the boss luckily the boss wasn't clueless and said "He's not talking about the bug is he?" and when told yes he is and Glenn had tried to tell him that the PHB got a serious chewing out and Glenn got a $100 thank you in his check and a really nice steak dinner for 2 for him and his wife. if that would have been a booksmart he'd have most likely caved and pwned the whole damned network.
It was this and other bullshit that made me give up corporate for my little shop. Sure i make maybe half of what i did and its strictly feast or famine but the stress of dealing with just constant stupidity and dumbshit behavior was taking a serious toll on my health. My wakeup call was when my two boys came to me and said "We don't really need this fancy junk Uncle but we already lost our mom and dad, we just can't lose you too and you look like you are gonna die". Boy talk about a slap in the face, hell of a wakeup call. Frankly I wouldn't wish the corporate IT life on my worst enemy after getting out, now my color is back, I'm not having chest pains or living off aspirin anymore,you don't realize how much stress being surrounded by stupid shit like dealing with booksmarts is until you get away from it.
Tried Chrome's screencap and several others and friend don't nothing compare to EC. you see EC will automatically drop their desktop into basic mode to make for a lighter transmission, I'm sure yours don't do that, it requires NO account or software installs, again i seriously doubt the same is true of join me, and finally its so simple that i only have to walk them through it ONCE and after that it is literally "See my name? Click that" and they are done, EC does the rest. I have taken control of a checkout girl's desktop in less than 4 minutes and that poor thing couldn't even find control panel, bless her little clueless heart. With EC its just like a Godsend for repair and tech support as it does ALL the heavy lifting, deals with NAT, no software or accounts to mess with, no complex passwords to remember, just a one time number they read off to me over the phone. that's it, no muss, no fuss, no hassle.
I'll have to see if EC still works when my dad's new laptop comes in, I found him a sweeeet AMD quad for $430 so he can carry his office with him on the truck and give out quotes and bids but you know those things are ALWAYS full of crapware, so i think when he gets it i'll try EC to hook up and clean out the garbage, this will let me see if this latest patch broke anything but God i hope not. hell that was one of my biggest selling points for getting my customers to switch to 7, because with EC I just give them my chat address and they can pop up a "Help Me!" message any time I'm online and have an instant "tech in a box" to help them with their problems. made selling new Win 7 units easy peasy and was a great value add for my business. man that would suck if they broke EC but that would be about the speed of MSFT, break the best thing on the damned OS.
How do I train it exactly? I don't think I've flagged spam a dozen times since i opened the account in 2005, no different than google or hotmail. Do you have a really easy to guess password? Or use Firefox? as there is an exploit that if you look at a video site, usually of the "hot and nekked' variety in FF they can open a hidden iFrame and use FF's auto-login to grab your account and spam with it. Do you have a bunch of friends on FF that have penises? as that is frankly the ONLY time I see spam in Yahoo. I actually find it kinda funny as it instantly tells me who has been spanking the monkey.
I wish i could explain more but I'm not an HTML guy I've just figured it out from customers complaining "How come I'm sending spam when i don't have a virus?" and here is how I found out basically what it does, feel free to try this yourself. make two dummy accounts in Yahoo, call them shit and bird for example. Use a portable FF (For safest results I'd suggest setting up a new account on your PC so that it won't be able to access your real FF profile) and take the shit account and in its address book ONLY have the bird account. I didn't think to do this part and some of my buds got a spam from me when i was first testing this so you really don't want ANY names in your yahoo address book. Then make sure that FF has the auto-login info for the shit account and start looking at some pron, be sure to randomly click on links to other video sites. XHamster and Xnxx are two good places to start. If you do this for about 30 minutes then use a separate portable browser, say QTWeb to load the bird account sure enough you WILL see spam. you see the reason it is able to get around the filters is its sent from an actual user and since it only sends a single email for each address in the address book per "hit" it doesn't look like a spam attack, it just looks like one person popping off a couple of email to another.
Anyway this trick ONLY works in FF, nobody else. Having ABP doesn't seem to help either and in fact the ONLY way to stop it in FF is to have a master password set up and if you do that you'll quickly see how many sites now carry this bug, its just nuts. But I bet my last dollar if you're getting a bunch of spam in yahoo its from your friends using FF and looking at porno. Now when i get one of those I simply forward it to the person who "sent" it and explain why they shouldn't use Firefox and send them a link to Comodo Dragon, Chrome, and safari and tell them to take their pick. I've managed to get all of my old school buds and acquaintances switched over and now not a single spam. just one more reason not to use FF sadly.
And I say give the man credit as its a DAMN SMART move. There are a ton of hedge funds and other portfolios that won't touch a stock no matter how hot if it doesn't pay a dividend and now Apple will be considered a blue chip to those firms. i wouldn't be surprised if you see 20%, hell maybe even 30% uptick on their stock. If I had the cash to spare i know what stock I'd be buying right this minute and it wouldn't be Google or MSFT, it'd be Apple.
Your theory would make sense IF they had then used it at some point but I have customers on their second or third laptop that has NEVER been unplugged. i don't mean not unplugged for any length of real time friend, I mean its sitting on a desk where they use it EXACTLY like a desktop without ever unplugging the thing. Now why would you pay MORE money for a computer with LESS speed, less memory, less screen real estate, less of everything? Fuck if I know but I see it all the time Hell I ask them "Are you gonna use it on the road? car? Going to school? Need it for on the job? Then why?" and all I get is 'i just want one' so i think its more for saying "I have a laptop" than anything else personally, The funny part is since they leave it plugged in 24/7 and never use the battery in less than a year the battery is shot anyway so all it ends up is just a really shitty desktop.
But if your theory was true why wouldn't they just do as I suggest and get a cheaper laptop along WITH a decent speed desktop? Then they could be mobile AND wouldn't be stuck dragging ass when at home with those slow mobile chips. But they don't, they'll buy some $700-$900+ laptop and then the thing never leaves the place they unpack it to, talk about a waste. To use a/. car analogy it would be like buying a new car every 3 years only to leave it parked in the lot until it locked up only to go out and do it again, so stupid.
Screencaps please? Because i've been using it for years and haven't seen any more spam than what google gets, in fact I'd say all three, Hotmail, yahoo, and google are about even on that respect. Sure it gets lots of spam in its SPAM folder but that is what spam folders are for but in the actual interface itself i don't get anything i didn't sign up for. Are you sure you don't have one of your "friends" signing you up for spam for shits and giggles? Because if its an opt in newsletter type deal then yahoo will rightly treat it like what it is, something you signed up for.
So lets see those screencaps, otherwise its just another case of "all go to hell except cave 76!" fanboi bullshitting.
Well I use Easyconnect to help some of my customers when they some basic stupid problem that doesn't warrant them paying for a service call. Its nice to be able to use Win 7 Easyconnect to have not only control of their desktop but an open 2 way chat session so they can sit there and type "See this thing here? i don't understand that" or "This is the part where I can't get it to print" or whatever. i hope this doesn't affect Easyconnect as that thing is a real blessing to use repair guys, its simple enough even the most average of Joes can be walked through launching it in less than 3 minutes, gives us an easy way to take control of the desktop and actually see what is going on with the unit like we were standing by the customer and lets them chat with us while we work so they can easily point out things they are having trouble with.
My customers love it as i only charge $35 for the average EC session and this lets them get their problems fixed without having to come in or pay for a service call, i love it as its simple and easy and a great little value add on my new builds, its a win/win and i just hope this doesn't fuck that up. The average user simply doesn't have the skills to run something like VNC and trying to walk them through starting a VNC session is a fricking nightmare, whereas EC is "clicky clicky and give me the password" simple.
Actually I'd say you are misinformed, or at least misguided. you say that atheist can tell "good" from "evil" yet yet we are supposed to not act on this...why exactly? Because there is no sky bully to beat us, to spank our asses like naughty children? How about because we wouldn't like it if the same thing were done to OUR families, isn't that a good enough reason? Just because i don't believe in the sky bully doesn't magically mean life is without consequence ya know, one can choose not to destroy not because they fear the sky bully or any other consequence that affects them personally but because they see how it affects the world around them and don't want to shit in their own yard for lack of a better metaphor.
If anything I would argue that belief in a sky bully has been proven time and time again to be a BAD thing and is in many ways immoral. look at how many supposedly "God fearing" would happily bash in the head of a gay teen, those same ones would have been happy to bash in the head of a black or a Jew 50 years ago and in fact it was the churches using the "curse of Ham" to justify state sponsored terrorism of an entire peoples and THIS is supposedly the more moral choice? Hell look at Santorum now, our poor are hurting and our children are dying in third world hellholes and his answer is...keep adults from looking at other adults having sex.
I'm sorry friend but the world would be a better place if we took your books and threw them in the fire and danced as they burned and we have proof of this, in the former Soviet union. for nearly 90 years overt religion was banned and Jew lived next to Muslim lived next to Christian. They say "You can have freedom of religion now!" and what do you get? Ethnic cleansing and "My God is better than yours Ai ei eie ei ye!" Right now at this very moment someone is probably being abused, or murdered because they believe differently, how does that make you feel? In the old days they used to say "There is no such thing as a good commie' and in the case of religion they are right, because you stand up to be counted with those that wish to control you, that honestly want an "American Taliban" that will tell you everything from who to pray to to what positions you are allowed to use in the bedroom. All it takes for evil to flourish is for good men to do nothing and in this case too many of your fellow believers stand up for practices that any rational person would see is just plain wrong and evil, yet because some Christian mullah says this piece of sheepkin written by a goat herder 1000+ years ago about some dude that died 2000+ years ago says doing this evil thing is okay so it must be okay.
Except as we saw during the "gilded age" with practically ZERO government intervention all you had was "super monopolies" where the corps would crush any competition and even went so far as to hire private armies to crush those that opposed them.
Sorry friend but for your theory to have even some merit it has to have worked or even attempted to work SOMEWHERE and pure capitalism hasn't and has proven to be as much of a fantasy as pur communism or any other ism for that matter. The only difference if you abolished government tomorrow is you'd go back to the 1800s where corps bought monopolies and then crushed any attempt at competition. See Hearst or Rockefeller for examples.
He is probably scared of the "book smart" which I used to run into quite often when i worked corporate IT. They'd send us this guy with tons of paper and if you gave him some written test on a subject he'd just slaughter. the problem was if he was thrown ANY kind of curveball, anything that wasn't going from step A to step B, they'd be worse than useless. This would be because they were "book smart" and were able to absorb facts like a sponge but they never really had a grasp on how those facts actually applied to the situation.
One of the old server guys gave me this analogy which I thought really nailed it: "Its like you are given this parrot that has been taught how to speak the alphabet in perfect English, his inflection, tone of voice, everything is so damned perfect...until you ask him "Hey bird what letter comes after Q?" and then you find out its just a parrot and it doesn't actually understand what the fuck you are talking about" and that was the book smart ones in a nutshell, they knew everything from rote memorization but really didn't have a clue how to do anything else and when taken out of that comfort zone were just completely clueless.
Exactly and its something we retailers have been doing for years. You want someone who is on the fence to purchase? throw in some cheap swag, like a wireless mouse. this makes the person feel good, like they are getting something "free" and it makes them more likely to buy. In this case they want the person to take fugly photos so you give them some carrot to take fugly photos and they are more likely to take fugly photos. Hell everybody does this, look at those "games' which are nothing more than mouse click fests like farmville or some of the MMOs. You make sure to dole out the rewards in just the right amount, not too much or they won't feel any accomplishment, not too little or they'll feel frustrated, hit the right amount and you'll get them clicking on that mouse like a hamster trying to get a pellet.
Hell even the malware guys figured this out ages ago which is why we have the dancing bunnies problem. You offer them the right reward, be it free songs or porn or some dumb match 3 games and even though they may feel its really not such a good idea they will go right through all those security measures and roadblocks you put in trying to protect them, all so they can have the bunny.
Sadly most humans are impulsive things and really not that hard to figure out, all you have to do is wave the right shiny in front of their face and they'll happily dance to your tune. Probably the easiest way for this guy to get those pics is make it like a contest, and each time you do what he wants you get another shot at the prize. i bet he'd have folks tripping over themselves to do what he wanted and it wouldn't even have to be huge prizes, one iPad, one netbook, and a dozen little wimp prizes like wireless mice and gift cards. Hell if he played it right he wouldn't even have to pay for the prizes as the corps would give him a little swag for the plugs.
Oh man I hate what I call "guitarists that pretend to be bass players" as that is usually the ones doing that lame ass 'bomp bomp bomp" crap. i try to have the bass line be singable, I look at something like "sitting on the dock of the bay" or "freewill" as REAL bass playing and what I try my damnedest to do. Now as for noise cancelling? last i checked you are talking about close to $3000 for a set that will work on stage and most of us don't have an extra $3k to plonk down, not when gas is $4 a gallon and we got bills to pay. I mean I'd love to have that, hell i'd love to go to Fullerton CA and tell the Fender custom shop they are gonna build my dream bass but sadly i doubt either one of those are gonna happen anytime soon. Maybe our next album will become a youtube hit and I can do both of those things but right now its just not in the cards.
Got the ringing in the ears yet? I have that occasionally, not from my own playing mind you, but AC/DC Who Made Who tour 86 did that. One of the local DJs about 2 weeks after the concert, which FYI he waited two weeks because one of his buds went and it took that long for him to stop going "HUH? WHAT?" said "For all you guys that went to the AC concert, now that your hearing is back i want to play something for you. This is a recording i made by sticking my mike out the window and remember this studio is TWENTY FIVE MILES AWAY from the concert hall, now listen" and he fires up this tape and sure enough you hear "The video games they play me" just as clear as if it was on a car stereo in the lot LOL!
While I don't use a low pass i do have a Trace Elliot (one of the last good British ones before they got bought by Peavey and ruined) with a nice 7 band and use that to give me a nice response without all that ultra low end "rumble". Between that and the compressor on my Zoom pedal (B1X, if you haven't tried one please do, they are great pedals) I try to keep the ultra low rumble to a minimum which you really have to watch when you play 5 string.
Because there are many that believe you can't have evil as tangible thing without a devil behind it, but I think they are wrong. i think you can pour enough hatred into a thing, be it land or an institution you literally "sour the ground" and create something truly dark and sinister.
I truly believe a thing can be evil, it can be soured. it is no God nor devil, but the combined malice and viciousness of humans that creates it, feeds it, makes it grow like a cancer. I believe some of those corps i have named earlier have become that, and that everyone who goes to work for them are affected by that darkness that has grown within its walls. That of course is no excuse but it does explain how you can get so many people that will happily join in no matter how nasty and evil the deeds are, its literally in the air of these places, like a dark cloud hanging overhead.
The customers I wasn't able to talk out of getting one are telling me the ame thing, it either is used as a very expensive ebook reader or a video player which considering a portable DVD player is like $40 is just another waste. After trying several (yes including an iPad) I think I'll just stick with my netbook, its got an AMD dual core APU so its got more CPU and GPU power than the tablets, gets just crazy good battery life, over 7 hours surfing or 6 playing HD video, only weighs 3 pounds so is no problem to carry in its little sleeve, 12 inch screen so easy to read, 320Gb drive so I can have all my tunes and tons of videos, tons of great software like Audacity that is 100% free and finally I managed to snag it pre flood for $350 with an 8Gb RAM upgrade.
YES there are some niches like medical and warehouses where tablets make sense NO that doesn't translate to the majority of the population. Its just marketing buzz, same as more than 80% of the laptops i sell are never ever unplugged. What is the point of paying more for a mobile computer that you don't use the mobility on? Fuck if I know but that's what folks do with the things, just as the tablets end up eBook readers or portable video players.
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Its been ages since i messed with Linux, but just off the top of my head unzip it and if its program code you use make to compile and install? Again its been more than half a decade, not much use for tarballs in Windows.
As for HR old Glenn called them "The source of pain and suffering, the eternal cockblockers" and I had to agree, it was like bizarro world dealing with those people. logic, rational thought, none of these things exist when dealing with HR. I think half the chest pains I suffered doing corporate IT was caused by HR, the other half by PHB middle managers. Those cheap bastards would nickel and dime you to death, get themselves rewarded for "saving the company money" and then made sure they were well away from there when their penny pinching caused the whole system to fall over and die. hell its no wonder we are getting our asses kicked by China and India, our corporate culture just breeds dumbasses like mushrooms.
No I think YOU missed the point friend, the developers of the web, these supposed bastions of freedom and FOSS sold their asses like Bangkok whores to Jobs and the iShiny and are now gonna get punked for it, which is EXACTLY what i said would happen. I said that they should support Flash because Adobe was paying the h.264 license for them, and I said they should tell Jobs to go fuck himself until the iShiny supported a FOSS codec as a bare minimum like WebM or Theora.
In the end what will happen is because the future (hell the present) is CONSUMERS in 50 foot flaming neon FOSS is going the way of the 8 track except in servers where MSFT charges too high a price to compete. Google WILL TiVo Android, because once H.265 hits they won't have a choice unless they strip out all the video parts and just give you a broken mess because H.265 WILL have DRM. Oh and before anyone says "X264" that codec is ILLEGAL in any country that signed Berne, that covers pretty much the entire western world. Before the patents on H.264 expire they'll have H.265 which will give MPEG-LA control for another 30 years, Apple, Google, and MSFT will pay their license fees, and FOSS won't be able to play 90%+ of the content that is out there.
And finally don't forget that Mozilla's crazy scheme counts on MPEG-LA selling them a license that in their entire history they have NEVER sold, a license that covers not only the one buying it but those downstream AND those that modify AND those that redistribute. What if MPEG-LA tell them to fuck off, that they won't sell them a license like that? or that if Mozilla wants to license the entire FOSS community they can pay for the entire community, say 4 billion dollars? After all MPEG-LA owns it, they can charge what they want. i have a feeling MPEG-LA is gonna tell Moz to go fuck off and they are gonna be dead within 5 years. In the end pick your poison, Apple, Google with a locked Android, or MSFT. The web will be their property NOT yours friend, and I believe...yes i told you so. So if you'll excuse me I have to do the dance of smug superiority over how incredibly right my rightness was.
But who thinks this is a GOOD idea? anyone? Bueller? I am starting to think that some of these "geniuses" are nothing but VERY lucky hacks. take George Lucas, did you know he wanted to make Indy 3 in a haunted house? or make C3P0 a slimy used car salesman in the original Star Wars? Or that Luke's original name was something like "Rex Starkiller"? I have a feeling these guys are just hacks that luck out in they get people to work with them that take the one or two good germs of ideas they have and get rid of all the schlock and shape it into something good. Problem is when Lucas became rich and famous he got rid of those that said 'That's a fucking stupid idea George" and replaced them with yes men and then you get The Phantom Menace.
While I'm sure most here have seen them for the few that haven't watch the the Plinkett reviews and pay close attention to the looks on the faces of those around him during the behind the scenes. George will come up with some lame idea and they just smile or let out a really half ass fake laugh and you can see if you look at their eyes they are thinking "WTF? why isn't anyone saying anything? this is a joke, right? Are we being punked?" but nobody has the balls to say anything. I bet Bay is the same way, I bet he could announce that 'Here is the setup, the TMNT are created when Donald Trump gets exposed to radioactive lettuce which gives him a MASSIVE case of the runs and the shit travels through the pipes (which we'll follow with 3D camera work) where it lands in a sewer pipe on some pet store turtles that were flushed down a different crapper, its brilliant!" and everyone gets a queasy look and goes "Wow, that is a great idea Michael, you're the best!"
Exactly who cares if they get a tax break if a great hospital like St Jude's gets a check? BTW another great one that people should think of donating to is AR Children's Hospital, they give tons of excellent care to kids, especially those with cancer and heart disease. I worked there hired gun putting in Pikasis units and it broke my fucking heart to see all these happy kids playing in these huge playsets and seeing how fucked up they were and knowing most were gonna die. i told the nurses there they were truly incredible people, no way i could do that daily. I'll never forget little Maria, about 8 years old with a permanent smile on her face. she liked to hand me the wrenches while I worked and would point stuff out because she couldn't talk with the giant trache in her throat. Poor little thing.
Nope because after all Google is free but they are still paying their $699 license fee. Can I say "told ya so" now? because i did, i told you so over and over that this is EXACTLY what would happen. All the FOSS zealots with their perception bubbles were 'Yay flash is dead!" and I said 'hey dumbass, you are cheering the death of a company that NEVER bitched if you redistributed, and even let you come up with a knockoff! And finally guess who was paying that $699 license fee for you? that would be Adobe".
But you reap what you sow and you WILL pay what you owe, you cheered the death of flash and then sat on your collective asses as it got replaced by the new SCO who will make sure all those cock smoking teabaggers pay their $699 license fee. In fact now that SCO is defunct I propose the $699 fee meme be officially assigned to MPEG-LA, who will slap you with a lawsuit if you don't pay your fee even faster than Mcbride would have.
The sad part is this COULD have been different, you COULD have stood up as developers and refused to support the iShiny unless it got support for Theora or WebM and refused to have anything to do with HTML V5 until it had a FOSS codec as minimum supported....but you didn't. You sold out, you went for the iShiny with dreams of appstores and iMoney. Well judas you made your bed, hope you find it comfy. Who's laughing now? Oh right, that would be Apple, Google, and MSFT. Final prediction Android locked with code signing or eFuses in less than 2 years, because H.265 will have DRM and it'll be a DMCA violation to support it without protected path. Google knew this, why do you think they've been treating GPL V3 as the black death, never to touch Android?
Game, set, and match FOSS. Now you either change your license so you can charge, take a hell of a hit to pay the $699 license fee for ALL of those downstream, or get locked out the web, your choice. But don't say i didn't tell ya so, because i most certainly did.
That is why my old VB teacher used to laugh his butt off when someone tried to copy another's code because as he put it 'programming is one of the few areas where you can't just copy and memorize and BS your way through it because if you don't know why and how the pieces go together you might as well be copying gibberish".
Once this little 19 year old kid tried to pass my code off as his, which of course he took one look and gave him an F. When the kid said 'How do you know that HE didn't rip off ME?" after Mike got done laughing he put the code in question on the projector and said "class do you notice anything....funny...about this?" and one of the kids popped up "Why are the lines numbered and what is a GOTO?" and he said "You see young ones waaaay back in the olden days PCs didn't have GUIs and they all ran a dialect of a language called BASIC which VB is descended from. Whomever wrote this HAS to be at least in their mid to late 30s to have even had one of these machines and...." he turned to me with his head cocked and said 'Atari or Commodore?' and when I said "VIC20, how did you know that?" he laughed and said 'It looked like Atari or Commodore code, VERY good on resources but about as elegant as a chainsaw. works good though"
But the problem with actually hiring someone who BSed their way through is that while they look good on paper you are gonna waste time thinking you have a decent worker when in reality what you have is more clueless than the average secretary, a real fish out of water. So you end up wasting time giving them a few tasks which they half ass or fuck up before realizing they are useless and that is time you are never gonna get back. I don't know how many headaches old Glenn had or how many times he had to give up having a vacation because the HR dept would give him some "Linux guru" for him to train and it would turn out they'd memorized just enough to get some cert and when you gave them an actual problem to solve they would try to BS their way through and royally fuck shit up.
But sadly you SHOULD be scared of them as one of the reasons i quit doing corporate is all the HR depts were switching to these "employee management" software that they would just scan resumes for buzzwords and it would spit out the "most likely" candidates which were nearly always paper tigers. Both Glenn and I would get so damned frustrated when HR refused to listen and would pass up somebody really good because the software didn't spit them out. didn't matter that they could do nearly any IT job, that they were sharp and had good troubleshooting skills, hard workers, nope all that matters was what the program told them. And sadly these programs reward paper tigers over good guys that have spent their time actually learning instead of piling on certs. So we'd end up having to go through a half a dozen paper tigers that just wore us down and didn't help for shit and when they would FINALLY say "Well maybe we should give that guy you recommended a call" he'd already be working somewhere else. I swear it was like being trapped in an episode of Dilbert.
You seem to think the market is about logic when its not, its about trends and flows and feelings. Hell as another pointed out it was already the biggest corp on the planet at $450 a share, now its over $600, that's 25% right there. Just you watch the positive buzz from this will send them up 20% on the stock price.
Win2K was nice, win 7 was nice, XP was Fisher price but easily switched and XP X64 was built like a tank and again easy to skin. if you want to talk fugly though then lets talk metro, the half assed "Its a desktop, its a tablet, its half of one and half the other and neither really works!" which has to be the stupidest damned UI since MS Bob. I mean do you see Apple making iOS the new mac OSX? Nope they are working on making the APPS work on both because hey! That actually makes sense. I swear MSFT and so many of the other UI developers are stuck with the cargo cult mindset where they THINK they understand a thing but in reality they are just aping the most obvious layer which which just gives you a "kinda sorta but not really" half assed design. And can we find the fucknuts that came up with the bright idea that ALL OSes should be fucking cell phones and throw them under a bus, please?
The sad part is they have a couple of really good products they just don't have a fucking clue what to do with them. they should push back Windows 8 for another 2 years to give Windows 7 time to be adopted by businesses and they should go back to having the consumer and business desktop be two different things. no business is gonna want the social bling bling fucking trainwreck that is Metro as a business OS, they should spin off metro into an OS strictly for ARM and X86 tablets and phones and leave Windows for the desktop. But frankly win 7 is damned good, winPhone 7 is nice, they just don't have a single original thought on what to do with either. in a way it reminds me of the clusterfuck that was HP and WebOS, where you have this really nice thing but a company so lame they couldn't sell porn in a prison.
Kudos Blizzard for doing such a decent thing, couldn't have picked a better charity.
This is why as soon as his new laptop gets here (found him a sweet AMD quad for $430) I'm gonna be setting up Win 7 WMC for my dad. Hell other than the country channel (Rural TV or whatever its called) he doesn't watch anything that can't be had on the net or is built into WMC like NCIS and CSI and frankly the net version not only has a better picture over the sat but less ads as well. the nice thing is I can slap him a cheap USB cap card if he wants in it and when he is home it'll work like a DVR and record his favorite shows and just let him skip commercials. i tried setting up the DVR for him that came with the sat but ever since the TiVo case they have fucked the UI up so bad an old guy like my dad simply can't get the hang of it whereas Win 7 WMC is as simple as "Right click>>record series" and it'll record ONLY those episodes of NCIS and CSI that he hasn't already recorded.
i'm gonna have to look into whether Hulu Plus gets those new shows like NCIS because if it does i bet we can just cancel his sat because there really isn't anything he watches on it anymore other than those shows. once i got him a media tank (Nbox HD for the living room, highly recommend them) and loaded all his action movies onto it frankly the sat just sits there sucking money and between the constant commercials and how quickly they start showing reruns he is getting seriously sick of it.
This is a serious problem in IT from what I saw working corporate and the bitch is while I have seen jobs where book smarts can get you through IT is NOT one of those. With IT you have software AND hardware AND networking AND OSes AND mobile AND wireless AND security AND policies AND how all these things fit together leaves pretty much nothing BUT curveballs that rote memorization simply won't prepare you for. and then of course there is the fact that the book smart are really unsure of themselves and will get kowtowed by PHBs real easy and that can be a disaster. my old server buddy Glenn ended up being drug before the regional head because he was being threatened with being fired for insubordination. His crime? "You have NO RIGHT to tell me who I can speak to! You will give me my email from Melissa RIGHT THIS MINUTE!" That's right, some fat dateless PHB had convinced himself the Melissa bug was some hot babe sending him pictures. When Glenn was brought before the boss luckily the boss wasn't clueless and said "He's not talking about the bug is he?" and when told yes he is and Glenn had tried to tell him that the PHB got a serious chewing out and Glenn got a $100 thank you in his check and a really nice steak dinner for 2 for him and his wife. if that would have been a booksmart he'd have most likely caved and pwned the whole damned network.
It was this and other bullshit that made me give up corporate for my little shop. Sure i make maybe half of what i did and its strictly feast or famine but the stress of dealing with just constant stupidity and dumbshit behavior was taking a serious toll on my health. My wakeup call was when my two boys came to me and said "We don't really need this fancy junk Uncle but we already lost our mom and dad, we just can't lose you too and you look like you are gonna die". Boy talk about a slap in the face, hell of a wakeup call. Frankly I wouldn't wish the corporate IT life on my worst enemy after getting out, now my color is back, I'm not having chest pains or living off aspirin anymore,you don't realize how much stress being surrounded by stupid shit like dealing with booksmarts is until you get away from it.
Tried Chrome's screencap and several others and friend don't nothing compare to EC. you see EC will automatically drop their desktop into basic mode to make for a lighter transmission, I'm sure yours don't do that, it requires NO account or software installs, again i seriously doubt the same is true of join me, and finally its so simple that i only have to walk them through it ONCE and after that it is literally "See my name? Click that" and they are done, EC does the rest. I have taken control of a checkout girl's desktop in less than 4 minutes and that poor thing couldn't even find control panel, bless her little clueless heart. With EC its just like a Godsend for repair and tech support as it does ALL the heavy lifting, deals with NAT, no software or accounts to mess with, no complex passwords to remember, just a one time number they read off to me over the phone. that's it, no muss, no fuss, no hassle.
I'll have to see if EC still works when my dad's new laptop comes in, I found him a sweeeet AMD quad for $430 so he can carry his office with him on the truck and give out quotes and bids but you know those things are ALWAYS full of crapware, so i think when he gets it i'll try EC to hook up and clean out the garbage, this will let me see if this latest patch broke anything but God i hope not. hell that was one of my biggest selling points for getting my customers to switch to 7, because with EC I just give them my chat address and they can pop up a "Help Me!" message any time I'm online and have an instant "tech in a box" to help them with their problems. made selling new Win 7 units easy peasy and was a great value add for my business. man that would suck if they broke EC but that would be about the speed of MSFT, break the best thing on the damned OS.
How do I train it exactly? I don't think I've flagged spam a dozen times since i opened the account in 2005, no different than google or hotmail. Do you have a really easy to guess password? Or use Firefox? as there is an exploit that if you look at a video site, usually of the "hot and nekked' variety in FF they can open a hidden iFrame and use FF's auto-login to grab your account and spam with it. Do you have a bunch of friends on FF that have penises? as that is frankly the ONLY time I see spam in Yahoo. I actually find it kinda funny as it instantly tells me who has been spanking the monkey.
I wish i could explain more but I'm not an HTML guy I've just figured it out from customers complaining "How come I'm sending spam when i don't have a virus?" and here is how I found out basically what it does, feel free to try this yourself. make two dummy accounts in Yahoo, call them shit and bird for example. Use a portable FF (For safest results I'd suggest setting up a new account on your PC so that it won't be able to access your real FF profile) and take the shit account and in its address book ONLY have the bird account. I didn't think to do this part and some of my buds got a spam from me when i was first testing this so you really don't want ANY names in your yahoo address book. Then make sure that FF has the auto-login info for the shit account and start looking at some pron, be sure to randomly click on links to other video sites. XHamster and Xnxx are two good places to start. If you do this for about 30 minutes then use a separate portable browser, say QTWeb to load the bird account sure enough you WILL see spam. you see the reason it is able to get around the filters is its sent from an actual user and since it only sends a single email for each address in the address book per "hit" it doesn't look like a spam attack, it just looks like one person popping off a couple of email to another.
Anyway this trick ONLY works in FF, nobody else. Having ABP doesn't seem to help either and in fact the ONLY way to stop it in FF is to have a master password set up and if you do that you'll quickly see how many sites now carry this bug, its just nuts. But I bet my last dollar if you're getting a bunch of spam in yahoo its from your friends using FF and looking at porno. Now when i get one of those I simply forward it to the person who "sent" it and explain why they shouldn't use Firefox and send them a link to Comodo Dragon, Chrome, and safari and tell them to take their pick. I've managed to get all of my old school buds and acquaintances switched over and now not a single spam. just one more reason not to use FF sadly.
And I say give the man credit as its a DAMN SMART move. There are a ton of hedge funds and other portfolios that won't touch a stock no matter how hot if it doesn't pay a dividend and now Apple will be considered a blue chip to those firms. i wouldn't be surprised if you see 20%, hell maybe even 30% uptick on their stock. If I had the cash to spare i know what stock I'd be buying right this minute and it wouldn't be Google or MSFT, it'd be Apple.
Your theory would make sense IF they had then used it at some point but I have customers on their second or third laptop that has NEVER been unplugged. i don't mean not unplugged for any length of real time friend, I mean its sitting on a desk where they use it EXACTLY like a desktop without ever unplugging the thing. Now why would you pay MORE money for a computer with LESS speed, less memory, less screen real estate, less of everything? Fuck if I know but I see it all the time Hell I ask them "Are you gonna use it on the road? car? Going to school? Need it for on the job? Then why?" and all I get is 'i just want one' so i think its more for saying "I have a laptop" than anything else personally, The funny part is since they leave it plugged in 24/7 and never use the battery in less than a year the battery is shot anyway so all it ends up is just a really shitty desktop.
But if your theory was true why wouldn't they just do as I suggest and get a cheaper laptop along WITH a decent speed desktop? Then they could be mobile AND wouldn't be stuck dragging ass when at home with those slow mobile chips. But they don't, they'll buy some $700-$900+ laptop and then the thing never leaves the place they unpack it to, talk about a waste. To use a /. car analogy it would be like buying a new car every 3 years only to leave it parked in the lot until it locked up only to go out and do it again, so stupid.
Screencaps please? Because i've been using it for years and haven't seen any more spam than what google gets, in fact I'd say all three, Hotmail, yahoo, and google are about even on that respect. Sure it gets lots of spam in its SPAM folder but that is what spam folders are for but in the actual interface itself i don't get anything i didn't sign up for. Are you sure you don't have one of your "friends" signing you up for spam for shits and giggles? Because if its an opt in newsletter type deal then yahoo will rightly treat it like what it is, something you signed up for.
So lets see those screencaps, otherwise its just another case of "all go to hell except cave 76!" fanboi bullshitting.
Well I use Easyconnect to help some of my customers when they some basic stupid problem that doesn't warrant them paying for a service call. Its nice to be able to use Win 7 Easyconnect to have not only control of their desktop but an open 2 way chat session so they can sit there and type "See this thing here? i don't understand that" or "This is the part where I can't get it to print" or whatever. i hope this doesn't affect Easyconnect as that thing is a real blessing to use repair guys, its simple enough even the most average of Joes can be walked through launching it in less than 3 minutes, gives us an easy way to take control of the desktop and actually see what is going on with the unit like we were standing by the customer and lets them chat with us while we work so they can easily point out things they are having trouble with.
My customers love it as i only charge $35 for the average EC session and this lets them get their problems fixed without having to come in or pay for a service call, i love it as its simple and easy and a great little value add on my new builds, its a win/win and i just hope this doesn't fuck that up. The average user simply doesn't have the skills to run something like VNC and trying to walk them through starting a VNC session is a fricking nightmare, whereas EC is "clicky clicky and give me the password" simple.
Actually I'd say you are misinformed, or at least misguided. you say that atheist can tell "good" from "evil" yet yet we are supposed to not act on this...why exactly? Because there is no sky bully to beat us, to spank our asses like naughty children? How about because we wouldn't like it if the same thing were done to OUR families, isn't that a good enough reason? Just because i don't believe in the sky bully doesn't magically mean life is without consequence ya know, one can choose not to destroy not because they fear the sky bully or any other consequence that affects them personally but because they see how it affects the world around them and don't want to shit in their own yard for lack of a better metaphor.
If anything I would argue that belief in a sky bully has been proven time and time again to be a BAD thing and is in many ways immoral. look at how many supposedly "God fearing" would happily bash in the head of a gay teen, those same ones would have been happy to bash in the head of a black or a Jew 50 years ago and in fact it was the churches using the "curse of Ham" to justify state sponsored terrorism of an entire peoples and THIS is supposedly the more moral choice? Hell look at Santorum now, our poor are hurting and our children are dying in third world hellholes and his answer is...keep adults from looking at other adults having sex.
I'm sorry friend but the world would be a better place if we took your books and threw them in the fire and danced as they burned and we have proof of this, in the former Soviet union. for nearly 90 years overt religion was banned and Jew lived next to Muslim lived next to Christian. They say "You can have freedom of religion now!" and what do you get? Ethnic cleansing and "My God is better than yours Ai ei eie ei ye!" Right now at this very moment someone is probably being abused, or murdered because they believe differently, how does that make you feel? In the old days they used to say "There is no such thing as a good commie' and in the case of religion they are right, because you stand up to be counted with those that wish to control you, that honestly want an "American Taliban" that will tell you everything from who to pray to to what positions you are allowed to use in the bedroom. All it takes for evil to flourish is for good men to do nothing and in this case too many of your fellow believers stand up for practices that any rational person would see is just plain wrong and evil, yet because some Christian mullah says this piece of sheepkin written by a goat herder 1000+ years ago about some dude that died 2000+ years ago says doing this evil thing is okay so it must be okay.
Except as we saw during the "gilded age" with practically ZERO government intervention all you had was "super monopolies" where the corps would crush any competition and even went so far as to hire private armies to crush those that opposed them.
Sorry friend but for your theory to have even some merit it has to have worked or even attempted to work SOMEWHERE and pure capitalism hasn't and has proven to be as much of a fantasy as pur communism or any other ism for that matter. The only difference if you abolished government tomorrow is you'd go back to the 1800s where corps bought monopolies and then crushed any attempt at competition. See Hearst or Rockefeller for examples.
He is probably scared of the "book smart" which I used to run into quite often when i worked corporate IT. They'd send us this guy with tons of paper and if you gave him some written test on a subject he'd just slaughter. the problem was if he was thrown ANY kind of curveball, anything that wasn't going from step A to step B, they'd be worse than useless. This would be because they were "book smart" and were able to absorb facts like a sponge but they never really had a grasp on how those facts actually applied to the situation.
One of the old server guys gave me this analogy which I thought really nailed it: "Its like you are given this parrot that has been taught how to speak the alphabet in perfect English, his inflection, tone of voice, everything is so damned perfect...until you ask him "Hey bird what letter comes after Q?" and then you find out its just a parrot and it doesn't actually understand what the fuck you are talking about" and that was the book smart ones in a nutshell, they knew everything from rote memorization but really didn't have a clue how to do anything else and when taken out of that comfort zone were just completely clueless.
Exactly and its something we retailers have been doing for years. You want someone who is on the fence to purchase? throw in some cheap swag, like a wireless mouse. this makes the person feel good, like they are getting something "free" and it makes them more likely to buy. In this case they want the person to take fugly photos so you give them some carrot to take fugly photos and they are more likely to take fugly photos. Hell everybody does this, look at those "games' which are nothing more than mouse click fests like farmville or some of the MMOs. You make sure to dole out the rewards in just the right amount, not too much or they won't feel any accomplishment, not too little or they'll feel frustrated, hit the right amount and you'll get them clicking on that mouse like a hamster trying to get a pellet.
Hell even the malware guys figured this out ages ago which is why we have the dancing bunnies problem. You offer them the right reward, be it free songs or porn or some dumb match 3 games and even though they may feel its really not such a good idea they will go right through all those security measures and roadblocks you put in trying to protect them, all so they can have the bunny.
Sadly most humans are impulsive things and really not that hard to figure out, all you have to do is wave the right shiny in front of their face and they'll happily dance to your tune. Probably the easiest way for this guy to get those pics is make it like a contest, and each time you do what he wants you get another shot at the prize. i bet he'd have folks tripping over themselves to do what he wanted and it wouldn't even have to be huge prizes, one iPad, one netbook, and a dozen little wimp prizes like wireless mice and gift cards. Hell if he played it right he wouldn't even have to pay for the prizes as the corps would give him a little swag for the plugs.
Oh man I hate what I call "guitarists that pretend to be bass players" as that is usually the ones doing that lame ass 'bomp bomp bomp" crap. i try to have the bass line be singable, I look at something like "sitting on the dock of the bay" or "freewill" as REAL bass playing and what I try my damnedest to do. Now as for noise cancelling? last i checked you are talking about close to $3000 for a set that will work on stage and most of us don't have an extra $3k to plonk down, not when gas is $4 a gallon and we got bills to pay. I mean I'd love to have that, hell i'd love to go to Fullerton CA and tell the Fender custom shop they are gonna build my dream bass but sadly i doubt either one of those are gonna happen anytime soon. Maybe our next album will become a youtube hit and I can do both of those things but right now its just not in the cards.
Got the ringing in the ears yet? I have that occasionally, not from my own playing mind you, but AC/DC Who Made Who tour 86 did that. One of the local DJs about 2 weeks after the concert, which FYI he waited two weeks because one of his buds went and it took that long for him to stop going "HUH? WHAT?" said "For all you guys that went to the AC concert, now that your hearing is back i want to play something for you. This is a recording i made by sticking my mike out the window and remember this studio is TWENTY FIVE MILES AWAY from the concert hall, now listen" and he fires up this tape and sure enough you hear "The video games they play me" just as clear as if it was on a car stereo in the lot LOL!
While I don't use a low pass i do have a Trace Elliot (one of the last good British ones before they got bought by Peavey and ruined) with a nice 7 band and use that to give me a nice response without all that ultra low end "rumble". Between that and the compressor on my Zoom pedal (B1X, if you haven't tried one please do, they are great pedals) I try to keep the ultra low rumble to a minimum which you really have to watch when you play 5 string.
Because there are many that believe you can't have evil as tangible thing without a devil behind it, but I think they are wrong. i think you can pour enough hatred into a thing, be it land or an institution you literally "sour the ground" and create something truly dark and sinister.
I truly believe a thing can be evil, it can be soured. it is no God nor devil, but the combined malice and viciousness of humans that creates it, feeds it, makes it grow like a cancer. I believe some of those corps i have named earlier have become that, and that everyone who goes to work for them are affected by that darkness that has grown within its walls. That of course is no excuse but it does explain how you can get so many people that will happily join in no matter how nasty and evil the deeds are, its literally in the air of these places, like a dark cloud hanging overhead.
The customers I wasn't able to talk out of getting one are telling me the ame thing, it either is used as a very expensive ebook reader or a video player which considering a portable DVD player is like $40 is just another waste. After trying several (yes including an iPad) I think I'll just stick with my netbook, its got an AMD dual core APU so its got more CPU and GPU power than the tablets, gets just crazy good battery life, over 7 hours surfing or 6 playing HD video, only weighs 3 pounds so is no problem to carry in its little sleeve, 12 inch screen so easy to read, 320Gb drive so I can have all my tunes and tons of videos, tons of great software like Audacity that is 100% free and finally I managed to snag it pre flood for $350 with an 8Gb RAM upgrade.
YES there are some niches like medical and warehouses where tablets make sense NO that doesn't translate to the majority of the population. Its just marketing buzz, same as more than 80% of the laptops i sell are never ever unplugged. What is the point of paying more for a mobile computer that you don't use the mobility on? Fuck if I know but that's what folks do with the things, just as the tablets end up eBook readers or portable video players.