Well in a way I honestly can't say that I blame them. Just look at how many here are pissing and moaning they are gonna have to go and deploy this patch across their system, aka doing their jobs, when we ALL know it is SOP for the script kiddies to reverse engineer every single patch MSFT releases and to use that for making easy attacks. Look at how many "ZOMFG Windows got horribly hacked!" we have seen where it was fucking patched MONTHS AGO but corps drug their feet and ended up getting pwned.
To use a/. car analogy if you park your car on the railroad track to take a nap and someone comes along and says "hey i live around here and there is a train coming down that track, let me help you move to someplace safe" and you go "nahhh, hitting those bumps might shake loose a screw, give me time to crawl under the hood and check everything out" and you drag your feet until the train hits you? Well stupid fucking you, you deserved what you got. Its not like this isn't common knowledge, or some new thing the script kiddies are doing, its been SOP since Win9X. MSFT releases a patch, script kiddies reverse engineer, a dozen variants are out in the wild within hours of patching. If you are so damned worried about compatibility you need to be running a test bed anyway just for this scenario, and when a nasty bug is patched your ass damned well better be on the ball and ready to deploy because those script kiddies aren't gonna go "Its okay, we'll wait, just let us know when you're ready". Like it or not folks malware and exploits are a billion dollar business and with that kind of money at stake you damned well better bring your A game, anything less is your ass.
That cities slogan should be "Chicago: Where even the dead vote".
As for TFA whether this is true or not frankly doesn't matter, what DOES matter is until the people actually get a voice and a say at the negotiating table then ALL copyrights and patterns should be ignored as the unjust laws that they are. When laws are created by bribery and backroom dealing that goes completely against the will of the people call it what it is, tyranny. Its the locking up of our entire culture behind paywalls for decades after that artist who originally created it has long past, see Elvis, Hendrix, Disney, etc. Not to mention the artists themselves are getting fucked as bad as the people, see Meatloaf having to file for bankruptcy in the 80s because thanks to Hollywood Accounting Bat Out Of Hell I, an album that set records for length of time in the top 200 and may still be there, well that just didn't make a penny don't ya see, or for a more recent Cheap Trick who hasn't seen a single penny from digital sales and whose record company has basically said "Since it didn't exist then so it isn't in the contract you get zip".
So until we the people can get a spot at the negotiating table these laws should be ignored and once more as geeks we should teach the masses how to ignore these laws based on blatant bribery. When both the politicians and courts refuse to listen and continue to support unjust laws then all one can do is ignore these unjust laws just as they ignore the people.
Actually I managed to find the reason why WinME sucked if you are interested Drinkypoo, it was the damnedest thing. you see i had to deal with all these buggy as fuck WinME machines EXCEPT for a single customer, whose machine purred like a kitten. intrigued I sat down and compared the machines to this "perfect unit" until i could find what the difference was, you ready?
VXDs, that's it, that was the secret. Every damned machine that the OEMs shipped had a mix of VXDs and WDMs and were buggy as fuck, this one unit had WDMs ONLY and he just finally trashed the machine 6 months ago because it was just too slow to do anything with anymore, but it was still running after all these years. so if you had one of the "good" WinME machines I bet you too lucked out and got one of those few machines where the OEMs actually bothered to come up with WDM drivers. But from what I was able to gather from testing when you had VXDs and WDMs on the same machine the VXDs would end up either corrupting the WDMs by stepping on its memory or they would end up fighting for resources and either crash or lock up.
So in the end it was MSFT trying to support two different driver models at the same time. notice how they never did that again, each OS used one and ONLY ONE driver model, most likely because they realized that trying to run two different models on something as low level as drivers was a seriously bad idea.
I don't know about him but I have music I've been ripping since 97, tons of recordings I've made with digital multitracks, pictures, documents, frankly i wouldn't be surprised if you counted all the stuff i could probably hit 30k, not exactly hundreds of thousands but still a metric shitload of stuff I'd have to search through which is why I WANTS WinFS!
If you ever saw the video it "learned' for lack of a better word thanks to smart indexing. lets say you have a video of you and a girl on a beach. when it indexed it would "see" that it is a beach, you are wearing a white shirt and blue pants, and she is in a yellow dress. then you could type in beach, or yellow dress, or ocean, or frankly anything you could remember about that video and volia! there it was. It would also ask you questions, like I have a bunch of pics of my GF so it would ask "Who is this person?" and when i put in her name and our relationship it would then tag ALL instances with her under those categories.
Man if they could pull that off then it will be a game changer!
I have a really good question....why? I mean if there is one device that people either know they want or know they don't its iPad and other Apple gear. Apple has always been one of those "love 'em or hate 'em" kind of companies, with half praising everything they do while the other half make "Ur holdin it wrong" YouTube videos. Its not like you need to research this thing or don't know what it does, its an iPad which is probably the most over-saturated device when it comes to the press in history. Hell I was watching a movie review last night and one of the reviewers talked about how much shilling the movie was doing as the character was supposed to be an advertising exec and he had a Sony Viao and "as everybody knows the press uses Apple duh!".
So seriously WTF? 30 seconds in a store is gonna tell you if you want it or not, its not like this is some device with a serious learning curve ya know, its an iPad. you poke it, it does stuff, really not that hard to figure out.
You DO realize that even if you had magically managed to get rid of the old farts Ron Paul never had a chance, yes? look at Maine where votes magically jumped from Paul to Mittens, even with the officials in charge of handing the votes in going "Uhhh...excuse me, but that's not the numbers we just handed you". Hell even if you had managed to somehow keep them from rigging the votes you DO remember what happened to the last guy that tried to kill the banker elite's money scam that is the Fed right? he had a none too pleasant trip to Dallas. Sadlly this is why voting is completely pointless now as all you will get is prebought and preapproved candidates that will do what their masters tell them to do. As the late great Bill Hicks so perfectly put it "Well I believe the puppet on the left shares MY beliefs, well I believe the puppet on the right has MY interests at heart....hey wait a minute, there's one guy controlling both puppets!". Any ideas that don't strictly follow the old money's game plan is strictly verbotten citizen, now please go back to watching the Kardashians.
As for TFA raise you hands how many here did NOT know the TSA was a scam?...crickets chirping...thought so. When the guy from mythbusters goes through a flight with these huge fricking blades and nobody ever notices? Or how there have been several cases where someone forgot their loaded firearm was in a bag and it got through? I think we can all agree its just a joke. The problem is gonna be getting rid of that joke because it lets Sen Kickbackus and Congressman Porkman say they are "bringing jobs to the community!" while I'm sure they'll get to collect some bribes....err..I mean "campaign contributions' while they are at it. As we have seen time and time again there is nothing harder to kill than a government program.
And THIS is why I have NO problem with pirates or piracy, because its a classic case of the free market routing around damage. The same thing happens with tangible goods when you have a black market. in this case people are willing to pay X amount for a thing that does Y, they won't provide it, so somebody else does, just that simple. My dad has an Nbox media tank, that thing is perfect for him, but legally there isn't a single thing it can play, nothing. it is allowed to exist ONLY because of piracy, because the MPAA refuse to simply sell an.avi and according to DMCA you can't even rip a DVD into a format that it'll read.
So yet again we have media cartels holding up innovation, or did everyone forget how they fought tooth and nail against VCRs, going so far as to call them "The Boston Strangler" and delayed them in court? or how they blocked DAT and kept it from becoming anything but studio recording equipment? How about slowing down MP3 players for 2 years with the Rio case? And now we have the cartels blocking what should be the most obvious next step, the media tank. There should be NO reason why people like my dad couldn't just go to amazon, whip out a CC, download an.avi onto a flashstick, and plug it in to have a movie. So instead of giving them the money all we can do is route around the damage yet again, just as we did when they tried to push DRM crapped WMAs over MP3, and now instead of embracing this new tech they are offering these DRM infected files with movies now that are nothing but a series of flaming hoops to jump...or you can just go to TPB, which do you think folks will choose?
Well don't forget we now have actual thoughtcrime here in the USA, never thought I'd see the day but we have. There have been not one but TWO people thrown in jail for thoughtcrime, one the writer of the "pro pedo" book which put his thoughts on paper, no pictures, no drawings even (although i think it is bullshit that they can try to charge you for crimes against a child that doesn't actually exist, what's next get busted for a book with vamps or elves in it? they look Lolita) and the other was a guy that was actually told by his shrink to write his fantasies down in a diary so he could sit down with the shrink and discuss them. Both are in jail for thoughts on a page which if that isn't the very definition of thoughtcrime i don't know what is.
basically the whole damned thing has gone insane, its like the red scare all over again. and the worse part is its not doing a damned thing about those that actually abuse children for profit, hell there is an article on wikileaks by a guy that sells CP where he is laughing his ass offf at the whole thing. he talks about what a joke the system is, how easy it is for him to get around it, and how just for fun and to give cops something to do he'll occasionally pay malware writers to dump some CP on some dumbass who gets a bug and point the cops towards it just to watch some random schmuck suffer. You can tell by reading his article he's the type that would throw bricks off a busy overpass just to see some random suffering, a real sick fuck, yet he lives like a king and doesn't worry about shit. sadly talking to a friend that works catching CP for the state crime lab i now know why, the prosecutors have no desire to go after guys like him because it crosses state lines and would mean they don't get the credit or press conferences that advance their career,so in the end its all worthless, just another case of doing "something" no matter how stupid, pointless, nor how many lives it destroys, because "something" gets them elected while "something that works' don't. this whole fucking system is just rotten and foul, no other word for it, foul.
If you are talking about Gibson they weren't "just using imported wood" they were pulling a backdoor by having illegal wood from endangered forests routed to another country which didn't have those kinds of wood and then saying 'yeah we harvested them from there, those aren't endangered". yeah no shit those aren't endangered, because they don't exist!
As for TFAA how do you expect them to find and stop a company that has loaded their PCs up with hot software, use the psychic friends network? The guys here can live in their perception bubbles and go "herp derp use Linux" which is so completely fantasy island i don't even know where to start, how about 1.-If Linux don't have the software they need to work its pointless, which 99 times out of 100 DOES NOT EVEN EXIST on Linux, like Quickbooks/Quicken, photoshop, vegas, etc. And NOOOO Gimp is NOT a substitute, its a kid's class project. no really, not being snarky, it actually IS a kid's class project, look it up, 2.-A Linux admin with the skills to troubleshoot all the problems with a couple of dozen desktops or more will cost a MINIMUM of $75,000 IF you can even find one, whereas MCSEs are cheap as dirt and just as plentiful, and 3.-Since 99 out of 100 software they need does NOT exist you are talking about hiring a development team to build it, that's a good $60,000+ for each software of any complexity and that is IF you don't get sued for stepping on the patents of company whom you are ripping off. Hell you still don't even have a substitute for Access, Excel, Exchange and Sharepoint yet, not that works. Linux is good IF and ONLY IF the ONLY work you are doing involves web surfing or servers, it does NOT have the tools for small business.
But I hate to break the news to ya but BSAA wouldn't exist if piracy wasn't so rampant, and if Linux is such a miracle why would they rather risk having their business sued for millions than use it? maybe because it doesn't do what they need? I've walked into companies where EVERY PC had every kind of crazy expensive software you can name, from Acrobat to Photoshop, just because the IT guy had P2P. I've even had a business owner ask me "Do you know how to set up Windows so it'll update to our servers?" and when I asked why he pulled out a copy of Windows Vista Ultimate Razr1911 edition. These companies wouldn't be having to sweat if they actually treated IT decently and didn't fuck them over every chance they got so i really have trouble feeling sorry for these people. And if you think Linux is the answer, lets see you get Staples, Best Buy.Office Max, all these places small businesses shop, and get them to carry your product. they won;t for the same reason i won't, your software is insanely expensive when it comes to support costs. Give us a version of Linux that is supported for 10 years WITHOUT the upgrade deathmarch and costs LESS than Windows and then we'll talk, as it is? Well there is a good reason why all these companies settle with the BSAA, its because their machines are full of hot software.
Hell what about the bazillion game SDKs you can download and use for free? Or hooking up with one of the modding communities? with the modern SDKs they are REALLY easy and what's more they have really great and friendly communities that will be glad to show a kid the ropes. That would seem to me a better way to get one's feet wet than something you gotta pay for that probably won't have nearly as rich and strong a community. Unreal, most of the Valve games, hell even some of the older games like Freelancer have pretty active modders that are happy to help out noobs.
Well in the case of the natives i have to wonder how much of their own self hate comes from being told that they are ugly. It has taken me years to undo some of the damage living next to the rez did on my little Cherokee princess because she was told almost from the first day of school she was ugly because she didn't look white. She didn't have "good" hair or features which of course are white hair and features. The Cherokee female appearance is very typical for the plains Indians, they are short, with wider hips and wider noses, nothing like the typical European female. Hell it took me forever just to get her to actually raise her voice and get mad at me and the first time she did she actually cried because she realized that even if we argued i wasn't gonna beat her. they had broken down her self esteem so damned much that she thought expressing herself would automatically get the back of my hand.
In the end all I can do is stick with her and let her see that not all men are gonna use or abuse her, but it takes time. at least the blacks had sense to accept their own features after the whole "black is beautiful' thing in the 70s, but even to this day you go anywhere near the rez and its nothing but self loathing, damned sad if you ask me because I personally find the complexion and features of the plains Indians to be quite lovely. Not to mention they age REALLY well, at 44 my Cherokee princess has skin as soft as any 20 year old, I just wish I could get her to quit dying her damned hair as i like the grey streaks but she says "men with grey are distinguished, women just look old" though I suppose the fact that she'll put her foot down and tell me no is progress i guess.
Do you think that songs with lyrics like 'can you pay my bills, can you pay my telephone bills' became megahits because there are a FEW of them? How many states have YOU toured through friend? how many all black clubs, parties, BBQs, and get togethers have YOU been to? because for nearly three years that was ALL I did, in fact for that period other than the white women dating the black men i was pretty much it, just one white guy in a sea of black folks. And i hate to break the news to ya it ain't racism if its fucking true, that would be like saying its racist to say black folks got curly hair or we Irish tend to freckle, that's just how it is. Like I said I talked to black women from one side of the country to the other because i wanted to make sure it wasn't a fluke, and we played just as many private parties and get togethers as we did clubs so you can't say it was just club girls.
But tell ya what Sparky, i'm sure there are black clubs in your area and you're not racist right? go talk to them yourself and see how quick your balls try to climb up in your chest to get away from them, because I can telly ya Skippy there ain't nothing more domineering in this world than a young single black female, especially when they are around other black females. Frankly calling them ball busting bitches is kinda a insult to ball busting bitches as we really need a new word to describe THAT level of emasculation. Hell why do you think damned near every black guy, from celebrities like Ice T to the guy down the street, are with white women? its because they like having their balls attached and being looked at as something other than a wallet with feet THAT's why.
But you go on back to your PC approved world where the black men aren't dating the white women or the white men are dating the black women, the rest of us have to live in reality. But if a stereotype is 100% accurate, should we still call it a stereotype? How high of a percentage do you need? 65%? 75%?
Not to mention anybody that has a family knows what REALLY killed them...assraping prices on the damned books, THAT is what killed them! It was just nuts what they wanted for those things, IIRC they were like $1700+ in the mid 90s. my sis asked "Should i buy these for the boys?" and I told her not no but HELL no, that with search engines and online resources it would be a waste as things will only get better while those will only get more out of date. Turned out that was the smart move as those researching skills sure come in handy for the oldest now that he is premed, in fact he gets extra credit as a TA helping those that learned to use encyclopedias how to research online in their remedial computer course.
If they would have lowered their prices or offered different models, the fancier bindings and style for libraries and schools and a more plain version for families maybe they'd still be around but instead they gouged for every cent they could right up until the end.
Then your model simply doesn't work and you should get a new one, not be allowed to pay the government to protect your horse and buggywhip business. Look at Valve and TF2, they found that by only having X number of people play the game they were leaving money on the table so they switched to F2P and their profits went up massively on the game!
There are a billion ways to monetize that customer and if the ONLY solution you can come up with is artificial scarcity and bribing public officials for more draconian laws then you simply aren't a good businessman. Everything from ads to swag to licensing, there are a ton of ways to make money off that customer without gouging, yet in the end its their own greed that is destroying their chances to make money. Its like the old raccoon my grandma had, it would get its paw stuck in the cookie jar because it HAD to have the biggest cookie and wouldn't let go. it didn't matter that if it would have grabbed the smaller cookies it would have ended up with more cookies than just the one, because that one cookie was the biggest and he wanted the biggest dammit! So in the end grandma would have to shake the jar causing the cookie to break and leaving the raccoon with nothing but a pile of crumbs in his little paw. It was his own greed that caused his grief, nobody else.
I used to think that the whole "stay the fuck away from black women" by black men was bullshit...until i spent nearly two years playing in a black band as the only white guy. in fact the singer used to diffuse tense situations when we'd first go into a black club by saying "Haven't you people heard of affirmative action? this is our token white boy!", but not a single one of them would EVER so much as speak to a black woman, much less date one. One night at the club I just flat out asked "Why? there are plenty of seriously hot women in this club, why wouldn't you even speak to them?" and finally Charles the singer said "Go try it, and see for yourself". i did and fuuuuuck, talk about queen bitches of the western world! they make it VERY fucking clear they look at you as nothing but a walking wallet, really don't give a fuck WHAT you think, and are more fucking bossy than a damned dominatrix. When I went back to Charles they were all snickering at the thousand yard stare I had on and I was all "Holy shit, not if they was the last fucking females on the face of God's green earth would i put up with that much domination!"
So I can see why black men completely avoid black women and won't stay with one, I wouldn't have one on a bet! I've dated White, Asian, Latino, and my current GF is Cherokee and I have NEVER seen women that are so damned emasculating as the black. I even thought "Maybe its just a fluke, i'll try the next state over when we play there on sat" and nope, not a fluke, being a ball breaking superbitch is pretty much SOP for the black female, and talk about racist! There are many of them that made it quite clear they look at any race other than black as beneath them, which is of course ironic as hell as the black males don't want a damned thing to do with them on account of their ballbusting. No wonder in cities like Atlanta there is less than 2 black men for every 10 black women, because the black men that actually want to keep a pair sure as hell ain't gonna go near them bitches!
Not to mention didn't we already spend a ton developing those huge wings that are supposed to be able to loiter for days or even weeks at a time using solar power? Between those, the drone planes, drone choppers, and actual manned craft this seems like just another excuse to cut the MIC a big fat check which when we are drowning in debt is the LAST thing we should be doing and if anything we should be cutting back. Cancel the F35, buy the stealth eagle instead, make the Ford the last carrier we buy for 20 years (we have ten while the next biggest military has two, talk about extreme overkill) and quit blowing money on technocrap and instead give our troops a raise and break, stop the endless stirring of shit and the constant redeployments.
Actually unless you do something off the beaten path or infect the system doing something really fucking dumb frankly win 7 just doesn't NEED forum hunts on any of that bullshit. I have over 500 units in the field right now, desktops and laptops and netbooks, know how many i have actually had to go out and fix? ONE, that's it, and that was because he got the bright idea (without consulting me natch) to go out and buy a 37 inch LCD TV and use that as a monitor without even bothering to buy the correct cable (he used the VGA cable) and fucked up his graphics. Took me less than 20 minutes, a simple driver reinstall and setting it to use "force TV" on the ATI driver and volia!. done.
I'm sorry but if you compare the reliability and ease of use Linux is just a bad joke, its a system never designed for desktops being jury rigged and shoehorned into that role. hell are you gonna say Linus Torvalds is "doin it wrong" as well? i can also provide you with links showing Linux admins with years of experience getting frustrated at forum hunts and brain dead dumbshit. Hell Barbra Hudson, one of the big contributors for linuxInsider and who makes her living admining a Linux server cluster for over a decade just gave up on Linux and went BSD because the latest SUSE upgrade took a giant shit all over her system! Is she' doin it wrong' as well?
Like it or not it will take north of 100 million to bring Linux up to win 7 and OSX lion levels and there is NO way to make that money thanks to the GPL, not on the desktop. In servers corps make money on the servers and therefor have no qualms spending on support, that is the polar opposite of desktops. hell even most corps with vast Linux server farms use a WinServer to manage the Windesktops because unlike Linux they "just work" and are easy peasy to manage and control. Sorry but numbers don't lie and after 20 years Linux can't even beat Vista, which was the most hated release since WinME. if that don't give you a whiff of fail then i don't know what will.
Actually, and I'm sure the left leaning on this site will scream and hit the downmod for me daring to point this out but it isn't blacks its AMERICAN blacks which have embraced a VERY destructive pattern of attacking those that try to get an education while worshiping the wasting of money and the whole "thug life!" bullshit that is the cause of the much higher crimerates among blacks, that and 50 years of white guilt that caused more damage to the black community than dropping an atomic bomb on them. Instead of hand ups all they got were hand outs that rewarded destructive behavior like having more unwed mothers with more unwanted children and the community itself not only not condemning this behavior but actually treating it as a valid "lifestyle" certainly didn't help matters any.
But if you do look at the stats you'll see a black just off the boat from Africa, despite language and culture barriers, is something like 9 times more likely to become middle class than an American black that has the advantage of being born here. I would argue this is entirely due to culture and the almost pathological hatred for anything that can be considered "white" like education. I have actually witnessed this myself, with friends that were actually trying to get ahead being openly ridiculed and attacked by others in the community and even in their own family, who have a "you think you are better than me Uncle Tom?" attitude to those trying to get ahead. i just haven't seen this kind of hatred for those trying to do better in any other race. Hell when my son was accepted into the college's premed on a full scholarship we were all happy he was gonna do better than us, but the attitude in the black community would have been to attack. To me that just doesn't compute and its no wonder there is so much crime when you have the worship of money in the form of wasted wealth like "bling" and rims and Caddys but attack the ways one can legally earn those things.
As for TFA as more and more people live off their cell i'm sure we'll see this more often, big bro don't like not being able to get into anything they want at anytime. i have to wonder if it is not sheer laziness on the part of the police, as in the old days they would actually investigate whereas now with GPS and cells and a bazillion other easy sources of information all it takes is access to the data and you can find out anything you want about an individual. Kinda sad that you don't really need big bro to plant a tracker on you as the corps have made sure you are shackled to that smartphone 24/7 that makes it easy enough to track your every move. I have to wonder if that isn't the real future of big brother, that it won't be the governments who will just become impotent stoolies but the multinational corps who end up ruling vast nation states like in the classic rollerball. As someone with whom i was discussing Brave New World VS 1984 pointed out to me we are living in BNW right now, with every pleasure on demand and endless information and he wondered if they aren't simply too sides to the same coin, you start off with BNW and then as the system breaks down as more and more simply can't afford the endless distractions and trappings of BNW it slowly morphs into 1984 as the elite build more and more safeguards into the system to protect themselves from the masses of poor who get tired of being hungry and never getting ahead.
triple core WITH SSD is $199 after MIR, if you look around you can find an OEM Win 7 HP for around $60-$70, an HD4850 at geeks is $50. That leaves me roughly $60 for putting it together which with the software installs being unattended takes less than an hour. and that $499 ipad is worthless without all the other crap, the docks and adapters and keyboards and crap, and while you can slap on Steam and have literally hundred of F2P games you ain't getting shit worth having in Appleland for free.
Hell you don't even have to give them ANYTHING to have them screw themselves, all you have to do is offer the illusion of giving them something. Its called the dancing bunnies problem and working PC sales and repair i've seen it more times than many here have had hot meals. People will give away their passwords, run ANY program, bypass ANY security, all you have to do is offer the right dancing bunny.
Sadly the only time i had to get ugly with a customer (I threw him out of the shop and told him I'd call the cops if he came back) was a customer that demanded that I repair his machine for free because he refused to listen and destroyed his system for a dancing bunny. Now with my little system I have for Win 7 I have had zero infected machines EXCEPT this guy, and I had told him before i ever sold him the machine when he asked about it "I can't give you that program because it doesn't exist anymore, the feds shut down limewire years ago and anything that says its limewire is just a virus" so what did he do? he Googled "The new limewire" the very second he got home and when both the AV AND the browser blocked him trying to get it he first uninstalled the browser then when he couldn't disable the AV he uninstalled it, all for the lure of a program that didn't exist. of course when he ran "the new limewire" what he got was over 100 malware infections and so many clickjackers that he couldn't even see the desktop for the constant stream of popups. when i finally threw him out the shop he was yelling "It says right there its the new limewire so make it work dammit!"
Linux won't save you, in fact there are websites that show you how to make a bug in 5 easy steps by using the dancing bunny, mac won't save you either as we saw with DNSChanger and MacDefender/Guardian, in the end security all comes to to the user. why would the user pay even 10c for their data to be secured when frankly they will hand over the keys to the kingdom for the offer of a dancing bunny? I had to come up with a free porn site just to keep the "Iz-not_Viruz_iz_codex" bugs from infecting guys, I've seen girls run strange programs offered them in chat sessions by strangers because it was supposed to be some match 3 or a "free' version of some popular game like Angry birds or Plants Vs Zombies, this is why I've had to spend so much time learning how to keep as many decisions OUT of the hands of the user as possible, because frankly the word security never even crosses their minds, not if you offer a dancing bunny.
Hell these websites could put "Not only are we gonna sell your data but we are gonna send a 600 pound silverback over to rape you while we film it for Youtube" and as long as they had some stupid thing to offer the user, some stupid game or chat or like FB a chance to blather on about themselves? they'd happily sign anything you want them to. Hell look at how many FB apps have been coming up with some truly insane demands, post as you, access to ALL of your data AND all the data of any friends, etc, and yet i get idiots I knew in HS and old GFs wanting me to use these crazy apps constantly. when i ask them 'Didn't you even read what it requires to use?" they are all "huh? what? but its cool!". Sadly while security takes real work blowing it all to hell takes only one dumbass a few minutes to crap all over it. if ugly is to the bone then dumbass must be to the molecule!
But is the data unlimited? or will they throttle you so badly that nothing will work? after all very little of the web will run on the dialup speeds and that's if they don't start charging for going past a certain threshold. I know my local cableco brags about their "high speed unlimited Internet" while not telling you that you are looking at a 36gb! cap on consumer lines and 76Gb cap on business and after that its a $1.50 a Gb. I was told that those of us that had been with them for years got 'grandfathered' and have a LOT more leeway than anybody else, we can hit anywhere between 60-80Gb before getting dinged, just however generous they are feeling that month, while the new users will get dinged if they use 36.01Gb.
Frankly I think they should have to put their FAPs (fair access policies for those that haven't been bitchslapped by one yet) in bold print and hand them to the user BEFORE they sign a contract, or else that user is allowed to walk away penalty free. Forcing someone to live by bullshit rules in a contract that you never even make them aware of is just complete horseshit. To use a/. car analogy imagine if they could hit you with fees above your car payment if you went above a certain mileage, or give you a penalty if you didn't go to approved stations?
Thanks for pointing out that I didn't say "just go pirate it" but pointed out what shouldn't even NEED to be pointed out, that when the price rises to above a certain threshold piracy (or a black market with physical goods) flourishes and when it drops below a certain threshold where the needs of the majority are met trivially then those markets dry up. You would think this would be the most obvious and common sense thing said here but i guess i'll need to give another example.
Now with new games I simply refuse to pay more than $20, if you don't offer it to me at that price or below (my personal sweet spot is $10 or less) then i simply walk away and that is money you have left on the table which when you are talking a price per unit of literally pennies then that is just stupid to leave that money on the table and as L4D showed when you hit the sweet spot the sales become truly astronomical. hell I would argue there are even times that giving away something valuable for nothing can pay off long term, as it was the Portal I giveaway that got me on steam where they have gotten easily more than $200 off of me in the past 6 months.
Now have I pirated games in the past? yes I have. is that because I felt entitled? no it is because the companies refused to service my needs and the pirates did.; i have been on 64bit operating systems since 2005 and many of the games before the release of Win 7 were tied to 32bit DRM that at best simply would give you nothing but the finger in return for your money but i quickly found that was NOT the norm, the norm was to try to jam 32bit code into a 64bit kernel using hooks which took a giant shit on the entire system and threw stability right out the window. so in my case the pirates actually offered me a better value not so much on price but by offering a product I could actually run without fear that it would trash my system. I'm not the only one who has been bitten by DRM, watch this video (warning language NSFW) and look at how many PC games the guy owns and gets nothing for his money. He would have been better off pirating. If you don't serve the market the market will route around the damage, be it with black markets or knockoffs or piracy. that's just how it works folks.
Hell that is what i love about my EEE 1215B, as not only can it carry a couple of dozen movies easily, and all the music i care to listen to, but when i am stuck somewhere I can fire up GTA:VC or L4D or Crazy Taxi 3 and have me some fun without needing an extra device. I need to carry the netbook anyway for service calls so why bother having a handheld like my old GBA? Of course you'd probably laugh your ass off if you saw me in the doctor's office as I have all these 'backseat drivers' going "Look out, watch out for the truck! the cops are chasing you, head down the alley!", its like trying to drive with my mother in the truck LOL!
That is why i couldn't believe that NOW of all times Sony releases the Vita gimped all to hell with Vita cards and Vita memory and Vita connectors, talk about the absolutely WORST time to try to gimp everyone with lock in, when everyone and their dog has cells and tablets and netbooks to choose from that use bog standard and cheap hardware. if they would have used standard SDHC or miniSD i could have seen it, but why would anyone want to deal with another memory stick assraping?
Not to mention one could having a gaming PC AND a console for the price of the iPad 3 which in a dead economy means it sure as hell isn't gonna get the mass market appeal of either gaming PCs nor consoles. ya know, THIS, this right here, is the part that always amaze me about Apple hipsters. just because they think its nothing to plonk $700 down for a new iShiny they automatically think that the world MUST be like them and therefor able to plonk $700 down for an iShiny.
News flash: the world isn't like you, hell the United States is more and more not like you as factory work has been replaced by McJobs and construction taken over by illegals. i work with the normal folks 6 days a week, folks like Suzy the checkout girl, Brian the backhoe operator, Lisa the bank teller. Ask these people how much money they make and then find out if they would plonk down $700 for an iShiny and see how quickly they laugh you out of the room.
The simple fact is the X360 starts on amazon at $135, I can build a casual gaming PC while still making a profit for around $350 and a monster gamer for around $575 so you could literally buy the monster AND the X360 for less than the ipad 3 before you even figure in the docks and keyboards and all the other accessories you'll want for the thing. Not saying it isn't a nice device, its a damned nice device, but to use a/. car analogy a Ferrari is a damned nice car but it'll never be a replacement for a Ford, anymore than the iShiny will replace gaming Pcs and consoles.
Actually the kind of scenario you are describing is why i was saying even back then we needed coprocessors. Even today think about how fast certain jobs could be run if you had a coprocessor slot you could drop a SPARC or Cell or custom FPGA into. this is one of the things I like about the GP-GPU revolution we are seeing as for certain tasks the chips make for great coprocessors and will be even better when AMD finishes switching over to vector units.
But the thing you are missing in your scenario and why ultimately MSFT really didn't give a crap about those platforms other than as checkboxes on a PPT is control. Gates had crazy amounts of influence on Intel almost from the beginning, See how many changes were incorporated into 286 and 386 because of Gate's "brain dead chip" remarks about 186 which bombed in no small part because it didn't run MSFT DOS well. If MSFT would have worked hard on those other platforms they'd be just what they are now on ARM, just another company that has to live and die by their merits, not by "you scratch my back' favors. This back scratching on x86 is a two way street, see how a Phenom I will run like crap on Vista but great on Win 7 or how MSFT is busting their butts on a patch for win 7 because of the AMD FX series. In the case of Phenom I WinVista doesn't understand that the Phenom can slow down one core while keeping the other fast as a powersaving feature and thus will dump code onto a slowed core and drag down the system, which ironically when they added the changes to the kernel for Win 7 AMD had dropped the feature or how the new FX and its having two integers but only one FP for two cores throws Windows off.
In the end though all of this is academic as Windows on ARM simply makes no damned sense no matter how you slice it, there simply isn't any compelling reason to run it. this is why they are trying to shoehorn the WinPhone onto the Win 8 desktop because they hope developers are dumb enough to think they can "Write once and use everywhere" if they write for Metro. the sad fact is like you pointed out the differences between ARM and X86 are so great that anything more complex than a fart app will have to be written twice anyway, and if they are gonna have to do that why bother with metro at all? they'll get a better chance of selling their product on Android of iOS with their much larger user bases. This is why i believe ultimately MSFT didn't give a shit about those other platforms, they would have been small fish in a big pond whereas with wintel they could call the shots more. MSFT has always loved that level of control, see how all the features like tessellation coming out in GPUs for the past decade have been dictated by MSFT with DrectX. MSFT wants to have that level of control over a platform and with the other platforms it was severely doubtful they could have gotten it.
Oh and I think you may be giving MSFT more credit than they were due then, see how they practically begged game devs to write for Windows and were ignored. it wasn't until WinQuake that the other games began coming out with Windows versions, most were still running DOS at the time despite MSFT's begging and offers to help with the conversion to Windows. If MSFT would have somehow come out with a universal binary format or virtual machine so a company could write once use anywhere they might have gained traction but with so many widely differing platforms most publishers were simply gonna ignore regardless of what MSFT did IMHO, it simply didn't make good business sense to port. in a way its a classic catch-22, the publishers didn't want to port until the users were there and the users didn't want it without the apps they needed.
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Well in a way I honestly can't say that I blame them. Just look at how many here are pissing and moaning they are gonna have to go and deploy this patch across their system, aka doing their jobs, when we ALL know it is SOP for the script kiddies to reverse engineer every single patch MSFT releases and to use that for making easy attacks. Look at how many "ZOMFG Windows got horribly hacked!" we have seen where it was fucking patched MONTHS AGO but corps drug their feet and ended up getting pwned.
To use a /. car analogy if you park your car on the railroad track to take a nap and someone comes along and says "hey i live around here and there is a train coming down that track, let me help you move to someplace safe" and you go "nahhh, hitting those bumps might shake loose a screw, give me time to crawl under the hood and check everything out" and you drag your feet until the train hits you? Well stupid fucking you, you deserved what you got. Its not like this isn't common knowledge, or some new thing the script kiddies are doing, its been SOP since Win9X. MSFT releases a patch, script kiddies reverse engineer, a dozen variants are out in the wild within hours of patching. If you are so damned worried about compatibility you need to be running a test bed anyway just for this scenario, and when a nasty bug is patched your ass damned well better be on the ball and ready to deploy because those script kiddies aren't gonna go "Its okay, we'll wait, just let us know when you're ready". Like it or not folks malware and exploits are a billion dollar business and with that kind of money at stake you damned well better bring your A game, anything less is your ass.
That cities slogan should be "Chicago: Where even the dead vote".
As for TFA whether this is true or not frankly doesn't matter, what DOES matter is until the people actually get a voice and a say at the negotiating table then ALL copyrights and patterns should be ignored as the unjust laws that they are. When laws are created by bribery and backroom dealing that goes completely against the will of the people call it what it is, tyranny. Its the locking up of our entire culture behind paywalls for decades after that artist who originally created it has long past, see Elvis, Hendrix, Disney, etc. Not to mention the artists themselves are getting fucked as bad as the people, see Meatloaf having to file for bankruptcy in the 80s because thanks to Hollywood Accounting Bat Out Of Hell I, an album that set records for length of time in the top 200 and may still be there, well that just didn't make a penny don't ya see, or for a more recent Cheap Trick who hasn't seen a single penny from digital sales and whose record company has basically said "Since it didn't exist then so it isn't in the contract you get zip".
So until we the people can get a spot at the negotiating table these laws should be ignored and once more as geeks we should teach the masses how to ignore these laws based on blatant bribery. When both the politicians and courts refuse to listen and continue to support unjust laws then all one can do is ignore these unjust laws just as they ignore the people.
Actually I managed to find the reason why WinME sucked if you are interested Drinkypoo, it was the damnedest thing. you see i had to deal with all these buggy as fuck WinME machines EXCEPT for a single customer, whose machine purred like a kitten. intrigued I sat down and compared the machines to this "perfect unit" until i could find what the difference was, you ready?
VXDs, that's it, that was the secret. Every damned machine that the OEMs shipped had a mix of VXDs and WDMs and were buggy as fuck, this one unit had WDMs ONLY and he just finally trashed the machine 6 months ago because it was just too slow to do anything with anymore, but it was still running after all these years. so if you had one of the "good" WinME machines I bet you too lucked out and got one of those few machines where the OEMs actually bothered to come up with WDM drivers. But from what I was able to gather from testing when you had VXDs and WDMs on the same machine the VXDs would end up either corrupting the WDMs by stepping on its memory or they would end up fighting for resources and either crash or lock up.
So in the end it was MSFT trying to support two different driver models at the same time. notice how they never did that again, each OS used one and ONLY ONE driver model, most likely because they realized that trying to run two different models on something as low level as drivers was a seriously bad idea.
I don't know about him but I have music I've been ripping since 97, tons of recordings I've made with digital multitracks, pictures, documents, frankly i wouldn't be surprised if you counted all the stuff i could probably hit 30k, not exactly hundreds of thousands but still a metric shitload of stuff I'd have to search through which is why I WANTS WinFS!
If you ever saw the video it "learned' for lack of a better word thanks to smart indexing. lets say you have a video of you and a girl on a beach. when it indexed it would "see" that it is a beach, you are wearing a white shirt and blue pants, and she is in a yellow dress. then you could type in beach, or yellow dress, or ocean, or frankly anything you could remember about that video and volia! there it was. It would also ask you questions, like I have a bunch of pics of my GF so it would ask "Who is this person?" and when i put in her name and our relationship it would then tag ALL instances with her under those categories.
Man if they could pull that off then it will be a game changer!
I have a really good question....why? I mean if there is one device that people either know they want or know they don't its iPad and other Apple gear. Apple has always been one of those "love 'em or hate 'em" kind of companies, with half praising everything they do while the other half make "Ur holdin it wrong" YouTube videos. Its not like you need to research this thing or don't know what it does, its an iPad which is probably the most over-saturated device when it comes to the press in history. Hell I was watching a movie review last night and one of the reviewers talked about how much shilling the movie was doing as the character was supposed to be an advertising exec and he had a Sony Viao and "as everybody knows the press uses Apple duh!".
So seriously WTF? 30 seconds in a store is gonna tell you if you want it or not, its not like this is some device with a serious learning curve ya know, its an iPad. you poke it, it does stuff, really not that hard to figure out.
You DO realize that even if you had magically managed to get rid of the old farts Ron Paul never had a chance, yes? look at Maine where votes magically jumped from Paul to Mittens, even with the officials in charge of handing the votes in going "Uhhh...excuse me, but that's not the numbers we just handed you". Hell even if you had managed to somehow keep them from rigging the votes you DO remember what happened to the last guy that tried to kill the banker elite's money scam that is the Fed right? he had a none too pleasant trip to Dallas. Sadlly this is why voting is completely pointless now as all you will get is prebought and preapproved candidates that will do what their masters tell them to do. As the late great Bill Hicks so perfectly put it "Well I believe the puppet on the left shares MY beliefs, well I believe the puppet on the right has MY interests at heart....hey wait a minute, there's one guy controlling both puppets!". Any ideas that don't strictly follow the old money's game plan is strictly verbotten citizen, now please go back to watching the Kardashians.
As for TFA raise you hands how many here did NOT know the TSA was a scam?...crickets chirping...thought so. When the guy from mythbusters goes through a flight with these huge fricking blades and nobody ever notices? Or how there have been several cases where someone forgot their loaded firearm was in a bag and it got through? I think we can all agree its just a joke. The problem is gonna be getting rid of that joke because it lets Sen Kickbackus and Congressman Porkman say they are "bringing jobs to the community!" while I'm sure they'll get to collect some bribes....err..I mean "campaign contributions' while they are at it. As we have seen time and time again there is nothing harder to kill than a government program.
And THIS is why I have NO problem with pirates or piracy, because its a classic case of the free market routing around damage. The same thing happens with tangible goods when you have a black market. in this case people are willing to pay X amount for a thing that does Y, they won't provide it, so somebody else does, just that simple. My dad has an Nbox media tank, that thing is perfect for him, but legally there isn't a single thing it can play, nothing. it is allowed to exist ONLY because of piracy, because the MPAA refuse to simply sell an .avi and according to DMCA you can't even rip a DVD into a format that it'll read.
So yet again we have media cartels holding up innovation, or did everyone forget how they fought tooth and nail against VCRs, going so far as to call them "The Boston Strangler" and delayed them in court? or how they blocked DAT and kept it from becoming anything but studio recording equipment? How about slowing down MP3 players for 2 years with the Rio case? And now we have the cartels blocking what should be the most obvious next step, the media tank. There should be NO reason why people like my dad couldn't just go to amazon, whip out a CC, download an .avi onto a flashstick, and plug it in to have a movie. So instead of giving them the money all we can do is route around the damage yet again, just as we did when they tried to push DRM crapped WMAs over MP3, and now instead of embracing this new tech they are offering these DRM infected files with movies now that are nothing but a series of flaming hoops to jump...or you can just go to TPB, which do you think folks will choose?
Well don't forget we now have actual thoughtcrime here in the USA, never thought I'd see the day but we have. There have been not one but TWO people thrown in jail for thoughtcrime, one the writer of the "pro pedo" book which put his thoughts on paper, no pictures, no drawings even (although i think it is bullshit that they can try to charge you for crimes against a child that doesn't actually exist, what's next get busted for a book with vamps or elves in it? they look Lolita) and the other was a guy that was actually told by his shrink to write his fantasies down in a diary so he could sit down with the shrink and discuss them. Both are in jail for thoughts on a page which if that isn't the very definition of thoughtcrime i don't know what is.
basically the whole damned thing has gone insane, its like the red scare all over again. and the worse part is its not doing a damned thing about those that actually abuse children for profit, hell there is an article on wikileaks by a guy that sells CP where he is laughing his ass offf at the whole thing. he talks about what a joke the system is, how easy it is for him to get around it, and how just for fun and to give cops something to do he'll occasionally pay malware writers to dump some CP on some dumbass who gets a bug and point the cops towards it just to watch some random schmuck suffer. You can tell by reading his article he's the type that would throw bricks off a busy overpass just to see some random suffering, a real sick fuck, yet he lives like a king and doesn't worry about shit. sadly talking to a friend that works catching CP for the state crime lab i now know why, the prosecutors have no desire to go after guys like him because it crosses state lines and would mean they don't get the credit or press conferences that advance their career,so in the end its all worthless, just another case of doing "something" no matter how stupid, pointless, nor how many lives it destroys, because "something" gets them elected while "something that works' don't. this whole fucking system is just rotten and foul, no other word for it, foul.
If you are talking about Gibson they weren't "just using imported wood" they were pulling a backdoor by having illegal wood from endangered forests routed to another country which didn't have those kinds of wood and then saying 'yeah we harvested them from there, those aren't endangered". yeah no shit those aren't endangered, because they don't exist!
As for TFAA how do you expect them to find and stop a company that has loaded their PCs up with hot software, use the psychic friends network? The guys here can live in their perception bubbles and go "herp derp use Linux" which is so completely fantasy island i don't even know where to start, how about 1.-If Linux don't have the software they need to work its pointless, which 99 times out of 100 DOES NOT EVEN EXIST on Linux, like Quickbooks/Quicken, photoshop, vegas, etc. And NOOOO Gimp is NOT a substitute, its a kid's class project. no really, not being snarky, it actually IS a kid's class project, look it up, 2.-A Linux admin with the skills to troubleshoot all the problems with a couple of dozen desktops or more will cost a MINIMUM of $75,000 IF you can even find one, whereas MCSEs are cheap as dirt and just as plentiful, and 3.-Since 99 out of 100 software they need does NOT exist you are talking about hiring a development team to build it, that's a good $60,000+ for each software of any complexity and that is IF you don't get sued for stepping on the patents of company whom you are ripping off. Hell you still don't even have a substitute for Access, Excel, Exchange and Sharepoint yet, not that works. Linux is good IF and ONLY IF the ONLY work you are doing involves web surfing or servers, it does NOT have the tools for small business.
But I hate to break the news to ya but BSAA wouldn't exist if piracy wasn't so rampant, and if Linux is such a miracle why would they rather risk having their business sued for millions than use it? maybe because it doesn't do what they need? I've walked into companies where EVERY PC had every kind of crazy expensive software you can name, from Acrobat to Photoshop, just because the IT guy had P2P. I've even had a business owner ask me "Do you know how to set up Windows so it'll update to our servers?" and when I asked why he pulled out a copy of Windows Vista Ultimate Razr1911 edition. These companies wouldn't be having to sweat if they actually treated IT decently and didn't fuck them over every chance they got so i really have trouble feeling sorry for these people. And if you think Linux is the answer, lets see you get Staples, Best Buy.Office Max, all these places small businesses shop, and get them to carry your product. they won;t for the same reason i won't, your software is insanely expensive when it comes to support costs. Give us a version of Linux that is supported for 10 years WITHOUT the upgrade deathmarch and costs LESS than Windows and then we'll talk, as it is? Well there is a good reason why all these companies settle with the BSAA, its because their machines are full of hot software.
Hell what about the bazillion game SDKs you can download and use for free? Or hooking up with one of the modding communities? with the modern SDKs they are REALLY easy and what's more they have really great and friendly communities that will be glad to show a kid the ropes. That would seem to me a better way to get one's feet wet than something you gotta pay for that probably won't have nearly as rich and strong a community. Unreal, most of the Valve games, hell even some of the older games like Freelancer have pretty active modders that are happy to help out noobs.
Well in the case of the natives i have to wonder how much of their own self hate comes from being told that they are ugly. It has taken me years to undo some of the damage living next to the rez did on my little Cherokee princess because she was told almost from the first day of school she was ugly because she didn't look white. She didn't have "good" hair or features which of course are white hair and features. The Cherokee female appearance is very typical for the plains Indians, they are short, with wider hips and wider noses, nothing like the typical European female. Hell it took me forever just to get her to actually raise her voice and get mad at me and the first time she did she actually cried because she realized that even if we argued i wasn't gonna beat her. they had broken down her self esteem so damned much that she thought expressing herself would automatically get the back of my hand.
In the end all I can do is stick with her and let her see that not all men are gonna use or abuse her, but it takes time. at least the blacks had sense to accept their own features after the whole "black is beautiful' thing in the 70s, but even to this day you go anywhere near the rez and its nothing but self loathing, damned sad if you ask me because I personally find the complexion and features of the plains Indians to be quite lovely. Not to mention they age REALLY well, at 44 my Cherokee princess has skin as soft as any 20 year old, I just wish I could get her to quit dying her damned hair as i like the grey streaks but she says "men with grey are distinguished, women just look old" though I suppose the fact that she'll put her foot down and tell me no is progress i guess.
Do you think that songs with lyrics like 'can you pay my bills, can you pay my telephone bills' became megahits because there are a FEW of them? How many states have YOU toured through friend? how many all black clubs, parties, BBQs, and get togethers have YOU been to? because for nearly three years that was ALL I did, in fact for that period other than the white women dating the black men i was pretty much it, just one white guy in a sea of black folks. And i hate to break the news to ya it ain't racism if its fucking true, that would be like saying its racist to say black folks got curly hair or we Irish tend to freckle, that's just how it is. Like I said I talked to black women from one side of the country to the other because i wanted to make sure it wasn't a fluke, and we played just as many private parties and get togethers as we did clubs so you can't say it was just club girls.
But tell ya what Sparky, i'm sure there are black clubs in your area and you're not racist right? go talk to them yourself and see how quick your balls try to climb up in your chest to get away from them, because I can telly ya Skippy there ain't nothing more domineering in this world than a young single black female, especially when they are around other black females. Frankly calling them ball busting bitches is kinda a insult to ball busting bitches as we really need a new word to describe THAT level of emasculation. Hell why do you think damned near every black guy, from celebrities like Ice T to the guy down the street, are with white women? its because they like having their balls attached and being looked at as something other than a wallet with feet THAT's why.
But you go on back to your PC approved world where the black men aren't dating the white women or the white men are dating the black women, the rest of us have to live in reality. But if a stereotype is 100% accurate, should we still call it a stereotype? How high of a percentage do you need? 65%? 75%?
Not to mention anybody that has a family knows what REALLY killed them...assraping prices on the damned books, THAT is what killed them! It was just nuts what they wanted for those things, IIRC they were like $1700+ in the mid 90s. my sis asked "Should i buy these for the boys?" and I told her not no but HELL no, that with search engines and online resources it would be a waste as things will only get better while those will only get more out of date. Turned out that was the smart move as those researching skills sure come in handy for the oldest now that he is premed, in fact he gets extra credit as a TA helping those that learned to use encyclopedias how to research online in their remedial computer course.
If they would have lowered their prices or offered different models, the fancier bindings and style for libraries and schools and a more plain version for families maybe they'd still be around but instead they gouged for every cent they could right up until the end.
Then your model simply doesn't work and you should get a new one, not be allowed to pay the government to protect your horse and buggywhip business. Look at Valve and TF2, they found that by only having X number of people play the game they were leaving money on the table so they switched to F2P and their profits went up massively on the game!
There are a billion ways to monetize that customer and if the ONLY solution you can come up with is artificial scarcity and bribing public officials for more draconian laws then you simply aren't a good businessman. Everything from ads to swag to licensing, there are a ton of ways to make money off that customer without gouging, yet in the end its their own greed that is destroying their chances to make money. Its like the old raccoon my grandma had, it would get its paw stuck in the cookie jar because it HAD to have the biggest cookie and wouldn't let go. it didn't matter that if it would have grabbed the smaller cookies it would have ended up with more cookies than just the one, because that one cookie was the biggest and he wanted the biggest dammit! So in the end grandma would have to shake the jar causing the cookie to break and leaving the raccoon with nothing but a pile of crumbs in his little paw. It was his own greed that caused his grief, nobody else.
I used to think that the whole "stay the fuck away from black women" by black men was bullshit...until i spent nearly two years playing in a black band as the only white guy. in fact the singer used to diffuse tense situations when we'd first go into a black club by saying "Haven't you people heard of affirmative action? this is our token white boy!", but not a single one of them would EVER so much as speak to a black woman, much less date one. One night at the club I just flat out asked "Why? there are plenty of seriously hot women in this club, why wouldn't you even speak to them?" and finally Charles the singer said "Go try it, and see for yourself". i did and fuuuuuck, talk about queen bitches of the western world! they make it VERY fucking clear they look at you as nothing but a walking wallet, really don't give a fuck WHAT you think, and are more fucking bossy than a damned dominatrix. When I went back to Charles they were all snickering at the thousand yard stare I had on and I was all "Holy shit, not if they was the last fucking females on the face of God's green earth would i put up with that much domination!"
So I can see why black men completely avoid black women and won't stay with one, I wouldn't have one on a bet! I've dated White, Asian, Latino, and my current GF is Cherokee and I have NEVER seen women that are so damned emasculating as the black. I even thought "Maybe its just a fluke, i'll try the next state over when we play there on sat" and nope, not a fluke, being a ball breaking superbitch is pretty much SOP for the black female, and talk about racist! There are many of them that made it quite clear they look at any race other than black as beneath them, which is of course ironic as hell as the black males don't want a damned thing to do with them on account of their ballbusting. No wonder in cities like Atlanta there is less than 2 black men for every 10 black women, because the black men that actually want to keep a pair sure as hell ain't gonna go near them bitches!
Not to mention didn't we already spend a ton developing those huge wings that are supposed to be able to loiter for days or even weeks at a time using solar power? Between those, the drone planes, drone choppers, and actual manned craft this seems like just another excuse to cut the MIC a big fat check which when we are drowning in debt is the LAST thing we should be doing and if anything we should be cutting back. Cancel the F35, buy the stealth eagle instead, make the Ford the last carrier we buy for 20 years (we have ten while the next biggest military has two, talk about extreme overkill) and quit blowing money on technocrap and instead give our troops a raise and break, stop the endless stirring of shit and the constant redeployments.
Actually unless you do something off the beaten path or infect the system doing something really fucking dumb frankly win 7 just doesn't NEED forum hunts on any of that bullshit. I have over 500 units in the field right now, desktops and laptops and netbooks, know how many i have actually had to go out and fix? ONE, that's it, and that was because he got the bright idea (without consulting me natch) to go out and buy a 37 inch LCD TV and use that as a monitor without even bothering to buy the correct cable (he used the VGA cable) and fucked up his graphics. Took me less than 20 minutes, a simple driver reinstall and setting it to use "force TV" on the ATI driver and volia!. done.
I'm sorry but if you compare the reliability and ease of use Linux is just a bad joke, its a system never designed for desktops being jury rigged and shoehorned into that role. hell are you gonna say Linus Torvalds is "doin it wrong" as well? i can also provide you with links showing Linux admins with years of experience getting frustrated at forum hunts and brain dead dumbshit. Hell Barbra Hudson, one of the big contributors for linuxInsider and who makes her living admining a Linux server cluster for over a decade just gave up on Linux and went BSD because the latest SUSE upgrade took a giant shit all over her system! Is she' doin it wrong' as well?
Like it or not it will take north of 100 million to bring Linux up to win 7 and OSX lion levels and there is NO way to make that money thanks to the GPL, not on the desktop. In servers corps make money on the servers and therefor have no qualms spending on support, that is the polar opposite of desktops. hell even most corps with vast Linux server farms use a WinServer to manage the Windesktops because unlike Linux they "just work" and are easy peasy to manage and control. Sorry but numbers don't lie and after 20 years Linux can't even beat Vista, which was the most hated release since WinME. if that don't give you a whiff of fail then i don't know what will.
Actually, and I'm sure the left leaning on this site will scream and hit the downmod for me daring to point this out but it isn't blacks its AMERICAN blacks which have embraced a VERY destructive pattern of attacking those that try to get an education while worshiping the wasting of money and the whole "thug life!" bullshit that is the cause of the much higher crimerates among blacks, that and 50 years of white guilt that caused more damage to the black community than dropping an atomic bomb on them. Instead of hand ups all they got were hand outs that rewarded destructive behavior like having more unwed mothers with more unwanted children and the community itself not only not condemning this behavior but actually treating it as a valid "lifestyle" certainly didn't help matters any.
But if you do look at the stats you'll see a black just off the boat from Africa, despite language and culture barriers, is something like 9 times more likely to become middle class than an American black that has the advantage of being born here. I would argue this is entirely due to culture and the almost pathological hatred for anything that can be considered "white" like education. I have actually witnessed this myself, with friends that were actually trying to get ahead being openly ridiculed and attacked by others in the community and even in their own family, who have a "you think you are better than me Uncle Tom?" attitude to those trying to get ahead. i just haven't seen this kind of hatred for those trying to do better in any other race. Hell when my son was accepted into the college's premed on a full scholarship we were all happy he was gonna do better than us, but the attitude in the black community would have been to attack. To me that just doesn't compute and its no wonder there is so much crime when you have the worship of money in the form of wasted wealth like "bling" and rims and Caddys but attack the ways one can legally earn those things.
As for TFA as more and more people live off their cell i'm sure we'll see this more often, big bro don't like not being able to get into anything they want at anytime. i have to wonder if it is not sheer laziness on the part of the police, as in the old days they would actually investigate whereas now with GPS and cells and a bazillion other easy sources of information all it takes is access to the data and you can find out anything you want about an individual. Kinda sad that you don't really need big bro to plant a tracker on you as the corps have made sure you are shackled to that smartphone 24/7 that makes it easy enough to track your every move. I have to wonder if that isn't the real future of big brother, that it won't be the governments who will just become impotent stoolies but the multinational corps who end up ruling vast nation states like in the classic rollerball. As someone with whom i was discussing Brave New World VS 1984 pointed out to me we are living in BNW right now, with every pleasure on demand and endless information and he wondered if they aren't simply too sides to the same coin, you start off with BNW and then as the system breaks down as more and more simply can't afford the endless distractions and trappings of BNW it slowly morphs into 1984 as the elite build more and more safeguards into the system to protect themselves from the masses of poor who get tired of being hungry and never getting ahead.
triple core WITH SSD is $199 after MIR, if you look around you can find an OEM Win 7 HP for around $60-$70, an HD4850 at geeks is $50. That leaves me roughly $60 for putting it together which with the software installs being unattended takes less than an hour. and that $499 ipad is worthless without all the other crap, the docks and adapters and keyboards and crap, and while you can slap on Steam and have literally hundred of F2P games you ain't getting shit worth having in Appleland for free.
Hell you don't even have to give them ANYTHING to have them screw themselves, all you have to do is offer the illusion of giving them something. Its called the dancing bunnies problem and working PC sales and repair i've seen it more times than many here have had hot meals. People will give away their passwords, run ANY program, bypass ANY security, all you have to do is offer the right dancing bunny.
Sadly the only time i had to get ugly with a customer (I threw him out of the shop and told him I'd call the cops if he came back) was a customer that demanded that I repair his machine for free because he refused to listen and destroyed his system for a dancing bunny. Now with my little system I have for Win 7 I have had zero infected machines EXCEPT this guy, and I had told him before i ever sold him the machine when he asked about it "I can't give you that program because it doesn't exist anymore, the feds shut down limewire years ago and anything that says its limewire is just a virus" so what did he do? he Googled "The new limewire" the very second he got home and when both the AV AND the browser blocked him trying to get it he first uninstalled the browser then when he couldn't disable the AV he uninstalled it, all for the lure of a program that didn't exist. of course when he ran "the new limewire" what he got was over 100 malware infections and so many clickjackers that he couldn't even see the desktop for the constant stream of popups. when i finally threw him out the shop he was yelling "It says right there its the new limewire so make it work dammit!"
Linux won't save you, in fact there are websites that show you how to make a bug in 5 easy steps by using the dancing bunny, mac won't save you either as we saw with DNSChanger and MacDefender/Guardian, in the end security all comes to to the user. why would the user pay even 10c for their data to be secured when frankly they will hand over the keys to the kingdom for the offer of a dancing bunny? I had to come up with a free porn site just to keep the "Iz-not_Viruz_iz_codex" bugs from infecting guys, I've seen girls run strange programs offered them in chat sessions by strangers because it was supposed to be some match 3 or a "free' version of some popular game like Angry birds or Plants Vs Zombies, this is why I've had to spend so much time learning how to keep as many decisions OUT of the hands of the user as possible, because frankly the word security never even crosses their minds, not if you offer a dancing bunny.
Hell these websites could put "Not only are we gonna sell your data but we are gonna send a 600 pound silverback over to rape you while we film it for Youtube" and as long as they had some stupid thing to offer the user, some stupid game or chat or like FB a chance to blather on about themselves? they'd happily sign anything you want them to. Hell look at how many FB apps have been coming up with some truly insane demands, post as you, access to ALL of your data AND all the data of any friends, etc, and yet i get idiots I knew in HS and old GFs wanting me to use these crazy apps constantly. when i ask them 'Didn't you even read what it requires to use?" they are all "huh? what? but its cool!". Sadly while security takes real work blowing it all to hell takes only one dumbass a few minutes to crap all over it. if ugly is to the bone then dumbass must be to the molecule!
But is the data unlimited? or will they throttle you so badly that nothing will work? after all very little of the web will run on the dialup speeds and that's if they don't start charging for going past a certain threshold. I know my local cableco brags about their "high speed unlimited Internet" while not telling you that you are looking at a 36gb! cap on consumer lines and 76Gb cap on business and after that its a $1.50 a Gb. I was told that those of us that had been with them for years got 'grandfathered' and have a LOT more leeway than anybody else, we can hit anywhere between 60-80Gb before getting dinged, just however generous they are feeling that month, while the new users will get dinged if they use 36.01Gb.
Frankly I think they should have to put their FAPs (fair access policies for those that haven't been bitchslapped by one yet) in bold print and hand them to the user BEFORE they sign a contract, or else that user is allowed to walk away penalty free. Forcing someone to live by bullshit rules in a contract that you never even make them aware of is just complete horseshit. To use a /. car analogy imagine if they could hit you with fees above your car payment if you went above a certain mileage, or give you a penalty if you didn't go to approved stations?
Thanks for pointing out that I didn't say "just go pirate it" but pointed out what shouldn't even NEED to be pointed out, that when the price rises to above a certain threshold piracy (or a black market with physical goods) flourishes and when it drops below a certain threshold where the needs of the majority are met trivially then those markets dry up. You would think this would be the most obvious and common sense thing said here but i guess i'll need to give another example.
Now with new games I simply refuse to pay more than $20, if you don't offer it to me at that price or below (my personal sweet spot is $10 or less) then i simply walk away and that is money you have left on the table which when you are talking a price per unit of literally pennies then that is just stupid to leave that money on the table and as L4D showed when you hit the sweet spot the sales become truly astronomical. hell I would argue there are even times that giving away something valuable for nothing can pay off long term, as it was the Portal I giveaway that got me on steam where they have gotten easily more than $200 off of me in the past 6 months.
Now have I pirated games in the past? yes I have. is that because I felt entitled? no it is because the companies refused to service my needs and the pirates did.; i have been on 64bit operating systems since 2005 and many of the games before the release of Win 7 were tied to 32bit DRM that at best simply would give you nothing but the finger in return for your money but i quickly found that was NOT the norm, the norm was to try to jam 32bit code into a 64bit kernel using hooks which took a giant shit on the entire system and threw stability right out the window. so in my case the pirates actually offered me a better value not so much on price but by offering a product I could actually run without fear that it would trash my system. I'm not the only one who has been bitten by DRM, watch this video (warning language NSFW) and look at how many PC games the guy owns and gets nothing for his money. He would have been better off pirating. If you don't serve the market the market will route around the damage, be it with black markets or knockoffs or piracy. that's just how it works folks.
Hell that is what i love about my EEE 1215B, as not only can it carry a couple of dozen movies easily, and all the music i care to listen to, but when i am stuck somewhere I can fire up GTA:VC or L4D or Crazy Taxi 3 and have me some fun without needing an extra device. I need to carry the netbook anyway for service calls so why bother having a handheld like my old GBA? Of course you'd probably laugh your ass off if you saw me in the doctor's office as I have all these 'backseat drivers' going "Look out, watch out for the truck! the cops are chasing you, head down the alley!", its like trying to drive with my mother in the truck LOL!
That is why i couldn't believe that NOW of all times Sony releases the Vita gimped all to hell with Vita cards and Vita memory and Vita connectors, talk about the absolutely WORST time to try to gimp everyone with lock in, when everyone and their dog has cells and tablets and netbooks to choose from that use bog standard and cheap hardware. if they would have used standard SDHC or miniSD i could have seen it, but why would anyone want to deal with another memory stick assraping?
Not to mention one could having a gaming PC AND a console for the price of the iPad 3 which in a dead economy means it sure as hell isn't gonna get the mass market appeal of either gaming PCs nor consoles. ya know, THIS, this right here, is the part that always amaze me about Apple hipsters. just because they think its nothing to plonk $700 down for a new iShiny they automatically think that the world MUST be like them and therefor able to plonk $700 down for an iShiny.
News flash: the world isn't like you, hell the United States is more and more not like you as factory work has been replaced by McJobs and construction taken over by illegals. i work with the normal folks 6 days a week, folks like Suzy the checkout girl, Brian the backhoe operator, Lisa the bank teller. Ask these people how much money they make and then find out if they would plonk down $700 for an iShiny and see how quickly they laugh you out of the room.
The simple fact is the X360 starts on amazon at $135, I can build a casual gaming PC while still making a profit for around $350 and a monster gamer for around $575 so you could literally buy the monster AND the X360 for less than the ipad 3 before you even figure in the docks and keyboards and all the other accessories you'll want for the thing. Not saying it isn't a nice device, its a damned nice device, but to use a /. car analogy a Ferrari is a damned nice car but it'll never be a replacement for a Ford, anymore than the iShiny will replace gaming Pcs and consoles.
Actually the kind of scenario you are describing is why i was saying even back then we needed coprocessors. Even today think about how fast certain jobs could be run if you had a coprocessor slot you could drop a SPARC or Cell or custom FPGA into. this is one of the things I like about the GP-GPU revolution we are seeing as for certain tasks the chips make for great coprocessors and will be even better when AMD finishes switching over to vector units.
But the thing you are missing in your scenario and why ultimately MSFT really didn't give a crap about those platforms other than as checkboxes on a PPT is control. Gates had crazy amounts of influence on Intel almost from the beginning, See how many changes were incorporated into 286 and 386 because of Gate's "brain dead chip" remarks about 186 which bombed in no small part because it didn't run MSFT DOS well. If MSFT would have worked hard on those other platforms they'd be just what they are now on ARM, just another company that has to live and die by their merits, not by "you scratch my back' favors. This back scratching on x86 is a two way street, see how a Phenom I will run like crap on Vista but great on Win 7 or how MSFT is busting their butts on a patch for win 7 because of the AMD FX series. In the case of Phenom I WinVista doesn't understand that the Phenom can slow down one core while keeping the other fast as a powersaving feature and thus will dump code onto a slowed core and drag down the system, which ironically when they added the changes to the kernel for Win 7 AMD had dropped the feature or how the new FX and its having two integers but only one FP for two cores throws Windows off.
In the end though all of this is academic as Windows on ARM simply makes no damned sense no matter how you slice it, there simply isn't any compelling reason to run it. this is why they are trying to shoehorn the WinPhone onto the Win 8 desktop because they hope developers are dumb enough to think they can "Write once and use everywhere" if they write for Metro. the sad fact is like you pointed out the differences between ARM and X86 are so great that anything more complex than a fart app will have to be written twice anyway, and if they are gonna have to do that why bother with metro at all? they'll get a better chance of selling their product on Android of iOS with their much larger user bases. This is why i believe ultimately MSFT didn't give a shit about those other platforms, they would have been small fish in a big pond whereas with wintel they could call the shots more. MSFT has always loved that level of control, see how all the features like tessellation coming out in GPUs for the past decade have been dictated by MSFT with DrectX. MSFT wants to have that level of control over a platform and with the other platforms it was severely doubtful they could have gotten it.
Oh and I think you may be giving MSFT more credit than they were due then, see how they practically begged game devs to write for Windows and were ignored. it wasn't until WinQuake that the other games began coming out with Windows versions, most were still running DOS at the time despite MSFT's begging and offers to help with the conversion to Windows. If MSFT would have somehow come out with a universal binary format or virtual machine so a company could write once use anywhere they might have gained traction but with so many widely differing platforms most publishers were simply gonna ignore regardless of what MSFT did IMHO, it simply didn't make good business sense to port. in a way its a classic catch-22, the publishers didn't want to port until the users were there and the users didn't want it without the apps they needed.