Preaching changes NOTHING friend, you might as well be pissing in the wind. i will happily explain why your argument is worthless, ready? PPT math. You see it frankly doesn't matter whether you pirate it or not, as regardless of what you do the companies are gonna bring a PPT into congress and say "If you'll look at slide 4 you'll see we made X on this game with the consoles and since there are Y numbers of gamers we should have had X+Y in profits but we didn't get it so it must be teh ebil pirates argh! Give us more laws and extended copyrights" and you know what? they'll get it.
You see we are talking about capitalism and the market and whether that person takes the game or simply walks away doesn't matter in that sense because the end results are the same, money left on the table. I know many pirates that were converted into paying customers simply by Valve offering cheap games with easy ordering yet you still have companies like Ubisoft that do everything but shit on the game boxes before handing them to the customers, why? Can they not see all the money they are leaving on the table? Can they not see how many won't buy their products because frankly the pirated version is the better product thanks to its lack of DRM?
Its simple really, you give the people what they want or they go elsewhere, your morality means nothing to the market. If you magically destroyed piracy tomorrow i bet my last buck the sales wouldn't go up even 5%, because they simply would walk away, the end results would be no different than they are now. These assclown MBA, master of bullshitting assholes, simply have no ability to think beyond the quarter. Why should they? they'll have moved on long before any damage they do can be blamed on them anyway so why care? In the end when you try to introduce artificial scarcity with a product with infinite supply at little to no cost and then try to assrape the customers on top of that the market WILL route around the stupidity, be it with knockoff DVDs in China or Internet piracy. thinking that somehow THIS time, with THIS DRM you might get all those millions to actually pay you a bazillion dollars a product is just delusional. Either you take the amount they are willing to pay or watch as they walk away, your choice.
Well if you are gonna go by just raw usage data then i'm sure they would tell you that office and accounting programs are being replaced by this incredible new technology called "the fart app' since its number of users i'm sure makes Quicken, Quickbooks, and all the office suites look like penny ante apps.
But of course that just highlights what's wrong with using this kind of data, the "games' they describe are simply what is called 'time wasters" that someone can use at the average office without installing anything and thus getting fired. The boss at the last shop i worked at loved to fire up freecell on any machine brought in and see how many hours had been spent in it, some machines had literally thousands of hours in it. did that mean these people were prepping for some freecell tournament? that they just REALLY loved that card game? nope it meant the IT dept had blocked the web based time wasters but the MSFT standard games were accessible so that is what they used to waste time.
In the end these "games" are having little to no money spent on them by the users, who rarely have any loyalty to the games at all and will walk away at the drop of a hat for the next time waster that catches their eye. Just because a shitload of people run something doesn't mean they WANT to run that thing, it may simply mean that is all they can get past the IT dept at work. My GF has hundreds of hours in those FB games but that doesn't mean she gives a crap about them or would spend a single cent for the whole lot, it just means she has a lot of down time in between busy periods at work so she uses them to kill time, that's all. In the end they are for her no more worth caring about than solitaire, its just something to do that's all. if youtube wasn't blocked at her work she'd probably be watching videos instead.
Insightful? For what? bragging your on an OS lower than the margin for error and therefor not worth a criminal's time. hey you should brag you are on OS/2, I bet it ain't needed a single patch in years! Meanwhile you can enjoy such fun recreational activities as 1.-hunting for fixes on forums every 6 months when the latest update deathmarch craps on 1 or more of your drivers, 2.- Having such wonderful documentation that is at best just a pile of CLI use flags, at worse a 'todo" file, 3.-having an "OS" that is just a hodge podge of programs written by a bunch of groups that have nothing to do with each other, so some follow Windows conventions, some mac, and some unix, 4.- having such wonderful QA that Dell has to run their own repos just to keep the OS from going "LOL I made a stinky!" on itself and killing the wireless, need i go on?
As for your much vaunted security? might want to look at some things, ready?
Get ready, heretheycome! BTW if you'd like a little more food for thought, what OS was 3 of the 4 CAs running that were compromised? takea lookand see. Maybe they just had bad configs? Surely someone with knowledge would be safe right? Guess again and its not a flukeby any means.
Then you obviously have your settings blocking him as he has dumped his account right in the shitter, hence his posting as AC and karma whoring lately. go into your settings and allow negative posts to be seen and i'm sure you'll find them or just look for the dumbasses misquote that he thinks by posting HALF a sentence it proves...well i still haven't figured that part out, that he is too fucking stupid to use copy/paste maybe? Anyway the misquote (which he now uses as a sig) is THERE IS NO COMMAND LINE IN WINDOWS when the actual sentence is "As far as the users are concerned there is no command line in Windows as it simply isn't needed". But if you will look at the above or simply post a few negative posts about his "precious" I'm sure you too can enjoy having your very own batshit FOSSie.
You'd be amazed how much sheer bile and hatred i often get for pointing out what is just common sense, nobody is gonna piss a $100 million plus down the toilet if all they are gonna get is a "thanks dude'. The problem is too much of the community I truly believe, and not using this in a bad way, just saying, has strong communist leanings and don't see the failures in such a system. hell look up the videos of RMS gushing to leaders like Chavez how wonderful they are.
But the problem with communist systems and why Linux will never have a world class desktop is easy to explain, its the "busted shitter" problem. You see the zealots will scream "But people wrote all this FOSS so you are a lying shill dirty poo poo head!" while ignoring that its simple human nature to want to create, its simply good for the human spirit and rewards us in that way. while I like getting paid for playing music i have sat in a million times for free, why? because letting the music flow from my heart through to my bass makes me feel good, its purity and creative expression makes me happy so THAT is my reward when i'm not getting paid.
For Linux to be a truly world class OS though there are literally tens of thousands of jobs that will have to be done that are NOT creative, or rewarding for the spirit, but are about as "fun" and and enjoyable as walking into a stranger's house and being given the task of fixing his turd filled shitter. Would YOU do that for free? of course not and THAT is the problem. in communism it was well known they would have to order soldiers to do "potato duty" to make up for the lack of workers but FOSS can't do that. until a man can actually do these lousy jobs and get paid to do them Linux simply won't go anywhere. I mean look at the numbers from W3 schools, an incredibly nerd heavy set of sites yet the absolute best numbers Linux can do is 4.8% which is equal to the most hated Windows desktop since WinME more than 2 years after it was abandoned by the majority, and this is after 20+ years of effort.
Until the community accepts that the GPL model simply can't work in this case, that no company is gonna invest the tens of millions required if they will get nothing in return, then things will simply not get better. I'd say its painfully obvious that this is as good as it gets, and once Canonical is gone and their money with them frankly it'll backslide because the community simply isn't gonna fix those busted shitters. I will never understand why pointing out something so obvious and logical gets such hatred in return, other than its truly as one poster told me and people living in perception bubbles where everything wrong in FOSS is somebody else's fault, its a conspiracy or companies refusing to give specs or something, never their OS model that simply can't work.
But the question is WHY did it excite them? allow me to answer that, its because they thought all those WINDOWS PROGRAMS wqould be ported to what at the time was a much better arch for what they were doing than x86. After all even intel didn't see the life in x86 and was working on Itanic, AMD blindsided them with X86-64. But MSFT was half hearted because i'm sure they found out talking to their developer networks that frankly many software houses simply didn't see a need to port to all these different platforms. After all they were making money on X86 and porting would have been an expense with no guarantee people would buy so why bother? And ReactOS while a nice idea in theory i just don't ever see working. After all they started out emulating Win95 and have moved over to now WinXP which by the time they get a beta will be EOLed. you are talking about emulating an entire OS at the API level when the OS is a moving target and won't give you the code anyway, with 1000x the manpower they would never pull it off. wish they would, just not gonna happen.
In the end though we agree that WinARM is gonna be a flop, we are simply getting there from different angles. You think it will be performance but as someone who has an AMD netbook running a full win 7 X64 I can tell you Windows can be quite snappy even on less powerful hardware and that's without any real specific optimizations for the target like they'll get on ARM. make no mistake MSFT is gonna probably blow a cool billion on this turkey. No what will kill them is the same thing that makes Linux a non starter on the desktop...wintel. Folks only want Windows to run Windows programs, not because of any loyalty to the MSFT branding or love for MSFT design, and without all those millions of programs, of which there is ALWAYS a half a dozen or more that are "must have", then its just gonna flop. Hell I'm trying to find some place with a decent price on an AMD E350 or E450 netbook for my dad, even though most of what he wants to do could be done on ARM EXCEPT for the fact that Quickbooks is a "must have" for him, and QB don't run on ARM. I have a feeling no matter how MSFT tries to spin it without x86 they are toasty.
Why oh why would you give her OpenSUSE after it even gave Linus fits? hell that's the distro that drove barb from here over to BSD because its last update crapped all over her system and left her without a home PC for a week. Vector with KDE classic is stable and mature, all the features that someone like your mom would want are there while the show stoppers were fixed in KDE 3 ages ago. I bet my last buck you give her that with Seamonkey and thunderbird and she WILL be a happy camper and more over you will be too as you won't have to mess with it or show her how to do anything as anybody who has used a PC in the past 12 years can understand KDE 3.
Like I said give her the LiveCD, let her play with it and see what she thinks. IIRC you can even set it to save to a flash on exit so she won't have to lose anything when she shuts down for the night. But unless you are just wanting to use her system to play with i just don't see why you'd go SUSE or debian testing over something that is both mature AND supported.
Oh please! Has everyone including you forgotten that when valve as an experiment lowered the price of L4D to $2 their PROFITS on that game went up by 1700%? Geez someone need to wrap old Henry Ford in wire as the revolutions he is turning in his grave could power half the country!
Sadly the only ones that seem to get old style capitalism anymore is Valve and just look at 'em, old gabe can jump in a swimming pool full of money like Scrooge mcDuck, why? because the way you make money in a TRUE capitalist sense, instead of using the government to be your pitbull (as with all the nasty laws and DRM) is to sell it cheap and crank the things out like hotcakes. Well thanks to digital distribution and DVDs your cost per unit is so teeny tiny its practically non existent, so what do they do? do they lower the prices and then make MASSIVE profits when they are able to create franchises and tie ins and DLC and a bazillion other ways to make even MORE profits off those new customers? nope they go "Gee, how badly can we assrape our customers before they squeal like a piggy? charge 10% above that" and you have what you have now.
Piracy is the TRUE free markets answer to assraping prices and screwing over the consumer. You lower those prices and guess what? Not only can you practically wipe out piracy but you can then monetize those new customers even more with cool DLC, t-shirts and memorabilia, upselling them other products in your line, a smart businessman instead of a greedy one would know this, but sadly it isn't even limited to gaming this stupidity. Did you know in the late summer of 09 I saw Windows piracy practically disappear overnight? Did MSFT come up with some new DRM? Nope they were selling Win 7 HP for $50 which caused guys that had probably never bought a copy of Windows in their life to buy. Almost to the minute that MSFT removed the $50 win 7 HP and $100 triple packs suddenly the local Craigslist was filled with $100 PCs with $300 copies of Windows Ultimate.
In the end you can be a smart business like Valve, realize that while you can't stop piracy that doesn't mean you can't convert large numbers of them into paying customers. Hell I've probably blown $300 myself on steam in the last 6 months, even though I could pirate those games easily, because valve offers me games that are cheap, easy as "push button to get game" and convenient with autopatching and matchmaking, and now when i get done playing a Steam game they get to pop up a little window telling me what's on sale and you know what? they've made a shitload of sales to me that way. its called being SMART and knowing you'll make a hell of a lot more on 10 million customers than on half a million when the costs per unit is so incredibly cheap. DVDs are what? less than a dollar including packaging? And of course digital deliver is a pittance, so its really only stupid shortsighted greed that is keeping these companies from making a shitload more money. In a way it reminds me of the MPAA who screamed that VCRs would be the "Boston Strangler" of the movie industry...right up until their first check from videotape sales came in.
When you charge assraping prices you are simply leaving tons of money on the table, both from those that will pirate as well as from those that will simply walk away. its business 101 folks and charging the absolute limit the market will bear is almost never the way to maximize profits.
Dude BUY NOW as Tiger is selling off the last of their Thuban X6 units crazy cheap, we are talking about a fully loaded PC, just add OS, for $289 after MIR delivered. For a fricking 6 core! I snatched one of the 1035T chips for myself and i can tell you its a fricking monster, VMs, transcoding, gaming, you name it it'll chew through it like it was nothing and when using single threaded apps turbocore really gives them a kick in the pants. Normally I'm a "if it ain't broke" kinda guy but I gave my quad to one of my kids and snatched one because i knew you simply aren't gonna see chips that powerful for THAT cheap for a hell of a long time if ever. And if you decide later you "feel the need for speed" I decided just to see how far she'd go without a voltage increase since the Asrock board i have has killer OCing tools and I managed to get to over 3.4Ghz on air with a turbocore of 3.8. And that's without bumping the volts! These babies are the sweethearts of the thuban line, the 95w envelope gives them OCing room like you wouldn't believe and still keeps the chips nice and cool.
So if you are running a dual I highly recommend you snatching one of those x6 barebones while you can as they won't last long and having that kind of power you'll easily be able to go to 2020 and beyond with the unit. I've built 2 of their x6 kits so far and not only is the setup so simple your grandma could do it but the MSI boards they are packing with them are real nice with solid caps and well cut traces, just good solid units. snatch one while you can friend because a company being this stupid when it comes to price don't happen every day. I paired them with a $50 HD4850 from geeks and at $550 a pop I had those units gone before i could even get them put in the window, just a truly sweet unit with tons of power and features. get it friend you will NOT regret it.
May I make a suggest which may shock you since I'm supposedly an "M$ Ninja" secretly shilling for "teh man"? Give your mom Vector Linux which has a fullly supported "KDE classic" which is a HELL of a lot closer to the old XP way than anything else out there. Also works great on older hardware and they have a live CD you can test with here. Let her try it, I bet she likes it.
Actually WinFS WAS NTFS, it just added more metadata support so no need to freak friend, it was still the NTFS goodness you knew and loved. Supposedly what would happen if you plugged into an older OS, with say a USB drive, is that the new metadata simply wouldn't be added until you plugged into a more modern OS and it had a chance to index it. Think of it as just a smarter version of the Win 7 search feature, one that would allow you to say type "blue dress" and the system would be able to find all the videos and pictures that had a blue dress in them because it had more intelligent indexing.
And as for the rest of your post i don't think its "over" so much for MSFT as they'll just have to either accept they are the new IBM, with a stable and mature market that only replaces when it breaks, or they will have to completely spin off the mobile. because the real problem is they keep trying to tie in the Windows branding where it makes NO fucking sense whatsoever. WinARM called Windows 8 but don't run Windows programs? WinMo with its little XP look complete with start button that again didn't actually run Windows programs?
And THAT is the problem with MSFT under Ballmer in a nutshell, they keep trying to go for old Gates style lock in when those days are over and the Windows brand simply doesn't have the pull anymore. People aren't scared of Android and iOS the way they were with OS/2 and BeOS and because 90%+ of the folks out there only give a shit about the web without windows programs to entice them there really isn't anything MSFT can offer over those other two OSes in the mobile space. So either they accept they are the new IBM or they spin off mobile who can then just sell "Metro OS" without any hint of MSFT or Windows to confuse and piss off customers who see those names and expect their camera software and other x86 programs to run. MSFT has to realize that folks don't know ARM from a toaster oven, all they know is "Windows runs Windows programs" and when you break that you have sealed your fate.
Actually I hate to break the news to ya but not only is the highest expense by far of big pharma marketing but a great number of these drugs were found and researched by universities, you know, those things we tax payers support to a great extent with student loans and grants? yeah those things, who then sell the patents to big pharma. frankly the only real expense they have any more is clinical trials and I believe a lot of that could be streamlined by cutting out a lot of the CYA that goes into those by allowing those with the disease in question to sign up to be long term test subjects. Hell that was the only way I could get the miracle drug i'm on, Remicade, as the wholesale cost is $25k and the retail cost is over $100,000 a year but the drug companies have always loved me because other than psoriatic arthritis i'm in perfect health. Liver, kidneys, blood, everything tests 100 percent perfect which makes me perfect for long term study.I just lucked out my doctor had signed on for one of the long term case studies and put me on the top of the list.
So lets be honest folks, the 8000% markups on many of these drugs have nothing to do with breaking even or even getting a little ROI and EVERYTHING to do with the ass cancer of the planet, which is the financial markets and the plague that is speculators. if you don't make iMoney and CONTINUE to make iMoney then your stock nosedives and may never recover. We need to get rampant speculation and the endless drive for higher stock prices out of the system, i would argue by having massive taxes on those that flip stocks after minutes or even seconds and reward those that do long term investments with lower taxes.
Oh lord, another one. Tsk tsk tsk you hate to see a FOSSies get infected with Voldemort syndrome but there ya go, another poor victim of such a horrible disease who will now end up looking like this poor bastard. So won't you please give to the "Save a FOSSie America" or SOFA fund, currently located in a shoebox next to where RMS squats on the MIT campus? Remember folks, just because FOSSies are free doesn't mean you should waste 'em, no matter how irritating they are.
And I hate to break the news to ya sparky, but nobody WANTED Windows on Itanic, or SPARC, or PA-RISC, or MIPS because without WINDOWS PROGRAMS Windows makes no damned sense at all! It would be like porting it so the NT kernel could run Plan 9, WTF? What good is it? It isn't good for anything which is what MSFT is finding out in the mobile space. Ever try winPhone 7? I have, its nice, but why should I want it when both Android and iOS have more apps, more support, and in the case on Android dozens more units to choose from? What sells Windows is Windows programs, not the kernel, not the "look and feel' of the desktop, just Windows programs. And THAT is why WinARM is gonna go down into the same garbage can where all those copies of NT for those other arches went because without the ability to run Windows programs (the best Itanic could do was the speed on a Pentium II when running Windows programs in x86 emulation when the average x86 was approaching 3GHz) then there simply isn't a point.
And please get treatment for your Voldemort syndrome, a mind is a terrible thing to waste and I hear that stuff spreads like the clap.
And you can return to sticking your head in the sand and going "la la la, america is great, la la la" while ignoring the mercs, rendition rides, waterboarding, false flags like fast & furious,Americans executed without trial, hell just the stuff they've already flat footed admitted to SHOULD have had men shot for treason, yet not only does that not happen but the three letter agencies have bigger budgets than ever. I would also point out that the NSA has been pushing ideas like carnivore for years and the current trend in government is to hire third parties as they can get around those pesky legality issues that having the government do the dirty work directly cause.
They don't charge a dime because thanks to the GPL they CAN NOT charge a single dime, its simply not possible. Lets say you make your own linux, We'll call it DivLinux. You just spent 30 million plus fixing the driver model and now it runs stable no matter how many times you upgrade or update the kernel, great huh? so you try selling it for $50 a copy. problem is the first ones that download it will include someone who will simply slap a copy of it on their own website or put a little spin on it and give it away for "free" because since they aren't paying for any R&D the money they are getting off adsense is just gravy.
Mark my words, Canonical dead in 3. The support model does not work on desktops, I repeat it DOES NOT WORK in desktops. This is why you've seen companies try every workaround from selling hardware (gOS and now Canonical) to selling proprietary add ons (Xandros) to selling "premium services" (Mandriva and Linspire) and ALL HAVE FAILED. Like it or not to bring Linux, where the vast majority of the R&D and packages have been expressly designed for the server role, and make it into a world class desktop that can stand toe to toe with win 7 and OSX Lion you are gonna have to spend north of 100 million, there is just no way around it. Consumers aren't gonna go on forum hunts, no Google for "fixes', not deal with "update foo broke my drivers" which if you look on the Canonical forums is a major problem, not deal with help files that are just CLI use flags or "to do" placeholders, not deal with an OS that looks like a hodge podge with some programs doing things the Windows way, some the Mac way, and some the Unix way, it just won't fly. To get it up to the level it needs will require money that simply cannot be made using the GPL, it just can't. As I said the GPL works fine in use cases where one can easily sell support, but that isn't the desktop and trying to tie the price of all your efforts into the OS simply won't work because anyone can distribute and you have zero say in the matter.
So I'm sorry friend but there are places GPL works and places it don't and this is a big don't.
The same could have been said about the USSR, it stood more than 80 years, even withstood the Nazi onslaught...yet they aren't here anymore. Egypt, Libya, their leaders ruled for decades...gone. Are you really so arrogant you think the mighty empire can never fall? tell that to the Romans. Black males are already at 30%+ unemployment and you literally have tens of millions on uneducated and undereducated that simply don't have the IQ to become lawyers or doctors, what are you gonna do? herd them into camps?
The simple fact is thanks to globalism most of the poor in the USA simply cannot trade their labor for capital because their labor simply isn't required. between third world sweatshops and automation there simply is no need for them which means your system of capitalism no longer is functional. Why do you think prisons are bursting? poverty and hopelessness breeds crime like a cancer.
Like it or not the clock is winding down on the USA empire, we let corps become too big and corrupt after we bombed out the competition in WWII and now there simply aren't any jobs for those millions as they all went to Asia. You gonna print everyone a check? Pay them for busy work? You already do for about 20-30% of the low wage jobs through federal assistance, hell Walmart even shows new hires how to get on food stamps. The system is simply not sustainable and while they talk "jobless recovery" aka "hey the rich are living like Gods!" the top 10% now hold more than 92% of the wealth. You simply can't have those levels of rampant inequality long term. things fall apart, the center does not hold, watch what happens when the unemployment actual rates, not the BS they feed you, hits 40%+, just watch.
Actually that wasn't what Vista capable was about, it was about not slapping Intel in the face. You see the early betas for Vista included support for several older chips by Intel and when they changed their driver model at the last minute it left no way for those Intel chips to qualify as they were "kinda sorta" Dx9, not actually full Dx9. So to keep Intel from getting burned with warehouses full of the shitty chips and from the OEMs getting burnt by their Intel boards and looking elsewhere MSFT basically gimped Vista Basic (in the early builds Basic had a lot more visual features that were omitted like more Aero features) to give Intel a checkbox they and the OEMs could use to say "Sure it runs the new Windows!". what got their asses in a sling was all the ads were nothing but Aero Aero Aero and the courts ruled a reasonable person would think being able to run Vista meant shock! gasp! actually being able to run Vista. who'd have thunk it?
Let me dispel another myth while I'm here, kay? the whole "Its the death of the PC!" horseshit which is complete and total horseshit, if anything people have more x86 units than ever before...and that's the problem. You see folks have been conditioned to shitcan their smartphones every 2 years when the contract is up, they got drawers full of the damned things, whereas on the x86 PC front its just the opposite. You see for several years now PCs have been more than "good enough" for the tasks folks have for them. hell my mom has a 10 year old hand me down P4, and for the stuff she does, shopping on Amazon, playing her AoE and match 3 games, its frankly overkill. Anybody still using 10 year old smartphones? Hell my boys like to game and I just NOW upgraded them from Pentium Ds to AMD quads because they games finally started to drag, that's 6 years on those units, and did they get trashed? Nope i sold them and both units are running happily one with a checkout girl that uses it to chat and use youtube, the other a neighbor that likes old flight sims. Does anybody think either of those are even gonna stress those 6+ year old Pentium Ds? of course not.
This is why MSFT is shitting themselves with fear over being left out of mobile and is willing to waste millions upon millions on this disaster trying to force their way into mobile, its because once we got dual cores PCs became "good enough" for the vast majority for the tasks they had. Does anyone think that someone like my GF, that only uses FB, webmail, and Youtube, would actually notice if you switched her 3 year + triple core for a brand new 8 core? Hell the triple spends most of its time twiddling its thumbs. MSFT and the PC OEMs got spoiled during the MHz wars where throwing out your PC every 3 years was the norm because of the huge chip advancements that made that 3 year old PC simply too slow to run the modern programs but once we went to dual cores and everyone started spending more and more time on the web that era was over. A 4 year old triple or quad could easily last you until 2020 and beyond simply because people just aren't stressing the units. Hell I bought a 6 core because they are selling 6 core barebones on Tigerdirect for $289 delivered, but did I NEED it? Nope, my quad was crazy fast and even gaming wasn't stressing it.
MSFT wants into the ARM race because they see its the new MHz wars but nobody cares about having Windows when it won't run Windows programs. android can undercut them on price (although I still don't see why they are popped for product dumping, as they spend a billion a year only to give the product away. if MSFT or Apple did that they would so be busted) and Apple has the buzz and network effect. MSFT needs to spin off their mobile division or just call the new ARM OS Metro with no Windows or Microsoft name anywhere, but that would make sense. Instead they are gonna shoot themselves in the face trying to shoehorn the smartphone onto the desktop instead of the desktop onto the smartphone like WinMo. if its any consolation MSFT I predict in 5 to 8 years you'll see smartphones end
Preach brother! When i saw the demo of WinFS I was like "Hell yeah! Finally! Woo hoo!" so naturally it got cut. The new search in Win 7 is nice but when you saw what they were going for with WinFS...wow. Imagine having the OS scan all your videos and note details about them so that you could find any picture or video by just typing in a detail about what's in it. If the OS couldn't make heads or tails or wasn't sure on initial scan it would just ask you some questions and put your answers in the DB, just too damned cool.
As for TFA? Lets cut through the bullshit, okay? this don't have a damned thing to do with innovating shit, it has to do with MSFT getting bitch slapped across mobile by Google and Apple and they are now trying to throw a Hail Mary that has the stench of fail written all over it. Anybody remember WinMo? anybody remember their stupidity of putting a little teeny tiny desktop on it, complete with start button? well some PHB decided that since that was a failwhale the answer wasn't to keep mobile and desktop separate, you know, like those companies that are smacking the shit out of them? Nope the bright idea is jam the smartphone UI, with its full screen one at a time little fart apps crap and all, jam that shit right onto the desktop, so "Hey they'll get stuck with it and when they learn the WinPhone way they'll buy our ARM phones and tablets!" except of course they WON'T buy MSFT phones and tablets as there is no damned point. People buy Windows to run windows programs which don't run on ARM. MSFT made its bed with Wintel and now they are stuck lying in it. Hell at this point the smarter move would be to release a phone OS called metro that didn't have the words Microsoft or Windows anywhere near it!
As for why you are seeing articles like this? Its called damage control. it looks like some are actually getting through to some of the PHBs that jamming a smartphone onto a desktop, which is the most lamebrained idea to come out of MSFT since Bob, miiiight not be such a good idea, hence the damage control. they are too far along now to stop without looking like fools so rather than admit they fucked up they are gonna shat it out and then start on win 9 which people will actually buy. Mark my words the OEMs get downgrade rights almost from the start if not the very release day, Wintab tablets will end up on Woot! for touchpad firesale prices, and MSFT will either have to spin off mobile or accept the fact nobody wants windows on ARM. Without Wintel they simply don't have the apps, they don't have the support of the devs, they don't have the network effect of millions of units already in people's hands. in other words they sat on their asses too long and missed the mobile boat.
That is why I'm glad my oldest boy is going to be a doctor. The pastor at the local college was so impressed by his work ethic and leadership ability he pulled some strings and pretty much all of his education is gonna be paid for (he's hoping to talk him into being a medical missionary, which with his love of helping the poor i could see him going on a couple of missions a year) so when he graduates 8 years from now hopefully there will still be a high demand for doctors. I told him he ought to specialize but he has it in his heart to be an old fashioned country doctor and believes that is where he can do the most good.
As for TFA Yahoo I'm sure paid to have these features developed for themselves so why shouldn't they get paid for them? While i agree that we need patent reform with the way FB has companies like Zynga blatantly ripping off indie game designers i have a REAL hard time feeling sorry for FB here.
And that isn't even figuring in what happens when someone in the system just decides to get your ass, be it a vendetta or because they are too lazy to catch the real criminal or just because its Tuesday. true story..
We had a prosecutor in our county the cops called "that God damned bitch" for about 4 years, the reason she had that name? Simple if you had a penis you were guilty, period. women were innocent, men were guilty and God fucking help you you got investigated for ANY things sexual as she would tear into you like a pitbull tearing into a t-bone, all because she was raped in college and it seriously warped her. A friend lost a home that had been in his family 3 generations, built by his grandfather before WWI, all because of the GDB. it was a nasty divorce, he found she was banging two different docs at the hospital she worked at and he made it damned clear he was gonna fight for his kid so she got the 16 year old stepdaughter to say he grabbed her tits. Now it didn't matter that the cops actually went into court on his side, that they had written and testified the case was bogus, the girl had changed her story no less than 5 different times and never came close to telling the same story twice and that at least on one occasion they caught grandma coaching her (which GDB refused to prosecute). Nope none of that mattered as she came up with every charge she could think of and drug it out for over 2 years. By the time it was over the jury took less than 20 minutes to find him not guilty but in the meantime he had lost his job, his home went for lawyer bills and after she cleaned his account she hired a lawyer (which he couldn't afford one after this) and got full custody of his son and promptly took him out of the country, never shall he see his son again.
so don't think because you have a decent job now that will help you if someone decides to crush you like a bug. it amazed me how no matter how insane the charges were or the fact even the cops said it was completely fabricated this one GDB could completely and utterly destroy a person's life like that. And of course now he doesn't have 2 cents to rub together so good luck getting her for malicious prosecution, which wouldn't give him back his son anyway which he hasn't seen in 14 years now and probably wouldn't even recognize if he ran into him on the street sadly.
Sadly this is true and even the ones that actually have to do the work would tell you so if they weren't in fear of their jobs.
A friend works in the state crime lab finding CP on suspected computers (he keeps trying to recruit me but fuuuuck that noise) and he says a good 80%-90% of those they bust frankly shouldn't ever be in jail at all but simply get mental help as they are "social retards" as he calls them. he says they are as easy to spot as can be because it ALWAYS follows the same pattern, first they collect regular porn, then the basic fetishes, then trannys and S&M and finally beastiality and CP. He said you look into their backgrounds and most avoid as much human contacts as possible and frankly aren't a threat to anybody, one hadn't even left his home since 1997 and had to be tranquilizer darted like an animal because of the way he shrieked and freaked the fuck out if you touched him in any way. he said if you locked one of them up in a room with a kid they'd go hide in the corner rocking, as they don't want to be touched by anyone.
He said in a sane world those types would be given treatment which would free he and his colleagues from months worth of court time so they could actually be trying to track down real predators but sadly prosecutors don't want to go after those as they nearly always cross state lines and then they don't get the big headlines that help their political career. Just another case where as long as they are "doing something" even if that something is stupid, pointless, counterproductive, or even takes away our rights like the guy thrown in prison for writing his thoughts on a page or the one in jail for comic books, well as long as it looks like they are doing "something" that is all that matters, just like in TFA. Oh and in case anyone is wondering "the shrieker" as they named him will be sitting in a 6x9 for the next 65 years, so since he was in his 30s when they put him in and it costs over $100,000 to house an inmate (they usually can't place them in general pop, so stick another $50k on top of that for special protection) so if he lives to 80 you are looking at $7.5 million. for just the one. Wow...I can see why they want to privatize prisons, there's money to be made!
Actually its quite simple, although I get called every filthy name in the book for daring to point out what SHOULD be simple common sense. You see while the GPL works in SOME cases it does NOT work in ALL cases and in fact can be counterproductive in those cases. Case in point why you will never have a real world class desktop.
Its simple, look for yourself how many companies have already died trying to bring that to you, gOS, Linspire, Novell, Xandros, Mandriva is on life support and soon Canonical will joining them, why? Because the ONLY way to make money with the GPL is by using the support model just as the company in TFA does but this model DOES NOT WORK in desktops. Consumers don't buy support contracts and if you try to write in the cost of support into the OS you've just raised your price above and beyond the competition, which has a hell of a lot more hardware and software support. this is because the OEMs can balance and even make a profit with some SKUs by putting trialware onto the systems. This is why Sony charges you $50 to have a trialware free system, because you are cutting into their profits by removing it. Since so few people will pay for software with Linux trialware is not an option for the most part and is certainly not gonna bring in enough to allow a GPL desktop company to stay afloat, much less spend the $50-$100 million required to bring Linux up to the same level of ease of use and stability as OSX and Win 7. You have to pay for regression testing and tons of docs and help files to be rewritten (or written in the first place as it still amazes me how many only give you CLI use flags or a "to be done" placeholder) along with QA and probably either a complete rewrite of the driver model or for a team to backport to keep from breaking drivers with the frankly insane speed the kernel keeps changing.
So like it or not if you want a Linux desktop that can compete with OSX and Windows you really need a new license, one that will allow a company like Canonical to make money fixing bugs and making the system better instead of trying ever more crazy schemes like Ubuntu TV and Unity phones trying to keep the lights on. Something along the lines of "You can look, you can modify for personal use, but if you distribute you have to pay" so that these companies can actually stay afloat. Because I have a feeling after Mandriva and Canonical go tits up that's it, you aimply won't get another company to blow tens of millions on something that will never make a dime, in fact Novell didn't even break even until 2010!
And before you say "Well the community will do it!" I'm afraid that's a lie because of the "busted shitter" problem. You see everyone wants to be the artist, everyone wants to create new things, nobody wants to be the guy that cleans and fixes the busted shitters which is why they just don't get fixed. look at any GPL OS bug tracker and see how many bugs over 2 years are there, and then realize that don't count all the ones where the devs decided they just don't give a shit and put "will not fix" and threw it in the trash. To fix the above problems you are gonna need skilled developers to dedicate YEARS of their lives to fixing them, nobody is gonna do that, at least not in great enough numbers to matter. This is one of the reasons why communism failed, as it got so bad that they had to order soldiers to do "potato duty" simply to get the lousy jobs done. The above jobs are boring, thankless, time sucking, and overall about as fun as fixing a turd filled shitter overflowing into the floor. Would you go fix that kind of mess in a stranger's house for nothing? of course not, its simply human nature.
So the sooner the community accepts either they have to change their current model as GPL doesn't work in this use case or simply gives up on the desktop frankly the happier everyone will be. TINSTAAFL folks and while RMS may be truly happy squatting at MIT and not owning anything more than the clothe
Actually there IS a magic bullet, its called "get rid of sin crimes" and treat adults like adults. The late William F Buckley said a perfect explanation once, sorry if i don't get the quote exact but it went like this: "If I put a bottle on a table that says poison and has a skull and crossbones on it and i tell you 'this is poison, it will destroy your health, destroy your family, before it finally destroys you' and you push me out of the way and gulp the bottle straight down? Well stupid you frankly are too ignorant to live! why should I spend billions to build cages to put you in and armed guards around the bottle because you are too dumb not to drink it?"
Gambling, prostitution and drugs should ALL be legal and regulated, no different than booze is now. Personal responsibility means being able to choose stupidly as well as smartly and if you removed non violent offenders out of the system you wouldn't have this problem...
But here is the REAL truth, ugly and sick such as it is, the elite have figured out how to make money off those poor by locking them up, both by privatizing the prison system and with prison labor, not to mention all the traditionally mafia style rackets like concessions Prisons and the prison system are billion dollar businesses and they give the elite the added bonus of stripping the rights away from a large section of the minorities so it is a win/win for them.
Well right up until we have an Arab spring, which i figure we will have in the next decade, right around when unemployment hits 50% and the crime shoots through the roof because all these millions of uneducated poor can't feed themselves because all the factories were sent to Asia and all the manual labor given to illegals. Somehow I doubt power will be transferred as nicely as it was in the old USSR, it'll probably be more like Libya which with the amount of firepower the USA has spread out all over the country should give anyone nightmares. But hopefully when the final round has been fired we will go back to a more strict constitutional government where people are treated like adults again and the corps aren't allowed to become destructive monsters like they are now.
Yeah, those are called "public pretenders" and are about as useful as tits on a boar hog. look up the conviction rates under public pretenders, last i checked it was over 96%! Hell you'd be better off defending yourself as i hear that's only a 92% conviction rate. A public pretender's answer to anything and everything is plea, no matter what. frankly i wouldn't trust one to represent my dog.
Well there is that rumor that valve is gonna put out a "steam box" which will basically be a stripped down OS just running steam on COTS hardware, but hell if you are gonna do that why not just slap yourself together a dirt cheap HTPC? The AMD AM3 and AM3+ chips are really cheap, with the Athlon X3 at $70 and if you catch the sales the Thuban X6 has been selling at tiger for $109 and the boards for those are again dirt cheap with nice Asrock boards for around $40, you can pick up brand new HD4850 cards at geeks for $51 now and while not the top of the heap anymore they are still insanely powerful, finally add the HDD of your choice and Win 7 HP and tada!
Or if you'd like even easier here is a 6 core monster for $320 and I can say as i own that chip that it kicks major ass both in gaming and transcoding, just slap that HD4850 I mentioned and Win 7 along with your choice of wireless controller (X360, PS3 style, flightstick, etc) and you have a machine that will not only kick some major ass gaming but will do just about any job you can come up with, be it streaming, downloading, office work, media tank, websurfing, you name it it'll do it for many many years to come.
In the end that's why i gave up on the consoles and went full time PC, sure the consoles have some nice specs when they first come out but they are so DRMed that frankly they quickly become useless for anything but consuming approved content in approved ways. My 2.5GHz P4 that I was gaming on a decade ago is now my mom's netbox where she plays her match 3 games and shops, the 2008 era Pentium duals my nephews were gaming on I recently sold for enough I was able to upgrade them to AMD triple cores (both I was able to successfully unlock) so they'll be good for awhile and I have no doubt the most I'll have to do with this AMD 6 core is change out the GPU for another $60 card in a year or two when the 6850s are as cheap as the 4850s are now. That's the nice thing about PCs, when they are no longer powerful enough for gaming they can be re-purposed and continue to be useful. In fact my very first gamer PC, a 100MHz Pentium, is actually still running 5 days a week at a lumber mill. they bought it and my 233Mhz to run an old C&C lathe that only runs on an ISA card. You'd be surprised how long a PC will last with just a little care.
Slashdot Mirror
Preaching changes NOTHING friend, you might as well be pissing in the wind. i will happily explain why your argument is worthless, ready? PPT math. You see it frankly doesn't matter whether you pirate it or not, as regardless of what you do the companies are gonna bring a PPT into congress and say "If you'll look at slide 4 you'll see we made X on this game with the consoles and since there are Y numbers of gamers we should have had X+Y in profits but we didn't get it so it must be teh ebil pirates argh! Give us more laws and extended copyrights" and you know what? they'll get it.
You see we are talking about capitalism and the market and whether that person takes the game or simply walks away doesn't matter in that sense because the end results are the same, money left on the table. I know many pirates that were converted into paying customers simply by Valve offering cheap games with easy ordering yet you still have companies like Ubisoft that do everything but shit on the game boxes before handing them to the customers, why? Can they not see all the money they are leaving on the table? Can they not see how many won't buy their products because frankly the pirated version is the better product thanks to its lack of DRM?
Its simple really, you give the people what they want or they go elsewhere, your morality means nothing to the market. If you magically destroyed piracy tomorrow i bet my last buck the sales wouldn't go up even 5%, because they simply would walk away, the end results would be no different than they are now. These assclown MBA, master of bullshitting assholes, simply have no ability to think beyond the quarter. Why should they? they'll have moved on long before any damage they do can be blamed on them anyway so why care? In the end when you try to introduce artificial scarcity with a product with infinite supply at little to no cost and then try to assrape the customers on top of that the market WILL route around the stupidity, be it with knockoff DVDs in China or Internet piracy. thinking that somehow THIS time, with THIS DRM you might get all those millions to actually pay you a bazillion dollars a product is just delusional. Either you take the amount they are willing to pay or watch as they walk away, your choice.
Well if you are gonna go by just raw usage data then i'm sure they would tell you that office and accounting programs are being replaced by this incredible new technology called "the fart app' since its number of users i'm sure makes Quicken, Quickbooks, and all the office suites look like penny ante apps.
But of course that just highlights what's wrong with using this kind of data, the "games' they describe are simply what is called 'time wasters" that someone can use at the average office without installing anything and thus getting fired. The boss at the last shop i worked at loved to fire up freecell on any machine brought in and see how many hours had been spent in it, some machines had literally thousands of hours in it. did that mean these people were prepping for some freecell tournament? that they just REALLY loved that card game? nope it meant the IT dept had blocked the web based time wasters but the MSFT standard games were accessible so that is what they used to waste time.
In the end these "games" are having little to no money spent on them by the users, who rarely have any loyalty to the games at all and will walk away at the drop of a hat for the next time waster that catches their eye. Just because a shitload of people run something doesn't mean they WANT to run that thing, it may simply mean that is all they can get past the IT dept at work. My GF has hundreds of hours in those FB games but that doesn't mean she gives a crap about them or would spend a single cent for the whole lot, it just means she has a lot of down time in between busy periods at work so she uses them to kill time, that's all. In the end they are for her no more worth caring about than solitaire, its just something to do that's all. if youtube wasn't blocked at her work she'd probably be watching videos instead.
Insightful? For what? bragging your on an OS lower than the margin for error and therefor not worth a criminal's time. hey you should brag you are on OS/2, I bet it ain't needed a single patch in years! Meanwhile you can enjoy such fun recreational activities as 1.-hunting for fixes on forums every 6 months when the latest update deathmarch craps on 1 or more of your drivers, 2.- Having such wonderful documentation that is at best just a pile of CLI use flags, at worse a 'todo" file, 3.-having an "OS" that is just a hodge podge of programs written by a bunch of groups that have nothing to do with each other, so some follow Windows conventions, some mac, and some unix, 4.- having such wonderful QA that Dell has to run their own repos just to keep the OS from going "LOL I made a stinky!" on itself and killing the wireless, need i go on?
As for your much vaunted security? might want to look at some things, ready?
Get ready, here they come! BTW if you'd like a little more food for thought, what OS was 3 of the 4 CAs running that were compromised? take a look and see. Maybe they just had bad configs? Surely someone with knowledge would be safe right? Guess again and its not a fluke by any means.
Then you obviously have your settings blocking him as he has dumped his account right in the shitter, hence his posting as AC and karma whoring lately. go into your settings and allow negative posts to be seen and i'm sure you'll find them or just look for the dumbasses misquote that he thinks by posting HALF a sentence it proves...well i still haven't figured that part out, that he is too fucking stupid to use copy/paste maybe? Anyway the misquote (which he now uses as a sig) is THERE IS NO COMMAND LINE IN WINDOWS when the actual sentence is "As far as the users are concerned there is no command line in Windows as it simply isn't needed". But if you will look at the above or simply post a few negative posts about his "precious" I'm sure you too can enjoy having your very own batshit FOSSie.
You'd be amazed how much sheer bile and hatred i often get for pointing out what is just common sense, nobody is gonna piss a $100 million plus down the toilet if all they are gonna get is a "thanks dude'. The problem is too much of the community I truly believe, and not using this in a bad way, just saying, has strong communist leanings and don't see the failures in such a system. hell look up the videos of RMS gushing to leaders like Chavez how wonderful they are.
But the problem with communist systems and why Linux will never have a world class desktop is easy to explain, its the "busted shitter" problem. You see the zealots will scream "But people wrote all this FOSS so you are a lying shill dirty poo poo head!" while ignoring that its simple human nature to want to create, its simply good for the human spirit and rewards us in that way. while I like getting paid for playing music i have sat in a million times for free, why? because letting the music flow from my heart through to my bass makes me feel good, its purity and creative expression makes me happy so THAT is my reward when i'm not getting paid.
For Linux to be a truly world class OS though there are literally tens of thousands of jobs that will have to be done that are NOT creative, or rewarding for the spirit, but are about as "fun" and and enjoyable as walking into a stranger's house and being given the task of fixing his turd filled shitter. Would YOU do that for free? of course not and THAT is the problem. in communism it was well known they would have to order soldiers to do "potato duty" to make up for the lack of workers but FOSS can't do that. until a man can actually do these lousy jobs and get paid to do them Linux simply won't go anywhere. I mean look at the numbers from W3 schools, an incredibly nerd heavy set of sites yet the absolute best numbers Linux can do is 4.8% which is equal to the most hated Windows desktop since WinME more than 2 years after it was abandoned by the majority, and this is after 20+ years of effort.
Until the community accepts that the GPL model simply can't work in this case, that no company is gonna invest the tens of millions required if they will get nothing in return, then things will simply not get better. I'd say its painfully obvious that this is as good as it gets, and once Canonical is gone and their money with them frankly it'll backslide because the community simply isn't gonna fix those busted shitters. I will never understand why pointing out something so obvious and logical gets such hatred in return, other than its truly as one poster told me and people living in perception bubbles where everything wrong in FOSS is somebody else's fault, its a conspiracy or companies refusing to give specs or something, never their OS model that simply can't work.
But the question is WHY did it excite them? allow me to answer that, its because they thought all those WINDOWS PROGRAMS wqould be ported to what at the time was a much better arch for what they were doing than x86. After all even intel didn't see the life in x86 and was working on Itanic, AMD blindsided them with X86-64. But MSFT was half hearted because i'm sure they found out talking to their developer networks that frankly many software houses simply didn't see a need to port to all these different platforms. After all they were making money on X86 and porting would have been an expense with no guarantee people would buy so why bother? And ReactOS while a nice idea in theory i just don't ever see working. After all they started out emulating Win95 and have moved over to now WinXP which by the time they get a beta will be EOLed. you are talking about emulating an entire OS at the API level when the OS is a moving target and won't give you the code anyway, with 1000x the manpower they would never pull it off. wish they would, just not gonna happen.
In the end though we agree that WinARM is gonna be a flop, we are simply getting there from different angles. You think it will be performance but as someone who has an AMD netbook running a full win 7 X64 I can tell you Windows can be quite snappy even on less powerful hardware and that's without any real specific optimizations for the target like they'll get on ARM. make no mistake MSFT is gonna probably blow a cool billion on this turkey. No what will kill them is the same thing that makes Linux a non starter on the desktop...wintel. Folks only want Windows to run Windows programs, not because of any loyalty to the MSFT branding or love for MSFT design, and without all those millions of programs, of which there is ALWAYS a half a dozen or more that are "must have", then its just gonna flop. Hell I'm trying to find some place with a decent price on an AMD E350 or E450 netbook for my dad, even though most of what he wants to do could be done on ARM EXCEPT for the fact that Quickbooks is a "must have" for him, and QB don't run on ARM. I have a feeling no matter how MSFT tries to spin it without x86 they are toasty.
Why oh why would you give her OpenSUSE after it even gave Linus fits? hell that's the distro that drove barb from here over to BSD because its last update crapped all over her system and left her without a home PC for a week. Vector with KDE classic is stable and mature, all the features that someone like your mom would want are there while the show stoppers were fixed in KDE 3 ages ago. I bet my last buck you give her that with Seamonkey and thunderbird and she WILL be a happy camper and more over you will be too as you won't have to mess with it or show her how to do anything as anybody who has used a PC in the past 12 years can understand KDE 3.
Like I said give her the LiveCD, let her play with it and see what she thinks. IIRC you can even set it to save to a flash on exit so she won't have to lose anything when she shuts down for the night. But unless you are just wanting to use her system to play with i just don't see why you'd go SUSE or debian testing over something that is both mature AND supported.
Oh please! Has everyone including you forgotten that when valve as an experiment lowered the price of L4D to $2 their PROFITS on that game went up by 1700%? Geez someone need to wrap old Henry Ford in wire as the revolutions he is turning in his grave could power half the country!
Sadly the only ones that seem to get old style capitalism anymore is Valve and just look at 'em, old gabe can jump in a swimming pool full of money like Scrooge mcDuck, why? because the way you make money in a TRUE capitalist sense, instead of using the government to be your pitbull (as with all the nasty laws and DRM) is to sell it cheap and crank the things out like hotcakes. Well thanks to digital distribution and DVDs your cost per unit is so teeny tiny its practically non existent, so what do they do? do they lower the prices and then make MASSIVE profits when they are able to create franchises and tie ins and DLC and a bazillion other ways to make even MORE profits off those new customers? nope they go "Gee, how badly can we assrape our customers before they squeal like a piggy? charge 10% above that" and you have what you have now.
Piracy is the TRUE free markets answer to assraping prices and screwing over the consumer. You lower those prices and guess what? Not only can you practically wipe out piracy but you can then monetize those new customers even more with cool DLC, t-shirts and memorabilia, upselling them other products in your line, a smart businessman instead of a greedy one would know this, but sadly it isn't even limited to gaming this stupidity. Did you know in the late summer of 09 I saw Windows piracy practically disappear overnight? Did MSFT come up with some new DRM? Nope they were selling Win 7 HP for $50 which caused guys that had probably never bought a copy of Windows in their life to buy. Almost to the minute that MSFT removed the $50 win 7 HP and $100 triple packs suddenly the local Craigslist was filled with $100 PCs with $300 copies of Windows Ultimate.
In the end you can be a smart business like Valve, realize that while you can't stop piracy that doesn't mean you can't convert large numbers of them into paying customers. Hell I've probably blown $300 myself on steam in the last 6 months, even though I could pirate those games easily, because valve offers me games that are cheap, easy as "push button to get game" and convenient with autopatching and matchmaking, and now when i get done playing a Steam game they get to pop up a little window telling me what's on sale and you know what? they've made a shitload of sales to me that way. its called being SMART and knowing you'll make a hell of a lot more on 10 million customers than on half a million when the costs per unit is so incredibly cheap. DVDs are what? less than a dollar including packaging? And of course digital deliver is a pittance, so its really only stupid shortsighted greed that is keeping these companies from making a shitload more money. In a way it reminds me of the MPAA who screamed that VCRs would be the "Boston Strangler" of the movie industry...right up until their first check from videotape sales came in.
When you charge assraping prices you are simply leaving tons of money on the table, both from those that will pirate as well as from those that will simply walk away. its business 101 folks and charging the absolute limit the market will bear is almost never the way to maximize profits.
Dude BUY NOW as Tiger is selling off the last of their Thuban X6 units crazy cheap, we are talking about a fully loaded PC, just add OS, for $289 after MIR delivered. For a fricking 6 core! I snatched one of the 1035T chips for myself and i can tell you its a fricking monster, VMs, transcoding, gaming, you name it it'll chew through it like it was nothing and when using single threaded apps turbocore really gives them a kick in the pants. Normally I'm a "if it ain't broke" kinda guy but I gave my quad to one of my kids and snatched one because i knew you simply aren't gonna see chips that powerful for THAT cheap for a hell of a long time if ever. And if you decide later you "feel the need for speed" I decided just to see how far she'd go without a voltage increase since the Asrock board i have has killer OCing tools and I managed to get to over 3.4Ghz on air with a turbocore of 3.8. And that's without bumping the volts! These babies are the sweethearts of the thuban line, the 95w envelope gives them OCing room like you wouldn't believe and still keeps the chips nice and cool.
So if you are running a dual I highly recommend you snatching one of those x6 barebones while you can as they won't last long and having that kind of power you'll easily be able to go to 2020 and beyond with the unit. I've built 2 of their x6 kits so far and not only is the setup so simple your grandma could do it but the MSI boards they are packing with them are real nice with solid caps and well cut traces, just good solid units. snatch one while you can friend because a company being this stupid when it comes to price don't happen every day. I paired them with a $50 HD4850 from geeks and at $550 a pop I had those units gone before i could even get them put in the window, just a truly sweet unit with tons of power and features. get it friend you will NOT regret it.
May I make a suggest which may shock you since I'm supposedly an "M$ Ninja" secretly shilling for "teh man"? Give your mom Vector Linux which has a fullly supported "KDE classic" which is a HELL of a lot closer to the old XP way than anything else out there. Also works great on older hardware and they have a live CD you can test with here. Let her try it, I bet she likes it.
Actually WinFS WAS NTFS, it just added more metadata support so no need to freak friend, it was still the NTFS goodness you knew and loved. Supposedly what would happen if you plugged into an older OS, with say a USB drive, is that the new metadata simply wouldn't be added until you plugged into a more modern OS and it had a chance to index it. Think of it as just a smarter version of the Win 7 search feature, one that would allow you to say type "blue dress" and the system would be able to find all the videos and pictures that had a blue dress in them because it had more intelligent indexing.
And as for the rest of your post i don't think its "over" so much for MSFT as they'll just have to either accept they are the new IBM, with a stable and mature market that only replaces when it breaks, or they will have to completely spin off the mobile. because the real problem is they keep trying to tie in the Windows branding where it makes NO fucking sense whatsoever. WinARM called Windows 8 but don't run Windows programs? WinMo with its little XP look complete with start button that again didn't actually run Windows programs?
And THAT is the problem with MSFT under Ballmer in a nutshell, they keep trying to go for old Gates style lock in when those days are over and the Windows brand simply doesn't have the pull anymore. People aren't scared of Android and iOS the way they were with OS/2 and BeOS and because 90%+ of the folks out there only give a shit about the web without windows programs to entice them there really isn't anything MSFT can offer over those other two OSes in the mobile space. So either they accept they are the new IBM or they spin off mobile who can then just sell "Metro OS" without any hint of MSFT or Windows to confuse and piss off customers who see those names and expect their camera software and other x86 programs to run. MSFT has to realize that folks don't know ARM from a toaster oven, all they know is "Windows runs Windows programs" and when you break that you have sealed your fate.
Actually I hate to break the news to ya but not only is the highest expense by far of big pharma marketing but a great number of these drugs were found and researched by universities, you know, those things we tax payers support to a great extent with student loans and grants? yeah those things, who then sell the patents to big pharma. frankly the only real expense they have any more is clinical trials and I believe a lot of that could be streamlined by cutting out a lot of the CYA that goes into those by allowing those with the disease in question to sign up to be long term test subjects. Hell that was the only way I could get the miracle drug i'm on, Remicade, as the wholesale cost is $25k and the retail cost is over $100,000 a year but the drug companies have always loved me because other than psoriatic arthritis i'm in perfect health. Liver, kidneys, blood, everything tests 100 percent perfect which makes me perfect for long term study.I just lucked out my doctor had signed on for one of the long term case studies and put me on the top of the list.
So lets be honest folks, the 8000% markups on many of these drugs have nothing to do with breaking even or even getting a little ROI and EVERYTHING to do with the ass cancer of the planet, which is the financial markets and the plague that is speculators. if you don't make iMoney and CONTINUE to make iMoney then your stock nosedives and may never recover. We need to get rampant speculation and the endless drive for higher stock prices out of the system, i would argue by having massive taxes on those that flip stocks after minutes or even seconds and reward those that do long term investments with lower taxes.
Oh lord, another one. Tsk tsk tsk you hate to see a FOSSies get infected with Voldemort syndrome but there ya go, another poor victim of such a horrible disease who will now end up looking like this poor bastard. So won't you please give to the "Save a FOSSie America" or SOFA fund, currently located in a shoebox next to where RMS squats on the MIT campus? Remember folks, just because FOSSies are free doesn't mean you should waste 'em, no matter how irritating they are.
And I hate to break the news to ya sparky, but nobody WANTED Windows on Itanic, or SPARC, or PA-RISC, or MIPS because without WINDOWS PROGRAMS Windows makes no damned sense at all! It would be like porting it so the NT kernel could run Plan 9, WTF? What good is it? It isn't good for anything which is what MSFT is finding out in the mobile space. Ever try winPhone 7? I have, its nice, but why should I want it when both Android and iOS have more apps, more support, and in the case on Android dozens more units to choose from? What sells Windows is Windows programs, not the kernel, not the "look and feel' of the desktop, just Windows programs. And THAT is why WinARM is gonna go down into the same garbage can where all those copies of NT for those other arches went because without the ability to run Windows programs (the best Itanic could do was the speed on a Pentium II when running Windows programs in x86 emulation when the average x86 was approaching 3GHz) then there simply isn't a point.
And please get treatment for your Voldemort syndrome, a mind is a terrible thing to waste and I hear that stuff spreads like the clap.
And you can return to sticking your head in the sand and going "la la la, america is great, la la la" while ignoring the mercs, rendition rides, waterboarding, false flags like fast & furious,Americans executed without trial, hell just the stuff they've already flat footed admitted to SHOULD have had men shot for treason, yet not only does that not happen but the three letter agencies have bigger budgets than ever. I would also point out that the NSA has been pushing ideas like carnivore for years and the current trend in government is to hire third parties as they can get around those pesky legality issues that having the government do the dirty work directly cause.
They don't charge a dime because thanks to the GPL they CAN NOT charge a single dime, its simply not possible. Lets say you make your own linux, We'll call it DivLinux. You just spent 30 million plus fixing the driver model and now it runs stable no matter how many times you upgrade or update the kernel, great huh? so you try selling it for $50 a copy. problem is the first ones that download it will include someone who will simply slap a copy of it on their own website or put a little spin on it and give it away for "free" because since they aren't paying for any R&D the money they are getting off adsense is just gravy.
Mark my words, Canonical dead in 3. The support model does not work on desktops, I repeat it DOES NOT WORK in desktops. This is why you've seen companies try every workaround from selling hardware (gOS and now Canonical) to selling proprietary add ons (Xandros) to selling "premium services" (Mandriva and Linspire) and ALL HAVE FAILED. Like it or not to bring Linux, where the vast majority of the R&D and packages have been expressly designed for the server role, and make it into a world class desktop that can stand toe to toe with win 7 and OSX Lion you are gonna have to spend north of 100 million, there is just no way around it. Consumers aren't gonna go on forum hunts, no Google for "fixes', not deal with "update foo broke my drivers" which if you look on the Canonical forums is a major problem, not deal with help files that are just CLI use flags or "to do" placeholders, not deal with an OS that looks like a hodge podge with some programs doing things the Windows way, some the Mac way, and some the Unix way, it just won't fly. To get it up to the level it needs will require money that simply cannot be made using the GPL, it just can't. As I said the GPL works fine in use cases where one can easily sell support, but that isn't the desktop and trying to tie the price of all your efforts into the OS simply won't work because anyone can distribute and you have zero say in the matter.
So I'm sorry friend but there are places GPL works and places it don't and this is a big don't.
The same could have been said about the USSR, it stood more than 80 years, even withstood the Nazi onslaught...yet they aren't here anymore. Egypt, Libya, their leaders ruled for decades...gone. Are you really so arrogant you think the mighty empire can never fall? tell that to the Romans. Black males are already at 30%+ unemployment and you literally have tens of millions on uneducated and undereducated that simply don't have the IQ to become lawyers or doctors, what are you gonna do? herd them into camps?
The simple fact is thanks to globalism most of the poor in the USA simply cannot trade their labor for capital because their labor simply isn't required. between third world sweatshops and automation there simply is no need for them which means your system of capitalism no longer is functional. Why do you think prisons are bursting? poverty and hopelessness breeds crime like a cancer.
Like it or not the clock is winding down on the USA empire, we let corps become too big and corrupt after we bombed out the competition in WWII and now there simply aren't any jobs for those millions as they all went to Asia. You gonna print everyone a check? Pay them for busy work? You already do for about 20-30% of the low wage jobs through federal assistance, hell Walmart even shows new hires how to get on food stamps. The system is simply not sustainable and while they talk "jobless recovery" aka "hey the rich are living like Gods!" the top 10% now hold more than 92% of the wealth. You simply can't have those levels of rampant inequality long term. things fall apart, the center does not hold, watch what happens when the unemployment actual rates, not the BS they feed you, hits 40%+, just watch.
Actually that wasn't what Vista capable was about, it was about not slapping Intel in the face. You see the early betas for Vista included support for several older chips by Intel and when they changed their driver model at the last minute it left no way for those Intel chips to qualify as they were "kinda sorta" Dx9, not actually full Dx9. So to keep Intel from getting burned with warehouses full of the shitty chips and from the OEMs getting burnt by their Intel boards and looking elsewhere MSFT basically gimped Vista Basic (in the early builds Basic had a lot more visual features that were omitted like more Aero features) to give Intel a checkbox they and the OEMs could use to say "Sure it runs the new Windows!". what got their asses in a sling was all the ads were nothing but Aero Aero Aero and the courts ruled a reasonable person would think being able to run Vista meant shock! gasp! actually being able to run Vista. who'd have thunk it?
Let me dispel another myth while I'm here, kay? the whole "Its the death of the PC!" horseshit which is complete and total horseshit, if anything people have more x86 units than ever before...and that's the problem. You see folks have been conditioned to shitcan their smartphones every 2 years when the contract is up, they got drawers full of the damned things, whereas on the x86 PC front its just the opposite. You see for several years now PCs have been more than "good enough" for the tasks folks have for them. hell my mom has a 10 year old hand me down P4, and for the stuff she does, shopping on Amazon, playing her AoE and match 3 games, its frankly overkill. Anybody still using 10 year old smartphones? Hell my boys like to game and I just NOW upgraded them from Pentium Ds to AMD quads because they games finally started to drag, that's 6 years on those units, and did they get trashed? Nope i sold them and both units are running happily one with a checkout girl that uses it to chat and use youtube, the other a neighbor that likes old flight sims. Does anybody think either of those are even gonna stress those 6+ year old Pentium Ds? of course not.
This is why MSFT is shitting themselves with fear over being left out of mobile and is willing to waste millions upon millions on this disaster trying to force their way into mobile, its because once we got dual cores PCs became "good enough" for the vast majority for the tasks they had. Does anyone think that someone like my GF, that only uses FB, webmail, and Youtube, would actually notice if you switched her 3 year + triple core for a brand new 8 core? Hell the triple spends most of its time twiddling its thumbs. MSFT and the PC OEMs got spoiled during the MHz wars where throwing out your PC every 3 years was the norm because of the huge chip advancements that made that 3 year old PC simply too slow to run the modern programs but once we went to dual cores and everyone started spending more and more time on the web that era was over. A 4 year old triple or quad could easily last you until 2020 and beyond simply because people just aren't stressing the units. Hell I bought a 6 core because they are selling 6 core barebones on Tigerdirect for $289 delivered, but did I NEED it? Nope, my quad was crazy fast and even gaming wasn't stressing it.
MSFT wants into the ARM race because they see its the new MHz wars but nobody cares about having Windows when it won't run Windows programs. android can undercut them on price (although I still don't see why they are popped for product dumping, as they spend a billion a year only to give the product away. if MSFT or Apple did that they would so be busted) and Apple has the buzz and network effect. MSFT needs to spin off their mobile division or just call the new ARM OS Metro with no Windows or Microsoft name anywhere, but that would make sense. Instead they are gonna shoot themselves in the face trying to shoehorn the smartphone onto the desktop instead of the desktop onto the smartphone like WinMo. if its any consolation MSFT I predict in 5 to 8 years you'll see smartphones end
Preach brother! When i saw the demo of WinFS I was like "Hell yeah! Finally! Woo hoo!" so naturally it got cut. The new search in Win 7 is nice but when you saw what they were going for with WinFS...wow. Imagine having the OS scan all your videos and note details about them so that you could find any picture or video by just typing in a detail about what's in it. If the OS couldn't make heads or tails or wasn't sure on initial scan it would just ask you some questions and put your answers in the DB, just too damned cool.
As for TFA? Lets cut through the bullshit, okay? this don't have a damned thing to do with innovating shit, it has to do with MSFT getting bitch slapped across mobile by Google and Apple and they are now trying to throw a Hail Mary that has the stench of fail written all over it. Anybody remember WinMo? anybody remember their stupidity of putting a little teeny tiny desktop on it, complete with start button? well some PHB decided that since that was a failwhale the answer wasn't to keep mobile and desktop separate, you know, like those companies that are smacking the shit out of them? Nope the bright idea is jam the smartphone UI, with its full screen one at a time little fart apps crap and all, jam that shit right onto the desktop, so "Hey they'll get stuck with it and when they learn the WinPhone way they'll buy our ARM phones and tablets!" except of course they WON'T buy MSFT phones and tablets as there is no damned point. People buy Windows to run windows programs which don't run on ARM. MSFT made its bed with Wintel and now they are stuck lying in it. Hell at this point the smarter move would be to release a phone OS called metro that didn't have the words Microsoft or Windows anywhere near it!
As for why you are seeing articles like this? Its called damage control. it looks like some are actually getting through to some of the PHBs that jamming a smartphone onto a desktop, which is the most lamebrained idea to come out of MSFT since Bob, miiiight not be such a good idea, hence the damage control. they are too far along now to stop without looking like fools so rather than admit they fucked up they are gonna shat it out and then start on win 9 which people will actually buy. Mark my words the OEMs get downgrade rights almost from the start if not the very release day, Wintab tablets will end up on Woot! for touchpad firesale prices, and MSFT will either have to spin off mobile or accept the fact nobody wants windows on ARM. Without Wintel they simply don't have the apps, they don't have the support of the devs, they don't have the network effect of millions of units already in people's hands. in other words they sat on their asses too long and missed the mobile boat.
That is why I'm glad my oldest boy is going to be a doctor. The pastor at the local college was so impressed by his work ethic and leadership ability he pulled some strings and pretty much all of his education is gonna be paid for (he's hoping to talk him into being a medical missionary, which with his love of helping the poor i could see him going on a couple of missions a year) so when he graduates 8 years from now hopefully there will still be a high demand for doctors. I told him he ought to specialize but he has it in his heart to be an old fashioned country doctor and believes that is where he can do the most good.
As for TFA Yahoo I'm sure paid to have these features developed for themselves so why shouldn't they get paid for them? While i agree that we need patent reform with the way FB has companies like Zynga blatantly ripping off indie game designers i have a REAL hard time feeling sorry for FB here.
And that isn't even figuring in what happens when someone in the system just decides to get your ass, be it a vendetta or because they are too lazy to catch the real criminal or just because its Tuesday. true story..
We had a prosecutor in our county the cops called "that God damned bitch" for about 4 years, the reason she had that name? Simple if you had a penis you were guilty, period. women were innocent, men were guilty and God fucking help you you got investigated for ANY things sexual as she would tear into you like a pitbull tearing into a t-bone, all because she was raped in college and it seriously warped her. A friend lost a home that had been in his family 3 generations, built by his grandfather before WWI, all because of the GDB. it was a nasty divorce, he found she was banging two different docs at the hospital she worked at and he made it damned clear he was gonna fight for his kid so she got the 16 year old stepdaughter to say he grabbed her tits. Now it didn't matter that the cops actually went into court on his side, that they had written and testified the case was bogus, the girl had changed her story no less than 5 different times and never came close to telling the same story twice and that at least on one occasion they caught grandma coaching her (which GDB refused to prosecute). Nope none of that mattered as she came up with every charge she could think of and drug it out for over 2 years. By the time it was over the jury took less than 20 minutes to find him not guilty but in the meantime he had lost his job, his home went for lawyer bills and after she cleaned his account she hired a lawyer (which he couldn't afford one after this) and got full custody of his son and promptly took him out of the country, never shall he see his son again.
so don't think because you have a decent job now that will help you if someone decides to crush you like a bug. it amazed me how no matter how insane the charges were or the fact even the cops said it was completely fabricated this one GDB could completely and utterly destroy a person's life like that. And of course now he doesn't have 2 cents to rub together so good luck getting her for malicious prosecution, which wouldn't give him back his son anyway which he hasn't seen in 14 years now and probably wouldn't even recognize if he ran into him on the street sadly.
Sadly this is true and even the ones that actually have to do the work would tell you so if they weren't in fear of their jobs.
A friend works in the state crime lab finding CP on suspected computers (he keeps trying to recruit me but fuuuuck that noise) and he says a good 80%-90% of those they bust frankly shouldn't ever be in jail at all but simply get mental help as they are "social retards" as he calls them. he says they are as easy to spot as can be because it ALWAYS follows the same pattern, first they collect regular porn, then the basic fetishes, then trannys and S&M and finally beastiality and CP. He said you look into their backgrounds and most avoid as much human contacts as possible and frankly aren't a threat to anybody, one hadn't even left his home since 1997 and had to be tranquilizer darted like an animal because of the way he shrieked and freaked the fuck out if you touched him in any way. he said if you locked one of them up in a room with a kid they'd go hide in the corner rocking, as they don't want to be touched by anyone.
He said in a sane world those types would be given treatment which would free he and his colleagues from months worth of court time so they could actually be trying to track down real predators but sadly prosecutors don't want to go after those as they nearly always cross state lines and then they don't get the big headlines that help their political career. Just another case where as long as they are "doing something" even if that something is stupid, pointless, counterproductive, or even takes away our rights like the guy thrown in prison for writing his thoughts on a page or the one in jail for comic books, well as long as it looks like they are doing "something" that is all that matters, just like in TFA. Oh and in case anyone is wondering "the shrieker" as they named him will be sitting in a 6x9 for the next 65 years, so since he was in his 30s when they put him in and it costs over $100,000 to house an inmate (they usually can't place them in general pop, so stick another $50k on top of that for special protection) so if he lives to 80 you are looking at $7.5 million. for just the one. Wow...I can see why they want to privatize prisons, there's money to be made!
Actually its quite simple, although I get called every filthy name in the book for daring to point out what SHOULD be simple common sense. You see while the GPL works in SOME cases it does NOT work in ALL cases and in fact can be counterproductive in those cases. Case in point why you will never have a real world class desktop.
Its simple, look for yourself how many companies have already died trying to bring that to you, gOS, Linspire, Novell, Xandros, Mandriva is on life support and soon Canonical will joining them, why? Because the ONLY way to make money with the GPL is by using the support model just as the company in TFA does but this model DOES NOT WORK in desktops. Consumers don't buy support contracts and if you try to write in the cost of support into the OS you've just raised your price above and beyond the competition, which has a hell of a lot more hardware and software support. this is because the OEMs can balance and even make a profit with some SKUs by putting trialware onto the systems. This is why Sony charges you $50 to have a trialware free system, because you are cutting into their profits by removing it. Since so few people will pay for software with Linux trialware is not an option for the most part and is certainly not gonna bring in enough to allow a GPL desktop company to stay afloat, much less spend the $50-$100 million required to bring Linux up to the same level of ease of use and stability as OSX and Win 7. You have to pay for regression testing and tons of docs and help files to be rewritten (or written in the first place as it still amazes me how many only give you CLI use flags or a "to be done" placeholder) along with QA and probably either a complete rewrite of the driver model or for a team to backport to keep from breaking drivers with the frankly insane speed the kernel keeps changing.
So like it or not if you want a Linux desktop that can compete with OSX and Windows you really need a new license, one that will allow a company like Canonical to make money fixing bugs and making the system better instead of trying ever more crazy schemes like Ubuntu TV and Unity phones trying to keep the lights on. Something along the lines of "You can look, you can modify for personal use, but if you distribute you have to pay" so that these companies can actually stay afloat. Because I have a feeling after Mandriva and Canonical go tits up that's it, you aimply won't get another company to blow tens of millions on something that will never make a dime, in fact Novell didn't even break even until 2010!
And before you say "Well the community will do it!" I'm afraid that's a lie because of the "busted shitter" problem. You see everyone wants to be the artist, everyone wants to create new things, nobody wants to be the guy that cleans and fixes the busted shitters which is why they just don't get fixed. look at any GPL OS bug tracker and see how many bugs over 2 years are there, and then realize that don't count all the ones where the devs decided they just don't give a shit and put "will not fix" and threw it in the trash. To fix the above problems you are gonna need skilled developers to dedicate YEARS of their lives to fixing them, nobody is gonna do that, at least not in great enough numbers to matter. This is one of the reasons why communism failed, as it got so bad that they had to order soldiers to do "potato duty" simply to get the lousy jobs done. The above jobs are boring, thankless, time sucking, and overall about as fun as fixing a turd filled shitter overflowing into the floor. Would you go fix that kind of mess in a stranger's house for nothing? of course not, its simply human nature.
So the sooner the community accepts either they have to change their current model as GPL doesn't work in this use case or simply gives up on the desktop frankly the happier everyone will be. TINSTAAFL folks and while RMS may be truly happy squatting at MIT and not owning anything more than the clothe
Actually there IS a magic bullet, its called "get rid of sin crimes" and treat adults like adults. The late William F Buckley said a perfect explanation once, sorry if i don't get the quote exact but it went like this: "If I put a bottle on a table that says poison and has a skull and crossbones on it and i tell you 'this is poison, it will destroy your health, destroy your family, before it finally destroys you' and you push me out of the way and gulp the bottle straight down? Well stupid you frankly are too ignorant to live! why should I spend billions to build cages to put you in and armed guards around the bottle because you are too dumb not to drink it?"
Gambling, prostitution and drugs should ALL be legal and regulated, no different than booze is now. Personal responsibility means being able to choose stupidly as well as smartly and if you removed non violent offenders out of the system you wouldn't have this problem...
But here is the REAL truth, ugly and sick such as it is, the elite have figured out how to make money off those poor by locking them up, both by privatizing the prison system and with prison labor, not to mention all the traditionally mafia style rackets like concessions Prisons and the prison system are billion dollar businesses and they give the elite the added bonus of stripping the rights away from a large section of the minorities so it is a win/win for them.
Well right up until we have an Arab spring, which i figure we will have in the next decade, right around when unemployment hits 50% and the crime shoots through the roof because all these millions of uneducated poor can't feed themselves because all the factories were sent to Asia and all the manual labor given to illegals. Somehow I doubt power will be transferred as nicely as it was in the old USSR, it'll probably be more like Libya which with the amount of firepower the USA has spread out all over the country should give anyone nightmares. But hopefully when the final round has been fired we will go back to a more strict constitutional government where people are treated like adults again and the corps aren't allowed to become destructive monsters like they are now.
Yeah, those are called "public pretenders" and are about as useful as tits on a boar hog. look up the conviction rates under public pretenders, last i checked it was over 96%! Hell you'd be better off defending yourself as i hear that's only a 92% conviction rate. A public pretender's answer to anything and everything is plea, no matter what. frankly i wouldn't trust one to represent my dog.
Well there is that rumor that valve is gonna put out a "steam box" which will basically be a stripped down OS just running steam on COTS hardware, but hell if you are gonna do that why not just slap yourself together a dirt cheap HTPC? The AMD AM3 and AM3+ chips are really cheap, with the Athlon X3 at $70 and if you catch the sales the Thuban X6 has been selling at tiger for $109 and the boards for those are again dirt cheap with nice Asrock boards for around $40, you can pick up brand new HD4850 cards at geeks for $51 now and while not the top of the heap anymore they are still insanely powerful, finally add the HDD of your choice and Win 7 HP and tada!
Or if you'd like even easier here is a 6 core monster for $320 and I can say as i own that chip that it kicks major ass both in gaming and transcoding, just slap that HD4850 I mentioned and Win 7 along with your choice of wireless controller (X360, PS3 style, flightstick, etc) and you have a machine that will not only kick some major ass gaming but will do just about any job you can come up with, be it streaming, downloading, office work, media tank, websurfing, you name it it'll do it for many many years to come.
In the end that's why i gave up on the consoles and went full time PC, sure the consoles have some nice specs when they first come out but they are so DRMed that frankly they quickly become useless for anything but consuming approved content in approved ways. My 2.5GHz P4 that I was gaming on a decade ago is now my mom's netbox where she plays her match 3 games and shops, the 2008 era Pentium duals my nephews were gaming on I recently sold for enough I was able to upgrade them to AMD triple cores (both I was able to successfully unlock) so they'll be good for awhile and I have no doubt the most I'll have to do with this AMD 6 core is change out the GPU for another $60 card in a year or two when the 6850s are as cheap as the 4850s are now. That's the nice thing about PCs, when they are no longer powerful enough for gaming they can be re-purposed and continue to be useful. In fact my very first gamer PC, a 100MHz Pentium, is actually still running 5 days a week at a lumber mill. they bought it and my 233Mhz to run an old C&C lathe that only runs on an ISA card. You'd be surprised how long a PC will last with just a little care.