You asked the parent which is me so I'll answer...Linux? Pointless because as you so rightly pointed out its the kiss of death at retail because without an ABI I have yet to see an in place upgrade not shit on drivers, be it LTS to LTS or regular to regular, now EG/ST? Totally different story as literally I can check my emails and fire off a reply before Win 7 has even loaded the WinFlag and that is coming out of hibernate, I can check my email,load up my tunes, and begin checking out books in the appstore before Win 7 starts from cold boot. Its about SPEED and ease of use. no CLI, no "update foo broke my drivers" bullshit, no muss, no fuss, its all intuitive, its all simple, its all clicky clicky easy. Oh and it does have a Google docs style app that makes opening and editing Word docs simple and again MUCH faster than Windows.
In the end what this does is give netbooks and laptops (and desktops BTW, there are a few models that come with it) the ability to have cell phone speeds without having to buy crazy expensive and failure high SSDs and THAT is a selling point. You'd be surprised how many EEE netbooks i've sold simply by showing people how quickly I can be working on the web from cold start, i can literally check my email in under 14 seconds from cold start. This adds a hell of a lot of value to my netbook because anywhere at anytime I can just pop the lid and i'm connected BAM! And its so intuitive I had my mom using it in under 30 seconds, all i needed to show her was "where is the mouse?"...its called a trackpad ma. Once she knew how to move the mouse that was it, she was checking out ebooks and looking on amazon for her favorite authors as it has built in kindle support.
You should give a EEE with EG a try Billy, as a retailer I know of every complaint you've mentioned and wouldn't sell Linux on even these offlease machines simply because of the high driver failure rates but EG? its an easy sale as you lose nothing while gaining speed.
Wow, thanks, I so rarely get to use this in a sentence...WHOOSH! Which part of "Xandros had ALREADY ABANDONED EEE OS" is not clear? By the time that the MSFT ad came out Xandros was ALREADY 3 kernels BEHIND and hadn't had so much as a single package update, not a single one. Now for the third time, why would Asus put an UNSUPPORTED OS on their shiny new netbooks? Answer? they wouldn't that would be stupid and raise their support costs.
And how about reading your own link? again asus is talking about an OS that was ABANDONED. Which means they either had to 1.-Fork the entire system and become their own distro, no small task as Xandros had many proprietary bits that were NOT GPL, or 2.-Quit selling Linux.....hmmm...not really a hard choice, is it? Spend untold millions or simply stop selling an unsupported product. you'll also note that MSI was talking about THEIR offering which was Ubuntu. Did you read MY link perhaps? then you'd know that Dell sells less than a dozen ubuntu units they can't even get enough QA to keep the drivers from puking so they had to go with #1, well guess what? try asking what Dell "makes" on Ubuntu, I dare you. I've tried, several reporters have tried, they all got nothing, why? Because DELL IS LOSING MONEY ON EVERY UNIT because they have to pay their own dev team. do you think they can make that up on volume?
Again the fanboi perception bubble rears its ugly head, you have 2 companies LOSING money, you have one with an abandoned OS, an abandoned OS that mind you was killed by a boycott BY the community because "ZOMFG they signed a deal with M$ ZOMFG!" so that one was entirely the community's fault. Now you tell me Mr Smart guy how EXACTLY is two companies losing money on every sale and one that has a dead OS considered a "success"? If that is what the community considers success then no wonder its lower than the margin for error in most polls. hell even on/. it has less than 2%, and this is a supposedly FOSS heavy site!
In the end its NOT a conspiracy, or some mythical money truck, in point of fact MSFT actually RAISED their OEM prices by more than 40% with Win 7, in part because they saw that Linux really wasn't a threat, its simply business 101: You don't give the customer what they want they'll go to someone who will, that's it. That's all. its so simple if it was a bug it would have bit you. Don't you think in a dead economy we retailers would LIKE to have an alternative? Sadly your product is a good decade behind everyone else. Sure it looks pretty, when it runs. but your driver model is crap, pulseaudio is a bad joke and is less stable in every way compared to ALSA, both major DEs threw out years of work and bug fixes to go bling bling city when everyone was going for low resource devices, its been one clusterfuck after another with the Linux community. Hell I could go on all day just listing the things that are wrong, but why bother? Nobody ever listens. I've written articles for LinuxInsider pointing out simple and cheap things the community could do to make Linux more attractive, know what I was told? "That sounds nice, you should do that"...right, because I have nothing better to do than go get a master's in programming to completely fix an OS I can't charge for, yeah no thanks. in the end mark my words just like Vista Win 8 WILL bomb and you will GAIN NOTHING. If that doesn't smack the community witha cluebat frankly they are too damned dense to worry about.
I had the same thing happen to me only it was a 16 year old kid wearing all black! Man you want to talk about nearly having a coronary, that stretch of road didn't have lights (kinda like TFA) and by the time my headlights illuminated the kid i literally had seconds to swerve. I pulled off at the next exit and called the cops and one of the cops stopped to thank me, he said the kid had gotten some bad dope of some kind and literally didn't know where he was at so if I wouldn't have called them when i did (and it hadn't been a slow night) he most likely would have died.
I'm all for saving money but there are just too many ways this can end horribly. try coming to rural AR sometime, where many of our roads don't have lights for long stretches, and see how many more fatalities there are. All it takes is as you said a board with nails (actually hit one at 60 once and it shredded the tire, if I hadn't been a good driver i could have flipped and as it was it ended up with nearly a dozen cars broken in less than 2 blocks thanks to one board and tight traffic) or an animal or some kid and WHAM! you have a recipe for disaster. Surely there are better ways to save money than to gamble with lives like that.
THAT is not the problem, the problem is with the chip design my 2.6GHz Thuban will most likely stomp the dogshit out of it in most of the benchmarks. You see basically AMD has their own netburst on their hands. As most remember a 3.6GHz netburst P4 can get the dogshit stomped out of it by a 2.2GHz Intel Core arch simply because of IPC, or instructions per clock.
Now what AMD did wrong as several things, first they are basically lying out their ass and trying to sell dual cores as quads, quads as octcores, so naturally the comparisons to actual quads and octacores is gonna suck, again my Thuban will stomp it simply because it has 6 ACTUAL cores as opposed to 4 real cores and 4 virtual ones. in fact if one disables every other core in a FX chip then that chip WILL get faster IPC, why? Because all the other core is is hardware assisted hyperthreading and it is sucking the shit out of problem number 2, which is they gimped the living hell out of the cache. As everyone probably knows AMD chips usually can get by with less cache than an intel chip, but only to a point, see how much more lousy a Sempron is than an Athlon simply because the cache is too gimped. because of the hardware assisted HT they have a lousy 16KB! Yes you read that right, 16KB per core of L1 cache. that means older programs or ones that don't hit the L3 are gonna be gimped right out the gate. Look up the reviews for the FX4100 and see how the reviewers are shocked that putting the new core design against the previous Deneb and even with a 1GHz speed boost it was still getting its clock cleaned and only by OCing the living shit out of the cores (over 4GHz) were they able to get it to pull ahead of Deneb, which brings me to 3, they made the pipes too long in search of speed. I guess Intel having the crown as being an OCing monster got to them because they made the pipes MUCH longer than Stars arch in the hopes of high clock speeds, but as we saw with netburst having long pipes means MUCH bigger risk of a stall and much lower IPC as a result. again this is why the BD was stomped by Stars as the longer pipes meant that only in certain specialized jobs could the chip shine.
In the end as someone who has been selling AMD exclusively since the Intel bribery and compiler rigging came out this chip is junk and i just can't sell it. they are trying to get more than quad core money for a dual core with HT thus killing AMD's "Bang for the buck" and the killing of the AM3 line when only a single chip was needed to keep the entire line shows their incredible shortsightedness and a company with no real leadership. A single 95w Thuban could have kept the entire AM3 line alive while they worked on BD/PD, all that came out perfect would be X6, any with bad cores would be Phenom X4/X3, any with bad cache would have been Athlon X4/X3. this would have kept not only the entire Am3 line alive but also would have given value hunters and the DIYers on board as they could be buying X3s and X4s and hoping to unlock an X6 and the X6 is frankly kick ass for gaming and transcoding thus giving them a good chip to keep the gamers on a budget and AMD fans happy.
You just can't get around one fundamental fact...the BD/PD core is really a server chip, it excels in server roles. the problem with this is server roles are the complete and polar opposite to what the average user of a desktop or laptop actually DOES with their machine and in the jobs that home users and SMBs have a PC or laptop for the BD/PD design is a real dog, hell I'd compare it to a Pentium 4 but sadly that wouldn't be fair to the P4, its actually more like a netburst Celeron in that lack of cache has gimped the shit out of the chip. Look up the benches for the BD folks and remember they are expecting ONLY about a 15%-20% gain. Now when the chips are having to be OCed like mad to keep up with the last gen offering, much less the Intel chips, do you REALLY think a lousy 20% increase to such a flawed design is gonna help?
And never forget you are ultimately paying for a service and if they are hindering your ability to learn by crippling the network they are providing a poor service and need to be called on it. It took me awhile to get that to sink in with my oldest but now when a teacher isn't doing their job (one gave them a test on material he never covered because he went on vacation during the period he was suppose to cover it and didn't bother to tell the TA) or something is hampering their ability to get the most out of the class he will get as many of his classmates as he can together and they go to the dean. not only has several things been changed but he was put on the Dean's list for his leadership ability.
Its like that old saying "There are sheep and there are wolves" and too many simply are afraid to 'rock the boat' or complain even when something is causing them grief. i bet if he organizes his fellow students he CAN get these rules changed, they are paying for the network after all.
Thank you for that brilliant suggestion. is it really so much to ask to give us a little overview, why it was created, who its targeted at, why they think its better than the other guys, is that really so much to ask for? For a good example look at Vector Linux which is actually a damned nice distro. it says what their main goals are (speed, performance and stability) why they think its better (keep it simple, keep it small and let the end user decide) and gives a very nice overview of the whole thing. if you want to know more there are plenty of links, its all nice and easy to read. Hell even their download page gives a nice simple summary of each version and who it is for.
Really guys, with over 600 distros on distrowatch asking for a little "why should we care" page really isn't asking for a lot. it would take maybe an hour to cook up and could allow someone to quickly decide if the OS is right for them.
Thank you. Notcie how I get modded down for daring to point out the obvious? this is a "how do I double click" level of question and THIS makes Ask Slashdot? Jesus tap Dancing Christ as I said a whole minute on the Ubuntu forums and they would have told them the preferred tool for that OS! What's next, how do I use synaptic to install stuff? This is eHow level noob crap, not something that should be on ask slashdot. this isn't even a slightly interesting problem, its first year noob shit that Google could solve in under 60 seconds.
Do you think it was some magical conspiracy? Did you forget they had to do THE SAME THING with Vista and it caused their own OS to be hobbled with broken drivers for a year? Do you think that made them happy? Nope it was the same shit that caused them to change driver APIs on Vista, its because somebody found a "Holy shit!" bug and they didn't have time to patch it before release. remember gates had spent 3 quarters of a billion dollars on the buildup for Win95, Hiring everyone from the actors of Friends to the Rolling Stones, can you imagine the fallout if the big day came and no product because it was too buggy? Shiiit, they'd have never lived it down.
As for the deal with the US Gov they undercut WP by 40%, its called competition. The US Gov gave them a chance to beat the offer, they refused. i guess they didn't think the business was worth the cut. And PLEASE don't cite Groklaw, after PJ said, I swear to God, that "Psystar was a MSFT attempt to destroy FOSS" I think anything printed there should be looked at as about as reliable as above top Secret. She was sane during the whole SCO case but once that didn't destroy her "enemy" she frankly lost it. look it up yourself, type "Psystar destroy FOSS" into Groklaw and I'm sure you'll find it. And I notice you didn't say shit about netscape? Smart move as even the former devs admit NS4 was shit on a crusty roll.
in the end it isn't some super sekret evil master plan that lets MSFT win, hell their current CEO isn't even smart enough to smell the fail surrounding their mobile "strategy", no in the end MSFT wins because they are the least stupid in a room full of dumbasses. Seriously the amount of boneheaded moves the competition does is just staggering? I won't blame LO for at least 2 years because they have to fix the bloated mess of code that Sun made but Sun COULD have taken the market, all they needed to do was make it lean while supporting MS Office 2k formats, instead they got slower and more bloated with every release and while Writer got all the love the other three just kind of sat there and they NEVER listened to businesses who told them again and again they needed an outlook replacement. Now we see Firefox numbers falling as they refuse to listen to users and play number version roulette GPL hasn't had a single quarter of gains in over 2 years, not since RMS got punked by tiVo and went too far with GPL V3, in the end you lose not because Microsoft is a genius but because the devs of the competition are about as swift as Forrest Gump. Seriously has nobody heard of a focus group? how about actually asking the people using the competition what they want in a product? anyone? Bueller?
Uhhh...your link shows Microsoft PAID FOR AN AD. Are you no longer allowed to pay for ads because FOSS wants to be "free as in beer"? And did you look at the date? Xandros had already stopped updating by that time. Again do you HONESTLY expect Asus to place an unsupported OS on their units? finally a little link of my own you might find interesting and a far more likely reason they quit carrying Linux, which is a 400% higher return rate for Linux than Windows on netbooks. We are talking about a unit where the average profit per unit is $6-$8. At margins that razor thin literally more than a handful of returns can make the whole line unprofitable. Have you EVER sold anything at retail? If you'd have you'd know high returns are the kiss of death.
This is what never fails to amaze me about FOSS zealots and their perception bubbles. More people STEAL WINDOWS than have EVER used your product, even though your product is free, doesn't that whack you upside the head with a cluebat? Here it is 2012 and you STILL refuse to ask the single most important question: What are my competitors (and it is a competition) doing right that I'm doing wrong? Ask the retailers, we'll be happy to tell you. your driver model is horribly broken and like something from 15 years ago, your sound system is the buggiest POS I've ever seen with updates to seemingly unrelated systems causing Pulseaudio to puke and give silence or static, you still have figured out how to get a machine to wake from sleep, NONE of your devs follow the UI conventions, some use the Windows conventions, some use Mac conventions, some old school Unix which makes the whole experience disjointed. Basically the whole system feels like a bunch of different crap thrown together by people who never talk to each other....which is pretty much what it is. Hell even one of the largest OEMs on the planet Dell has to run their own repos because they can't even get enough QA from the so called "user friendly distro" to keep the drivers from puking, even though they sell less than a dozen models!
Waste your mod points all you want but this is a truth that needs to be spoken, it is THIS, this right here, that keeps Linux in last place. Somewhere along the way making F/LOSS accessible to the masses was thrown to the wayside in favor of the "FLOSSie club" as I call it, where You must prove your "worthy" of using the gifts the great Torvalds and RMS have bestowed upon thee. In this club anything that makes F/LOSS more useful, easier, and friendlier? why that is bad, its "rampant consumerism" or "dumbing down" and anything that makes Linux more complex, obtuse, or fiddly is "smarter" and "more powerful". I have actually been told by a member of the FLOSSie club when i pointed out that Linux was too CLI heavy for my consumers "to make them embrace the power of CLI" like its the Goddamn force!
A wise person once said "You know what the definition of insanity is? Its doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result" and that is EXACTLY what the community has been doing. Insane release schedule, broken drivers, none of that matter because the users will embrace the power of CLI and learn "the Unix way" even though Unix was NEVER supposed to be a consumer OS and died out over a decade ago!
In the end its not a conspiracy, its not magic, hell Microsoft is being run by a bumbling idiot with Apple envy and you STILL can't get ahead! Have you seen Win 8? Its a fricking bad joke and you STILL won't gain any share, people will pirate Win 7 instead, why? Its because you DO NOT LISTEN TO US. You don't listen to the consumers, to the retailers, nor the OEMs, its a bunch of nerds scratching itches and having a "I'm moar leet!" wankfest. You're a good decade behind your competition, here we are in the great XP dieoff in a recession and NOBODY, not Best Buy
I hope they don't have any animals....or people who wear dark clothing that cross the road...or anything that can fall off the back of a truck. Boy the different ways this can go bad.
Citation please on " removal of Linux from Asus Eee"? Because as someone who has hung around the EEE forums for awhile i Googled that and only found people asking how to remove Linux from a EEE, no MSFT there. What I heard is that Xandros simply ran out of funds and couldn't continue development, look on their website or distrowatch and you'll see their last release was in 2009. Can't blame Asus for not wanting to sell a unit with an abandoned OS on it, can you?
Oh please! learn your damned history...puppies, geez. MS Office became the de facto standard because what WAS the former de facto standard, that was WordPerfect, thought their shite didn't have an aroma and therefor put out a lame as hell DOS port for Windows which puked and died more than it ran and since it was really designed for a single tasking OS pretty much anything and everything could get its memory stomped on by WP and crash, including the OS. Word back then was fairly basic but it DID run and didn't chew the documents all to pieces when it crapped itself. BTW the original Star Office was released about this time and for its first couple of releases was a real pig with regards to memory was what you really did NOT want on the RAM starved machines of the day.
So learn your history kid, many times MSFT has ended up winning not by trickery, not by skill, but simply because their competition made some seriously boneheaded move and MSFT was able to capitalize on their mistake. Two great examples are the above WP and Netscape which frankly put out a giant rotting turd known as Netscape 4 which was so bloated and soooo buggy frankly anybody could have beaten it just by coming up with something that didn't crash constantly.
MS Office is now de facto because despite the myriad of boneheaded moves by the company they have been pretty good about leaving the Office guys alone instead of pushing for "vertical integration synergy" and all that other PHB crap. because of this I can open docs from 1997 in office 2K7 and they look fine and save without puking, try that with a OO.o 1.0 file and find out how quickly LO chokes on that old crap.
You forgot 4) Trying to edit and share files with the new generations is a mess. What I mean by new generations is those that use the ribbon. The ribbon, or as i like to call it "The divider of young and old" as the young love it and the old hate it, has caused folks to become a little more...shall we say artsy fartsy? I personally blame that quick mouse over preview that lets folks go through every combo in less than a minute.
So what you get is funky fonts with headers and footers and everything else they think looks slick. Try opening, editing, and saving back into.doc using LO and you are gonna get word salad as it does NOT like all the new Office artsy fartsy crap. this is fine if its Suzy sending a recipe to her mom, she can always tone it down and send again. if this doc could mean the difference between a job or a contract and not? Well you can't afford to have the thing mangled as it just doesn't look professional, it looks mickey mouse.
Don't get me wrong, I think LO has made great strides and does have its place, for example all home users that come through my shop get LO if they don't have MS Office because for the kinds of things home users are doing, writing down recipes or little Billy working on a paper he is gonna have to print? works beautifully there, no complaints at all. But as people go more nuts with fonts and bling bling crap LO really doesn't have an easy go of it. Sure if you hand it a standard TNR font with nothing fancy it does great, but once the bling starts getting added its chances of rendering and saving correctly go waaaay down, at least from what i saw.
You are forgetting folks are getting tired of spiraling debt and the teabaggers have won enough seats to become real thorns in the old party reps. Mark my words though none of it matters as we WILL have a nasty false flag pulled on us in the next 12 months, something that I'm betting will make the twin towers look like a bad joke, something they can use to lock down the net and throw dissenters into camps. Why is that? simple the Federal Reserve charter expires in 2013 and they know with all the hatred the people have for the fed and their little backdoor bullshit the odds of a grassroots group NOT blocking their moneymaking scam is nil...unless no grassroots can be formed. Did you know billions "Went missing" between the end of Dubya and the start of Obama? Wouldn't be surprised if that has been going on for decades. the fed is the biggest moneymaking scam those at the top have EVER had, don't expect them to give that up without a fight.
Frankly whether NASA gets any more monies will be the least of our worries, my guess is they will call in the Greek loans to cause a collapse and that tied in with a war in Iran causing gas to shoot through the roof will destroy the EU. Then with Americans scared that $100 bill in their pocket is gonna be worth 50c they'll be able to ram through every jackbooted dream they've ever had, just like PATRIOT and NDAA. Mark my words, its coming. Be sure to have plenty of non perishable food, things other than cash for barter, and a gun or two probably wouldn't be a bad idea, especially if you live in a city because if they make gas hit $9 a gallon thanks to a war with Iran food will get scarce there.
See? This is what irritates me about these TFAs as nobody explains nothing! they all just assume we know all there is to know about this OS so their little terse changelog will give us actually valuable information. if all they want is users THAT familiar with it, why bother posting it to/. at all? Won't they know when the next release is?
So I say there should be a new rule, a "Why the fuck should we care" rule, after all there is literally thousands of pieces of software released every day, probably a dozen niche distros a week, if they don't give us a reason why we should care then why should we? if they don't include a link with some basic reasoning, this is why the OS exists, this is its goals, this is what we think makes it better than foo, this is how it compares to bar, THEN we'd have a reason to care! Otherwise this is another "The Phantom menace' where we are sitting here going "Huh, what? Who? Why?" because they haven't even bothered to give us a reason to care! if your distro maintainers are too arrogant or too lazy to even provide a simple "Why we should care" page then frankly they don't deserve the free advertising as it would take...what? maybe an hour tops? Give us a reason to care or just go away!
It is also included with AMD netbooks so its not Intel only either as it came with my EEE 1215B. its not bad but I have a question: Dear Linux community, you guys WANT to gain share...right? You WANT people to actually use Linux, to spread the wealth of FOSS software, to have more and more people have real choices...yes? Am I right?
Then why in the hell are you not getting behind ExpressGate/Splashtop? Its fucking brilliant! The most innovative thing I've seen come from FOSS and you are just ignoring it? WTF? Why aren't you sending emails and letters and demanding all OEMs include this wonderful thing? For those that haven't tried it here is how it works: you have two buttons, one starts regular Windows, the other ExpressGate which we'll call EG. Now you push the Windows button you are looking at a bare minimum 45 seconds and that is if you used hibernate, with EG? 6 seconds cold boot. Now lets talk battery life, Win 7 HP X64 gets right at 6 hours on my 6 cell, if I use Brazos tweaker to lower the voltage I can squeeze it to 6:45, now how does that compare to EG? Over 7 hours with no tweaking. Now lets talk intuitive, if you know Windows you know Win 7, the search box is a big help but otherwise it hasn't really changed much. EG has a top row of tabs where everything is VERY logically laid out, you got games, video, audio, the appstore (yes they have an App store and its nice), and system. hell my mother could work this thing. it can also access media on your hard drive if you wish so you can still have all those tunes and videos you may have on your Windows partition in EG but again with better battery life as it seems to load as much as it can in memory and then shut down the HDD, this of course is smart as RAM takes the same power empty or full.
So here is your shot community, quit trying to rip off Windows (or more often the Macintosh) and simply route AROUND Windows instead. This is a way that every OEM could supply a FOSS OS to the masses WITHOUT the hassles of dual booting WITHOUT any "update foo broke my drivers" crap, hell you don't even really need CLI at all unless you want to script something. all you need to do is port plenty of apps to run with the EG/ST UI and pressure OEMs which frankly shouldn't be a hard sell as its a pretty simple setup, a little ROM, a little HDD space for extra apps, and a button. That's it! It probably costs less than 50c to add that feature to the bulletpoints on a unit. So C'mon Linux community, you finally have a winner if you would just step up. it has everything users want, its fast, its intuitive, it gets great battery life, its easy.
He's an M$ Ninja!" citation please? because it seems to me he is saying that if XP had it 10 years ago in all likelihood Ubuntu already HAS the tools the guys needs, he just hasn't bothered to look for them. You know most OSes don't have things listed in categories like "The thing you need to use to sync all teh stuff" so one generally does have to do a teeny tiny bit of fricking research. I mean ask Slashdot was supposed to be for HARD questions, what's next? How do I keep from getting pizza sauce on my shirt? 10 seconds with Google would have given this guy a dozen choices! hell a whole minute on the Ubuntu forums would have easily given him a dozen more, and who better than the guys that help folks with that OS?
I'm sorry but its a lame ass question and just because it has your favorite OS in it don't make it any less lame, it would be lame if he'd have asked about Windows, OSX, PCLOS, BSD, all of these answers are 10 seconds in Google. We should be getting GOOD questions in ask/., things like how to deal with thorny security issues without becoming a BOFH or how to make sure your network topology has the least bottlenecks, something interesting, this is "I'm too fucking lazy to ask Google,would you do it for me?". This entire thread should simple have a "let me Google that for you" link and call it a day. Its THAT stupid.
Actually I was originally FOR ChromeOS as i thought it was a brilliant idea for clueless home users. An OS that will protect them by basically running everything on the server and thus get rid of local exploits. As for Chrome, why should we care exactly? Unless you are running XP (or Linux) you have low rights mode which by default has lower permissions than users which makes it pretty damned hard to infect a machine anyway. i know as i tried to infect a machine that I planeed to wipe anyway and went to every topsite and crapsite i could find and...nothing, zip nada squat.
So its a thing for software that doesn't need it except for old OSes or niche OSes...wow, great, thanks.
Why not use one of the bazillion free download managers? I assume by your sig you don't use Windows but I assume Linux has similar software.
As for TFA, how does this compare to the other major OSes, like OSX, Win 7, Ubuntu, or even PC-BSD? What advantages does it give over the others? What are its best features? Why would you recommend this over other OSes? This is why i hate announcements like TFA because they don't give someone who doesn't use the OS a reason why we should care or try it.
I'm sorry but you are wrong and here is why: We have learned more about our system from a single NASA probe than from 40 years of/kicks on reverb/ "Meatbags in spaaaace!"/kills pedal/ because we meatbags are incredibly fragile creatures that have an insane amount of crap we have to have brought along with us, things like food, water, toilets, a place to sleep, all of this adds weight and with engines that frankly aren't really any more advanced than the old Saturn rockets its INSANELY expensive per pound, and because of the first reason we are pretty much stuck at LEO and finally with the entire right wing signing Grover Norquist's "No new taxes on teh rich EVAR!" pledge good luck doing anything about the debt we are drowning in which means no more money for NASA, hell look at how many are having a shitfit at Obama calling to LOWER corporate taxes simply because he wants to close the loopholes that give companies like GE billions in return for nothing.
So we have to accept some things 1.- The NASA budget will NEVER be back up to the glory days of the cold war, 2.- With an economy that will most likely be finally killed outright when gas hits $5 a gallon we won't be able to raise the budget for NASA and 3.- it will cost billions to get us a new rocket thanks to sen Porkus and Congressman kickbackman wanting to "bring home the bacon" by having some piece of it built in their district and they will vigorously cockblock anything they can't get their snouts in.
In the end we really have only one choice, and that is stay on the course NASA is on and concentrate on probes. Sure we can bum rides with the Russians but that is only a band aid as their tech is getting long in the tooth too (Soyuz is what? 40+ years old?) and all it will take is a few more massive fails and they may end up grounded for good. So our only real choice is to continue to get the absolute most bang for the buck we can and that is small and light probes we can launch on Atlas and Delta rockets. Maybe if we had a congress that gave a shit about the country as a whole instead of their own enrichment we might actually be able to do something, but what are the odds of that happening? About the same as you winning the lotto while being struck by lightning.
At least have the balls to make an account, and faggot is the best you can do? hell I've been told I live in a sekret warren under redmond where i subtly manipulate the masses into thinking MSFT is the product of choice by insulting them along with everyone else...still haven't figured out how insults make me FOR something? maybe its an underpants gnome thing.
Oh and how can you NOT laugh your ass off at MSFT after seeing Windows 8? I mean have you seen the thing? ZOMFG! They might as well just call it "WinPad.NET Live Zune eXPerience 3.0!" for all the levels of Apple envy and fail built in.
Finally its kinda sad the ONLY insult I get is a really lame one from a Softie AC, I'd have thought the batshit FOSSies would have been weaving one of their great 'Its a conspiracy by that other OS!" Voldemort syndrome nuttiness or at least get a ragging from a hipster Appleite or a BSDHead, but i bet they probably thought it was a compliment that i mentioned them at all. Oh and did I mention Apple used some of their code once? I swear its true, it was in like 1992 or something and Steve was a little high on some bad tofu but he totally did! I Swear!
Did you know its kind of pointless as ChromeOS is a giant fail? Oh while I'm sure the OS is just fine if its anything like Android, the problem is that the ODMs slapped it on underpowered hardware and then slapped a "ZOMFG! What are they thinking?" pricetag on it! Hell they wanted nearly $550 for the Samsung? its a fricking Atom! You could buy either a full size laptop OR a MUCH nicer netbook for much less and actually have more functionality?
ChromeOS might have had a chance if they'd only known what to do with it, it should have been the OS of a $150 ARM dual core netbook. Google should have sold it at cost with the data mining locked in so the user couldn't change it and then raked in the cash as users would happily give up their privacy for a sub $200 laptop, instead they picked OEMs that tried to jack the living hell out of the price so badly you'd have thought it was made by a certain fruit company.
Finally sadly security can't be solved by tech, well not unless you can cook up something that shocks the shit out of the user and says "WTF are you doing? Stop that!" when they do something incredibly stupid which is often. You can get the average user to give you more than enough info for identity theft simply by offering a drawing for a free iPad. No matter how many times I warn people that TINSTAAFL you'd be amazed at how many will run any executable, fill out any form, jump through any hoop for the chance at 'free' stuff. They can lock down the OS all they want. Its the data that's worth money now, the OS? not so much.
Really? That's a damned shame because you can, well at least you COULD with AMD enjoy hellish speed boosts by getting one of the lower chips to start with and then moving up as the prices dropped. the box i'm typing on started with a dual core 7550 (which is now in my landlady's PC) then I went up to a Phenom II 925 quad (now in my youngest boy's PC) before finally getting a Thuban X6. With each upgrade I got a hell of a speed boost and since I was able to keep everything else, like the 8gb of DDR 2 800 I got when it was cheap I was able to upgrade the machine for a hell of a lot cheaper than it would cost to buy a new box each time. I saved enough that with this last upgrade i went ahead and bought a crossfire board so simply add a second GPU when mine starts to lag to get even more life between replacements. Personally I bet this X6 will probably last me until the end of the decade unless some breakthrough allows them to code for more than 4 chips easily.
anyway next time before chunking you might want to try Starmicro as they are the go to place for cheap chips. they go all the way back to socket 423 on the Intel side and slot A on the AMD side so there pretty much isn't a desktop out there you can't give a speed boost with a starmicro chip.
Hell ask the P2P guys because if there is anybody that has to balance craploads of connections its those guys. Look at how much overhead the first gen P2Ps used compared to now, with each version they get better at moving data without the connections getting overloaded. Give me somebody that has actually had to deal with the BS day to day than somebody that is writing a paper any day of the week. the trial by fire quickly weeds out the dumb ideas and you fix it or die.
The sad part is when it comes to Appleites its damned hard to tell anymore. i thought when Jobs passed the RDF would die with him but if anything it has gotten stronger, maybe Cook snuck up on him and sucked out the RDF along with his soul which i hear is gonna be packaged in tiny bits for the iPhone 5. . Oh and just in case anyone thinks I'm picking on Apple let me pick on everyone else, wouldn't want anyone feeling left out ya know..."Do no evil" is "think different' for nerds and is just as pointless, MSFT is so lame they can't even come up with a slogan so allow me "Microsoft: We want to be Apple so bad it hurts" and of course Linux has a slogan but it takes 23 hours with CLI and a handwritten compiler to read it, and you have to be an expert in long PHP coding, did i miss anybody? Well maybe BSD, I'll give them a slogan too, just to show what a nice guy I am "BSD: you're so free you're free not to use it like everybody else. Did we mention Apple used some of our code once?"
But if you want to do sarcasm you got to add that touch of bitter to make it really good, its like nutmeg that way, just a pinch adds just the right flavor. if you are too nice about it without a sarcasm tag people can't tell if you are being sarcastic or have had a koolaid overdose.
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You asked the parent which is me so I'll answer...Linux? Pointless because as you so rightly pointed out its the kiss of death at retail because without an ABI I have yet to see an in place upgrade not shit on drivers, be it LTS to LTS or regular to regular, now EG/ST? Totally different story as literally I can check my emails and fire off a reply before Win 7 has even loaded the WinFlag and that is coming out of hibernate, I can check my email,load up my tunes, and begin checking out books in the appstore before Win 7 starts from cold boot. Its about SPEED and ease of use. no CLI, no "update foo broke my drivers" bullshit, no muss, no fuss, its all intuitive, its all simple, its all clicky clicky easy. Oh and it does have a Google docs style app that makes opening and editing Word docs simple and again MUCH faster than Windows.
In the end what this does is give netbooks and laptops (and desktops BTW, there are a few models that come with it) the ability to have cell phone speeds without having to buy crazy expensive and failure high SSDs and THAT is a selling point. You'd be surprised how many EEE netbooks i've sold simply by showing people how quickly I can be working on the web from cold start, i can literally check my email in under 14 seconds from cold start. This adds a hell of a lot of value to my netbook because anywhere at anytime I can just pop the lid and i'm connected BAM! And its so intuitive I had my mom using it in under 30 seconds, all i needed to show her was "where is the mouse?"...its called a trackpad ma. Once she knew how to move the mouse that was it, she was checking out ebooks and looking on amazon for her favorite authors as it has built in kindle support.
You should give a EEE with EG a try Billy, as a retailer I know of every complaint you've mentioned and wouldn't sell Linux on even these offlease machines simply because of the high driver failure rates but EG? its an easy sale as you lose nothing while gaining speed.
Wow, thanks, I so rarely get to use this in a sentence...WHOOSH! Which part of "Xandros had ALREADY ABANDONED EEE OS" is not clear? By the time that the MSFT ad came out Xandros was ALREADY 3 kernels BEHIND and hadn't had so much as a single package update, not a single one. Now for the third time, why would Asus put an UNSUPPORTED OS on their shiny new netbooks? Answer? they wouldn't that would be stupid and raise their support costs.
And how about reading your own link? again asus is talking about an OS that was ABANDONED. Which means they either had to 1.-Fork the entire system and become their own distro, no small task as Xandros had many proprietary bits that were NOT GPL, or 2.-Quit selling Linux.....hmmm...not really a hard choice, is it? Spend untold millions or simply stop selling an unsupported product. you'll also note that MSI was talking about THEIR offering which was Ubuntu. Did you read MY link perhaps? then you'd know that Dell sells less than a dozen ubuntu units they can't even get enough QA to keep the drivers from puking so they had to go with #1, well guess what? try asking what Dell "makes" on Ubuntu, I dare you. I've tried, several reporters have tried, they all got nothing, why? Because DELL IS LOSING MONEY ON EVERY UNIT because they have to pay their own dev team. do you think they can make that up on volume?
Again the fanboi perception bubble rears its ugly head, you have 2 companies LOSING money, you have one with an abandoned OS, an abandoned OS that mind you was killed by a boycott BY the community because "ZOMFG they signed a deal with M$ ZOMFG!" so that one was entirely the community's fault. Now you tell me Mr Smart guy how EXACTLY is two companies losing money on every sale and one that has a dead OS considered a "success"? If that is what the community considers success then no wonder its lower than the margin for error in most polls. hell even on /. it has less than 2%, and this is a supposedly FOSS heavy site!
In the end its NOT a conspiracy, or some mythical money truck, in point of fact MSFT actually RAISED their OEM prices by more than 40% with Win 7, in part because they saw that Linux really wasn't a threat, its simply business 101: You don't give the customer what they want they'll go to someone who will, that's it. That's all. its so simple if it was a bug it would have bit you. Don't you think in a dead economy we retailers would LIKE to have an alternative? Sadly your product is a good decade behind everyone else. Sure it looks pretty, when it runs. but your driver model is crap, pulseaudio is a bad joke and is less stable in every way compared to ALSA, both major DEs threw out years of work and bug fixes to go bling bling city when everyone was going for low resource devices, its been one clusterfuck after another with the Linux community. Hell I could go on all day just listing the things that are wrong, but why bother? Nobody ever listens. I've written articles for LinuxInsider pointing out simple and cheap things the community could do to make Linux more attractive, know what I was told? "That sounds nice, you should do that"...right, because I have nothing better to do than go get a master's in programming to completely fix an OS I can't charge for, yeah no thanks. in the end mark my words just like Vista Win 8 WILL bomb and you will GAIN NOTHING. If that doesn't smack the community witha cluebat frankly they are too damned dense to worry about.
I had the same thing happen to me only it was a 16 year old kid wearing all black! Man you want to talk about nearly having a coronary, that stretch of road didn't have lights (kinda like TFA) and by the time my headlights illuminated the kid i literally had seconds to swerve. I pulled off at the next exit and called the cops and one of the cops stopped to thank me, he said the kid had gotten some bad dope of some kind and literally didn't know where he was at so if I wouldn't have called them when i did (and it hadn't been a slow night) he most likely would have died.
I'm all for saving money but there are just too many ways this can end horribly. try coming to rural AR sometime, where many of our roads don't have lights for long stretches, and see how many more fatalities there are. All it takes is as you said a board with nails (actually hit one at 60 once and it shredded the tire, if I hadn't been a good driver i could have flipped and as it was it ended up with nearly a dozen cars broken in less than 2 blocks thanks to one board and tight traffic) or an animal or some kid and WHAM! you have a recipe for disaster. Surely there are better ways to save money than to gamble with lives like that.
THAT is not the problem, the problem is with the chip design my 2.6GHz Thuban will most likely stomp the dogshit out of it in most of the benchmarks. You see basically AMD has their own netburst on their hands. As most remember a 3.6GHz netburst P4 can get the dogshit stomped out of it by a 2.2GHz Intel Core arch simply because of IPC, or instructions per clock.
Now what AMD did wrong as several things, first they are basically lying out their ass and trying to sell dual cores as quads, quads as octcores, so naturally the comparisons to actual quads and octacores is gonna suck, again my Thuban will stomp it simply because it has 6 ACTUAL cores as opposed to 4 real cores and 4 virtual ones. in fact if one disables every other core in a FX chip then that chip WILL get faster IPC, why? Because all the other core is is hardware assisted hyperthreading and it is sucking the shit out of problem number 2, which is they gimped the living hell out of the cache. As everyone probably knows AMD chips usually can get by with less cache than an intel chip, but only to a point, see how much more lousy a Sempron is than an Athlon simply because the cache is too gimped. because of the hardware assisted HT they have a lousy 16KB! Yes you read that right, 16KB per core of L1 cache. that means older programs or ones that don't hit the L3 are gonna be gimped right out the gate. Look up the reviews for the FX4100 and see how the reviewers are shocked that putting the new core design against the previous Deneb and even with a 1GHz speed boost it was still getting its clock cleaned and only by OCing the living shit out of the cores (over 4GHz) were they able to get it to pull ahead of Deneb, which brings me to 3, they made the pipes too long in search of speed. I guess Intel having the crown as being an OCing monster got to them because they made the pipes MUCH longer than Stars arch in the hopes of high clock speeds, but as we saw with netburst having long pipes means MUCH bigger risk of a stall and much lower IPC as a result. again this is why the BD was stomped by Stars as the longer pipes meant that only in certain specialized jobs could the chip shine.
In the end as someone who has been selling AMD exclusively since the Intel bribery and compiler rigging came out this chip is junk and i just can't sell it. they are trying to get more than quad core money for a dual core with HT thus killing AMD's "Bang for the buck" and the killing of the AM3 line when only a single chip was needed to keep the entire line shows their incredible shortsightedness and a company with no real leadership. A single 95w Thuban could have kept the entire AM3 line alive while they worked on BD/PD, all that came out perfect would be X6, any with bad cores would be Phenom X4/X3, any with bad cache would have been Athlon X4/X3. this would have kept not only the entire Am3 line alive but also would have given value hunters and the DIYers on board as they could be buying X3s and X4s and hoping to unlock an X6 and the X6 is frankly kick ass for gaming and transcoding thus giving them a good chip to keep the gamers on a budget and AMD fans happy.
You just can't get around one fundamental fact...the BD/PD core is really a server chip, it excels in server roles. the problem with this is server roles are the complete and polar opposite to what the average user of a desktop or laptop actually DOES with their machine and in the jobs that home users and SMBs have a PC or laptop for the BD/PD design is a real dog, hell I'd compare it to a Pentium 4 but sadly that wouldn't be fair to the P4, its actually more like a netburst Celeron in that lack of cache has gimped the shit out of the chip. Look up the benches for the BD folks and remember they are expecting ONLY about a 15%-20% gain. Now when the chips are having to be OCed like mad to keep up with the last gen offering, much less the Intel chips, do you REALLY think a lousy 20% increase to such a flawed design is gonna help?
And never forget you are ultimately paying for a service and if they are hindering your ability to learn by crippling the network they are providing a poor service and need to be called on it. It took me awhile to get that to sink in with my oldest but now when a teacher isn't doing their job (one gave them a test on material he never covered because he went on vacation during the period he was suppose to cover it and didn't bother to tell the TA) or something is hampering their ability to get the most out of the class he will get as many of his classmates as he can together and they go to the dean. not only has several things been changed but he was put on the Dean's list for his leadership ability.
Its like that old saying "There are sheep and there are wolves" and too many simply are afraid to 'rock the boat' or complain even when something is causing them grief. i bet if he organizes his fellow students he CAN get these rules changed, they are paying for the network after all.
Thank you for that brilliant suggestion. is it really so much to ask to give us a little overview, why it was created, who its targeted at, why they think its better than the other guys, is that really so much to ask for? For a good example look at Vector Linux which is actually a damned nice distro. it says what their main goals are (speed, performance and stability) why they think its better (keep it simple, keep it small and let the end user decide) and gives a very nice overview of the whole thing. if you want to know more there are plenty of links, its all nice and easy to read. Hell even their download page gives a nice simple summary of each version and who it is for.
Really guys, with over 600 distros on distrowatch asking for a little "why should we care" page really isn't asking for a lot. it would take maybe an hour to cook up and could allow someone to quickly decide if the OS is right for them.
Thank you. Notcie how I get modded down for daring to point out the obvious? this is a "how do I double click" level of question and THIS makes Ask Slashdot? Jesus tap Dancing Christ as I said a whole minute on the Ubuntu forums and they would have told them the preferred tool for that OS! What's next, how do I use synaptic to install stuff? This is eHow level noob crap, not something that should be on ask slashdot. this isn't even a slightly interesting problem, its first year noob shit that Google could solve in under 60 seconds.
Do you think it was some magical conspiracy? Did you forget they had to do THE SAME THING with Vista and it caused their own OS to be hobbled with broken drivers for a year? Do you think that made them happy? Nope it was the same shit that caused them to change driver APIs on Vista, its because somebody found a "Holy shit!" bug and they didn't have time to patch it before release. remember gates had spent 3 quarters of a billion dollars on the buildup for Win95, Hiring everyone from the actors of Friends to the Rolling Stones, can you imagine the fallout if the big day came and no product because it was too buggy? Shiiit, they'd have never lived it down.
As for the deal with the US Gov they undercut WP by 40%, its called competition. The US Gov gave them a chance to beat the offer, they refused. i guess they didn't think the business was worth the cut. And PLEASE don't cite Groklaw, after PJ said, I swear to God, that "Psystar was a MSFT attempt to destroy FOSS" I think anything printed there should be looked at as about as reliable as above top Secret. She was sane during the whole SCO case but once that didn't destroy her "enemy" she frankly lost it. look it up yourself, type "Psystar destroy FOSS" into Groklaw and I'm sure you'll find it. And I notice you didn't say shit about netscape? Smart move as even the former devs admit NS4 was shit on a crusty roll.
in the end it isn't some super sekret evil master plan that lets MSFT win, hell their current CEO isn't even smart enough to smell the fail surrounding their mobile "strategy", no in the end MSFT wins because they are the least stupid in a room full of dumbasses. Seriously the amount of boneheaded moves the competition does is just staggering? I won't blame LO for at least 2 years because they have to fix the bloated mess of code that Sun made but Sun COULD have taken the market, all they needed to do was make it lean while supporting MS Office 2k formats, instead they got slower and more bloated with every release and while Writer got all the love the other three just kind of sat there and they NEVER listened to businesses who told them again and again they needed an outlook replacement. Now we see Firefox numbers falling as they refuse to listen to users and play number version roulette GPL hasn't had a single quarter of gains in over 2 years, not since RMS got punked by tiVo and went too far with GPL V3, in the end you lose not because Microsoft is a genius but because the devs of the competition are about as swift as Forrest Gump. Seriously has nobody heard of a focus group? how about actually asking the people using the competition what they want in a product? anyone? Bueller?
Uhhh...your link shows Microsoft PAID FOR AN AD. Are you no longer allowed to pay for ads because FOSS wants to be "free as in beer"? And did you look at the date? Xandros had already stopped updating by that time. Again do you HONESTLY expect Asus to place an unsupported OS on their units? finally a little link of my own you might find interesting and a far more likely reason they quit carrying Linux, which is a 400% higher return rate for Linux than Windows on netbooks. We are talking about a unit where the average profit per unit is $6-$8. At margins that razor thin literally more than a handful of returns can make the whole line unprofitable. Have you EVER sold anything at retail? If you'd have you'd know high returns are the kiss of death.
This is what never fails to amaze me about FOSS zealots and their perception bubbles. More people STEAL WINDOWS than have EVER used your product, even though your product is free, doesn't that whack you upside the head with a cluebat? Here it is 2012 and you STILL refuse to ask the single most important question: What are my competitors (and it is a competition) doing right that I'm doing wrong? Ask the retailers, we'll be happy to tell you. your driver model is horribly broken and like something from 15 years ago, your sound system is the buggiest POS I've ever seen with updates to seemingly unrelated systems causing Pulseaudio to puke and give silence or static, you still have figured out how to get a machine to wake from sleep, NONE of your devs follow the UI conventions, some use the Windows conventions, some use Mac conventions, some old school Unix which makes the whole experience disjointed. Basically the whole system feels like a bunch of different crap thrown together by people who never talk to each other....which is pretty much what it is. Hell even one of the largest OEMs on the planet Dell has to run their own repos because they can't even get enough QA from the so called "user friendly distro" to keep the drivers from puking, even though they sell less than a dozen models!
Waste your mod points all you want but this is a truth that needs to be spoken, it is THIS, this right here, that keeps Linux in last place. Somewhere along the way making F/LOSS accessible to the masses was thrown to the wayside in favor of the "FLOSSie club" as I call it, where You must prove your "worthy" of using the gifts the great Torvalds and RMS have bestowed upon thee. In this club anything that makes F/LOSS more useful, easier, and friendlier? why that is bad, its "rampant consumerism" or "dumbing down" and anything that makes Linux more complex, obtuse, or fiddly is "smarter" and "more powerful". I have actually been told by a member of the FLOSSie club when i pointed out that Linux was too CLI heavy for my consumers "to make them embrace the power of CLI" like its the Goddamn force!
A wise person once said "You know what the definition of insanity is? Its doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result" and that is EXACTLY what the community has been doing. Insane release schedule, broken drivers, none of that matter because the users will embrace the power of CLI and learn "the Unix way" even though Unix was NEVER supposed to be a consumer OS and died out over a decade ago!
In the end its not a conspiracy, its not magic, hell Microsoft is being run by a bumbling idiot with Apple envy and you STILL can't get ahead! Have you seen Win 8? Its a fricking bad joke and you STILL won't gain any share, people will pirate Win 7 instead, why? Its because you DO NOT LISTEN TO US. You don't listen to the consumers, to the retailers, nor the OEMs, its a bunch of nerds scratching itches and having a "I'm moar leet!" wankfest. You're a good decade behind your competition, here we are in the great XP dieoff in a recession and NOBODY, not Best Buy
I hope they don't have any animals....or people who wear dark clothing that cross the road...or anything that can fall off the back of a truck. Boy the different ways this can go bad.
Citation please on " removal of Linux from Asus Eee"? Because as someone who has hung around the EEE forums for awhile i Googled that and only found people asking how to remove Linux from a EEE, no MSFT there. What I heard is that Xandros simply ran out of funds and couldn't continue development, look on their website or distrowatch and you'll see their last release was in 2009. Can't blame Asus for not wanting to sell a unit with an abandoned OS on it, can you?
Oh please! learn your damned history...puppies, geez. MS Office became the de facto standard because what WAS the former de facto standard, that was WordPerfect, thought their shite didn't have an aroma and therefor put out a lame as hell DOS port for Windows which puked and died more than it ran and since it was really designed for a single tasking OS pretty much anything and everything could get its memory stomped on by WP and crash, including the OS. Word back then was fairly basic but it DID run and didn't chew the documents all to pieces when it crapped itself. BTW the original Star Office was released about this time and for its first couple of releases was a real pig with regards to memory was what you really did NOT want on the RAM starved machines of the day.
So learn your history kid, many times MSFT has ended up winning not by trickery, not by skill, but simply because their competition made some seriously boneheaded move and MSFT was able to capitalize on their mistake. Two great examples are the above WP and Netscape which frankly put out a giant rotting turd known as Netscape 4 which was so bloated and soooo buggy frankly anybody could have beaten it just by coming up with something that didn't crash constantly.
MS Office is now de facto because despite the myriad of boneheaded moves by the company they have been pretty good about leaving the Office guys alone instead of pushing for "vertical integration synergy" and all that other PHB crap. because of this I can open docs from 1997 in office 2K7 and they look fine and save without puking, try that with a OO.o 1.0 file and find out how quickly LO chokes on that old crap.
You forgot 4) Trying to edit and share files with the new generations is a mess. What I mean by new generations is those that use the ribbon. The ribbon, or as i like to call it "The divider of young and old" as the young love it and the old hate it, has caused folks to become a little more...shall we say artsy fartsy? I personally blame that quick mouse over preview that lets folks go through every combo in less than a minute.
So what you get is funky fonts with headers and footers and everything else they think looks slick. Try opening, editing, and saving back into .doc using LO and you are gonna get word salad as it does NOT like all the new Office artsy fartsy crap. this is fine if its Suzy sending a recipe to her mom, she can always tone it down and send again. if this doc could mean the difference between a job or a contract and not? Well you can't afford to have the thing mangled as it just doesn't look professional, it looks mickey mouse.
Don't get me wrong, I think LO has made great strides and does have its place, for example all home users that come through my shop get LO if they don't have MS Office because for the kinds of things home users are doing, writing down recipes or little Billy working on a paper he is gonna have to print? works beautifully there, no complaints at all. But as people go more nuts with fonts and bling bling crap LO really doesn't have an easy go of it. Sure if you hand it a standard TNR font with nothing fancy it does great, but once the bling starts getting added its chances of rendering and saving correctly go waaaay down, at least from what i saw.
You are forgetting folks are getting tired of spiraling debt and the teabaggers have won enough seats to become real thorns in the old party reps. Mark my words though none of it matters as we WILL have a nasty false flag pulled on us in the next 12 months, something that I'm betting will make the twin towers look like a bad joke, something they can use to lock down the net and throw dissenters into camps. Why is that? simple the Federal Reserve charter expires in 2013 and they know with all the hatred the people have for the fed and their little backdoor bullshit the odds of a grassroots group NOT blocking their moneymaking scam is nil...unless no grassroots can be formed. Did you know billions "Went missing" between the end of Dubya and the start of Obama? Wouldn't be surprised if that has been going on for decades. the fed is the biggest moneymaking scam those at the top have EVER had, don't expect them to give that up without a fight.
Frankly whether NASA gets any more monies will be the least of our worries, my guess is they will call in the Greek loans to cause a collapse and that tied in with a war in Iran causing gas to shoot through the roof will destroy the EU. Then with Americans scared that $100 bill in their pocket is gonna be worth 50c they'll be able to ram through every jackbooted dream they've ever had, just like PATRIOT and NDAA. Mark my words, its coming. Be sure to have plenty of non perishable food, things other than cash for barter, and a gun or two probably wouldn't be a bad idea, especially if you live in a city because if they make gas hit $9 a gallon thanks to a war with Iran food will get scarce there.
See? This is what irritates me about these TFAs as nobody explains nothing! they all just assume we know all there is to know about this OS so their little terse changelog will give us actually valuable information. if all they want is users THAT familiar with it, why bother posting it to /. at all? Won't they know when the next release is?
So I say there should be a new rule, a "Why the fuck should we care" rule, after all there is literally thousands of pieces of software released every day, probably a dozen niche distros a week, if they don't give us a reason why we should care then why should we? if they don't include a link with some basic reasoning, this is why the OS exists, this is its goals, this is what we think makes it better than foo, this is how it compares to bar, THEN we'd have a reason to care! Otherwise this is another "The Phantom menace' where we are sitting here going "Huh, what? Who? Why?" because they haven't even bothered to give us a reason to care! if your distro maintainers are too arrogant or too lazy to even provide a simple "Why we should care" page then frankly they don't deserve the free advertising as it would take...what? maybe an hour tops? Give us a reason to care or just go away!
It is also included with AMD netbooks so its not Intel only either as it came with my EEE 1215B. its not bad but I have a question: Dear Linux community, you guys WANT to gain share...right? You WANT people to actually use Linux, to spread the wealth of FOSS software, to have more and more people have real choices...yes? Am I right?
Then why in the hell are you not getting behind ExpressGate/Splashtop? Its fucking brilliant! The most innovative thing I've seen come from FOSS and you are just ignoring it? WTF? Why aren't you sending emails and letters and demanding all OEMs include this wonderful thing? For those that haven't tried it here is how it works: you have two buttons, one starts regular Windows, the other ExpressGate which we'll call EG. Now you push the Windows button you are looking at a bare minimum 45 seconds and that is if you used hibernate, with EG? 6 seconds cold boot. Now lets talk battery life, Win 7 HP X64 gets right at 6 hours on my 6 cell, if I use Brazos tweaker to lower the voltage I can squeeze it to 6:45, now how does that compare to EG? Over 7 hours with no tweaking. Now lets talk intuitive, if you know Windows you know Win 7, the search box is a big help but otherwise it hasn't really changed much. EG has a top row of tabs where everything is VERY logically laid out, you got games, video, audio, the appstore (yes they have an App store and its nice), and system. hell my mother could work this thing. it can also access media on your hard drive if you wish so you can still have all those tunes and videos you may have on your Windows partition in EG but again with better battery life as it seems to load as much as it can in memory and then shut down the HDD, this of course is smart as RAM takes the same power empty or full.
So here is your shot community, quit trying to rip off Windows (or more often the Macintosh) and simply route AROUND Windows instead. This is a way that every OEM could supply a FOSS OS to the masses WITHOUT the hassles of dual booting WITHOUT any "update foo broke my drivers" crap, hell you don't even really need CLI at all unless you want to script something. all you need to do is port plenty of apps to run with the EG/ST UI and pressure OEMs which frankly shouldn't be a hard sell as its a pretty simple setup, a little ROM, a little HDD space for extra apps, and a button. That's it! It probably costs less than 50c to add that feature to the bulletpoints on a unit. So C'mon Linux community, you finally have a winner if you would just step up. it has everything users want, its fast, its intuitive, it gets great battery life, its easy.
He's an M$ Ninja!" citation please? because it seems to me he is saying that if XP had it 10 years ago in all likelihood Ubuntu already HAS the tools the guys needs, he just hasn't bothered to look for them. You know most OSes don't have things listed in categories like "The thing you need to use to sync all teh stuff" so one generally does have to do a teeny tiny bit of fricking research. I mean ask Slashdot was supposed to be for HARD questions, what's next? How do I keep from getting pizza sauce on my shirt? 10 seconds with Google would have given this guy a dozen choices! hell a whole minute on the Ubuntu forums would have easily given him a dozen more, and who better than the guys that help folks with that OS?
I'm sorry but its a lame ass question and just because it has your favorite OS in it don't make it any less lame, it would be lame if he'd have asked about Windows, OSX, PCLOS, BSD, all of these answers are 10 seconds in Google. We should be getting GOOD questions in ask /., things like how to deal with thorny security issues without becoming a BOFH or how to make sure your network topology has the least bottlenecks, something interesting, this is "I'm too fucking lazy to ask Google,would you do it for me?". This entire thread should simple have a "let me Google that for you" link and call it a day. Its THAT stupid.
Actually I was originally FOR ChromeOS as i thought it was a brilliant idea for clueless home users. An OS that will protect them by basically running everything on the server and thus get rid of local exploits. As for Chrome, why should we care exactly? Unless you are running XP (or Linux) you have low rights mode which by default has lower permissions than users which makes it pretty damned hard to infect a machine anyway. i know as i tried to infect a machine that I planeed to wipe anyway and went to every topsite and crapsite i could find and...nothing, zip nada squat.
So its a thing for software that doesn't need it except for old OSes or niche OSes...wow, great, thanks.
Why not use one of the bazillion free download managers? I assume by your sig you don't use Windows but I assume Linux has similar software.
As for TFA, how does this compare to the other major OSes, like OSX, Win 7, Ubuntu, or even PC-BSD? What advantages does it give over the others? What are its best features? Why would you recommend this over other OSes? This is why i hate announcements like TFA because they don't give someone who doesn't use the OS a reason why we should care or try it.
I'm sorry but you are wrong and here is why: We have learned more about our system from a single NASA probe than from 40 years of /kicks on reverb/ "Meatbags in spaaaace!" /kills pedal/ because we meatbags are incredibly fragile creatures that have an insane amount of crap we have to have brought along with us, things like food, water, toilets, a place to sleep, all of this adds weight and with engines that frankly aren't really any more advanced than the old Saturn rockets its INSANELY expensive per pound, and because of the first reason we are pretty much stuck at LEO and finally with the entire right wing signing Grover Norquist's "No new taxes on teh rich EVAR!" pledge good luck doing anything about the debt we are drowning in which means no more money for NASA, hell look at how many are having a shitfit at Obama calling to LOWER corporate taxes simply because he wants to close the loopholes that give companies like GE billions in return for nothing.
So we have to accept some things 1.- The NASA budget will NEVER be back up to the glory days of the cold war, 2.- With an economy that will most likely be finally killed outright when gas hits $5 a gallon we won't be able to raise the budget for NASA and 3.- it will cost billions to get us a new rocket thanks to sen Porkus and Congressman kickbackman wanting to "bring home the bacon" by having some piece of it built in their district and they will vigorously cockblock anything they can't get their snouts in.
In the end we really have only one choice, and that is stay on the course NASA is on and concentrate on probes. Sure we can bum rides with the Russians but that is only a band aid as their tech is getting long in the tooth too (Soyuz is what? 40+ years old?) and all it will take is a few more massive fails and they may end up grounded for good. So our only real choice is to continue to get the absolute most bang for the buck we can and that is small and light probes we can launch on Atlas and Delta rockets. Maybe if we had a congress that gave a shit about the country as a whole instead of their own enrichment we might actually be able to do something, but what are the odds of that happening? About the same as you winning the lotto while being struck by lightning.
At least have the balls to make an account, and faggot is the best you can do? hell I've been told I live in a sekret warren under redmond where i subtly manipulate the masses into thinking MSFT is the product of choice by insulting them along with everyone else...still haven't figured out how insults make me FOR something? maybe its an underpants gnome thing.
Oh and how can you NOT laugh your ass off at MSFT after seeing Windows 8? I mean have you seen the thing? ZOMFG! They might as well just call it "WinPad .NET Live Zune eXPerience 3.0!" for all the levels of Apple envy and fail built in.
Finally its kinda sad the ONLY insult I get is a really lame one from a Softie AC, I'd have thought the batshit FOSSies would have been weaving one of their great 'Its a conspiracy by that other OS!" Voldemort syndrome nuttiness or at least get a ragging from a hipster Appleite or a BSDHead, but i bet they probably thought it was a compliment that i mentioned them at all. Oh and did I mention Apple used some of their code once? I swear its true, it was in like 1992 or something and Steve was a little high on some bad tofu but he totally did! I Swear!
Did you know its kind of pointless as ChromeOS is a giant fail? Oh while I'm sure the OS is just fine if its anything like Android, the problem is that the ODMs slapped it on underpowered hardware and then slapped a "ZOMFG! What are they thinking?" pricetag on it! Hell they wanted nearly $550 for the Samsung? its a fricking Atom! You could buy either a full size laptop OR a MUCH nicer netbook for much less and actually have more functionality?
ChromeOS might have had a chance if they'd only known what to do with it, it should have been the OS of a $150 ARM dual core netbook. Google should have sold it at cost with the data mining locked in so the user couldn't change it and then raked in the cash as users would happily give up their privacy for a sub $200 laptop, instead they picked OEMs that tried to jack the living hell out of the price so badly you'd have thought it was made by a certain fruit company.
Finally sadly security can't be solved by tech, well not unless you can cook up something that shocks the shit out of the user and says "WTF are you doing? Stop that!" when they do something incredibly stupid which is often. You can get the average user to give you more than enough info for identity theft simply by offering a drawing for a free iPad. No matter how many times I warn people that TINSTAAFL you'd be amazed at how many will run any executable, fill out any form, jump through any hoop for the chance at 'free' stuff. They can lock down the OS all they want. Its the data that's worth money now, the OS? not so much.
Really? That's a damned shame because you can, well at least you COULD with AMD enjoy hellish speed boosts by getting one of the lower chips to start with and then moving up as the prices dropped. the box i'm typing on started with a dual core 7550 (which is now in my landlady's PC) then I went up to a Phenom II 925 quad (now in my youngest boy's PC) before finally getting a Thuban X6. With each upgrade I got a hell of a speed boost and since I was able to keep everything else, like the 8gb of DDR 2 800 I got when it was cheap I was able to upgrade the machine for a hell of a lot cheaper than it would cost to buy a new box each time. I saved enough that with this last upgrade i went ahead and bought a crossfire board so simply add a second GPU when mine starts to lag to get even more life between replacements. Personally I bet this X6 will probably last me until the end of the decade unless some breakthrough allows them to code for more than 4 chips easily.
anyway next time before chunking you might want to try Starmicro as they are the go to place for cheap chips. they go all the way back to socket 423 on the Intel side and slot A on the AMD side so there pretty much isn't a desktop out there you can't give a speed boost with a starmicro chip.
Hell ask the P2P guys because if there is anybody that has to balance craploads of connections its those guys. Look at how much overhead the first gen P2Ps used compared to now, with each version they get better at moving data without the connections getting overloaded. Give me somebody that has actually had to deal with the BS day to day than somebody that is writing a paper any day of the week. the trial by fire quickly weeds out the dumb ideas and you fix it or die.
The sad part is when it comes to Appleites its damned hard to tell anymore. i thought when Jobs passed the RDF would die with him but if anything it has gotten stronger, maybe Cook snuck up on him and sucked out the RDF along with his soul which i hear is gonna be packaged in tiny bits for the iPhone 5. . Oh and just in case anyone thinks I'm picking on Apple let me pick on everyone else, wouldn't want anyone feeling left out ya know..."Do no evil" is "think different' for nerds and is just as pointless, MSFT is so lame they can't even come up with a slogan so allow me "Microsoft: We want to be Apple so bad it hurts" and of course Linux has a slogan but it takes 23 hours with CLI and a handwritten compiler to read it, and you have to be an expert in long PHP coding, did i miss anybody? Well maybe BSD, I'll give them a slogan too, just to show what a nice guy I am "BSD: you're so free you're free not to use it like everybody else. Did we mention Apple used some of our code once?"
But if you want to do sarcasm you got to add that touch of bitter to make it really good, its like nutmeg that way, just a pinch adds just the right flavor. if you are too nice about it without a sarcasm tag people can't tell if you are being sarcastic or have had a koolaid overdose.