The point is that like a lot of things in life you save money for the bundle and if you don't like it don't fucking buy it! they should hand him back EXACTLY what they paid MINUS the amount they got for the crapware they bundled, not a penny more. We know that Sonny offers crapware free for $50 so lets figure $40 for the crapware as i doubt Sony is doing anything for free. Now XP Home was $25 and I doubt seriously the OEMs would take them doubling their prices so lets say they paid $35 for Win 7 Home, of course starter is cheaper lets say $25 like Win XP Home used to be.
So if my rough calculations are anywhere close he owes the OEM between $15 and $25 dollars, will that be cash or charge? Because I doubt seriously MSFT has raised their prices by any great amount to OEMs or else Asus wouldn't be putting win 7 HP even on the $300 netbooks. That's pre flood price of course now the same unit is $450 to make up for the HDD prices but still, if even their $300 netbooks had win 7 HP I doubt seriously MSFT is charging much for it, hell the only place I've seen is Starter is the $250 walmart special netbooks.
So frankly when you figure in the money from crapware they are bundling I'd be amazed if they paid even $30 for Win 7 Home and they probably get Starter for nothing or even make a buck or two. Is this court gonna let them figure in the crapware losses or are they gonna act like these OEMs are paying retail? Because if its the latter I'd just sell blank boxes with a 40% markup and then make them order Windows separately. I don't give a shit how big the EU is NO OEM is gonna do business there if they could end up losing money on every PC sold, hell the ones like Dell that are making $8 a sale could lose money on entire shipments just by having a couple of hundred ask for their "Windows Tax" rebate checks.
Also I'll get hate for saying this but the guy is a douche. there are plenty of online Linux vendors that would have been MORE than happy to have his business, its assholes like him that just go buy winboxes that convinces OEMs there is no point in offering Linux. so next time you can't find drivers for some Dell blame Mr windows buying douchebag who made sure the OEMs don't care about you.
The problem with SSDs was nailed by the guys at coding horror and that is SSDs are still new enough tech it works on a "Hot/crazy" scale. Smoking hot speeds, crazy failure rates. A couple of my gamer customers have gone through like 4 of the things each in the past two years, and these ain't the cheap ones either, its whatever scored highest on the benches which is usually the top dollar stuff. They've already learned don't put anything on an SSD you give a shit about unless you have it backed up because unlike a HDD which will give you some warning the SSDs just go "poof" and that's it. No getting your data back, no tricks, just one day it works and the next its toast.
Tell me which mean were you intending to invoke, was it works for me or works for me at home it does really because it really would help if you would just point to which meme you are gonna sling. Personally i think they ought to just number them, then you can say 'i'm gonna call a number 4, followed by a 6 and a 19" and call it a day.
You want something besides anecdotes? be careful what you wish for because you justmight get it friend. BTW if your OS wasn't broken why did ASUS abandon it? could it be the the insane return rate from people buying your shit and finding it be broke? how do you answer the fact that dell has to run their own repo, even though they only offer Linux on a teeny tiny amount, because otherwise the deathmarch upgrades shit all over the drivers?
The simple answer is you can't, you can't and you won't because that would mean stopping all the koolaid guzzling and admitting the dirty little secret of FOSS, and that is the driver model is shit. Its shit because Linus Torvalds doesn't care if its shit and has said there will NEVER be an ABI, even though Solaris, BSD, OSX, Windows and every other OS that is NOT Linux has one. Do you HONESTLY believe Linus is smarter than every single OS designer in the world? arrogant much? Oh and please post that bit from one of the kernel devs against ABIs because i don't have that cultist rant bookmarked yet, thanks. When the guy goes so far as to say 'I hope anybody who uses non free drivers has their devices break often!" he has ceased being a developer and became a FOSSie, which like Moonies only accept "the one true way" all bow before the smelly feet of RMS.
But if you'd like more examples, please just ask, 5 minutes in google and i can wallpaper this page with link after link saying the same thing I am, your shit be broke yo.
See there is where you fail. Control Panel? Nobody uses it anymore! they simply type what they want in the box and Bing! There it is, nobody uses control panel. hell I'm about as geeky as they come and even I don't use control panel anymore, i have a shortcut to perfmon and relimon in my shortcuts folder, and frankly i haven't needed anything else from control panel in ages.
And that is neither here nor there when it comes to the fact the UIs in Linux are painful and often quite proud of their shittiness. You ask for something simple, like better help files or better icons and you'll get "Go back to winblowz winfag" like having a good UI is a horrible thing, because gasp shock! somebody might be able to use the thing easily. In Linux some have Windows shortcuts, some have Mac, some have unix, no real pattern to any of it, just which camp the dev is in, good luck on getting any kind of standard in there because its like herding cats.
You complain about the Win 7 control panel yet they managed to change as much as they did in under 16 months from the time Vista flopped until they were handing out the beta. Considering you are talking about a couple of thousand UIs no shit they didn't get them all switched in time. they used metrics on the ones that people use the most and those went first, which is why many of the UIs buried in control panel still have slightly better than XP UIs. But Win 8 will toss many of those, and by Win 9 they will all be gone and replaced by a single UI design. of course if you don't like it nearly every tool in Windows is trivial to replace with often free third party tools, which unless you are talking text editors is often not the case in Linux land. And finally let us not forget support, Win 7 is supported from 2009-2020, that's 11 years of guaranteed support. show me a SINGLE FOSS OS, just one, where I can get that many years of support without paying yearly for it. The only one I've found is RHEL which is $300 a year and if you want support for the last version that is gonna be extra.
The fallacy you are trying to invoke has a name and its called Use Distro X and if you are gonna use BS that is so old it has its own meme, please use meme repo to invoke it, thanks. Use distro X is a fallacy because there is really only 3, with different levels of crap thrown on top, they are Slax, Debian, and Red hat, that's it. Everything else is based on those and to date i've tried over 14 "user friendly" distros and found use distro x is as much bullshit as telling someone who is looking at a black screen of death in linux to reboot. it does nothing, its pointless, thanks for wasting our time with your pointless flag waving. hell you don't even have the guts to name which distro x, just some mythical one that works. yep, bullshitter.
He's dead. he's dead in good part because of this law. Pardoning him now would be like walking up to someone who's family member was lynched in the 50s and saying "Ooops, our bad'. I have to go with the Brits on this one, it serves nothing and i'd say its kinda insulting to think waving a pardon wand will undo the damage they caused. if there was some family member that was denied benefits because of that conviction yes, otherwise its pointless.
Most likely he doesn't want to play hardware roulette or keep a second machine with a different OS for Googling why the first machine crapped itself when some DE dev decided he didn't like the way things were and caused his video to take a crap, or the PukeAudio guys gave him a Goatse. There was a time, around 06-07, when i would have supported you on that McGrew but Canonical has done infected the ecosystem with "Lets throw everything out and add more bling! Blingapaloza baby yeah!" and now if anything Linux is more unstable than a bog standard Windows. Oh and before anybody says Debian, that's a workstation OS and about as designed for home users as an HPC server makes a good phone OS. Its support for the stuff you buy in walmart is non existent and its plug and play sucks. you had better REALLY know what you are doing before you make Debian stable your main OS or be ready for pain.
Now as for AV I agree completely, in fact with a few simple tools I am able to make a modern Windows machine pretty much dumbass proof. How? Simple replace IE with Comodo Dragon with ABP, that gives them a low rights mode browser that blocks the nastier ads which is the biggest source of drivebys, add Avast Free or Comodo CIS, both free and which have default sandboxing and scan before load for all webpages and new code. I've been using avast for home users and Comodo for businesses but i'm starting to use Comodo for home again because they have made it less "chatty" on initial setup which used to scare new users, and finally if I want it so nothing other than hardware failure is gonna break that sucker Comodo Time Machine set to do a daily snapshot. With CTM if their kid gets on and manages to pwn a machine so bad it can't even boot all they do is click the home key on start and voila! takes less than 15 minutes to get them back before the trouble. you can even tell it to pay extra attention to certain folders like my pics so they don't have to worry about losing that pic of grandma if they go back.
Now how much time does that take me to setup Mcgrew? Thanks to Almeza Multiset which i got free from Giveawayoftheday.com it takes less than 20 minutes and a grand total of 2 clicks, one to launch the automated installer, the other to click the "yes you can reboot now' button. Compared to the 4 and a half hours i spend on the forums trying to figure out why the last upgrade took a giant dump on my sound and left me nothing but static there really is NO comparison. Quick, where is the list that will tell me EXACTLY which devices sold in walmart are supported under distro X? Most of the lists are badly out of date IF you can find them, and if you DO find a device all you get is a cryptic "Distro S, version number, kernel foo" which might as well be in Chinese for home users. With Windows all they do is look for the Winflag as every device comes with support for XP/Vista/7 by default and frankly most don't even need a disc now, Windows Update will install the drivers when you plug it in.
So while it is pointless to pay for AV it is NOT pointless to pay for Windows. Linux is ONLY for those with the skills to do a systematic step by step troubleshooting diagnosis on error, thanks to Torvalds thinking his shit don't stink and that he is smarter than every other OS developer on the planet the driver situation has gotten so bad users will honestly tell you "Just do a clean wipe and reinstall' which is something they made fun of Windows for back in 05. which wouldn't be bad if we were talking once a decade but the max support is five years IF you plan your installs and sales around LTS, but who the fuck can do that other than enterprise buyers? I have machines in the field going on 9 years with ZERO need for reinstall or even tweaking, that's two service packs, countless updates and ZERO broken drivers. Linux is still too unstable and everything from DE to sound to kernel has been going through rapid and major changes the past 5 years. And in Linux you have the choice: Bleeding edge or no support for modern hardware unless you can c
Except if anybody actually followed your advice we wouldn't have desktop viruses either now would we? We've been handing out that same fucking advice for 30 damned years and it STILL DON'T WORK because all the malware writer has to do is wave the right cookie in front of their faces true story:
For the first time ever I had to throw someone out of my shop and threaten to call the cops if he didn't GTFO, all because a machine I had sold him was infected not 24 hours later and he was demanding i replace it for free. So did I hand him a machine with no updates? No AV protection? Nope he wanted when he was looking at the machines for me to install "the new limewire" and I told him "Look man, that program hasn't existed in a couple of years, the feds shut it down and that whole network is nothing but viruses and pornbugs now. If you'd like me to install a Bittorrent client there are several to choose from and I'll download you a tutorial video so you can learn how to use it" but he passed. So what did he do? The SECOND he got home he Googled "the new limewire" and when the AV wouldn't let him install it first he disabled it then when he couldn't disable it enough to let the malware run he uninstalled the AV. His last words when I threw his dumbass out of my shop were "Its says new limewire right there, you make it work!" stupid fuck. His "new limewire" was a trojan downloader that not only turned it into a spambot but landed over 150 viruses and malware which were doing everything from fighting with each other to infect every file on his system to clickjacking.
And THAT is why your idea won't work friend, because it requires common sense that sadly is so rare nowadays it might as well be a damned superpower. They could have placed the.exe for "the new limewire' in the middle of a life size picture of Goatse with "here it is LOL dumbass" written right above it and it wouldn't have mattered, he wanted limewire and no feds or common sense was gonna keep him away from having it dammit! All you have to do is replace limewire with porn codec, cool screensaver,letter from a Nigerian price, chance to win an iPad/iPod, and voila! You will have a HUGE section of the population that will happily ignore your common sense and will in fact be quite hostile to it.
Maybe it will also teach them to have a browser that actually blocks that crap like Comodo Dragon, along with having a good free AV like Avast or Comodo that will sandbox and try to minimize their own rampant stupidity?
Just another example of what I predict all malware of the future will be, simple social engineering to exploit the PEBKAC for personal gain. Frankly here at the shop i can't even remember the last time i saw a malware driveby bug, even on XP, its all PEBKAC trolling now. The truly sad part is no matter how many times you warn them there are a percentage that will ignore you or even be downright hostile to you if you try to keep them from getting infected if it involves them not getting the real or imagined cookie the malware writers offer. I have seen this myself when i threatened to call the cops and had to throw a guy out of my shop for wanting his PC fixed for free after he got infected not 24 hours after getting it from me. What did I do wrong to cause such a short turnaround? not a damned thing, after i told the guy that Limewire had been shut down by the feds years ago and anything calling itself "the new limewire" would just be a virus he went home and when his AV wouldn't let him have his "New limewire" he first tried disabling it and then uninstalled it, all so he could have a fake limewire that was nothing but a trojan delivery package.
When you are dealing with THAT level of stupid selfcenteredness frankly it doesn't matter if it is Windows or Linux, if its Android or iOS, all you have to do is dangle the right cookie in front of their faces and they will be downright hostile to anything that tries to keep them from their goal, no matter how many time you expressly warn them that the only cookie they'll be getting is some malware writer blowing his cookies all over their computer. But as long as the user has the rights to control his system you will be dealing with a section of them that don't think, a section of them that are downright greedy and will fall for anything that appeals to that greed, a section of them that only think with the little head that will happily do anything you want as long as your offer includes their fetish, and finally a section of users that are just DUMB, stupid ignorant, clueless and have no intention of learning shit, just good old fashioned idiots.
this is a perfect example, how many times have we seen this exact same shit pulled? How many times has FB warned them about just clicking on random shit that asks them to install anything? yet here we are, thousands of machines pwned by people so fucking retarded they probably shouldn't have been on them in the first place.
Re:Your right to what?
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BTJunkie No More?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Except you can't use "I have a dream" or "Ask not what your country can do for you" in a video without cutting a big fat check. PBS had a great special years ago on the civil rights movement...yet you can't see it, why? because its all behind paywalls now. This isn't just about the latest titney spears pop song you know, this is about media cartels locking the entire history of modern society behind paywalls. Nearly every spoken word of any note is now behind a paywall and all for Walt Disney, a man whose been dead longer than many of us have been alive, so that his first works which were made when planes were made from cloth and antibiotics were but a dream, all so his works can stay behind a paywall.
You want something to have one of those petitions for on the White House website? demand an end to the sonny Bono act, and demand that copyrights take sane terms again. watch how quickly our media shill of a POTUS tells you to go fuck yourself, he knows whose paying his salary and it AIN'T you. It is time we really start voting third parties across the board, its obvious to anyone with eyes that the two party system is simply no longer functional. We frankly need four five and six parties but lets start with three and work from there. I urge everyone to vote green across the board, they have already made gains in many states, lets give the shills a reason to fear for their jobs again!
But if we use your definition then we would lose any and all generalizations! We'd have to say "congressmen (insert huge list) are all holy rollers" when in this case the simple generalization "congress reps are holy rollers' tends to be more generally accurate. i mean again if I say "Dems kiss big media booty" do I REALLY need to go through an entire list of dems that kiss big media booty? If we have to go through a list every time its a subject that will cause someone to be butthurt we are gonna have a LOT of posts that look like war and peace when the simple fact that nobody likes to admit is sometimes stereotypes are true!
Since i don't want anyone to think i'm picking on the Dems or Reps I will the list the general stereotypes that i have found to be generally accurate, feel free to play along at home! It will probably work better if you hear it sung by Eric idle in your head... Now many dems kiss the media ring, and the 1% makes the reps heart sing,and they wish the dirty poor would just go away, there are many gay females with butch hair, and gay males with an effeminate air, and some you can't tell what they are either way...Many whites that can't dance, many Asians are light in their pants, while blacks are hung which they often like to rap, the Micks like their booze, the catholic priests are in the news, and most of the media is filled with Jews...
So as you can see while I'm sure there are quite a few that could be butthurt by that little ditty it was simply a little list of generalizations sung to a little classic Python. Hell I could have added another dozen lines or so but I'd like to get a little gaming in before bed, have a nice day!
Actually that would be a yes AND a no. you see the original T-34 did have a FEW advantages, mainly the sloping armor which gave it better protection, frankly the turret design of the original made it kinda shit in battle. the commander had to pull double duty as the loader, they didn't have a radio so coordinating attacks were right out (they were supposed to use flags? In the middle of a firefight?) and the great purge meant anybody with experience had already been shot. While they did gain surprise for a little while, frankly because the Germans thought they would quickly crumble and that they didn't have any real tanks all they had to do was bring the towed heavy artillery and they started punching through their tanks. In fact if you've watched the excellent BBC documentary "World At War" you'll know that there was a time around Stalingrad that the Germans were using tons of Soviet tanks and guns simply because so many had been abandoned at the first sign of trouble.
No what ultimately doomed the Germans was just the fact that the soviets could crank out the tanks in such masses that tactics didn't really matter much, they could just swarm them. The Germans made great designs but had never planned for a long war and their raw material situation was frankly barely adequate for their western attack and was badly short for any eastern attack. Personally i'd say it was over before they even got to Stalingrad, when they had failed to gain control of the air over Britain. Not only did that leave German industry that was already stretched thin open to night bombing but if they couldn't even defeat a tiny island how did they expect to win against such a huge front in the east?
so I'd say while the T-34 and KV gave them a little time where they could run roughshod simply because all the German weapons were "doorkockers' as it were the Germans quickly recovered and learned from that mistake and were taking out soviet tanks by the bunch, but it didn't matter if they took out even 20 to 1 if it was taking a huge chunk of their resources to produce the one while it was trivial for the soviets to crank out another 20. And don't underestimate the ability of superior airpower to make up for inferior ground work. one thing the soviets got right pretty damned quick was tank killing with the IL2 and of course the American Airacobra could chop through German planes with that big ass gun it was built around. No wonder the Soviets called it "Dear little cobra".
Geez I've honestly thrown away computers 5 times that powerful because they were so wimpy i couldn't think of anything to do with them. i don't think the future is the microsat simply because smaller equals easier broken and with all the space junk we got whizzing around up there something the size of a pebble at that speed could fuck your microsat all to hell and add yet more debris.
No I think the answer will be that space tug idea we saw the other day and then doing like we would here on earth and simply changing out the guts. That way you could have the high powered antenna while still having an easily upgraded system. if the space tug gets built i could easily envision the ISS becoming a space garage, with the tug pulling all kinds of commercial and scientific sats in for repairs and upgrades. In the end this would probably be cheaper than the microsats simply because of all the replacements you'd have to do, both to failures and to damage. this way you could build some really powerful sats with simple "plug and play" style insides that could be swapped out with new chips and new capabilities. And on the plus side this would also allow us to get huge amounts of time out of sats that are simply too expensive to easily toss like Hubble. A win/win IMHO.
No and just from looking at the screencaps which looks like something from the Win95 era frankly i wouldn't want to. You see THAT is the heart of the matter, the thing that supposedly brilliant FOSS guys can't seem to grasp. First impressions MATTER, ease of use MATTERS, intuitiveness MATTERS.
Now last i checked there wasn't a law that says FOSS software HAS to have a shitty UI, fiddly as fuck controls, and shitty if not non existent help files is there? Because you know it takes just as much time to code something shitty as it does something good. But sadly FOSS devs not only don't understand it, they fucking brag about how they don't understand it, just like doing good in school is "acting white" in the ghetto so too is trying to make even a halfway decent GUI suddenly "dumbing down" and making it "for the noobs' like being a fiddly pain in the ass is a GOOD thing one should aspire to!
You see you seem to think the fact that something is free, both in beer and freedom, is a selling point which it honestly is not to anybody but FOSS nerds. To everyone else ease of use and how long its gonna take to deal with this shit is of MUCH more importance. Take me for example, I won't sell Linux in my shop because at $35 an hour it takes only 2 and a half hours of forum hunts or tweaking fixes for Linux to cost MORE than Windows, or in this case if your "steep learning curve" takes more of my $35 an hour time than would be saved by not buying quickbooks frankly I'd be a fucking idiot to learn this software, wouldn't you agree?
In the end it comes down to a simple question, does FOSS want to be a winner or a loser? Does FOSS get adopted by the masses or stay nothing but a hobbyist playtoy? Because adoption brings with it great things, it brings support and drivers, it brings better selection and more variety, and it brings more users thus more of everything. But you'll simply never get those masses if all UIs are frankly a half assed afterthought and you honestly think a "steep learning curve' will be considered worth it to anybody but yourself. most of us don't want to waste time reading boring ass (usually half written in the case of FOSS) manuals for days on end just so we can kinda sortra understand how to use this crap, we just want to do whatever task it is we need to do and go the fuck home. And I'm sorry but that win95 reject is in no way, shape, nor form anywhere as easy as the tab design used in QB, I don't care how much you futz with the thing which honestly if you have to futz with it in the first place? it means its a BAD UI and shouldn't have crap defaults.
But in the end i do want to thank you as your post is a perfect example of that disconnect I was talking about, because if you think any more than the teeniest tiniest of minorities are gonna fight their way through a steep learning curve for either freedom you're sadly waaaay out of the loop friend. Think iOS, think win 7, think OSX, think something so simple your grandma ought to be able to figure it out just by looking and reading the mouse overs. THAT is what you should be shooting for, not something that would have looked good on Windows 95. Sadly the fact that FOSS developers are still making win 95 GUIs just shows how out of touch THEY are. Of course i bet it has like a bazillion scripting options, not that anybody gives a crap about scripting but nerds.
But that brings up the question, is it flamebait if its true? because its pretty obvious that it's the house reps more than the senate that tend to be the real holy rollers, and since they don't get the face time the senate does they are easier to keep bought since so few even keep up with them, they are like the minor league of politicians. So as an independent, so i don't really have a horse in this race, there isn't anything i can find factually wrong about his post, anymore than if i said 'Dems love to kiss the ass of big media" would that be in any way false. Does this mean we can't say anything truthful if someone will get butthurt? Because if so that will leave a pretty damned small list of topics we can cover, pretty much space and physics unless there are some ready to downmod while thinking "You take that compliment back, Hawking is a fucking douchenozzle and his books suck!"
as for TFA frankly anything coming from any congress we've had in at least the last decade will be the "worst ever" because honestly they don't even pretend to hide the bribery and frankly why should they? when Dodd gets on national television and makes not even slightly veiled threats that are all in one swoop coercion, blackmail AND bribery and yet he won't even be investigated for something that in times past frankly would have had him shot? Then why the fuck should they care WHAT the peasants think? Hell we might as well just put after their D or R 'Me love you long time ten dolla each" and call it a day.
Well in the case of WebM you have an 8000 pound gorilla buying patents like they are going out of style so I'm sure if they went after Google there would be a serious case of the MAD strategy at play, as Google could unleash their patents and lawyers and make things SERIOUSLY bad for MPEG-LA.
As for what I mean? There are already two browsers FF and Opera, that can't legally play your videos, so any users of those browsers won't be able to use your site. But since those users CAN use flash, why the fuck should I switch? you're either gonna end up with H.264 for the iShiny and flash for everybody else, or they'll stick with flash and leave the iShiny to GTFO. Oh and most of the videos i've seen in flash are VP6 which on anything under 1080p looks just fine with nice small files.
Finally how is Adobe forcing shit? not only can you include their player absolutely free which you can NOT do withH.264, they didn't even say shit about Gnash whose who goal is to make a 100% free flash! try that shit with MPGE-LA and see how quickly you get a C&D. Look I'm a Windows guy and even I can see that H.264 is a way to cut off FOSS and lock the web down to the big three. MSFT has NEVER had any trouble from Apple because they know that they aren't really in the same markets. The hipsters that buy Apple wouldn't have anything that Suzy the checkout girl uses so MSFT isn't a consideration and Suzy doesn't have iMoney and would dilute the branding so Apple don't give a fuck about the peasants. And for Google to have full support for H.264 they are gonna have to lock it down as MPEG-LA ain't gonna put up with having their codec free for anybody to have, so watch in the next year to year and a half for Android to get eFuses or code signing. if Google didn't want the TiVo option left open they wouldn't have made damned sure not a single line of GPL V3 code comes anywhere near the Droid.
You watch either the web sticks with flash or you can kiss any FOSS users watching shit goodbye. Kinda hard to be free as in beer when they gotta pay license fees ya know. Not to mention I can't see RMS and the other hardcore FOSSies allowing kernel DRM into Linux which is what they'll need to have encrypted video like Netflix has which you can be damned sure both MSFT and Apple will be pushing.
Then explain how quantum entanglement can get around that pesky "can't go faster than light" thing because even with our limited tests so far it most certainly does. Go on, we're waiting. And this isn't some "new age hippie shit" this is the fact that we simply have VERY limited understanding of how everything reacts and interacts at the quantum level but what we are finding so far has shown us that at this point in time we are about like a 2D race trying to understand 4D space.
"Set up seems like a bit of a pain"...You lose. And you are actually calling having LaTeX, one of the most nerdy NON FRIENDLY things in the fricking history of software, you think having that is a GOOD thing? Jesus Tap dancing Christ, no wonder FOSS guys don't get it! QB is so hand holding simple the majority of the QB girls (and they ALWAYS seem to be girls, its almost like they have a union or something) can make that thing dance with just a couple of mouse clicks and filling in the blank. LaTeX, at least last time i tried it, almost seems to carry its "I'm fucking painful to use!" like a badge of honor.
This is something I've tried to literally beat over the heads of the FOSS geeks its that making a good UI isn't dumbing down its making your tool actually usable to the masses. How geeks can see Win 7 and OSX lion, with its ease of use and intuitiveness, and then think "Yeah, we'll add LaTeX, that'll rock!" is frankly beyond me.
Frankly i'm starting to believe that is the whole fucking point of FOSS, its to make UIs that are as painful as possible, real needles under the fingernails painful, so that if you can still work IN SPITE OF the UI you've proved to the rest you're "one of us" and have the "geek cred" and don't need no "dumbing down" because no matter how truly shitty and unintuitive the UI, you're down. hell you don't need no stinking UI at all, just give you a blinking cursor and you'll take over the world!
Yeah horseshit, I'd never touched bookkeeping software in my life and within 5 minutes of just goofing off with QB I had picked up enough to start making entries and could do basics like start filling in inventory. Why? Because it was all GUI, intuitive, with handy little pop ups on mouse over and a handy help file that was written to actually help as opposed to just listing arcane commands with zero context or even worse a "to be done" placeholder.
And I apologize if this comes off a little ranty, and its nothing personal, but when we are talking about FOSS software for the masses and you start talking LaTeX because you actually think THAT is a selling point? It just illustrates how bad the disconnect is between those that use and develop FOSS and the masses, because using LaTeX for those that haven't spent years fiddling with the damned thing is about as fun as anal cancer.
Ya know, that is the part I have always found frankly mystifying when it comes to Apple. you talk to Applelites or whatever you want to call them and the way they talk you'd think it was SJ and a bunch of hippies sitting around with no shoes in bean bag chairs somewhere in Cupertino. Whether you like their devices or hate them SJ was NEVER like that, he was always frankly an asshole, see how he screwed his supposedly good friend Woz out of half the profits of their game sale to Atari. The one thing ALL those companies had in common, Apple, MSFT, Oracle, etc is at least 1 type A super asshole with a cutthroat take no prisoners attitude that had no problem backstabbing their way to the top.
So i just never understood this complete disconnect between reality and mythology when it comes to Apple. Frankly i'm surprised that SJ's douchebag behavior is finally coming out now that he's gone, frankly i figured they'd make him into a saint if past treatment of him and Apple was any indication. If you like their products? hey i'm glad you found something that works for you, really wish you nothing but happiness. but don't pretend that Apple is ANY different than IBM or any other megacorp because they aren't. These companies are NOT your friends, they do NOT care about you, and if Apple could see their profits rise 15% this quarter by throwing you in a cage with a horny silverback you'd be getting some gorilla loving before the day is out. Maybe a few applelites ought to read this book and do some introspection.
Well I think its a fine idea IF and only if they are allowed to pick what they consider the best tool for the job that fits instead of having to take FOSS even where the FOSS solution doesn't work. For example if you were forced to take a completely FOSS replacement for the integration of WinDesktop plus AD, GPOs, Exchange, and Sharepoint what you'd get is a big fucking mess of software that was frankly never designed to work together and written by different teams with different goals. That is because nobody has spent the money to develop a complete top to bottom solution like the above using only FOSS so what is out there is pretty much DIY, or at least it was when i looked at it last in 09. There are other cases where NOT using the FOSS solution would be stupid, for example webservers. Significant money has been spent developing FOSS for this role and its solid, well maintained, and robust. There is a good reason why Apache runs the web and that's because its solid and well maintained.
So as long as they are allowed to use the best tool for each job and not forced to pick one OR the other simply by philosopy I think its a smart idea. Now watch all the hatred i get for daring to say that FOSS isn't the answer to everything and every job, but the simple fact is sometimes it works, sometimes it don't. For a final example I would never recommend Linux for SMB desktops simply because getting QuickBooks running with full functionality on Linux is damned near impossible and SMBs live and die by QB and there simply isn't a FOSS equivalent to the depth of QB when it comes to SMB management. Conversely I wouldn't think of using anything BUT FOSS in the embedded space, the FOSS dev boards like Arduino are well known, have plenty of add ons, and most of the code is already written and free to use, its a no brainer. But I always try to use the best tool for the job instead of treating code as a religion so what do I know.
Well that was one area where MSFT was smart, the whole "developers developers developers" bit. They've always been quite good with giving you plenty of docs and a large KB to work with so using their tools is pretty painless. Now you can even download Visual Studio Express for free, so it doesn't cost anything to use VS for some small project. I agree with you though that the sooner Java is history the better, I don't install anything but writer with my new builds now simply because i don't want LO asking for Java, once its completely out of there I'll start installing the full suite again.
Yes but I wonder how much of it is 'pretend it isn't there and the monster might go away" wishful thinking? i mean in ANY small town you have enough chemicals that mixed in the right way would be an instant nightmare, see OKC for an example, yet we simply can't survive without those very same chemicals. Frankly I'm amazed we haven't had some nutjob set off a nuke yet as the gun design is VERY crude and with the fall of the USSR there have been plenty of reports of shit just turning up gone.
Frankly I think the ONLY thing that has saved our asses so far is terrorists are like most criminals and REALLY fucking stupid. We are in serious fucking trouble if they ever figure out how to recruit people with a brain because frankly all this security theater crap would be trivially avoided by anybody with a brain, lucky for us what they get is morons like the underwear bomber. But if they had to actually lock down all the different things that could create mass destruction frankly the whole country would be in gridlock. The best they can do is hope they can trip over the right intel at the right time of they do something really fucking stupid like brag about their plans on some jihad channel on the net. Because the world we have now simply wasn't designed with "Hey can this be used by a nutjob with a cause against us?" in mind.
For those of us who are not physicists could someone please explain this in English? Because trying to follow this while hitting the Wiki quickly convinced me I'd need about two weeks worth of studying magneto optical effects just to even have half a clue here. No need for car analogies, simple layman's terms would be good.
Well that might be because its on a mobile device. i noticed when i had to be offline for awhile on my desktop which normally has a 24/7 cable connection it got a little chatty, but that may also be because most of my games have achievements and those of course don't count when offline because of the risk of cheaters.
Personally the fact that its butt simple to hack if Steam ever went away makes it a "I don't give a crap" DRM for me, its like those CD checks back in the day. those never bothered me because i'd just drop in a cracked.exe and put the game box in my closet so it never affected my gameplay one way or another. But with this always online DRM bullshit it WOULD affect my gameplay unless i went all out and downloaded the razr1911 version which has hacked the whole thing but I'm not gonna pay good money for a game that I have to go through THAT much trouble for just to be able to play if/when my network is down. Fuck that.
Cool as I don't mind it asking to install MSFT Visual C++ like it did last time I installed it, as everyone and their dog has MSFT Visual C++ installed anyway. All the games use it, and many of the freeware programs use Visual C++ the way they use to use VB back in the day. it also gets updates through WU so no need for a constantly running third party updater like with Java.
I did find it strange with so much hatred in the FOSS community they would use Visual C++ but i think its a good sign, they are using the best tool for the job on each platform and on Windows Visual C++ works great and is widely deployed.
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The point is that like a lot of things in life you save money for the bundle and if you don't like it don't fucking buy it! they should hand him back EXACTLY what they paid MINUS the amount they got for the crapware they bundled, not a penny more. We know that Sonny offers crapware free for $50 so lets figure $40 for the crapware as i doubt Sony is doing anything for free. Now XP Home was $25 and I doubt seriously the OEMs would take them doubling their prices so lets say they paid $35 for Win 7 Home, of course starter is cheaper lets say $25 like Win XP Home used to be.
So if my rough calculations are anywhere close he owes the OEM between $15 and $25 dollars, will that be cash or charge? Because I doubt seriously MSFT has raised their prices by any great amount to OEMs or else Asus wouldn't be putting win 7 HP even on the $300 netbooks. That's pre flood price of course now the same unit is $450 to make up for the HDD prices but still, if even their $300 netbooks had win 7 HP I doubt seriously MSFT is charging much for it, hell the only place I've seen is Starter is the $250 walmart special netbooks.
So frankly when you figure in the money from crapware they are bundling I'd be amazed if they paid even $30 for Win 7 Home and they probably get Starter for nothing or even make a buck or two. Is this court gonna let them figure in the crapware losses or are they gonna act like these OEMs are paying retail? Because if its the latter I'd just sell blank boxes with a 40% markup and then make them order Windows separately. I don't give a shit how big the EU is NO OEM is gonna do business there if they could end up losing money on every PC sold, hell the ones like Dell that are making $8 a sale could lose money on entire shipments just by having a couple of hundred ask for their "Windows Tax" rebate checks.
Also I'll get hate for saying this but the guy is a douche. there are plenty of online Linux vendors that would have been MORE than happy to have his business, its assholes like him that just go buy winboxes that convinces OEMs there is no point in offering Linux. so next time you can't find drivers for some Dell blame Mr windows buying douchebag who made sure the OEMs don't care about you.
The problem with SSDs was nailed by the guys at coding horror and that is SSDs are still new enough tech it works on a "Hot/crazy" scale. Smoking hot speeds, crazy failure rates. A couple of my gamer customers have gone through like 4 of the things each in the past two years, and these ain't the cheap ones either, its whatever scored highest on the benches which is usually the top dollar stuff. They've already learned don't put anything on an SSD you give a shit about unless you have it backed up because unlike a HDD which will give you some warning the SSDs just go "poof" and that's it. No getting your data back, no tricks, just one day it works and the next its toast.
Tell me which mean were you intending to invoke, was it works for me or works for me at home it does really because it really would help if you would just point to which meme you are gonna sling. Personally i think they ought to just number them, then you can say 'i'm gonna call a number 4, followed by a 6 and a 19" and call it a day.
You want something besides anecdotes? be careful what you wish for because you just might get it friend. BTW if your OS wasn't broken why did ASUS abandon it? could it be the the insane return rate from people buying your shit and finding it be broke? how do you answer the fact that dell has to run their own repo, even though they only offer Linux on a teeny tiny amount, because otherwise the deathmarch upgrades shit all over the drivers?
The simple answer is you can't, you can't and you won't because that would mean stopping all the koolaid guzzling and admitting the dirty little secret of FOSS, and that is the driver model is shit. Its shit because Linus Torvalds doesn't care if its shit and has said there will NEVER be an ABI, even though Solaris, BSD, OSX, Windows and every other OS that is NOT Linux has one. Do you HONESTLY believe Linus is smarter than every single OS designer in the world? arrogant much? Oh and please post that bit from one of the kernel devs against ABIs because i don't have that cultist rant bookmarked yet, thanks. When the guy goes so far as to say 'I hope anybody who uses non free drivers has their devices break often!" he has ceased being a developer and became a FOSSie, which like Moonies only accept "the one true way" all bow before the smelly feet of RMS.
But if you'd like more examples, please just ask, 5 minutes in google and i can wallpaper this page with link after link saying the same thing I am, your shit be broke yo.
See there is where you fail. Control Panel? Nobody uses it anymore! they simply type what they want in the box and Bing! There it is, nobody uses control panel. hell I'm about as geeky as they come and even I don't use control panel anymore, i have a shortcut to perfmon and relimon in my shortcuts folder, and frankly i haven't needed anything else from control panel in ages.
And that is neither here nor there when it comes to the fact the UIs in Linux are painful and often quite proud of their shittiness. You ask for something simple, like better help files or better icons and you'll get "Go back to winblowz winfag" like having a good UI is a horrible thing, because gasp shock! somebody might be able to use the thing easily. In Linux some have Windows shortcuts, some have Mac, some have unix, no real pattern to any of it, just which camp the dev is in, good luck on getting any kind of standard in there because its like herding cats.
You complain about the Win 7 control panel yet they managed to change as much as they did in under 16 months from the time Vista flopped until they were handing out the beta. Considering you are talking about a couple of thousand UIs no shit they didn't get them all switched in time. they used metrics on the ones that people use the most and those went first, which is why many of the UIs buried in control panel still have slightly better than XP UIs. But Win 8 will toss many of those, and by Win 9 they will all be gone and replaced by a single UI design. of course if you don't like it nearly every tool in Windows is trivial to replace with often free third party tools, which unless you are talking text editors is often not the case in Linux land. And finally let us not forget support, Win 7 is supported from 2009-2020, that's 11 years of guaranteed support. show me a SINGLE FOSS OS, just one, where I can get that many years of support without paying yearly for it. The only one I've found is RHEL which is $300 a year and if you want support for the last version that is gonna be extra.
The fallacy you are trying to invoke has a name and its called Use Distro X and if you are gonna use BS that is so old it has its own meme, please use meme repo to invoke it, thanks. Use distro X is a fallacy because there is really only 3, with different levels of crap thrown on top, they are Slax, Debian, and Red hat, that's it. Everything else is based on those and to date i've tried over 14 "user friendly" distros and found use distro x is as much bullshit as telling someone who is looking at a black screen of death in linux to reboot. it does nothing, its pointless, thanks for wasting our time with your pointless flag waving. hell you don't even have the guts to name which distro x, just some mythical one that works. yep, bullshitter.
He's dead. he's dead in good part because of this law. Pardoning him now would be like walking up to someone who's family member was lynched in the 50s and saying "Ooops, our bad'. I have to go with the Brits on this one, it serves nothing and i'd say its kinda insulting to think waving a pardon wand will undo the damage they caused. if there was some family member that was denied benefits because of that conviction yes, otherwise its pointless.
Most likely he doesn't want to play hardware roulette or keep a second machine with a different OS for Googling why the first machine crapped itself when some DE dev decided he didn't like the way things were and caused his video to take a crap, or the PukeAudio guys gave him a Goatse. There was a time, around 06-07, when i would have supported you on that McGrew but Canonical has done infected the ecosystem with "Lets throw everything out and add more bling! Blingapaloza baby yeah!" and now if anything Linux is more unstable than a bog standard Windows. Oh and before anybody says Debian, that's a workstation OS and about as designed for home users as an HPC server makes a good phone OS. Its support for the stuff you buy in walmart is non existent and its plug and play sucks. you had better REALLY know what you are doing before you make Debian stable your main OS or be ready for pain.
Now as for AV I agree completely, in fact with a few simple tools I am able to make a modern Windows machine pretty much dumbass proof. How? Simple replace IE with Comodo Dragon with ABP, that gives them a low rights mode browser that blocks the nastier ads which is the biggest source of drivebys, add Avast Free or Comodo CIS, both free and which have default sandboxing and scan before load for all webpages and new code. I've been using avast for home users and Comodo for businesses but i'm starting to use Comodo for home again because they have made it less "chatty" on initial setup which used to scare new users, and finally if I want it so nothing other than hardware failure is gonna break that sucker Comodo Time Machine set to do a daily snapshot. With CTM if their kid gets on and manages to pwn a machine so bad it can't even boot all they do is click the home key on start and voila! takes less than 15 minutes to get them back before the trouble. you can even tell it to pay extra attention to certain folders like my pics so they don't have to worry about losing that pic of grandma if they go back.
Now how much time does that take me to setup Mcgrew? Thanks to Almeza Multiset which i got free from Giveawayoftheday.com it takes less than 20 minutes and a grand total of 2 clicks, one to launch the automated installer, the other to click the "yes you can reboot now' button. Compared to the 4 and a half hours i spend on the forums trying to figure out why the last upgrade took a giant dump on my sound and left me nothing but static there really is NO comparison. Quick, where is the list that will tell me EXACTLY which devices sold in walmart are supported under distro X? Most of the lists are badly out of date IF you can find them, and if you DO find a device all you get is a cryptic "Distro S, version number, kernel foo" which might as well be in Chinese for home users. With Windows all they do is look for the Winflag as every device comes with support for XP/Vista/7 by default and frankly most don't even need a disc now, Windows Update will install the drivers when you plug it in.
So while it is pointless to pay for AV it is NOT pointless to pay for Windows. Linux is ONLY for those with the skills to do a systematic step by step troubleshooting diagnosis on error, thanks to Torvalds thinking his shit don't stink and that he is smarter than every other OS developer on the planet the driver situation has gotten so bad users will honestly tell you "Just do a clean wipe and reinstall' which is something they made fun of Windows for back in 05. which wouldn't be bad if we were talking once a decade but the max support is five years IF you plan your installs and sales around LTS, but who the fuck can do that other than enterprise buyers? I have machines in the field going on 9 years with ZERO need for reinstall or even tweaking, that's two service packs, countless updates and ZERO broken drivers. Linux is still too unstable and everything from DE to sound to kernel has been going through rapid and major changes the past 5 years. And in Linux you have the choice: Bleeding edge or no support for modern hardware unless you can c
Except if anybody actually followed your advice we wouldn't have desktop viruses either now would we? We've been handing out that same fucking advice for 30 damned years and it STILL DON'T WORK because all the malware writer has to do is wave the right cookie in front of their faces true story:
For the first time ever I had to throw someone out of my shop and threaten to call the cops if he didn't GTFO, all because a machine I had sold him was infected not 24 hours later and he was demanding i replace it for free. So did I hand him a machine with no updates? No AV protection? Nope he wanted when he was looking at the machines for me to install "the new limewire" and I told him "Look man, that program hasn't existed in a couple of years, the feds shut it down and that whole network is nothing but viruses and pornbugs now. If you'd like me to install a Bittorrent client there are several to choose from and I'll download you a tutorial video so you can learn how to use it" but he passed. So what did he do? The SECOND he got home he Googled "the new limewire" and when the AV wouldn't let him install it first he disabled it then when he couldn't disable it enough to let the malware run he uninstalled the AV. His last words when I threw his dumbass out of my shop were "Its says new limewire right there, you make it work!" stupid fuck. His "new limewire" was a trojan downloader that not only turned it into a spambot but landed over 150 viruses and malware which were doing everything from fighting with each other to infect every file on his system to clickjacking.
And THAT is why your idea won't work friend, because it requires common sense that sadly is so rare nowadays it might as well be a damned superpower. They could have placed the .exe for "the new limewire' in the middle of a life size picture of Goatse with "here it is LOL dumbass" written right above it and it wouldn't have mattered, he wanted limewire and no feds or common sense was gonna keep him away from having it dammit! All you have to do is replace limewire with porn codec, cool screensaver,letter from a Nigerian price, chance to win an iPad/iPod, and voila! You will have a HUGE section of the population that will happily ignore your common sense and will in fact be quite hostile to it.
Maybe it will also teach them to have a browser that actually blocks that crap like Comodo Dragon, along with having a good free AV like Avast or Comodo that will sandbox and try to minimize their own rampant stupidity?
Just another example of what I predict all malware of the future will be, simple social engineering to exploit the PEBKAC for personal gain. Frankly here at the shop i can't even remember the last time i saw a malware driveby bug, even on XP, its all PEBKAC trolling now. The truly sad part is no matter how many times you warn them there are a percentage that will ignore you or even be downright hostile to you if you try to keep them from getting infected if it involves them not getting the real or imagined cookie the malware writers offer. I have seen this myself when i threatened to call the cops and had to throw a guy out of my shop for wanting his PC fixed for free after he got infected not 24 hours after getting it from me. What did I do wrong to cause such a short turnaround? not a damned thing, after i told the guy that Limewire had been shut down by the feds years ago and anything calling itself "the new limewire" would just be a virus he went home and when his AV wouldn't let him have his "New limewire" he first tried disabling it and then uninstalled it, all so he could have a fake limewire that was nothing but a trojan delivery package.
When you are dealing with THAT level of stupid selfcenteredness frankly it doesn't matter if it is Windows or Linux, if its Android or iOS, all you have to do is dangle the right cookie in front of their faces and they will be downright hostile to anything that tries to keep them from their goal, no matter how many time you expressly warn them that the only cookie they'll be getting is some malware writer blowing his cookies all over their computer. But as long as the user has the rights to control his system you will be dealing with a section of them that don't think, a section of them that are downright greedy and will fall for anything that appeals to that greed, a section of them that only think with the little head that will happily do anything you want as long as your offer includes their fetish, and finally a section of users that are just DUMB, stupid ignorant, clueless and have no intention of learning shit, just good old fashioned idiots.
this is a perfect example, how many times have we seen this exact same shit pulled? How many times has FB warned them about just clicking on random shit that asks them to install anything? yet here we are, thousands of machines pwned by people so fucking retarded they probably shouldn't have been on them in the first place.
Except you can't use "I have a dream" or "Ask not what your country can do for you" in a video without cutting a big fat check. PBS had a great special years ago on the civil rights movement...yet you can't see it, why? because its all behind paywalls now. This isn't just about the latest titney spears pop song you know, this is about media cartels locking the entire history of modern society behind paywalls. Nearly every spoken word of any note is now behind a paywall and all for Walt Disney, a man whose been dead longer than many of us have been alive, so that his first works which were made when planes were made from cloth and antibiotics were but a dream, all so his works can stay behind a paywall.
You want something to have one of those petitions for on the White House website? demand an end to the sonny Bono act, and demand that copyrights take sane terms again. watch how quickly our media shill of a POTUS tells you to go fuck yourself, he knows whose paying his salary and it AIN'T you. It is time we really start voting third parties across the board, its obvious to anyone with eyes that the two party system is simply no longer functional. We frankly need four five and six parties but lets start with three and work from there. I urge everyone to vote green across the board, they have already made gains in many states, lets give the shills a reason to fear for their jobs again!
But if we use your definition then we would lose any and all generalizations! We'd have to say "congressmen (insert huge list) are all holy rollers" when in this case the simple generalization "congress reps are holy rollers' tends to be more generally accurate. i mean again if I say "Dems kiss big media booty" do I REALLY need to go through an entire list of dems that kiss big media booty? If we have to go through a list every time its a subject that will cause someone to be butthurt we are gonna have a LOT of posts that look like war and peace when the simple fact that nobody likes to admit is sometimes stereotypes are true!
Since i don't want anyone to think i'm picking on the Dems or Reps I will the list the general stereotypes that i have found to be generally accurate, feel free to play along at home! It will probably work better if you hear it sung by Eric idle in your head... Now many dems kiss the media ring, and the 1% makes the reps heart sing,and they wish the dirty poor would just go away, there are many gay females with butch hair, and gay males with an effeminate air, and some you can't tell what they are either way...Many whites that can't dance, many Asians are light in their pants, while blacks are hung which they often like to rap, the Micks like their booze, the catholic priests are in the news, and most of the media is filled with Jews...
So as you can see while I'm sure there are quite a few that could be butthurt by that little ditty it was simply a little list of generalizations sung to a little classic Python. Hell I could have added another dozen lines or so but I'd like to get a little gaming in before bed, have a nice day!
Actually that would be a yes AND a no. you see the original T-34 did have a FEW advantages, mainly the sloping armor which gave it better protection, frankly the turret design of the original made it kinda shit in battle. the commander had to pull double duty as the loader, they didn't have a radio so coordinating attacks were right out (they were supposed to use flags? In the middle of a firefight?) and the great purge meant anybody with experience had already been shot. While they did gain surprise for a little while, frankly because the Germans thought they would quickly crumble and that they didn't have any real tanks all they had to do was bring the towed heavy artillery and they started punching through their tanks. In fact if you've watched the excellent BBC documentary "World At War" you'll know that there was a time around Stalingrad that the Germans were using tons of Soviet tanks and guns simply because so many had been abandoned at the first sign of trouble.
No what ultimately doomed the Germans was just the fact that the soviets could crank out the tanks in such masses that tactics didn't really matter much, they could just swarm them. The Germans made great designs but had never planned for a long war and their raw material situation was frankly barely adequate for their western attack and was badly short for any eastern attack. Personally i'd say it was over before they even got to Stalingrad, when they had failed to gain control of the air over Britain. Not only did that leave German industry that was already stretched thin open to night bombing but if they couldn't even defeat a tiny island how did they expect to win against such a huge front in the east?
so I'd say while the T-34 and KV gave them a little time where they could run roughshod simply because all the German weapons were "doorkockers' as it were the Germans quickly recovered and learned from that mistake and were taking out soviet tanks by the bunch, but it didn't matter if they took out even 20 to 1 if it was taking a huge chunk of their resources to produce the one while it was trivial for the soviets to crank out another 20. And don't underestimate the ability of superior airpower to make up for inferior ground work. one thing the soviets got right pretty damned quick was tank killing with the IL2 and of course the American Airacobra could chop through German planes with that big ass gun it was built around. No wonder the Soviets called it "Dear little cobra".
Geez I've honestly thrown away computers 5 times that powerful because they were so wimpy i couldn't think of anything to do with them. i don't think the future is the microsat simply because smaller equals easier broken and with all the space junk we got whizzing around up there something the size of a pebble at that speed could fuck your microsat all to hell and add yet more debris.
No I think the answer will be that space tug idea we saw the other day and then doing like we would here on earth and simply changing out the guts. That way you could have the high powered antenna while still having an easily upgraded system. if the space tug gets built i could easily envision the ISS becoming a space garage, with the tug pulling all kinds of commercial and scientific sats in for repairs and upgrades. In the end this would probably be cheaper than the microsats simply because of all the replacements you'd have to do, both to failures and to damage. this way you could build some really powerful sats with simple "plug and play" style insides that could be swapped out with new chips and new capabilities. And on the plus side this would also allow us to get huge amounts of time out of sats that are simply too expensive to easily toss like Hubble. A win/win IMHO.
No and just from looking at the screencaps which looks like something from the Win95 era frankly i wouldn't want to. You see THAT is the heart of the matter, the thing that supposedly brilliant FOSS guys can't seem to grasp. First impressions MATTER, ease of use MATTERS, intuitiveness MATTERS.
Now last i checked there wasn't a law that says FOSS software HAS to have a shitty UI, fiddly as fuck controls, and shitty if not non existent help files is there? Because you know it takes just as much time to code something shitty as it does something good. But sadly FOSS devs not only don't understand it, they fucking brag about how they don't understand it, just like doing good in school is "acting white" in the ghetto so too is trying to make even a halfway decent GUI suddenly "dumbing down" and making it "for the noobs' like being a fiddly pain in the ass is a GOOD thing one should aspire to!
You see you seem to think the fact that something is free, both in beer and freedom, is a selling point which it honestly is not to anybody but FOSS nerds. To everyone else ease of use and how long its gonna take to deal with this shit is of MUCH more importance. Take me for example, I won't sell Linux in my shop because at $35 an hour it takes only 2 and a half hours of forum hunts or tweaking fixes for Linux to cost MORE than Windows, or in this case if your "steep learning curve" takes more of my $35 an hour time than would be saved by not buying quickbooks frankly I'd be a fucking idiot to learn this software, wouldn't you agree?
In the end it comes down to a simple question, does FOSS want to be a winner or a loser? Does FOSS get adopted by the masses or stay nothing but a hobbyist playtoy? Because adoption brings with it great things, it brings support and drivers, it brings better selection and more variety, and it brings more users thus more of everything. But you'll simply never get those masses if all UIs are frankly a half assed afterthought and you honestly think a "steep learning curve' will be considered worth it to anybody but yourself. most of us don't want to waste time reading boring ass (usually half written in the case of FOSS) manuals for days on end just so we can kinda sortra understand how to use this crap, we just want to do whatever task it is we need to do and go the fuck home. And I'm sorry but that win95 reject is in no way, shape, nor form anywhere as easy as the tab design used in QB, I don't care how much you futz with the thing which honestly if you have to futz with it in the first place? it means its a BAD UI and shouldn't have crap defaults.
But in the end i do want to thank you as your post is a perfect example of that disconnect I was talking about, because if you think any more than the teeniest tiniest of minorities are gonna fight their way through a steep learning curve for either freedom you're sadly waaaay out of the loop friend. Think iOS, think win 7, think OSX, think something so simple your grandma ought to be able to figure it out just by looking and reading the mouse overs. THAT is what you should be shooting for, not something that would have looked good on Windows 95. Sadly the fact that FOSS developers are still making win 95 GUIs just shows how out of touch THEY are. Of course i bet it has like a bazillion scripting options, not that anybody gives a crap about scripting but nerds.
But that brings up the question, is it flamebait if its true? because its pretty obvious that it's the house reps more than the senate that tend to be the real holy rollers, and since they don't get the face time the senate does they are easier to keep bought since so few even keep up with them, they are like the minor league of politicians. So as an independent, so i don't really have a horse in this race, there isn't anything i can find factually wrong about his post, anymore than if i said 'Dems love to kiss the ass of big media" would that be in any way false. Does this mean we can't say anything truthful if someone will get butthurt? Because if so that will leave a pretty damned small list of topics we can cover, pretty much space and physics unless there are some ready to downmod while thinking "You take that compliment back, Hawking is a fucking douchenozzle and his books suck!"
as for TFA frankly anything coming from any congress we've had in at least the last decade will be the "worst ever" because honestly they don't even pretend to hide the bribery and frankly why should they? when Dodd gets on national television and makes not even slightly veiled threats that are all in one swoop coercion, blackmail AND bribery and yet he won't even be investigated for something that in times past frankly would have had him shot? Then why the fuck should they care WHAT the peasants think? Hell we might as well just put after their D or R 'Me love you long time ten dolla each" and call it a day.
Well in the case of WebM you have an 8000 pound gorilla buying patents like they are going out of style so I'm sure if they went after Google there would be a serious case of the MAD strategy at play, as Google could unleash their patents and lawyers and make things SERIOUSLY bad for MPEG-LA.
As for what I mean? There are already two browsers FF and Opera, that can't legally play your videos, so any users of those browsers won't be able to use your site. But since those users CAN use flash, why the fuck should I switch? you're either gonna end up with H.264 for the iShiny and flash for everybody else, or they'll stick with flash and leave the iShiny to GTFO. Oh and most of the videos i've seen in flash are VP6 which on anything under 1080p looks just fine with nice small files.
Finally how is Adobe forcing shit? not only can you include their player absolutely free which you can NOT do withH.264, they didn't even say shit about Gnash whose who goal is to make a 100% free flash! try that shit with MPGE-LA and see how quickly you get a C&D. Look I'm a Windows guy and even I can see that H.264 is a way to cut off FOSS and lock the web down to the big three. MSFT has NEVER had any trouble from Apple because they know that they aren't really in the same markets. The hipsters that buy Apple wouldn't have anything that Suzy the checkout girl uses so MSFT isn't a consideration and Suzy doesn't have iMoney and would dilute the branding so Apple don't give a fuck about the peasants. And for Google to have full support for H.264 they are gonna have to lock it down as MPEG-LA ain't gonna put up with having their codec free for anybody to have, so watch in the next year to year and a half for Android to get eFuses or code signing. if Google didn't want the TiVo option left open they wouldn't have made damned sure not a single line of GPL V3 code comes anywhere near the Droid.
You watch either the web sticks with flash or you can kiss any FOSS users watching shit goodbye. Kinda hard to be free as in beer when they gotta pay license fees ya know. Not to mention I can't see RMS and the other hardcore FOSSies allowing kernel DRM into Linux which is what they'll need to have encrypted video like Netflix has which you can be damned sure both MSFT and Apple will be pushing.
Then explain how quantum entanglement can get around that pesky "can't go faster than light" thing because even with our limited tests so far it most certainly does. Go on, we're waiting. And this isn't some "new age hippie shit" this is the fact that we simply have VERY limited understanding of how everything reacts and interacts at the quantum level but what we are finding so far has shown us that at this point in time we are about like a 2D race trying to understand 4D space.
"Set up seems like a bit of a pain"...You lose. And you are actually calling having LaTeX, one of the most nerdy NON FRIENDLY things in the fricking history of software, you think having that is a GOOD thing? Jesus Tap dancing Christ, no wonder FOSS guys don't get it! QB is so hand holding simple the majority of the QB girls (and they ALWAYS seem to be girls, its almost like they have a union or something) can make that thing dance with just a couple of mouse clicks and filling in the blank. LaTeX, at least last time i tried it, almost seems to carry its "I'm fucking painful to use!" like a badge of honor.
This is something I've tried to literally beat over the heads of the FOSS geeks its that making a good UI isn't dumbing down its making your tool actually usable to the masses. How geeks can see Win 7 and OSX lion, with its ease of use and intuitiveness, and then think "Yeah, we'll add LaTeX, that'll rock!" is frankly beyond me.
Frankly i'm starting to believe that is the whole fucking point of FOSS, its to make UIs that are as painful as possible, real needles under the fingernails painful, so that if you can still work IN SPITE OF the UI you've proved to the rest you're "one of us" and have the "geek cred" and don't need no "dumbing down" because no matter how truly shitty and unintuitive the UI, you're down. hell you don't need no stinking UI at all, just give you a blinking cursor and you'll take over the world!
Yeah horseshit, I'd never touched bookkeeping software in my life and within 5 minutes of just goofing off with QB I had picked up enough to start making entries and could do basics like start filling in inventory. Why? Because it was all GUI, intuitive, with handy little pop ups on mouse over and a handy help file that was written to actually help as opposed to just listing arcane commands with zero context or even worse a "to be done" placeholder.
And I apologize if this comes off a little ranty, and its nothing personal, but when we are talking about FOSS software for the masses and you start talking LaTeX because you actually think THAT is a selling point? It just illustrates how bad the disconnect is between those that use and develop FOSS and the masses, because using LaTeX for those that haven't spent years fiddling with the damned thing is about as fun as anal cancer.
Ya know, that is the part I have always found frankly mystifying when it comes to Apple. you talk to Applelites or whatever you want to call them and the way they talk you'd think it was SJ and a bunch of hippies sitting around with no shoes in bean bag chairs somewhere in Cupertino. Whether you like their devices or hate them SJ was NEVER like that, he was always frankly an asshole, see how he screwed his supposedly good friend Woz out of half the profits of their game sale to Atari. The one thing ALL those companies had in common, Apple, MSFT, Oracle, etc is at least 1 type A super asshole with a cutthroat take no prisoners attitude that had no problem backstabbing their way to the top.
So i just never understood this complete disconnect between reality and mythology when it comes to Apple. Frankly i'm surprised that SJ's douchebag behavior is finally coming out now that he's gone, frankly i figured they'd make him into a saint if past treatment of him and Apple was any indication. If you like their products? hey i'm glad you found something that works for you, really wish you nothing but happiness. but don't pretend that Apple is ANY different than IBM or any other megacorp because they aren't. These companies are NOT your friends, they do NOT care about you, and if Apple could see their profits rise 15% this quarter by throwing you in a cage with a horny silverback you'd be getting some gorilla loving before the day is out. Maybe a few applelites ought to read this book and do some introspection.
Well I think its a fine idea IF and only if they are allowed to pick what they consider the best tool for the job that fits instead of having to take FOSS even where the FOSS solution doesn't work. For example if you were forced to take a completely FOSS replacement for the integration of WinDesktop plus AD, GPOs, Exchange, and Sharepoint what you'd get is a big fucking mess of software that was frankly never designed to work together and written by different teams with different goals. That is because nobody has spent the money to develop a complete top to bottom solution like the above using only FOSS so what is out there is pretty much DIY, or at least it was when i looked at it last in 09. There are other cases where NOT using the FOSS solution would be stupid, for example webservers. Significant money has been spent developing FOSS for this role and its solid, well maintained, and robust. There is a good reason why Apache runs the web and that's because its solid and well maintained.
So as long as they are allowed to use the best tool for each job and not forced to pick one OR the other simply by philosopy I think its a smart idea. Now watch all the hatred i get for daring to say that FOSS isn't the answer to everything and every job, but the simple fact is sometimes it works, sometimes it don't. For a final example I would never recommend Linux for SMB desktops simply because getting QuickBooks running with full functionality on Linux is damned near impossible and SMBs live and die by QB and there simply isn't a FOSS equivalent to the depth of QB when it comes to SMB management. Conversely I wouldn't think of using anything BUT FOSS in the embedded space, the FOSS dev boards like Arduino are well known, have plenty of add ons, and most of the code is already written and free to use, its a no brainer. But I always try to use the best tool for the job instead of treating code as a religion so what do I know.
Well that was one area where MSFT was smart, the whole "developers developers developers" bit. They've always been quite good with giving you plenty of docs and a large KB to work with so using their tools is pretty painless. Now you can even download Visual Studio Express for free, so it doesn't cost anything to use VS for some small project. I agree with you though that the sooner Java is history the better, I don't install anything but writer with my new builds now simply because i don't want LO asking for Java, once its completely out of there I'll start installing the full suite again.
Yes but I wonder how much of it is 'pretend it isn't there and the monster might go away" wishful thinking? i mean in ANY small town you have enough chemicals that mixed in the right way would be an instant nightmare, see OKC for an example, yet we simply can't survive without those very same chemicals. Frankly I'm amazed we haven't had some nutjob set off a nuke yet as the gun design is VERY crude and with the fall of the USSR there have been plenty of reports of shit just turning up gone.
Frankly I think the ONLY thing that has saved our asses so far is terrorists are like most criminals and REALLY fucking stupid. We are in serious fucking trouble if they ever figure out how to recruit people with a brain because frankly all this security theater crap would be trivially avoided by anybody with a brain, lucky for us what they get is morons like the underwear bomber. But if they had to actually lock down all the different things that could create mass destruction frankly the whole country would be in gridlock. The best they can do is hope they can trip over the right intel at the right time of they do something really fucking stupid like brag about their plans on some jihad channel on the net. Because the world we have now simply wasn't designed with "Hey can this be used by a nutjob with a cause against us?" in mind.
For those of us who are not physicists could someone please explain this in English? Because trying to follow this while hitting the Wiki quickly convinced me I'd need about two weeks worth of studying magneto optical effects just to even have half a clue here. No need for car analogies, simple layman's terms would be good.
Well that might be because its on a mobile device. i noticed when i had to be offline for awhile on my desktop which normally has a 24/7 cable connection it got a little chatty, but that may also be because most of my games have achievements and those of course don't count when offline because of the risk of cheaters.
Personally the fact that its butt simple to hack if Steam ever went away makes it a "I don't give a crap" DRM for me, its like those CD checks back in the day. those never bothered me because i'd just drop in a cracked .exe and put the game box in my closet so it never affected my gameplay one way or another. But with this always online DRM bullshit it WOULD affect my gameplay unless i went all out and downloaded the razr1911 version which has hacked the whole thing but I'm not gonna pay good money for a game that I have to go through THAT much trouble for just to be able to play if/when my network is down. Fuck that.
Cool as I don't mind it asking to install MSFT Visual C++ like it did last time I installed it, as everyone and their dog has MSFT Visual C++ installed anyway. All the games use it, and many of the freeware programs use Visual C++ the way they use to use VB back in the day. it also gets updates through WU so no need for a constantly running third party updater like with Java.
I did find it strange with so much hatred in the FOSS community they would use Visual C++ but i think its a good sign, they are using the best tool for the job on each platform and on Windows Visual C++ works great and is widely deployed.