But its not like you have an either or choice here friend, if you want Nvidia graphics you can slap a $17 Nvidia discrete and it'll still stomp Aton + ION because the Zacate chip is simply the better CPU. But considering how fast the open team is catching up and the fact that AMD is paying extra coders to help them I'd say the safe bet is to use the closed now and the open in a year, maybe less. After all with each release they are closing the gap and now that even Nvidia is going OpenCL which AMD fully supports pretty much everything will end up being OpenCL accelerated.
I can tell you that as someone that owns an E350 EEE I wouldn't have any problem with putting the E350 as the center of a low cost PC, be it Linux or Windows. Its quiet, low power, has great performance, and if Asus can make it fly like an eagle under Expressgate which is a custom Android like Linux frankly i don't see why the distro guys would have any worse time of it. Frankly I don't know why the community isn't pushing Expressgate/Splashtop because its bloody brilliant. 6 second cold starts, really nice slick task based UI, app store, its just a really nice experience. Oh and on mobile it'll give me an extra hour and a half on the battery, what's not to like?
but considering you can often find E350 boards starting at $80 I'd say its a no brainer for a low cost Linux box, dirt cheap to buy, crazy cheap on power, nice performance, quiet as a churchmouse. Hell you can even go full fanless and with a SSD have a completely silent PC that'll do any basic office or web task you can dream up. I've actually used a couple of E350 boards as cheap upgrades for a local office building and they just love the things, you can't even hear the machine and doesn't put out any heat. Its just a really nice little unit and you can't beat a dual core that cheap.
Not to mention the hatred for Mittens don't have a damned thing to do with the uncanny valley, its the fact that frankly you wouldn't trust the man to sell you a 76 nova because his very pores scream "Sellout!" and he has opened his mouth enough times when he thought folks weren't paying attention like his "More homes need to be foreclosed, it'll be good for the banks" or his little smarmy "I'm unemployed too" horseshit that makes people not stand him. I bet Obama is smiling like he won the lotto, because he's a shoe in despite being right up there with Dubya on the shitty POTUS list thanks to Mittens shifty smarmy bullshit making Obama look like the better choice.
Personally I'm gonna vote green across the board, because if the choice is Mittens or Nobama at least i won't have wasted a vote on a shill. Calling that a choice is like saying that going with either a knee in the nuts or a punch in the nuts is a choice, in either case you've got your balls broken and are in a perfect position for them to help themselves to your wallet.
That was before Disney kept hitting the snooze button friend, now we have "forever minus a single day" just as Valenti, may he rot, envisioned. Personally I think we need a "keep your God Damned mouse' law where we tell Disney just keep your God damned mouse and STFU and the rest of the world will move on while they keep jumping up and down on Disney's corpse to milk that IP.
I have WSUS Offline so the time spent updating? ZERO. As for bugs can I just say FUD? Because I hate to break the news to ya but XP is a 12 year old OS that MSFT is still updating because there are STILL so many copies actually FUNCTIONING. Show me a SINGLE distro that has had 12 years worth of updates with NO upgrades? thought so. Even though its 12 years old you can still run it safely by simply having a good AV and not running as admin. can you show me the 12 year old li nux that is still safe and patched? Thought so.
As a matter of fact I have machines in the field from 2004 STILL running with ZERO bugs, it's called "don't use IE and have an AV" which BTW Avast Home and Comodo Internet Security are both free. So your FUD is just that FUD. One upgrade deathmarch will cost as much as a Windows Home license, its $35 an hour since you asked, whereas with Vista or 7 thanks to Low Rights mode in Comodo Dragon or Chrome and Comodo Internet Security or Avast, depending on whether its a home or business, frankly the customers don't need me. i'm like the Maytag repairman that way.
So please go back to fantasy island where all home users know bash and have spare boxes they can Google from when Linux shits itself, which it does pretty much every upgrade in my experience, meanwhile I'll keep working with OSes that actually work like OSX and Windows. BTW the box I'm typing this on? office nettop, a circa 2004 1.8GHz Sempron, still on the original XP install. that 8 years, two service packs, and not a SINGLE failed driver, not a single one. tell me friend, do you HONESTLY expect us to believe if you were to take a distro from 2004, make sure all the drivers were working, and then upgrade to current that you'd have a 100% functional system? Because i can tell you what you'd have is a broken mess. I have a 2004 era off lease in the corner, care to step up to the challenge? Hell you know if you picked ANY distro from 2004 you'd have a broken mess, hell even one from 2006. in just the past couple of years you've had PulseAudio or as i like to call it pukeaudio since it seems to puke on itself quite often, and you've had the DEs throw out decent GUIs for frankly alpha quality code.
So don't blame the messenger because your shit be broke and unsuitable for home users, blame the itch scratching devs that don't give a shit. A wise man once said "Linux is free if your time is worthless" and no truer words have been spoken. if you have a spare box to Google from, time to fiddle and futz and deal with forum hunts, then sure you can get it to go. But you just got rid of 99.995% of the consumers out there pal. Geeks don't buy retail they DIY. Your upgrade path is nonexistent, your drivers are a mess, even going from LTS to LTS often leads to broken devices, no simple way for the user to rollback or get drivers for broken devices, no way to tell what hardware works except by playing hardware roulette, would you like me to post the links showing how many retailers gave up on your product? or the one where even Canonical admitted they were seeing 400% higher returns compared to Windows? be happy to, just ask. BTW every one of those returns had to be sold as used which means they lost money on every. single. one. Now how long you think a retailer is gonna put up with that shit? After watching over a dozen different "user friendly" distros puke on its own updates i can tell you from experience there is a reason why we don't carry Linux, and its because that shit be broke bro, it be broke bad.
It has nothing to do with AMD and frankly you will NEVER get those bits because it would be illegal to give them to you. AMD has already said there is nothing they can do over HDCP and protected path as that technology is owned by the HDMI consortium and to give out that information would be breaking DMCA as well as get every AMD card blacklisted. If you want those bits you can use the blob which again Phoronix ran full tests and found it runs just fine on Ubuntu 10.04 and Ubuntu 11 runs OOTB, it also smokes Atom + ION on their benches. For a board that costs just $142 for the barebone kit complete with PSU and case that makes it a hell of a cheap Linux box, especially when you figure in the fact you are getting dual core plus Radeon plus the ability to run 8Gb of RAM.
But FOSS users are simply gonna have to accept the fact unless you wanna do like RMS and hop on chinamart for some funky ass Loongson MIPS netbook there are NO machines that you are gonna have complete access to, because if it has even slightly modern video output it'll have protected path and if it has wireless it'll have non FOSS firmware. Hell even the Raspberry Pi has broadcom binary blobs, welcome to reality. in the end what should matter is "does it work" and as phoronix shows yes it does, and it beats Atom + ION while having better graphics and often a lower price. Seems like a win/win to me but if you really have your heart set on Nvidia they have a PCIe slot, and there is an open box GT210 on Newegg for less than $20, knock yourself out. Even with the discrete card it'll still be cheaper than an Atom + ION board.
Shouldn't you be able to find that material in abundance in the comets that go whizzing by as well as the great Oort cloud? Don't get me wrong, i'm really digging the "Small hard science missions" that NASA is focusing on I'm just trying to understand what makes THIS particular matter all that different from the stuff trapped all around us that didn't get sucked into any planetary formation.
But if any NASA guys are here just let me say a big thumbs up, don't let the clueless try to drag you back into shooting meatbags into LEO, frankly you are giving us more hard science about how the universe works in a single one of these probes than in all the LEO missions the shuttle ever did. So keep sending the probes and if congress tries to screw you be sure to send a heads up to all the geek sites, we'll back you up. This is good work you are doing, and all the data your many probes are sending back will expand our knowledge of the solar system for decades. i know you guys don't hear this enough anymore since probes aren't sexy, but thanks for all the hard work and hard science you are giving us.
Nice strawman you have there, don't mind the match...WHOOSH! One has exactly fuck all to do with the other, you might as well have said 'Welll...instead of playing with your iPhone you should go out and catch kiddie fiddlers". And most of us had NO problem with copyrights as the founding fathers intended, but the simple fact that Walt Disney, a man whose been dead longer than most of us have been alive, has most of his first works, works made when planes were made of cloth and antibiotics were just a dream, they are STILL under copyright? i'm sorry clueless but that is just fucked up. You have a right to make money from your works, you do NOT have a right to eternal profits, either make NEW things, which was the whole point of copyrights, to give the artist the money to continue working, or kindly GTFO.
Hate to break the news to ya but the E350 has been supported OOTB by Ubuntu since 10.04 so i'm sure the others are up and running as well. you seem to forget AMD actually hired coders for the free FOSS drivers as well as handed out the specs, go look that chip up on Phoronix, they say it works just fine.
Because consumers are frankly destructive little shits dude. that corporate machine isn't as likely to have the dog use it as a chew toy, have little Suzy knock it off the table, have dumbass Dennis leave it plugged into a straight outlet during a storm, all of these things i see fairly often. And many of the SMBs I know have actually slowed down on hardware refreshes as they see no point to get rid of a perfectly working multicore for another multicore. For the vast majority of business uses a circa 2006 Pentium D with 2gb of RAM is frankly "good enough" because they are actually doing work on the things, not gaming or playing HD video. Now fortune 500 is a totally different beast, but then again that's a lot smaller market than worldwide consumers friend. But those "supercorps" tend to stick with a single vendor and buy bog standard workstations, not the best money selling those.
So I can tell you even with my little shop I see on average 3 times the business from a home user than I do a corporate, they just don't break shit like the home users do.
You want distance pal try Just cause II. You can climb on top of a mountain and....wow, the view is just stunning, with the snow whipping, and you can then jump and free fall alllllll the way through the different climate zones all the way down to the jungle floor. I actually tied a bike to the back of a 707, let the 707 pull me up to about 25,000 feet and then cut the line and did the wickedest free fall bike stunt you'd ever seen...played just fine on my HD4850 BTW.
Now as for the poster thinking the next consoles with be 7000 series? Sorry to burst your bubble but from reports they've already been in development for over a year, more likely a year and a half, so you are looking at a mid 5xxx series card MAX. See that is the problem, it takes such a long turnaround because these things are so complex now that there are probably 4 generations of GPU out by the time the thing hits the market. the ONLY reason it will look better initially is because of heavier optimization, with only one CPU and GPU to write for they optimize the hell out of it whereas I've noticed with PC games they tend to be of the "Meh we'll throw more cycles at it" mindset. Frankly if they did half the optimization on the PC they did on the consoles we'd have smoked the X360 a year after it came out.
In the end I can't complain TOO much about the consoles, after all they have helped to usher in what I call a "golden age" of PC gaming. Why is that? Simple because I can build a $550 PC for a customer that hooks right into his 1080P set and gives him sweet graphics and he'll be able to play for fricking years. Later on he can slap a $100 GPU upgrade and get even more years out of that same system. When i first started PC gaming you were damned lucky and had probably bought state of the art if you got a year and a half out of the system, then you had to chunk and start all over. The PC I'm typing this on cost $800 if you count the upgrades but the actual cost would be more like $600 since i was able to use the quad and motherboard in a new Xmas PC for my GF. This PC has 6 cores, 8Gb of RAM, 3Tb HDD, and an HD4850. When the price drops I can just swap that HD4850 for a new 5xxx or 6xxx and get another 2 or 3 years out of that GPU and frankly I'd be amazed if I need to build another PC for the rest of the decade as I don't see games hitting 6 cores for several years yet.
SO I say enjoy it, my kids have been gaming on HD4850s and Pentium Ds and just now am I needing to upgrade their systems, I'll slap them an AMD quad and 4Gb of RAM and they'll get another 2 years out of those HD4850s I paid a whole $60 for, just you watch. In the old days you were lucky if a card even lasted a year before there were games that wouldn't run, now a $100 card can play damned near everything without chugging. Good times friends, good times.
You gonna murder all the Catholics and the third world? Because for your plan to work they'll have to have no way to import peasants from Mexico. Japan is freaked because they have always been xenophobic so importing Chinese or other Asians is right out, here they can just leave the border open while supporting el Presidente types in the South american hellholes and get all the peasants they want. after all they'll never have to talk to the fuckers so why should they care what language they speak? As long as they can slave for the man that's all that matters. Hell you can already see this trend in the way they are ignoring those that are blatantly hiring illegals, go to most construction sites and yell "Immigra!" and watch them scatter like deer. lots of peasants they can work like dogs for scraps.
Uhhh dude, he threatened those that wouldn't stay bought IN FUCKING PUBLIC, that's blackmail and coercion of elected officials right fucking there? What's the guy got to do to get investigated, drop trousers on national TV and wave a flag attached to his dick that says "I own your ass"? If ANY of us would have said the exact same words we would be sitting in a fucking cell man!
You obviously ain't never been to the south son. Come on down to meth alley sometime, here we got three kinds of elected officials, we got the greedy little shits, power hungry little shits, and just plain vicious little shits. Why do you think so many elected officials are for the drug war? because they are making out like fucking bandits off it, that's why. Money is power and power corrupts and thanks to the drug trade even little towns can have plenty of power to be had.
Good luck friend unless you can turn enough of the military you would be fucked. Shotgun VS predator drone equals dead citizen. Though with so many taking oaths I suppose you might get some to turn, but I figure it'll be about 40% unemployment, which i figure is another 4 to 6 years of shipping the jobs overseas away, before you'll get a large enough mob in the streets for that to actually happen. I do think it will happen in our lifetimes though, the system has become so rigged for the elite who are trying their damnedest to turn this into a third world country that I believe regime change is inevitable, the only question is when.
As for TFA, is anyone surprised? this IS the same president that basically gave a flowery "LOL Gatse" as a response for those asking why the will of the people when it came to pot was being ignored. As long as Obama gets them big fat checks he ain't doing shit except what massa tells him to, just like the last one, and the one before that, and the one before that...notice a pattern here? hell the elite are gonna make damned sure your "choice" come Nov is Romney or Obama...lets see that's a white sellout or a brown sellout, wow what choices!
Well the answer is simple, if you want those chips and would have the skills to actually assemble the thing desoldering it shouldn't be a problem. Oh and for those that do like to DIY, may i make a suggestion? Try BGMicro they have good prices and great service. I have an engineering buddy that does a lot of robotics design work for the local college and he's been going there for years, has nothing but good things to say about them. be sure to sign up for the emails as they have some pretty good email only sales.
You should probably still be cheering because that means the last gen stuff will drop like crazy! Hell the HD4850 I've got in here now retailed for $240 at release, know how much i paid for it a year and a half ago? $60. And frankly it still cranks out the purty on my 1600x900 monitor.
Of course that gets to the heart of the matter and why they are having to push 3D and GP-GPU and Eyefinity, simply because games don't keep up anymore. With the exception of a few games i call "benchmark bait" like Crysis frankly most of the games are console ports and all that extra power is sitting there twiddling its thumbs.
So while i'm hoping this will mean I'll find a steal on a 5850 or 6850 just because they crank out less heat honestly I doubt I really NEED it for any of the games i'm playing. What you'd actually use this card for except for winning benches and showing you have the biggest epeen is beyond me, is there even a game that would stress this bitch?
Well then they also do that with monitors, hard drives, flash sticks...hell pretty much anything they have floor models for, at least at my local store. Frankly the local Staples is a ghost town after they pulled some serious shit on Black Friday, according to some friends there was damned near fistfights because the guys they had working the desk put all the good stuff like monitors and laptops up for their friends and wouldn't let anyone have them. Frankly this wouldn't surprise me after I saw them pull that same bait and switch shit with monitors. While i'm sure you're probably right on the laptop, which frankly means they shouldn't be selling laptops, only bundles, what the fuck do they expect someone there for a monitor to buy?
Well that car dealer is a moron frankly. A good retailer should be willing to work with you. Like I said I'll often throw in a new keyboard and mouse set or thumbdrive or something just to get you feeling better about buying from me and I back my hardware up, I don't sell anything I wouldn't sell to my own mama. I'd also be pointing out the difference between me and the online retailer. with online you are just a number and the best you'll get is Apu in a chat session if you are stuck, with me you have my number and can call if you are stuck. Hell I've had them call me and say "Windows DVD Maker won't take my video, what do I do?" and i walked them through using a free video converter to make their video into something WinDVD would read. hell if you buy a Win 7 machine from me you can even have me remote in and help you while I talk you through it.
A good retailer should show you what you are getting for your money, mine know they have both my phone and my email so if they get in a jam I'm just a click away. My customers know that having an on call IT guy is what they are paying for when they buy from me and while you may think you have the skills and thus don't need me there are a LOT of folks out there that do. Hell I've had IT guys send me their family members because 'I knew you'd treat them right and i don't have time to support them" and that's fine, that's what i'm here for. it sounds like your car dealer just don't care as he has enough suckers he doesn't have to offer a reason, that tells me he is a bad retailer.
Actually WITH the value add its still kaput, the market is just too small. look at all those retailers that tried selling Linux, Walmart, Staples, best buy, they all bailed because it ended up being a money loser because ordinary folks don't buy support contracts, only corps do. look at Xandros which had the XMC which despite the hate the community threw at them if you had to work in a mixed office it was great, it played nice with AD and Exchange, Xandros server played nice in Windows server domains, but again the market was simply too small and now they are also kaput.
The problem is your competition has MASSIVE economies of scale on their side while you don't. the reason Linux works in servers is because MSFT charges assrape prices on Winserver and their licensing is a fricking maze so even with a support contract RHEL will more often than not be cheaper than Windows when it comes to any decently sized corp. but for the desktop you have to support the consumer and as a retailer i can tell you Linux is NOT consumer friendly, sure the GUI is nice but a good test of an OS is what happens when something goes wrong and on Linux that's when it all falls down. go from regular to regular or LTS to LTS and often drivers get totally borked, it has ZERO in the way of friendly driver help, like "find drivers" or "rollback drivers" buttons, instead it has a DIY forum system that unless you know your hardware as well as you do your social security number good luck buddy, because you have to know make/model/rev for most hardware. Is there a simple "last known good config" or other easy way if something goes wrong? nope your ass had damned well better know how to fix it or have a spare on hand for Googling buddy!
Personally I wish it weren't so, as I have maybe another 6 months I can just wipe and reinstall XP on these off leases before i'm gonna have to scramble for a source for Win 7 Starter, but I've tried every so called "user friendly" Linux there is and every single one ended up breaking and requiring a bunch of CLI mess to fix it. That simply won't cut it with home users so I either have to 1.-Tell them "too fucking bad, all sales are final" and screw my rep and any hope of repeat business, or 2.-Give away lifetime support and lose money on every machine. Neither one of those is acceptable so I simply can't carry your product. Oh and before someone brings up Dell i would point out since its Internet sales ONLY you are dealing with 1. because most won't keep paying for return shipping, and I'd point out dell will NOT tell you what the numbers are on its Ubuntu sales. I'd be willing to bet my last dollar because they are having to pay a dev team to run their own repo they are losing money on each and every Ubuntu sale. As everyone knows you can't lose money on every sale and make it up in volume, but since Dell also sells servers i think they are willing to take the hit in the hopes the one buying the Ubuntu box might look at a Dell server. That's good for Dell but consumers don't buy servers which MSFT found out with WHS.
So the simple fact is the market is too small for alternative OSes to really make any decent money on the desktop. I predict Canonical will bail on Ubuntu, giving it to the community, and focus on Ubuntu One within 2 years, why? Because they aren't making any money, at least not enough to pay expenses and Shuttleworth made it clear he isn't giving them more scratch. I bet when it comes time to sink or swim they'll admit just what I am saying now, that even with selling their searches and Amazon MP3s there simply isn't enough money in the desktop to allow them to break even, much less profit.
Well the only thing that ever impressed me about Apple was during the PPC era their memory management seemed better than both Windows and Linux. i'd go over to the printing shop and watching someone with windows struggle with this huge graphics file while Apple never seemed to struggle...but then they went Intel, Windows went x64, and now even the print shop is using Windows 7 quads because you can get so much more powerful hardware at such a cheaper price. Kinda pointless to worry about who has the tightest memory management when the workstations have 16Gb of RAM ya know?
It was the whole "general good" thing which was waaay too flowery IMHO. ya ever notice what trips the shills is always buzzwords? its like there is some script written by a PHB and they have to get "enhanced experience" or "synergy" or "vertical integration' in there or the shocky monkey hits them with the cattle prod.
As for Enterprise and Apple? no, is that clear enough? Apple made it clear when they killed their X-Serve server line and made FCP into iMovie Pro that they didn't give a flying crap about the enterprise they are a CONSUMER company, okay? CONSUMER, not business. Not that i blame them, its a smart move as their financials show quite clearly. they are THE consumer electronic maker to beat, much like Sony was with Walkman in the 80s with everyone trying to whip off knockoffs just hoping to pick up some of the scraps. But they gave up on the enterprise awhile back folks, if their stuff works there? Fine, but don't expect them to really give a crap one way or the other as you're not the target market anymore than IBM is gonna waste time trying to sell mainframes to high schools. Frankly business is small fry compared to the worldwide consumer electronics market and that is why MSFT is getting ready to shoot themselves in the face with Win 8, aka WinTab, because they are so desperate to get some of the action.
So the bottom line is if you manage to get that iPad or iPhone to work for your enterprise fine and dandy, just don't expect Apple to waste any real effort to make you happy, you just aren't a big enough fish. Sorry.
Are you forgetting the Linux devs having to scramble to plug a zero day privilege escalation just the other day? this is spear fishing dumbass, they'll find a zero day for whatever OS the target is using and then hit it. We aren't talking some low level script kiddies dufus, we are talking about either criminal orgs or more likely hostile government. your magical thinking won't save you from a targeted attack. Maybe you should tell the guys at Kernel.org to "just use Linux herp derp".,
You could probably also use a C-130 Hercules which IIRC is the platform they used to drop the daisy cutter. As someone who has actually been in one of those birds you can fit some REALLY big ordinance in the belly of one of those.
Actually jobs are made by competition, NOT buying your own laws. Funny how many have forgotten that, but businesses rise and fall constantly, somebody comes up with a better widget, hell somebody screw the competition by beating them to market or undercutting them, that's the way the game is played. SOPA/PIPA is the bribing of congress to try to turn the clock back to 1979, but you can't erase technology anymore than those buggy whip OEMs could erase the car. If this crap passes, which i have no doubt it'll be rammed through eventually, the darknet will simply replace the regular net and the MAFIAA can simply fucking die, simply because they didn't keep up with technology. Look at companies like Valve, they realized constantly fucking their customers trying to kill piracy was stupid so they offer a better product with autoupdates and matchmaking and chat and are rolling in pools of money.
Just because you made money in the past doesn't give you an eternal right to make money, you keep up or fucking die, welcome to the market.
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But its not like you have an either or choice here friend, if you want Nvidia graphics you can slap a $17 Nvidia discrete and it'll still stomp Aton + ION because the Zacate chip is simply the better CPU. But considering how fast the open team is catching up and the fact that AMD is paying extra coders to help them I'd say the safe bet is to use the closed now and the open in a year, maybe less. After all with each release they are closing the gap and now that even Nvidia is going OpenCL which AMD fully supports pretty much everything will end up being OpenCL accelerated.
I can tell you that as someone that owns an E350 EEE I wouldn't have any problem with putting the E350 as the center of a low cost PC, be it Linux or Windows. Its quiet, low power, has great performance, and if Asus can make it fly like an eagle under Expressgate which is a custom Android like Linux frankly i don't see why the distro guys would have any worse time of it. Frankly I don't know why the community isn't pushing Expressgate/Splashtop because its bloody brilliant. 6 second cold starts, really nice slick task based UI, app store, its just a really nice experience. Oh and on mobile it'll give me an extra hour and a half on the battery, what's not to like?
but considering you can often find E350 boards starting at $80 I'd say its a no brainer for a low cost Linux box, dirt cheap to buy, crazy cheap on power, nice performance, quiet as a churchmouse. Hell you can even go full fanless and with a SSD have a completely silent PC that'll do any basic office or web task you can dream up. I've actually used a couple of E350 boards as cheap upgrades for a local office building and they just love the things, you can't even hear the machine and doesn't put out any heat. Its just a really nice little unit and you can't beat a dual core that cheap.
Not to mention the hatred for Mittens don't have a damned thing to do with the uncanny valley, its the fact that frankly you wouldn't trust the man to sell you a 76 nova because his very pores scream "Sellout!" and he has opened his mouth enough times when he thought folks weren't paying attention like his "More homes need to be foreclosed, it'll be good for the banks" or his little smarmy "I'm unemployed too" horseshit that makes people not stand him. I bet Obama is smiling like he won the lotto, because he's a shoe in despite being right up there with Dubya on the shitty POTUS list thanks to Mittens shifty smarmy bullshit making Obama look like the better choice.
Personally I'm gonna vote green across the board, because if the choice is Mittens or Nobama at least i won't have wasted a vote on a shill. Calling that a choice is like saying that going with either a knee in the nuts or a punch in the nuts is a choice, in either case you've got your balls broken and are in a perfect position for them to help themselves to your wallet.
That was before Disney kept hitting the snooze button friend, now we have "forever minus a single day" just as Valenti, may he rot, envisioned. Personally I think we need a "keep your God Damned mouse' law where we tell Disney just keep your God damned mouse and STFU and the rest of the world will move on while they keep jumping up and down on Disney's corpse to milk that IP.
I have WSUS Offline so the time spent updating? ZERO. As for bugs can I just say FUD? Because I hate to break the news to ya but XP is a 12 year old OS that MSFT is still updating because there are STILL so many copies actually FUNCTIONING. Show me a SINGLE distro that has had 12 years worth of updates with NO upgrades? thought so. Even though its 12 years old you can still run it safely by simply having a good AV and not running as admin. can you show me the 12 year old li nux that is still safe and patched? Thought so.
As a matter of fact I have machines in the field from 2004 STILL running with ZERO bugs, it's called "don't use IE and have an AV" which BTW Avast Home and Comodo Internet Security are both free. So your FUD is just that FUD. One upgrade deathmarch will cost as much as a Windows Home license, its $35 an hour since you asked, whereas with Vista or 7 thanks to Low Rights mode in Comodo Dragon or Chrome and Comodo Internet Security or Avast, depending on whether its a home or business, frankly the customers don't need me. i'm like the Maytag repairman that way.
So please go back to fantasy island where all home users know bash and have spare boxes they can Google from when Linux shits itself, which it does pretty much every upgrade in my experience, meanwhile I'll keep working with OSes that actually work like OSX and Windows. BTW the box I'm typing this on? office nettop, a circa 2004 1.8GHz Sempron, still on the original XP install. that 8 years, two service packs, and not a SINGLE failed driver, not a single one. tell me friend, do you HONESTLY expect us to believe if you were to take a distro from 2004, make sure all the drivers were working, and then upgrade to current that you'd have a 100% functional system? Because i can tell you what you'd have is a broken mess. I have a 2004 era off lease in the corner, care to step up to the challenge? Hell you know if you picked ANY distro from 2004 you'd have a broken mess, hell even one from 2006. in just the past couple of years you've had PulseAudio or as i like to call it pukeaudio since it seems to puke on itself quite often, and you've had the DEs throw out decent GUIs for frankly alpha quality code.
So don't blame the messenger because your shit be broke and unsuitable for home users, blame the itch scratching devs that don't give a shit. A wise man once said "Linux is free if your time is worthless" and no truer words have been spoken. if you have a spare box to Google from, time to fiddle and futz and deal with forum hunts, then sure you can get it to go. But you just got rid of 99.995% of the consumers out there pal. Geeks don't buy retail they DIY. Your upgrade path is nonexistent, your drivers are a mess, even going from LTS to LTS often leads to broken devices, no simple way for the user to rollback or get drivers for broken devices, no way to tell what hardware works except by playing hardware roulette, would you like me to post the links showing how many retailers gave up on your product? or the one where even Canonical admitted they were seeing 400% higher returns compared to Windows? be happy to, just ask. BTW every one of those returns had to be sold as used which means they lost money on every. single. one. Now how long you think a retailer is gonna put up with that shit? After watching over a dozen different "user friendly" distros puke on its own updates i can tell you from experience there is a reason why we don't carry Linux, and its because that shit be broke bro, it be broke bad.
It has nothing to do with AMD and frankly you will NEVER get those bits because it would be illegal to give them to you. AMD has already said there is nothing they can do over HDCP and protected path as that technology is owned by the HDMI consortium and to give out that information would be breaking DMCA as well as get every AMD card blacklisted. If you want those bits you can use the blob which again Phoronix ran full tests and found it runs just fine on Ubuntu 10.04 and Ubuntu 11 runs OOTB, it also smokes Atom + ION on their benches. For a board that costs just $142 for the barebone kit complete with PSU and case that makes it a hell of a cheap Linux box, especially when you figure in the fact you are getting dual core plus Radeon plus the ability to run 8Gb of RAM.
But FOSS users are simply gonna have to accept the fact unless you wanna do like RMS and hop on chinamart for some funky ass Loongson MIPS netbook there are NO machines that you are gonna have complete access to, because if it has even slightly modern video output it'll have protected path and if it has wireless it'll have non FOSS firmware. Hell even the Raspberry Pi has broadcom binary blobs, welcome to reality. in the end what should matter is "does it work" and as phoronix shows yes it does, and it beats Atom + ION while having better graphics and often a lower price. Seems like a win/win to me but if you really have your heart set on Nvidia they have a PCIe slot, and there is an open box GT210 on Newegg for less than $20, knock yourself out. Even with the discrete card it'll still be cheaper than an Atom + ION board.
Shouldn't you be able to find that material in abundance in the comets that go whizzing by as well as the great Oort cloud? Don't get me wrong, i'm really digging the "Small hard science missions" that NASA is focusing on I'm just trying to understand what makes THIS particular matter all that different from the stuff trapped all around us that didn't get sucked into any planetary formation.
But if any NASA guys are here just let me say a big thumbs up, don't let the clueless try to drag you back into shooting meatbags into LEO, frankly you are giving us more hard science about how the universe works in a single one of these probes than in all the LEO missions the shuttle ever did. So keep sending the probes and if congress tries to screw you be sure to send a heads up to all the geek sites, we'll back you up. This is good work you are doing, and all the data your many probes are sending back will expand our knowledge of the solar system for decades. i know you guys don't hear this enough anymore since probes aren't sexy, but thanks for all the hard work and hard science you are giving us.
Nice strawman you have there, don't mind the match...WHOOSH! One has exactly fuck all to do with the other, you might as well have said 'Welll...instead of playing with your iPhone you should go out and catch kiddie fiddlers". And most of us had NO problem with copyrights as the founding fathers intended, but the simple fact that Walt Disney, a man whose been dead longer than most of us have been alive, has most of his first works, works made when planes were made of cloth and antibiotics were just a dream, they are STILL under copyright? i'm sorry clueless but that is just fucked up. You have a right to make money from your works, you do NOT have a right to eternal profits, either make NEW things, which was the whole point of copyrights, to give the artist the money to continue working, or kindly GTFO.
Hate to break the news to ya but the E350 has been supported OOTB by Ubuntu since 10.04 so i'm sure the others are up and running as well. you seem to forget AMD actually hired coders for the free FOSS drivers as well as handed out the specs, go look that chip up on Phoronix, they say it works just fine.
Because consumers are frankly destructive little shits dude. that corporate machine isn't as likely to have the dog use it as a chew toy, have little Suzy knock it off the table, have dumbass Dennis leave it plugged into a straight outlet during a storm, all of these things i see fairly often. And many of the SMBs I know have actually slowed down on hardware refreshes as they see no point to get rid of a perfectly working multicore for another multicore. For the vast majority of business uses a circa 2006 Pentium D with 2gb of RAM is frankly "good enough" because they are actually doing work on the things, not gaming or playing HD video. Now fortune 500 is a totally different beast, but then again that's a lot smaller market than worldwide consumers friend. But those "supercorps" tend to stick with a single vendor and buy bog standard workstations, not the best money selling those.
So I can tell you even with my little shop I see on average 3 times the business from a home user than I do a corporate, they just don't break shit like the home users do.
You want distance pal try Just cause II. You can climb on top of a mountain and....wow, the view is just stunning, with the snow whipping, and you can then jump and free fall alllllll the way through the different climate zones all the way down to the jungle floor. I actually tied a bike to the back of a 707, let the 707 pull me up to about 25,000 feet and then cut the line and did the wickedest free fall bike stunt you'd ever seen...played just fine on my HD4850 BTW.
Now as for the poster thinking the next consoles with be 7000 series? Sorry to burst your bubble but from reports they've already been in development for over a year, more likely a year and a half, so you are looking at a mid 5xxx series card MAX. See that is the problem, it takes such a long turnaround because these things are so complex now that there are probably 4 generations of GPU out by the time the thing hits the market. the ONLY reason it will look better initially is because of heavier optimization, with only one CPU and GPU to write for they optimize the hell out of it whereas I've noticed with PC games they tend to be of the "Meh we'll throw more cycles at it" mindset. Frankly if they did half the optimization on the PC they did on the consoles we'd have smoked the X360 a year after it came out.
In the end I can't complain TOO much about the consoles, after all they have helped to usher in what I call a "golden age" of PC gaming. Why is that? Simple because I can build a $550 PC for a customer that hooks right into his 1080P set and gives him sweet graphics and he'll be able to play for fricking years. Later on he can slap a $100 GPU upgrade and get even more years out of that same system. When i first started PC gaming you were damned lucky and had probably bought state of the art if you got a year and a half out of the system, then you had to chunk and start all over. The PC I'm typing this on cost $800 if you count the upgrades but the actual cost would be more like $600 since i was able to use the quad and motherboard in a new Xmas PC for my GF. This PC has 6 cores, 8Gb of RAM, 3Tb HDD, and an HD4850. When the price drops I can just swap that HD4850 for a new 5xxx or 6xxx and get another 2 or 3 years out of that GPU and frankly I'd be amazed if I need to build another PC for the rest of the decade as I don't see games hitting 6 cores for several years yet.
SO I say enjoy it, my kids have been gaming on HD4850s and Pentium Ds and just now am I needing to upgrade their systems, I'll slap them an AMD quad and 4Gb of RAM and they'll get another 2 years out of those HD4850s I paid a whole $60 for, just you watch. In the old days you were lucky if a card even lasted a year before there were games that wouldn't run, now a $100 card can play damned near everything without chugging. Good times friends, good times.
You gonna murder all the Catholics and the third world? Because for your plan to work they'll have to have no way to import peasants from Mexico. Japan is freaked because they have always been xenophobic so importing Chinese or other Asians is right out, here they can just leave the border open while supporting el Presidente types in the South american hellholes and get all the peasants they want. after all they'll never have to talk to the fuckers so why should they care what language they speak? As long as they can slave for the man that's all that matters. Hell you can already see this trend in the way they are ignoring those that are blatantly hiring illegals, go to most construction sites and yell "Immigra!" and watch them scatter like deer. lots of peasants they can work like dogs for scraps.
Uhhh dude, he threatened those that wouldn't stay bought IN FUCKING PUBLIC, that's blackmail and coercion of elected officials right fucking there? What's the guy got to do to get investigated, drop trousers on national TV and wave a flag attached to his dick that says "I own your ass"? If ANY of us would have said the exact same words we would be sitting in a fucking cell man!
You obviously ain't never been to the south son. Come on down to meth alley sometime, here we got three kinds of elected officials, we got the greedy little shits, power hungry little shits, and just plain vicious little shits. Why do you think so many elected officials are for the drug war? because they are making out like fucking bandits off it, that's why. Money is power and power corrupts and thanks to the drug trade even little towns can have plenty of power to be had.
Good luck friend unless you can turn enough of the military you would be fucked. Shotgun VS predator drone equals dead citizen. Though with so many taking oaths I suppose you might get some to turn, but I figure it'll be about 40% unemployment, which i figure is another 4 to 6 years of shipping the jobs overseas away, before you'll get a large enough mob in the streets for that to actually happen. I do think it will happen in our lifetimes though, the system has become so rigged for the elite who are trying their damnedest to turn this into a third world country that I believe regime change is inevitable, the only question is when.
As for TFA, is anyone surprised? this IS the same president that basically gave a flowery "LOL Gatse" as a response for those asking why the will of the people when it came to pot was being ignored. As long as Obama gets them big fat checks he ain't doing shit except what massa tells him to, just like the last one, and the one before that, and the one before that...notice a pattern here? hell the elite are gonna make damned sure your "choice" come Nov is Romney or Obama...lets see that's a white sellout or a brown sellout, wow what choices!
Well the answer is simple, if you want those chips and would have the skills to actually assemble the thing desoldering it shouldn't be a problem. Oh and for those that do like to DIY, may i make a suggestion? Try BGMicro they have good prices and great service. I have an engineering buddy that does a lot of robotics design work for the local college and he's been going there for years, has nothing but good things to say about them. be sure to sign up for the emails as they have some pretty good email only sales.
You should probably still be cheering because that means the last gen stuff will drop like crazy! Hell the HD4850 I've got in here now retailed for $240 at release, know how much i paid for it a year and a half ago? $60. And frankly it still cranks out the purty on my 1600x900 monitor.
Of course that gets to the heart of the matter and why they are having to push 3D and GP-GPU and Eyefinity, simply because games don't keep up anymore. With the exception of a few games i call "benchmark bait" like Crysis frankly most of the games are console ports and all that extra power is sitting there twiddling its thumbs.
So while i'm hoping this will mean I'll find a steal on a 5850 or 6850 just because they crank out less heat honestly I doubt I really NEED it for any of the games i'm playing. What you'd actually use this card for except for winning benches and showing you have the biggest epeen is beyond me, is there even a game that would stress this bitch?
Well then they also do that with monitors, hard drives, flash sticks...hell pretty much anything they have floor models for, at least at my local store. Frankly the local Staples is a ghost town after they pulled some serious shit on Black Friday, according to some friends there was damned near fistfights because the guys they had working the desk put all the good stuff like monitors and laptops up for their friends and wouldn't let anyone have them. Frankly this wouldn't surprise me after I saw them pull that same bait and switch shit with monitors. While i'm sure you're probably right on the laptop, which frankly means they shouldn't be selling laptops, only bundles, what the fuck do they expect someone there for a monitor to buy?
Well that car dealer is a moron frankly. A good retailer should be willing to work with you. Like I said I'll often throw in a new keyboard and mouse set or thumbdrive or something just to get you feeling better about buying from me and I back my hardware up, I don't sell anything I wouldn't sell to my own mama. I'd also be pointing out the difference between me and the online retailer. with online you are just a number and the best you'll get is Apu in a chat session if you are stuck, with me you have my number and can call if you are stuck. Hell I've had them call me and say "Windows DVD Maker won't take my video, what do I do?" and i walked them through using a free video converter to make their video into something WinDVD would read. hell if you buy a Win 7 machine from me you can even have me remote in and help you while I talk you through it.
A good retailer should show you what you are getting for your money, mine know they have both my phone and my email so if they get in a jam I'm just a click away. My customers know that having an on call IT guy is what they are paying for when they buy from me and while you may think you have the skills and thus don't need me there are a LOT of folks out there that do. Hell I've had IT guys send me their family members because 'I knew you'd treat them right and i don't have time to support them" and that's fine, that's what i'm here for. it sounds like your car dealer just don't care as he has enough suckers he doesn't have to offer a reason, that tells me he is a bad retailer.
Actually WITH the value add its still kaput, the market is just too small. look at all those retailers that tried selling Linux, Walmart, Staples, best buy, they all bailed because it ended up being a money loser because ordinary folks don't buy support contracts, only corps do. look at Xandros which had the XMC which despite the hate the community threw at them if you had to work in a mixed office it was great, it played nice with AD and Exchange, Xandros server played nice in Windows server domains, but again the market was simply too small and now they are also kaput.
The problem is your competition has MASSIVE economies of scale on their side while you don't. the reason Linux works in servers is because MSFT charges assrape prices on Winserver and their licensing is a fricking maze so even with a support contract RHEL will more often than not be cheaper than Windows when it comes to any decently sized corp. but for the desktop you have to support the consumer and as a retailer i can tell you Linux is NOT consumer friendly, sure the GUI is nice but a good test of an OS is what happens when something goes wrong and on Linux that's when it all falls down. go from regular to regular or LTS to LTS and often drivers get totally borked, it has ZERO in the way of friendly driver help, like "find drivers" or "rollback drivers" buttons, instead it has a DIY forum system that unless you know your hardware as well as you do your social security number good luck buddy, because you have to know make/model/rev for most hardware. Is there a simple "last known good config" or other easy way if something goes wrong? nope your ass had damned well better know how to fix it or have a spare on hand for Googling buddy!
Personally I wish it weren't so, as I have maybe another 6 months I can just wipe and reinstall XP on these off leases before i'm gonna have to scramble for a source for Win 7 Starter, but I've tried every so called "user friendly" Linux there is and every single one ended up breaking and requiring a bunch of CLI mess to fix it. That simply won't cut it with home users so I either have to 1.-Tell them "too fucking bad, all sales are final" and screw my rep and any hope of repeat business, or 2.-Give away lifetime support and lose money on every machine. Neither one of those is acceptable so I simply can't carry your product. Oh and before someone brings up Dell i would point out since its Internet sales ONLY you are dealing with 1. because most won't keep paying for return shipping, and I'd point out dell will NOT tell you what the numbers are on its Ubuntu sales. I'd be willing to bet my last dollar because they are having to pay a dev team to run their own repo they are losing money on each and every Ubuntu sale. As everyone knows you can't lose money on every sale and make it up in volume, but since Dell also sells servers i think they are willing to take the hit in the hopes the one buying the Ubuntu box might look at a Dell server. That's good for Dell but consumers don't buy servers which MSFT found out with WHS.
So the simple fact is the market is too small for alternative OSes to really make any decent money on the desktop. I predict Canonical will bail on Ubuntu, giving it to the community, and focus on Ubuntu One within 2 years, why? Because they aren't making any money, at least not enough to pay expenses and Shuttleworth made it clear he isn't giving them more scratch. I bet when it comes time to sink or swim they'll admit just what I am saying now, that even with selling their searches and Amazon MP3s there simply isn't enough money in the desktop to allow them to break even, much less profit.
Well the only thing that ever impressed me about Apple was during the PPC era their memory management seemed better than both Windows and Linux. i'd go over to the printing shop and watching someone with windows struggle with this huge graphics file while Apple never seemed to struggle...but then they went Intel, Windows went x64, and now even the print shop is using Windows 7 quads because you can get so much more powerful hardware at such a cheaper price. Kinda pointless to worry about who has the tightest memory management when the workstations have 16Gb of RAM ya know?
Sounds to me like somebody has been watching cheesy 80s movies. Now all we need is acid spitting robo-spiders.
It was the whole "general good" thing which was waaay too flowery IMHO. ya ever notice what trips the shills is always buzzwords? its like there is some script written by a PHB and they have to get "enhanced experience" or "synergy" or "vertical integration' in there or the shocky monkey hits them with the cattle prod.
As for Enterprise and Apple? no, is that clear enough? Apple made it clear when they killed their X-Serve server line and made FCP into iMovie Pro that they didn't give a flying crap about the enterprise they are a CONSUMER company, okay? CONSUMER, not business. Not that i blame them, its a smart move as their financials show quite clearly. they are THE consumer electronic maker to beat, much like Sony was with Walkman in the 80s with everyone trying to whip off knockoffs just hoping to pick up some of the scraps. But they gave up on the enterprise awhile back folks, if their stuff works there? Fine, but don't expect them to really give a crap one way or the other as you're not the target market anymore than IBM is gonna waste time trying to sell mainframes to high schools. Frankly business is small fry compared to the worldwide consumer electronics market and that is why MSFT is getting ready to shoot themselves in the face with Win 8, aka WinTab, because they are so desperate to get some of the action.
So the bottom line is if you manage to get that iPad or iPhone to work for your enterprise fine and dandy, just don't expect Apple to waste any real effort to make you happy, you just aren't a big enough fish. Sorry.
Are you forgetting the Linux devs having to scramble to plug a zero day privilege escalation just the other day? this is spear fishing dumbass, they'll find a zero day for whatever OS the target is using and then hit it. We aren't talking some low level script kiddies dufus, we are talking about either criminal orgs or more likely hostile government. your magical thinking won't save you from a targeted attack. Maybe you should tell the guys at Kernel.org to "just use Linux herp derp".,
You could probably also use a C-130 Hercules which IIRC is the platform they used to drop the daisy cutter. As someone who has actually been in one of those birds you can fit some REALLY big ordinance in the belly of one of those.
Actually jobs are made by competition, NOT buying your own laws. Funny how many have forgotten that, but businesses rise and fall constantly, somebody comes up with a better widget, hell somebody screw the competition by beating them to market or undercutting them, that's the way the game is played. SOPA/PIPA is the bribing of congress to try to turn the clock back to 1979, but you can't erase technology anymore than those buggy whip OEMs could erase the car. If this crap passes, which i have no doubt it'll be rammed through eventually, the darknet will simply replace the regular net and the MAFIAA can simply fucking die, simply because they didn't keep up with technology. Look at companies like Valve, they realized constantly fucking their customers trying to kill piracy was stupid so they offer a better product with autoupdates and matchmaking and chat and are rolling in pools of money.
Just because you made money in the past doesn't give you an eternal right to make money, you keep up or fucking die, welcome to the market.