Well can we all agree now that an unpatched OS, no matter if its OSX, BSD, Windows OR Linux, is a bad thing? Because i am really tired of posting how much trouble i'm having with updates puking on drivers only to get told "Well just disable updates and the sell the machine! Nothing will go wrong, its Linux!". There is NO "magical OS" that is immune to exploits, none. In the past couple of years we've seen Windows, Linux, Android, iOS, every OS of any popularity at all has been pwned at least once, most several times.
so can we please put the lie to bed that you can run unpatched Linux systems and never have to worry, please? Oh and for those that say "nobody would say that" i got that same answer not an hour ago so this belief is apparently common, scarily enough.
Uhhh...are you stoned? Seriously...are you? Linux was an x86 version of MINIX not unix, they used some of the POSIX conventions but that's all, as SCO found out. And having similar functionality is NOT the same as copying all the levels of a program and just sticking a new picture on it, a better example would be me just copypasta-ing all the levels in BioShock and calling it BioSmack. This isn't "similar" its a level for level, page for page, feature for feature bold faced ripoff. And you CAN shut down blod faced ripoff you know, see Rolex crushing Romex watches or MSFT shutting down Lindows.
Not even similar, he copied the place, composition, color schema, subject matter, answer me this, does Rolex have the right to stop vendors selling genuine Romex watches? Because if you say yes then you have to side with the original artist as that is EXACTLY what this guy has done. i'm a musician and am about to sink a couple of grand into getting my album recorded, do you think someone ought to be able to change a couple of words in the chorus of one of my songs and call it his own? You don't get to steal something just because you don't like the price you know, there are literally thousands of CC and public domain pictures he could have helped himself to but that wasn't good enough, he wanted THAT picture and when he couldn't get it for nothing he just took it, no different than some record company taking my album and sticking a new label on it and selling it. this isn't "kinda sorta' similar its a bald faced ripoff that even a blind man could see, hell he even copied the filters!
Re:So how's the Windows version coming along?
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KDE 4.8 Released
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· Score: 1
Because Linux isn't a magical woobie that doesn't get infected from unpatched software? i can wallpaper this pages with links to everyone from Kernel.org on down getting infected and its ALWAYS unpatched software that bites you in the ass. for me to hand out disabled software would be no better than handing out a Windows machines with WU disabled, its leaving the machine open to infection and it WILL become a zombie, I've seen enough infected Linux servers to know NO OS is immune to unpatched software. with the speed of browser exploits coming every single day it would especially be foolhardy on a home machine, look at the FF 8 exploit that let malware load a hidden iFrame and spam people's Yahoo mail accounts. Any security expert will tell you that having old unpatched software on the net is a BIG no no and i can't in good conscience do that to people that are expecting me to deliver a functional product, I just can't.
And funny you should mention openSUSE because i have a Linux admin friend that is going openBSD because openSUSE puked on an upgrade and wiped out 2 years worth of email, be happy to give ya the link on Linux Insider where she is bitching her ass off about it. I've found that it doesn't behave any better than Fedora or Ubuntu, it'll still puke, and we're talking NO funky repos, just bog standard stuff. With my experiment on OpenSUSE it puked on the Realtek HD, the Aetheros wireless card, and the Nvidia chipset. again this isn't some rare stuff here, the Nvidia 6100 chipset is as old as dirt and isn't even being updated anymore, and the Realtek HD chipset is likewise old as the hills. i had to just shake my head at the Aetheros because it was one i had picked up expressly because the community said "Oh don't get broadcom, get Aetheros, it always works!" yeah, except when it don't. And the arch rolling release just died slowly instead of all at once, first went the sound, all i got was static (which i hear is a common problem) then network settings wouldn't stick in the GUI, only CLI (another common problem) before finally i rebooted and ended up in single user mode with a black screen o' death.
So far I've tried Arch, Vector, Fedora, PCLOS, Ubuntu/Kubuntu/Xubuntu/Mint,Mepis,Puppy,Knoppix, Xandros (that came closest to "it just works' but it costs more than windows and is now discontinued), Mandriva, OpenSUSE,Slax,ArcLinux, CentOS,Kanotix, and a few variations on the above like Macpup and Slax popcorn and kill Bill, so its not from lack of trying here, the driver situation is just royally fucked on Linux IMHO. When I can find a distro that will let it upgrade twice without puking I'll be the first to sing its praises from the highest mountain but so far the search has come up with nothing. i've probably blown through a good 100gb+ in discs and upgrades trying to find one, just one, that would survive its own upgrade cycle but all i'm finding is the same problems. it works just fine on install, but if you upgrade it'll puke and if i was gonna disable all updates i might as well do like my competitors and just put on pirated Windows 7, it'll be a zombie machine soon enough either way.
Well I've always thought Comodo made some really solid products. While i prefer avast for my home users for businesses you really can't beat Comodo Internet Security, they let small businesses use it free and it has really top notch AV and firewall controls. Frankly i soured on Google when they started spamming first the toolbar and then Chrome with freeware, i feel if you make a good product you shouldn't HAVE to spam and the fact Google has become far worse than Sun and MSFT ever were when it comes to spamming freeware with Chrome makes me leery of going anywhere near it and their recent announcement of tying everything together just makes me more so.
Comodo has made a few mistakes in the past but were quick to announce them and send out revocations for the affected certs and in every test I've seen Comodo security software is always in the top 5 so that's good enough for me and my customers. Plus they love the speed, I put Comodo Secure DNS on as default in the browser and frankly their DNS is fast fast fast, much faster than the local ISPs. Every customer i give the Dragon to always ends up telling me how much faster their browsing is now and want me to send them links so they can send their friends the links to Comodo and ABP. so far knock on plastic every customer I've given Comodo dragon along with Comodo IS or Avast free has been 100% malware free so that is all i need to know, its really good at killing phishing sites and stopping malware sites from loading and when you are talking about home users every extra bit of protection helps.
Obvious bullshit is obvious. I take it you've never actually TRIED dragon because there ain't jack shit "hard coded', not the DNS or anything else. not only can you simply uncheck a box at install (or if you are placing it as a standalone or thumbdrive install) but at ANY time turning off the DNS is as easy as options>under the hood> uncheck the little box. Rockmelt is just a Chromium ripoff of Flock which also bombed hard, its not like one needs a special browser to visit FB. Oh if you like that sort of thing there is the option to have a FB button in dragon but again like everything else its one checkbox away from going bye bye.
Now as for SWIron its okay but personally if i wanted a standalone and wasn't gonna use Comodo i'd use QTWeb as its Webkit engine seems to play nicer with thumbdrives and it has tons of privacy features which help to leave no traces or read/write to the stick a lot. Chrome just has too much phone home for my taste, if i want to let Google have my search that's one thing but they shouldn't get squat when i'm using Yahoo.
Personally though i frankly don't see why you're bitching, never before have we had so many GOOD browsers to choose from, we literally have a feast of choices for our browsing. We have Gecko, webkit, chromium, presto and trident, and variations galore to fit every little niche. I like Dragon, my mom likes Seamonkey, my oldest has been a die hard Opera user for years, my youngest was FF for ages but decided that he liked the speed of the Dragon better, on my netbook I have a Webkit based in expressgate and QTWeb and dragon, man having choices is good, having all these free browsers that run well is good. So instead of bitching why don't you actually try the ones on TFA? They're free and who knows, you might find yourself a new browser.
Yeah but it is kinda sad a guy can bust his ass making something unique only to have some scumbum company like Zynga bold face copy the thing. it looks like they only gave it a little graphical polish and called it a day, pretty obvious ripoff IMHO. hopefully the guy can get a good lawyer that will rip Zynga a new one.
Re:So how's the Windows version coming along?
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KDE 4.8 Released
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· Score: 2
And then it costs MORE than Windows so is completely pointless, see the problem? I can't sell a $150 laptop with a $99 a year OS on it, that just won't cut it, and Windows home is $89 or if i want to cheat like many of my competitors i can buy family packs for $129 for 3 CALs. of course many of the smaller shops are getting frustrated by both MSFT and Linux and are just installing "wink wink" copies of Windows which i don't care for but hopefully now you see my problem. Linux says its ready for the masses but its only real selling point, price, simply doesn't exist. Sure if you're a programmer or a geek and don't mind spending a lot of time under the hood like a 74 Nova you can keep it running, but that just removed 99.95% of my customers. Geeks don't buy retail, they DIY.
So in the end i'm back to square one. I have right now 5 off lease machines, anywhere from 2.2Ghz P4s to early Pentium Ds and i'm gonna have to shove them out the door with XP simply because the community refuses to step up to the plate. its a damned shame as the great XP dieoff could FINALLY give us a "Year of the Linux desktop" but the community won't quit messing with their bash scripts to wake up and smell the opportunity. if they would only give us a usable product we small shop owners would give them a support network that makes the Apple stores look like a bad joke, you'd literally have a Linux store in every town and city in the nation, but we simply can't support you with the situation as it is. I tried selling linux in the past and ended up taking a bath simply because it was too fiddly, updates broke drivers, and you couldn't even buy a printer without playing hardware roulette because the hardware lists were so bad out of date.
Oh and I'm so damned sick of the bullshit argument "OEMs would give us blobs herp derp" against an ABI. NEWS FLASH THEY ALREADY DO! What do yoiu think you get from Nvidia, broadcom, hell the majority of wireless? blobs, the only difference is now you're screwed because the blob works on kernel X and you have kernel Y. If a company is gonna be open to FOSS the ABI isn't gonna change their minds one way or another. sadly dogma will ensure Linux stays just where it is now, dead last. I mean when shops would rather risk jail time selling hot Windows than take your free product, doesn't that give everyone a clue?
If I had mod points you'd be at +5 because you nailed it. What this guy did was no different than a Romex watch, he saw a picture he liked and when he couldn't get the guy who made it to basically hand it over he produced a knockoff. While i believe copyrights and patents need serious reform this is actually a textbook case of what they were originally meant to do, protect someone from cranking out knockoffs and stealing their work for nothing. It isn't like he had never seen the other pic and simply stumbled over the same idea, he knew about it, tried to buy it, didn't like the price and decided to rip it off. open and shut case IMHO and I applaud the judge for having common sense.
Well as someone who uses Comodo Dragon what extra crap are you referring to? The " send everything to Google" stuff being removed, or the completely optional Comodo Secure DNS (which i've found blocks most phishing and malware sites) which is not only changeable at install but can be toggled on and off with a checkbox? Or the single button that lets you use Comodo site inspector to check a site's malware history, again a single checkbox to remove? that extra?
if you care about security and privacy i urge to to read TFA and give the Dragon a try, its fast, has some really nice completely optional security features, can be installed standalone or on a thumbstick, and with each release frankly its gotten better both in performance and security. With the Dragon and Avast free just for shits and giggles i tried to get a machine i was gonna wipe anyway infected, threw every 'look at teh tittiez!" and 'get a free iPad!" topsite and crapsite i could find at it and between the two everything was stopped cold. i did a half a dozen offline and online scans and nothing, zero zip nada squat, which is good enough of a result i've switched my entire family to the Dragon with Avast and haven't had a single call, it all 'just works" smooth as butter. give it a try, its free and the standalone won't even mess with Chrome if that is your main browser so what have you got to lose?
No they are just spamming the living shit out of the thing by paying every freeware author and his cat and his cat's squeaky toy to include Chrome in the installer with default checked. i don't know how many Chrome "infections' I've had to clean in the past 6 months because of that shit but frankly its getting old. i didn't like it when it was sun spamming java, didn't like it when it was MSFT spamming bingBar, don't like it now that its Google spamming Chrome. spam is spam is spam and it sucks.
Actually I think you're wrong, and here is why: Most PCs have gotten "good enough" so people simply aren't buying new ones. that Pentium D or Athlon X2 they bought in 06 is still fine for webmail, YouTube, and FB, which is what the majority are doing so they simply aren't buying because compared to the jobs they have their current PCs are insanely overpowered. hell i sold my full size laptop and bought an E-350 netbook, could i have afforded bigger? Not a problem but i realized that my laptop was twiddling its thumbs a good 90% of the time so what's the point?
The Macs are selling on the other hand because they finally started selling some of them below the $1000 price point. I'd love to see the numbers broken down by price as i'd bet my last buck the vast majority of OSX's gains are below $1000 units. In a way its the same thing we are seeing with tablets now, where many that would have bought one were turned off by the price but now we are seeing all these nice sub $250 Android tablets the sales are climbing, same thing. those that held off because they couldn't see paying $2k+ for a Mac are jumping on now that the price has dropped and i expect you'll see this continue for probably a year until those that wanted one have one then the sales will drop again.
Funnily enough that'll be about the time you'll see Windows PCs jump like mad thanks to the "great XP dieoff" reaching a head. Right now most shops will tell you its just a trickle but as it gets closer to Apr 2014 that trickle will become a flood as all those people that thought their current PC was 'good enough" decide they'd rather buy a new one than pay to upgrade their old. the first to go were the late model P4s but now the early Pentium Ds and Athlon X2s are starting to make an appearance, can't way for the early core duo laptops to start showing up.
As for WebOS, stick a fork she be done. cell phones simply aren't like desktops, you can just stick any old thing on there and get it to work as all the drivers are proprietary and the network is locked down. while i liked the UI of WebOS without OEMs actually supplying drivers and handsets for it to run on i don't see it going anywhere and HP drug its feet and killed most of the buzz. final prediction? in less than 2 years it'll be another abandoned project on SourceForge.
Re:So how's the Windows version coming along?
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KDE 4.8 Released
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· Score: 2
Try my "is it safe?" test and you'll see the problem. Download the version from 3 releases ago and then upgrade to current. you see I can't plan my sales around when the next LTS release is and frankly the LTS isn't really much of an LTS at all as you get barely 3 years and that is if you sell the machines on the day of release.
Sadly what you'll find is the same thing i found, both with LTS to LTS and regular to regular, which is a broken mess. I've even had Linux guys tell me I should always install clean, which is what they used to make fun of Windows for. Which would be fine if we were talking once a decade but every 6 months? you get 10 years on Windows but I'll happily settle for 7 even though that's a little short. lets face it a Pentium d that was sold in 06 will still do the web based jobs people have no problemo and most of the off lease machines i'm getting are either pentium Ds or Athlon duals along with some of the early core series laptops. People aren't gonna be happy to just chunk those in 6 months and i doubt they'll chunk them in 3 years either and since home consumers don't buy support contracts the cost of having me reinstall and tweak the damned thing every 6 months will cost more than a copy of Windows home VERY quickly.
With the economy in the toilet there are a hell of a lot of working poor out there that appreciate $100 desktops and $150 laptops but until they come up with a Linux that don't crap on its own drivers i'm in a bit of a jam here. I can probably get away with leaving windows on them and shoving them out the door for the rest of 2012 but XP will be headed for that great OS bin in the sky and frankly i can't find a source for Win 7 Starter so that leaves Linux. And honestly while the initial install goes fine unless i want to disable all updates and just let the machines become zombies nobody has figured out yet how to do in place upgrades without them taking a big shit on the drivers. personally i blame Torvalds refusal to accept a driver ABI but then here come the fanbois having a fit, like every other OS is wrong and Linus fricking Torvalds is right, but since as long as he has a pulse Linux won't have one it don't matter anyway. But until the driver situation is fixed me and every other shop is in a catch 22, we'd like to offer your OS but the customer base simply don't have the skills to keep the damned thing running and giving away free support would break us. NOW do you see the problem?
Bah! i looked up that poutine stuff and that would be considered a health food in the south! Here we deep fry or BBQ everything so the only way to make us less healthy is to run the tail pipe of a big rig straight into the food court. Hell son that thing's got cheese curds, those have like vitamins, too healthy for us, try deep frying it in beef or even better pig lard and THEN you'll have something unhealthy boy!
I don't know about him but as for me....some of us miss the old days? Slashdot USED to be the kind of place where there would be a 300+ posting arguing merits of various file systems, various features of different OSes and even if you didn't agree with a poster dammit you LEARNED because everyone brought their A games and you might even end of with some of the guys who actually wrote the thing involved in the conversation. Once we were having a conversation on various quantum theories and when i spoke up and said i was having trouble grasping a concept someone who was actually working at one of the particle accelerators came on and nicely explained in layman's terms the particular quantum effect they were shooting for and why that would be useful in computing. it was quite nice and very civil.
Now you won 't get two posts in before its crapflodded with "die" "go fuck yourself" "your a shill for (insert company)' frankly 4chan is often more civil than the dick waving fanbois we have around here now breaking the flow and fucking things up. you can't simply surf at a higher level because some of them are making 200+ accounts to get modpoints to modbomb with and often anyone that dares to not suck the koolaid they are guzzling by the gallon becomes an "enemy of freedom/truth/puppies" and will be constantly modbombed. As far as I've been able to pick up the current fanboi raging hard on list is FOSS yay, Apple yay unless its VS FOSS then boo, MSFT boo, Canonical can be yay or boo depending on the day of the week,Oracle used to be yay because they were competing with MSFT until they bought sun so they are now boo, Google yay no matter what, its all just fanboi dick waving which doesn't matter what kind of citations you provide its groupthink or bust.
and THAT is why/. has seen its numbers dropping like a stone, because people are getting sick of the bullshit and bile thanks to the broken mod system encouraging douchebaggery. As soon as i can find a website similar to what/. USED to be i'll be moving on, but its not easy finding tech sites that aren't just commercials in website format. But i can understand his frustration because those of us that remember what this site was like in the late 90s/early 00s can tell you it was NOTHING like this, it was a place geeks of all kinds would go and discuss all matter of gear and tech and learn quite a bit in the process. the only thing I've learned here in the past few years is there is an amazing amount of ways one can combine curse words and insults I previously didn't know about. Oh and to make the fanbois (or those with a perception bubble as I've been told is a more civil way to say that) feel at home let me say "All go to hell except cave 76!" and you can just insert whatever makes you go squee for cave 76 and feel accepted.
Sorry if I misjudged, it can be hard separating the legitimate pro viewpoints from all the militant flag waving we get here now. Hell I've had one batshit loonie follow me around off and on for a year posting "die you fat fucker die' simply because i pointed out his "Linux magically protects you from viruses and doesn't need updates' was just as much bullshit as slapping an unpatched XP box on a network, and unpatched box without a firewall is an unpatched box without a firewall and there are plenty of pwned zombie Linux boxes as well.
As far as Google goes i use it for a spam dump mostly so i'm sure they have a seriously weird profile on me, probably think I take a LOT of herbal viagra and am in the market for romex watches. I have enough of my stuff split between Google yahoo and MSFT that unless all three were to share info (unlikely) nobody is getting enough data to really paint much of a profile on me. But I really do think the ballclub bullshit needs to go, because as the corps grow ever more powerful they WILL use that against us. I can easily see a day Google gets investigated for antitrust or product dumping and then sending out a call for their legion of fanbois to mail bomb congress to call off the inquiry, just as we see the Apple heads rush to apologize for 'their" company and excuse any behavior no matter how douchebag.
If a product works for you fine and dandy, not expecting everyone to start wearing burlap and live in mud huts. But just remember you are ONLY a wallet with feet to these megacorps, either they get cash from you directly like Apple, indirectly by selling to third parties like MSFT, or by selling your ass to advertisers like Google. in the end its all product and PPTs and quarterly reports, none of these companies would piss on the average Joe if they were on fire.
Re:So how's the Windows version coming along?
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KDE 4.8 Released
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Yeah if its one i'm actually gonna keep i get Aston and put on it, its what I run on my XP nettop and is quite nice. of course i'm not gonna blow $30 a pop on some off lease boxes i'm selling but hate dealing with that Fisher price UI (And nooooo, switching to the fugly as fuck Win98 UI isn't an improvement, thanks ever so) so it looks like I'll be hacking MSStyles.dll and putting on a nicer theme. And no you're not alone, many of use can't fricking stand the Fisher price UI, I like the Win 7 UI, Vista Black was okay (too bad the OS attached to it blew chunks) and KDE had a nice silvery look, but that blue is just fucking horrible to look at for any length of time. Whomever picked that shit out must have been color blind!
Watch me get hate for saying this next part, but fuck if I care, i just wish the Linux community would get all on the same page, quit all this damned rivalry and 50 bazillion distro crap, and actually make an OS usable by the masses, is to too much to ask? I need a rock solid OS that is as easy to use as Win 7 or OSX and gives a minumum 7 years support without dealing with that apt-dist-upgrade clusterfuck as I've yet to see a machine actually upgrade without having drivers broken. I know you will never get a stable ABI as long as Torvalds has a pulse but can't you either make a REAL LTS or find a way not to shit all over the drivers during an upgrade? Hell there isn't even a 'find drivers" or "rollback drivers" button and Windows has had that for a decade!
Look, this is your chance geeks, for the first time in history all the stars are aligning, the XP dieoff is filling shops like mine with insanely overpowered laptops and desktops, Ballmer is gonna shoot MSFT in the head trying to turn Windows into WinTab, most people only care about online stuff now, you've never had a better shot, all you have to do is accept the fact the world isn't a bunch of damned programmers and get rid of the fiddly bullshit and CLI wanking off, that's all. you wanna keep the wank fest in server fine, all well and good, but you ain't never gonna sell that Bash crap to the masses. you gotta "think different' to steal a line, think iOS and Win 7, call it dumbing down if you like, just give us something simple, easy to use, and supported 7 years. Make it so my grandma could run it with ZERO help from me,lots of big icons and pretty pictures and wizards. Hell my 71 year old clueless dad installed his own Win 7 and everything ran OOTB with ZERO input from me, that is what you need to shoot for, an OS that even the clueless can run.
You've got most of the basic parts already, KDE is VERY pretty and consistent, you've got most of the guts and drivers written, you just need to put it in a friendly package and stop updates/upgrades from tearing the thing apart, that's all. you have until Apr 2014 but the sooner the better as all us shops are scrambling for Win 7 Start CALs simply because we can't find a Linux that fits the bill. give it to us and you'll have a support network that makes the Apple stores look like a bad joke. We WANT you to succeed, we really do. But with the mess you have now literally we'd go broke trying to support you. you could use the XP dieoff to take a HUGE bite out of MSFT's ass, you just gotta want it and be willing to change, are you?
" All go to hell except cave 76!" which is what i will open posts with when its obvious that we are dealing with "perception bubbles' which i was told is a nicer way of saying faboys. Do you HONESTLY think FF got its rep for being a memory hog by....what? Accident? maybe a conspiracy to promote chrome? Noooo...FF gots its WELL DESERVED memory piggie rep by leaking like a fricking sieve! Open up a dozen of the 'usual suspects" tabs, by that i mean yahoo/Gmail, FB, YouTube, all the usual places people go, look at how much memory its using, then leave it running overnight. Can't speak on the Linux version but I can say the windows version WILL be pounding the page file like a fat guy pounding cheeseburgers at the Mickey D's come the next day. they have gotten a LITTLE better between 8 and 9 but when it goes from slamming 100% CPU to 94% CPU on page load on nettops and it taking 12 hours instead of 8 to start pounding swap i don't really see a reason to cheer, do you?
And PLEASE do NOT trout out some benchmark or i'll be happy to post the benchmark that shows the Geforce FX is actually a decent DX9 chip, I can do that because when you write to the bench you can get them to say anything you want. What matters is real world usage on real world sites and frankly FF still isn't doing great there and hasn't since they came out with V4 which is why their numbers are falling. But you don't get a rep like FF has by accident friend, its not a conspiracy, its just reality. Maybe you are on Linux, i heard the Linux version is better on memory (or Linux don't let it pull that shit, one of the two) or maybe you have an Intel CPU as I've found unlike Chromium/QTWeb/Opera/Safari/IE that FF tends to favor Intel over AMD, who knows, but thousands of us having to use task manager to kill it because its sucked up all the resources and is beating the shit out of swap because we forgot and left it on overnight are not saying this to piss on your little FF flag. Kinda sad when i slap Dragon on my nephews boxes and a week later they are like "Thanks so much uncle, our machines are soooo fast now!" and the ONLY difference was swapping out FF for Dragon. hell when i did the same on my E-350 netbook I got nearly an hour of battery life simply because Dragon wasn't pounding the fuck out of CPU and RAM like FF.
If I had to guess personally i think its gecko. They didn't have this (well except for the memory leaks as its ALWAYS leaked) nearly as bad before chrome came out but it seems like trying to go "me too!" with Chrome has simply stretched the old gecko engine beyond what its capable of handling. Maybe they should switch to Webkit? Hell if i know but I do know I miss the old FF, it may have been a pig but its UI was nicer. I may not like the chrome UI that Dragon uses but at least in 10 versions since I've used it I've never had the resource usage go up, only down, and at least it doesn't kill my extensions. i hope they fix the mess and i try every new version but so far no joy, it still sucks on AMD and Windows.
But does it have enough power to actually record? Or is it just another media tank? hell if you want a full blown HTPC you can buy an AMD based for cheap and slap on your choice of Linux or Windows and voila! Instant HTPC with XBMC (or if you use Windows WMC or MediaPortal) and if all you want is a media tank you can buy the Nbox HD for $59 that does 1080p and is ready to go or if you want streaming a WDTV for $99.
Don't get me wrong the Raspberry looks like a cool toy to fiddle with, i just don't see it having enough horse to be a full blown HTPC. Recording HD or even SD video can put a strain on a chip and the Raspberry was made to be low priced not high powered. But I have a feeling once you added all the stuff required to make it a fully functional HTPC you'd be better off just getting one the the AMD E-350s and calling it a day. According to Phoronix Ubuntu 10.04 and better has OOTB support for those chips so it should be a cakewalk to make a XBMC system out of one, everything works OOTB.
So how's the Windows version coming along?
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KDE 4.8 Released
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Last time i tried it it piled on the dependencies and I couldn't uninstall it without restoring from disk image but if its gotten better i wouldn't mind giving it a go. i have a ton of off lease XP machines piling up and can't stand the XP Fisher price UI and I give the KDE guys credit for having a nice UI, so how's it coming along? Great, good, lousy? How easy is it to install and uninstall? How easy is it to switch back and forth?
They are online now, look them up. Now that they don't have to pay for paper the stories are even more batshit, check them out with "above top secret' for your daily dose of crazy. I do and its a blast!
Thanks, and notice i got modded down for daring to go against libertarian groupthink that "the free hand will save us!" but if any of them would bother to read their history they would know that the Chinese leadership looked upon Stalin as one of the greatest "leaders" you could possibly have and when he died and they had De-Stalinization and the cutting down of his cult of personality that was a large reason for the Sino/Soviet split since the leaders of China modeled themselves after Comrade Stalin. This is also why traditionally the NK government and China has gotten along because they too in "dear leader' modeled themselves after Stalin, and Stalin was about as far from worker control as one could possibly get and in fact executed anybody who dared to point out that Stalinism was nothing like Leninism/Marxism as envisioned by those two groups.
While I agree that a lot of what is happening to China, India, and the entire BRIC block can be seen as simply catching up to the west there are sadly those that still believe the Cold War propaganda that these countries are communist when nothing could be further from the truth. They are totalitarian regimes no different than any other dictator run country, some are run "well" as far as output like China, some are run poorly like Zimbabwe under Mugabe, but they have more in common with each other than the worker controlled system dreamed of by Marx and Lenin. No intention to Godwin but it would be like saying Germany in the 40s was socialist since they had that in their name, or that NK right now is democratic since that is in the countries title. Just because a country calls themself something doesn't make that true, anymore than the USA is capitalist when i'd say its more of an oligarchy.
Yes but will you now admit that "do no evil" is no different and just as much bullshit as "think different" or "What do you want to do today?" (had to go look that last one up, wow MSFT sucks at catch phrases don't they?) because all three are NOTHING but marketing BS. If Google could make an extra 15% by throwing a random Google user into a pit of horny gorillas i have no doubt we'd be seeing gorilla loving on YouTube before the day was out. it doesn't matter HOW a company starts out once they get to a certain level there is simply too large and powerful an org there to be controlled by some silly catch phrase, no different than how Apple is nothing like that garage that Woz and Jobs hand built the first boards in.
What scares me isn't this so much as i expected this would be coming, but the quite disturbing 'treat corporations like ballclubs' complete with cheering and booing. These companies aren't FOR you, hell the ballclubs aren't FOR you as khan let slip with his "I only care about season ticket holders" gaffe, so cheering and booing these corps is not only stupid but more than a little dangerous because it gives these corps more power. If congress started investigating Google how many letters do you think would be wrote telling them to/slips blanket over head/ "Leave poor Google alone" do you think? Tens of thousands? Hundreds of thousands? as the economies of the world continue to sour these corps are gonna get nastier folks, once they are used to making X profits they simply aren't gonna settle for X-Y which is why we got the *.A.As pushing SOPA/PIPA because god forbid they don't meet the quarterly earnings reports, so please, judge companies by their douchebag behavior, not some marketing slogan.
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If its from the same ones that make clitter I probably shouldn't ask exactly WHERE that wand is located,should I?
Well can we all agree now that an unpatched OS, no matter if its OSX, BSD, Windows OR Linux, is a bad thing? Because i am really tired of posting how much trouble i'm having with updates puking on drivers only to get told "Well just disable updates and the sell the machine! Nothing will go wrong, its Linux!". There is NO "magical OS" that is immune to exploits, none. In the past couple of years we've seen Windows, Linux, Android, iOS, every OS of any popularity at all has been pwned at least once, most several times.
so can we please put the lie to bed that you can run unpatched Linux systems and never have to worry, please? Oh and for those that say "nobody would say that" i got that same answer not an hour ago so this belief is apparently common, scarily enough.
Uhhh...are you stoned? Seriously...are you? Linux was an x86 version of MINIX not unix, they used some of the POSIX conventions but that's all, as SCO found out. And having similar functionality is NOT the same as copying all the levels of a program and just sticking a new picture on it, a better example would be me just copypasta-ing all the levels in BioShock and calling it BioSmack. This isn't "similar" its a level for level, page for page, feature for feature bold faced ripoff. And you CAN shut down blod faced ripoff you know, see Rolex crushing Romex watches or MSFT shutting down Lindows.
Not even similar, he copied the place, composition, color schema, subject matter, answer me this, does Rolex have the right to stop vendors selling genuine Romex watches? Because if you say yes then you have to side with the original artist as that is EXACTLY what this guy has done. i'm a musician and am about to sink a couple of grand into getting my album recorded, do you think someone ought to be able to change a couple of words in the chorus of one of my songs and call it his own? You don't get to steal something just because you don't like the price you know, there are literally thousands of CC and public domain pictures he could have helped himself to but that wasn't good enough, he wanted THAT picture and when he couldn't get it for nothing he just took it, no different than some record company taking my album and sticking a new label on it and selling it. this isn't "kinda sorta' similar its a bald faced ripoff that even a blind man could see, hell he even copied the filters!
Because Linux isn't a magical woobie that doesn't get infected from unpatched software? i can wallpaper this pages with links to everyone from Kernel.org on down getting infected and its ALWAYS unpatched software that bites you in the ass. for me to hand out disabled software would be no better than handing out a Windows machines with WU disabled, its leaving the machine open to infection and it WILL become a zombie, I've seen enough infected Linux servers to know NO OS is immune to unpatched software. with the speed of browser exploits coming every single day it would especially be foolhardy on a home machine, look at the FF 8 exploit that let malware load a hidden iFrame and spam people's Yahoo mail accounts. Any security expert will tell you that having old unpatched software on the net is a BIG no no and i can't in good conscience do that to people that are expecting me to deliver a functional product, I just can't.
And funny you should mention openSUSE because i have a Linux admin friend that is going openBSD because openSUSE puked on an upgrade and wiped out 2 years worth of email, be happy to give ya the link on Linux Insider where she is bitching her ass off about it. I've found that it doesn't behave any better than Fedora or Ubuntu, it'll still puke, and we're talking NO funky repos, just bog standard stuff. With my experiment on OpenSUSE it puked on the Realtek HD, the Aetheros wireless card, and the Nvidia chipset. again this isn't some rare stuff here, the Nvidia 6100 chipset is as old as dirt and isn't even being updated anymore, and the Realtek HD chipset is likewise old as the hills. i had to just shake my head at the Aetheros because it was one i had picked up expressly because the community said "Oh don't get broadcom, get Aetheros, it always works!" yeah, except when it don't. And the arch rolling release just died slowly instead of all at once, first went the sound, all i got was static (which i hear is a common problem) then network settings wouldn't stick in the GUI, only CLI (another common problem) before finally i rebooted and ended up in single user mode with a black screen o' death.
So far I've tried Arch, Vector, Fedora, PCLOS, Ubuntu/Kubuntu/Xubuntu/Mint,Mepis,Puppy,Knoppix, Xandros (that came closest to "it just works' but it costs more than windows and is now discontinued), Mandriva, OpenSUSE,Slax,ArcLinux, CentOS,Kanotix, and a few variations on the above like Macpup and Slax popcorn and kill Bill, so its not from lack of trying here, the driver situation is just royally fucked on Linux IMHO. When I can find a distro that will let it upgrade twice without puking I'll be the first to sing its praises from the highest mountain but so far the search has come up with nothing. i've probably blown through a good 100gb+ in discs and upgrades trying to find one, just one, that would survive its own upgrade cycle but all i'm finding is the same problems. it works just fine on install, but if you upgrade it'll puke and if i was gonna disable all updates i might as well do like my competitors and just put on pirated Windows 7, it'll be a zombie machine soon enough either way.
Well I've always thought Comodo made some really solid products. While i prefer avast for my home users for businesses you really can't beat Comodo Internet Security, they let small businesses use it free and it has really top notch AV and firewall controls. Frankly i soured on Google when they started spamming first the toolbar and then Chrome with freeware, i feel if you make a good product you shouldn't HAVE to spam and the fact Google has become far worse than Sun and MSFT ever were when it comes to spamming freeware with Chrome makes me leery of going anywhere near it and their recent announcement of tying everything together just makes me more so.
Comodo has made a few mistakes in the past but were quick to announce them and send out revocations for the affected certs and in every test I've seen Comodo security software is always in the top 5 so that's good enough for me and my customers. Plus they love the speed, I put Comodo Secure DNS on as default in the browser and frankly their DNS is fast fast fast, much faster than the local ISPs. Every customer i give the Dragon to always ends up telling me how much faster their browsing is now and want me to send them links so they can send their friends the links to Comodo and ABP. so far knock on plastic every customer I've given Comodo dragon along with Comodo IS or Avast free has been 100% malware free so that is all i need to know, its really good at killing phishing sites and stopping malware sites from loading and when you are talking about home users every extra bit of protection helps.
Obvious bullshit is obvious. I take it you've never actually TRIED dragon because there ain't jack shit "hard coded', not the DNS or anything else. not only can you simply uncheck a box at install (or if you are placing it as a standalone or thumbdrive install) but at ANY time turning off the DNS is as easy as options>under the hood> uncheck the little box. Rockmelt is just a Chromium ripoff of Flock which also bombed hard, its not like one needs a special browser to visit FB. Oh if you like that sort of thing there is the option to have a FB button in dragon but again like everything else its one checkbox away from going bye bye.
Now as for SWIron its okay but personally if i wanted a standalone and wasn't gonna use Comodo i'd use QTWeb as its Webkit engine seems to play nicer with thumbdrives and it has tons of privacy features which help to leave no traces or read/write to the stick a lot. Chrome just has too much phone home for my taste, if i want to let Google have my search that's one thing but they shouldn't get squat when i'm using Yahoo.
Personally though i frankly don't see why you're bitching, never before have we had so many GOOD browsers to choose from, we literally have a feast of choices for our browsing. We have Gecko, webkit, chromium, presto and trident, and variations galore to fit every little niche. I like Dragon, my mom likes Seamonkey, my oldest has been a die hard Opera user for years, my youngest was FF for ages but decided that he liked the speed of the Dragon better, on my netbook I have a Webkit based in expressgate and QTWeb and dragon, man having choices is good, having all these free browsers that run well is good. So instead of bitching why don't you actually try the ones on TFA? They're free and who knows, you might find yourself a new browser.
Yeah but it is kinda sad a guy can bust his ass making something unique only to have some scumbum company like Zynga bold face copy the thing. it looks like they only gave it a little graphical polish and called it a day, pretty obvious ripoff IMHO. hopefully the guy can get a good lawyer that will rip Zynga a new one.
And then it costs MORE than Windows so is completely pointless, see the problem? I can't sell a $150 laptop with a $99 a year OS on it, that just won't cut it, and Windows home is $89 or if i want to cheat like many of my competitors i can buy family packs for $129 for 3 CALs. of course many of the smaller shops are getting frustrated by both MSFT and Linux and are just installing "wink wink" copies of Windows which i don't care for but hopefully now you see my problem. Linux says its ready for the masses but its only real selling point, price, simply doesn't exist. Sure if you're a programmer or a geek and don't mind spending a lot of time under the hood like a 74 Nova you can keep it running, but that just removed 99.95% of my customers. Geeks don't buy retail, they DIY.
So in the end i'm back to square one. I have right now 5 off lease machines, anywhere from 2.2Ghz P4s to early Pentium Ds and i'm gonna have to shove them out the door with XP simply because the community refuses to step up to the plate. its a damned shame as the great XP dieoff could FINALLY give us a "Year of the Linux desktop" but the community won't quit messing with their bash scripts to wake up and smell the opportunity. if they would only give us a usable product we small shop owners would give them a support network that makes the Apple stores look like a bad joke, you'd literally have a Linux store in every town and city in the nation, but we simply can't support you with the situation as it is. I tried selling linux in the past and ended up taking a bath simply because it was too fiddly, updates broke drivers, and you couldn't even buy a printer without playing hardware roulette because the hardware lists were so bad out of date.
Oh and I'm so damned sick of the bullshit argument "OEMs would give us blobs herp derp" against an ABI. NEWS FLASH THEY ALREADY DO! What do yoiu think you get from Nvidia, broadcom, hell the majority of wireless? blobs, the only difference is now you're screwed because the blob works on kernel X and you have kernel Y. If a company is gonna be open to FOSS the ABI isn't gonna change their minds one way or another. sadly dogma will ensure Linux stays just where it is now, dead last. I mean when shops would rather risk jail time selling hot Windows than take your free product, doesn't that give everyone a clue?
If I had mod points you'd be at +5 because you nailed it. What this guy did was no different than a Romex watch, he saw a picture he liked and when he couldn't get the guy who made it to basically hand it over he produced a knockoff. While i believe copyrights and patents need serious reform this is actually a textbook case of what they were originally meant to do, protect someone from cranking out knockoffs and stealing their work for nothing. It isn't like he had never seen the other pic and simply stumbled over the same idea, he knew about it, tried to buy it, didn't like the price and decided to rip it off. open and shut case IMHO and I applaud the judge for having common sense.
Well as someone who uses Comodo Dragon what extra crap are you referring to? The " send everything to Google" stuff being removed, or the completely optional Comodo Secure DNS (which i've found blocks most phishing and malware sites) which is not only changeable at install but can be toggled on and off with a checkbox? Or the single button that lets you use Comodo site inspector to check a site's malware history, again a single checkbox to remove? that extra?
if you care about security and privacy i urge to to read TFA and give the Dragon a try, its fast, has some really nice completely optional security features, can be installed standalone or on a thumbstick, and with each release frankly its gotten better both in performance and security. With the Dragon and Avast free just for shits and giggles i tried to get a machine i was gonna wipe anyway infected, threw every 'look at teh tittiez!" and 'get a free iPad!" topsite and crapsite i could find at it and between the two everything was stopped cold. i did a half a dozen offline and online scans and nothing, zero zip nada squat, which is good enough of a result i've switched my entire family to the Dragon with Avast and haven't had a single call, it all 'just works" smooth as butter. give it a try, its free and the standalone won't even mess with Chrome if that is your main browser so what have you got to lose?
No they are just spamming the living shit out of the thing by paying every freeware author and his cat and his cat's squeaky toy to include Chrome in the installer with default checked. i don't know how many Chrome "infections' I've had to clean in the past 6 months because of that shit but frankly its getting old. i didn't like it when it was sun spamming java, didn't like it when it was MSFT spamming bingBar, don't like it now that its Google spamming Chrome. spam is spam is spam and it sucks.
Actually I think you're wrong, and here is why: Most PCs have gotten "good enough" so people simply aren't buying new ones. that Pentium D or Athlon X2 they bought in 06 is still fine for webmail, YouTube, and FB, which is what the majority are doing so they simply aren't buying because compared to the jobs they have their current PCs are insanely overpowered. hell i sold my full size laptop and bought an E-350 netbook, could i have afforded bigger? Not a problem but i realized that my laptop was twiddling its thumbs a good 90% of the time so what's the point?
The Macs are selling on the other hand because they finally started selling some of them below the $1000 price point. I'd love to see the numbers broken down by price as i'd bet my last buck the vast majority of OSX's gains are below $1000 units. In a way its the same thing we are seeing with tablets now, where many that would have bought one were turned off by the price but now we are seeing all these nice sub $250 Android tablets the sales are climbing, same thing. those that held off because they couldn't see paying $2k+ for a Mac are jumping on now that the price has dropped and i expect you'll see this continue for probably a year until those that wanted one have one then the sales will drop again.
Funnily enough that'll be about the time you'll see Windows PCs jump like mad thanks to the "great XP dieoff" reaching a head. Right now most shops will tell you its just a trickle but as it gets closer to Apr 2014 that trickle will become a flood as all those people that thought their current PC was 'good enough" decide they'd rather buy a new one than pay to upgrade their old. the first to go were the late model P4s but now the early Pentium Ds and Athlon X2s are starting to make an appearance, can't way for the early core duo laptops to start showing up.
As for WebOS, stick a fork she be done. cell phones simply aren't like desktops, you can just stick any old thing on there and get it to work as all the drivers are proprietary and the network is locked down. while i liked the UI of WebOS without OEMs actually supplying drivers and handsets for it to run on i don't see it going anywhere and HP drug its feet and killed most of the buzz. final prediction? in less than 2 years it'll be another abandoned project on SourceForge.
Try my "is it safe?" test and you'll see the problem. Download the version from 3 releases ago and then upgrade to current. you see I can't plan my sales around when the next LTS release is and frankly the LTS isn't really much of an LTS at all as you get barely 3 years and that is if you sell the machines on the day of release.
Sadly what you'll find is the same thing i found, both with LTS to LTS and regular to regular, which is a broken mess. I've even had Linux guys tell me I should always install clean, which is what they used to make fun of Windows for. Which would be fine if we were talking once a decade but every 6 months? you get 10 years on Windows but I'll happily settle for 7 even though that's a little short. lets face it a Pentium d that was sold in 06 will still do the web based jobs people have no problemo and most of the off lease machines i'm getting are either pentium Ds or Athlon duals along with some of the early core series laptops. People aren't gonna be happy to just chunk those in 6 months and i doubt they'll chunk them in 3 years either and since home consumers don't buy support contracts the cost of having me reinstall and tweak the damned thing every 6 months will cost more than a copy of Windows home VERY quickly.
With the economy in the toilet there are a hell of a lot of working poor out there that appreciate $100 desktops and $150 laptops but until they come up with a Linux that don't crap on its own drivers i'm in a bit of a jam here. I can probably get away with leaving windows on them and shoving them out the door for the rest of 2012 but XP will be headed for that great OS bin in the sky and frankly i can't find a source for Win 7 Starter so that leaves Linux. And honestly while the initial install goes fine unless i want to disable all updates and just let the machines become zombies nobody has figured out yet how to do in place upgrades without them taking a big shit on the drivers. personally i blame Torvalds refusal to accept a driver ABI but then here come the fanbois having a fit, like every other OS is wrong and Linus fricking Torvalds is right, but since as long as he has a pulse Linux won't have one it don't matter anyway. But until the driver situation is fixed me and every other shop is in a catch 22, we'd like to offer your OS but the customer base simply don't have the skills to keep the damned thing running and giving away free support would break us. NOW do you see the problem?
Bah! i looked up that poutine stuff and that would be considered a health food in the south! Here we deep fry or BBQ everything so the only way to make us less healthy is to run the tail pipe of a big rig straight into the food court. Hell son that thing's got cheese curds, those have like vitamins, too healthy for us, try deep frying it in beef or even better pig lard and THEN you'll have something unhealthy boy!
I don't know about him but as for me....some of us miss the old days? Slashdot USED to be the kind of place where there would be a 300+ posting arguing merits of various file systems, various features of different OSes and even if you didn't agree with a poster dammit you LEARNED because everyone brought their A games and you might even end of with some of the guys who actually wrote the thing involved in the conversation. Once we were having a conversation on various quantum theories and when i spoke up and said i was having trouble grasping a concept someone who was actually working at one of the particle accelerators came on and nicely explained in layman's terms the particular quantum effect they were shooting for and why that would be useful in computing. it was quite nice and very civil.
Now you won 't get two posts in before its crapflodded with "die" "go fuck yourself" "your a shill for (insert company)' frankly 4chan is often more civil than the dick waving fanbois we have around here now breaking the flow and fucking things up. you can't simply surf at a higher level because some of them are making 200+ accounts to get modpoints to modbomb with and often anyone that dares to not suck the koolaid they are guzzling by the gallon becomes an "enemy of freedom/truth/puppies" and will be constantly modbombed. As far as I've been able to pick up the current fanboi raging hard on list is FOSS yay, Apple yay unless its VS FOSS then boo, MSFT boo, Canonical can be yay or boo depending on the day of the week,Oracle used to be yay because they were competing with MSFT until they bought sun so they are now boo, Google yay no matter what, its all just fanboi dick waving which doesn't matter what kind of citations you provide its groupthink or bust.
and THAT is why /. has seen its numbers dropping like a stone, because people are getting sick of the bullshit and bile thanks to the broken mod system encouraging douchebaggery. As soon as i can find a website similar to what /. USED to be i'll be moving on, but its not easy finding tech sites that aren't just commercials in website format. But i can understand his frustration because those of us that remember what this site was like in the late 90s/early 00s can tell you it was NOTHING like this, it was a place geeks of all kinds would go and discuss all matter of gear and tech and learn quite a bit in the process. the only thing I've learned here in the past few years is there is an amazing amount of ways one can combine curse words and insults I previously didn't know about. Oh and to make the fanbois (or those with a perception bubble as I've been told is a more civil way to say that) feel at home let me say "All go to hell except cave 76!" and you can just insert whatever makes you go squee for cave 76 and feel accepted.
Sorry if I misjudged, it can be hard separating the legitimate pro viewpoints from all the militant flag waving we get here now. Hell I've had one batshit loonie follow me around off and on for a year posting "die you fat fucker die' simply because i pointed out his "Linux magically protects you from viruses and doesn't need updates' was just as much bullshit as slapping an unpatched XP box on a network, and unpatched box without a firewall is an unpatched box without a firewall and there are plenty of pwned zombie Linux boxes as well.
As far as Google goes i use it for a spam dump mostly so i'm sure they have a seriously weird profile on me, probably think I take a LOT of herbal viagra and am in the market for romex watches. I have enough of my stuff split between Google yahoo and MSFT that unless all three were to share info (unlikely) nobody is getting enough data to really paint much of a profile on me. But I really do think the ballclub bullshit needs to go, because as the corps grow ever more powerful they WILL use that against us. I can easily see a day Google gets investigated for antitrust or product dumping and then sending out a call for their legion of fanbois to mail bomb congress to call off the inquiry, just as we see the Apple heads rush to apologize for 'their" company and excuse any behavior no matter how douchebag.
If a product works for you fine and dandy, not expecting everyone to start wearing burlap and live in mud huts. But just remember you are ONLY a wallet with feet to these megacorps, either they get cash from you directly like Apple, indirectly by selling to third parties like MSFT, or by selling your ass to advertisers like Google. in the end its all product and PPTs and quarterly reports, none of these companies would piss on the average Joe if they were on fire.
Yeah if its one i'm actually gonna keep i get Aston and put on it, its what I run on my XP nettop and is quite nice. of course i'm not gonna blow $30 a pop on some off lease boxes i'm selling but hate dealing with that Fisher price UI (And nooooo, switching to the fugly as fuck Win98 UI isn't an improvement, thanks ever so) so it looks like I'll be hacking MSStyles.dll and putting on a nicer theme. And no you're not alone, many of use can't fricking stand the Fisher price UI, I like the Win 7 UI, Vista Black was okay (too bad the OS attached to it blew chunks) and KDE had a nice silvery look, but that blue is just fucking horrible to look at for any length of time. Whomever picked that shit out must have been color blind!
Watch me get hate for saying this next part, but fuck if I care, i just wish the Linux community would get all on the same page, quit all this damned rivalry and 50 bazillion distro crap, and actually make an OS usable by the masses, is to too much to ask? I need a rock solid OS that is as easy to use as Win 7 or OSX and gives a minumum 7 years support without dealing with that apt-dist-upgrade clusterfuck as I've yet to see a machine actually upgrade without having drivers broken. I know you will never get a stable ABI as long as Torvalds has a pulse but can't you either make a REAL LTS or find a way not to shit all over the drivers during an upgrade? Hell there isn't even a 'find drivers" or "rollback drivers" button and Windows has had that for a decade!
Look, this is your chance geeks, for the first time in history all the stars are aligning, the XP dieoff is filling shops like mine with insanely overpowered laptops and desktops, Ballmer is gonna shoot MSFT in the head trying to turn Windows into WinTab, most people only care about online stuff now, you've never had a better shot, all you have to do is accept the fact the world isn't a bunch of damned programmers and get rid of the fiddly bullshit and CLI wanking off, that's all. you wanna keep the wank fest in server fine, all well and good, but you ain't never gonna sell that Bash crap to the masses. you gotta "think different' to steal a line, think iOS and Win 7, call it dumbing down if you like, just give us something simple, easy to use, and supported 7 years. Make it so my grandma could run it with ZERO help from me,lots of big icons and pretty pictures and wizards. Hell my 71 year old clueless dad installed his own Win 7 and everything ran OOTB with ZERO input from me, that is what you need to shoot for, an OS that even the clueless can run.
You've got most of the basic parts already, KDE is VERY pretty and consistent, you've got most of the guts and drivers written, you just need to put it in a friendly package and stop updates/upgrades from tearing the thing apart, that's all. you have until Apr 2014 but the sooner the better as all us shops are scrambling for Win 7 Start CALs simply because we can't find a Linux that fits the bill. give it to us and you'll have a support network that makes the Apple stores look like a bad joke. We WANT you to succeed, we really do. But with the mess you have now literally we'd go broke trying to support you. you could use the XP dieoff to take a HUGE bite out of MSFT's ass, you just gotta want it and be willing to change, are you?
" All go to hell except cave 76!" which is what i will open posts with when its obvious that we are dealing with "perception bubbles' which i was told is a nicer way of saying faboys. Do you HONESTLY think FF got its rep for being a memory hog by....what? Accident? maybe a conspiracy to promote chrome? Noooo...FF gots its WELL DESERVED memory piggie rep by leaking like a fricking sieve! Open up a dozen of the 'usual suspects" tabs, by that i mean yahoo/Gmail, FB, YouTube, all the usual places people go, look at how much memory its using, then leave it running overnight. Can't speak on the Linux version but I can say the windows version WILL be pounding the page file like a fat guy pounding cheeseburgers at the Mickey D's come the next day. they have gotten a LITTLE better between 8 and 9 but when it goes from slamming 100% CPU to 94% CPU on page load on nettops and it taking 12 hours instead of 8 to start pounding swap i don't really see a reason to cheer, do you?
And PLEASE do NOT trout out some benchmark or i'll be happy to post the benchmark that shows the Geforce FX is actually a decent DX9 chip, I can do that because when you write to the bench you can get them to say anything you want. What matters is real world usage on real world sites and frankly FF still isn't doing great there and hasn't since they came out with V4 which is why their numbers are falling. But you don't get a rep like FF has by accident friend, its not a conspiracy, its just reality. Maybe you are on Linux, i heard the Linux version is better on memory (or Linux don't let it pull that shit, one of the two) or maybe you have an Intel CPU as I've found unlike Chromium/QTWeb/Opera/Safari/IE that FF tends to favor Intel over AMD, who knows, but thousands of us having to use task manager to kill it because its sucked up all the resources and is beating the shit out of swap because we forgot and left it on overnight are not saying this to piss on your little FF flag. Kinda sad when i slap Dragon on my nephews boxes and a week later they are like "Thanks so much uncle, our machines are soooo fast now!" and the ONLY difference was swapping out FF for Dragon. hell when i did the same on my E-350 netbook I got nearly an hour of battery life simply because Dragon wasn't pounding the fuck out of CPU and RAM like FF.
If I had to guess personally i think its gecko. They didn't have this (well except for the memory leaks as its ALWAYS leaked) nearly as bad before chrome came out but it seems like trying to go "me too!" with Chrome has simply stretched the old gecko engine beyond what its capable of handling. Maybe they should switch to Webkit? Hell if i know but I do know I miss the old FF, it may have been a pig but its UI was nicer. I may not like the chrome UI that Dragon uses but at least in 10 versions since I've used it I've never had the resource usage go up, only down, and at least it doesn't kill my extensions. i hope they fix the mess and i try every new version but so far no joy, it still sucks on AMD and Windows.
Have y'all still got them oil sands? Dammit boys I smell WMDs! hope y'all like strip malls and burger joints!
But does it have enough power to actually record? Or is it just another media tank? hell if you want a full blown HTPC you can buy an AMD based for cheap and slap on your choice of Linux or Windows and voila! Instant HTPC with XBMC (or if you use Windows WMC or MediaPortal) and if all you want is a media tank you can buy the Nbox HD for $59 that does 1080p and is ready to go or if you want streaming a WDTV for $99.
Don't get me wrong the Raspberry looks like a cool toy to fiddle with, i just don't see it having enough horse to be a full blown HTPC. Recording HD or even SD video can put a strain on a chip and the Raspberry was made to be low priced not high powered. But I have a feeling once you added all the stuff required to make it a fully functional HTPC you'd be better off just getting one the the AMD E-350s and calling it a day. According to Phoronix Ubuntu 10.04 and better has OOTB support for those chips so it should be a cakewalk to make a XBMC system out of one, everything works OOTB.
Last time i tried it it piled on the dependencies and I couldn't uninstall it without restoring from disk image but if its gotten better i wouldn't mind giving it a go. i have a ton of off lease XP machines piling up and can't stand the XP Fisher price UI and I give the KDE guys credit for having a nice UI, so how's it coming along? Great, good, lousy? How easy is it to install and uninstall? How easy is it to switch back and forth?
They are online now, look them up. Now that they don't have to pay for paper the stories are even more batshit, check them out with "above top secret' for your daily dose of crazy. I do and its a blast!
Thanks, and notice i got modded down for daring to go against libertarian groupthink that "the free hand will save us!" but if any of them would bother to read their history they would know that the Chinese leadership looked upon Stalin as one of the greatest "leaders" you could possibly have and when he died and they had De-Stalinization and the cutting down of his cult of personality that was a large reason for the Sino/Soviet split since the leaders of China modeled themselves after Comrade Stalin. This is also why traditionally the NK government and China has gotten along because they too in "dear leader' modeled themselves after Stalin, and Stalin was about as far from worker control as one could possibly get and in fact executed anybody who dared to point out that Stalinism was nothing like Leninism/Marxism as envisioned by those two groups.
While I agree that a lot of what is happening to China, India, and the entire BRIC block can be seen as simply catching up to the west there are sadly those that still believe the Cold War propaganda that these countries are communist when nothing could be further from the truth. They are totalitarian regimes no different than any other dictator run country, some are run "well" as far as output like China, some are run poorly like Zimbabwe under Mugabe, but they have more in common with each other than the worker controlled system dreamed of by Marx and Lenin. No intention to Godwin but it would be like saying Germany in the 40s was socialist since they had that in their name, or that NK right now is democratic since that is in the countries title. Just because a country calls themself something doesn't make that true, anymore than the USA is capitalist when i'd say its more of an oligarchy.
Yes but will you now admit that "do no evil" is no different and just as much bullshit as "think different" or "What do you want to do today?" (had to go look that last one up, wow MSFT sucks at catch phrases don't they?) because all three are NOTHING but marketing BS. If Google could make an extra 15% by throwing a random Google user into a pit of horny gorillas i have no doubt we'd be seeing gorilla loving on YouTube before the day was out. it doesn't matter HOW a company starts out once they get to a certain level there is simply too large and powerful an org there to be controlled by some silly catch phrase, no different than how Apple is nothing like that garage that Woz and Jobs hand built the first boards in.
What scares me isn't this so much as i expected this would be coming, but the quite disturbing 'treat corporations like ballclubs' complete with cheering and booing. These companies aren't FOR you, hell the ballclubs aren't FOR you as khan let slip with his "I only care about season ticket holders" gaffe, so cheering and booing these corps is not only stupid but more than a little dangerous because it gives these corps more power. If congress started investigating Google how many letters do you think would be wrote telling them to /slips blanket over head/ "Leave poor Google alone" do you think? Tens of thousands? Hundreds of thousands? as the economies of the world continue to sour these corps are gonna get nastier folks, once they are used to making X profits they simply aren't gonna settle for X-Y which is why we got the *.A.As pushing SOPA/PIPA because god forbid they don't meet the quarterly earnings reports, so please, judge companies by their douchebag behavior, not some marketing slogan.