Yeah and my left leg plays jingle bells if you jiggle it! I don't see anybody else having that problem so they need an always on Internet connection, do you? Valve solved that problem years ago with the banhammer. you pull shit in MP? enjoy your banhammering.
i predict that Razr1911 or one of the other groups will have it hacked before release and the massive amount of piracy will be truly staggering to behold. nothing pisses off the hackers more than always phoning home DRM so they just painted a big ass bullseye right on their forehead. Me if it ain't on steam I don't want it, I'm sure as hell not having yet another service sucking bandwidth and calling home with God knows what information, no thanks. it isn't like there aren't thousands of Diablo clones out there to choose from and I bet we have a good 2 dozen released at the same time as DIII. Too bad ActiBlizzard as I'd like to give you my money but I don't pay to get kicked in the crotch, thanks ever so.
It doesn't matter as that turkey is gonna bomb so hard it'll finally make MSFT Bob look good!
Think about it friends, the way to know a thing is to understand it, now why do people buy Windows machines? Why to run WINDOWS programs of course! And guess what don't run on ARM? The 25 damned years worth of X86 Windows programs that everybody buys fricking windows for in the first place!
I can tell you what is gonna happen because i saw a dry run of it last Xmas, a local merchant was selling "Windows tablets!" and it looked like XP, but had in the corner a little "Compact Edition" label. Do you think ANYBODY knew what the fuck that meant? Hell no, they can't keep up with all the Windows versions anyway! So many bought the things and took them home, tried them and when they found they wouldn't actually run WINDOWS programs on a "Windows Tablet" they were brought back EN MASSE. The merchant ended up having to stick a sticker over the Windows part and sell them for a loss as a generic tablet.
And THAT dear children is what is gonna happen with Windows 8, Ballmer is trying to force a cell phone OS onto the desktop which doesn't have touch screens for 99.5% of the units being sold and at the same time fool developers into thinking "Hey if I write for Win 8 i can sell anywhere!" which of course is complete horseshit as X86 and ARM devices are about as different as mopeds and semi trucks. one you have to be ultra light and give a shit about resources, the other? Meh they got multicores and assloads of RAM anyway right?
The only thing that makes sense to me is that Ballmer is hated enough by the engineers they are gonna let the sweaty monkey hang himself by his own stupid ideas, otherwise somebody would have called captain obvious to save the day. Everyone knows since he has been CEO its been one clusterfuck after another with only the fact they brought in the office guys to gut Vista and rebuild it from the ground up into a decent OS keeping them from back to back flops. I mean look at his track record, rushing X360 with a fatal flaw costing billions, Zune, killing playsforsure for Zune market, kin, WinPhone looks to be another WinMo flop, hell i could probably go on all day. Any company that is stupid enough to waste resources on Windows 8 development deserves to fail. the smart money says everyone sticks with Win 7 which will hopefully get the monkey FIRED and bring in someone like Ozzie that has a brain. Lets face it if he wasn't billy's little buddy he'd already be shitcanned, he's cost them dump trucks worth of money trying to be Apple.
Final prediction? Win 8 total flop, win 7 sells like mad as people scramble to keep from getting stuck with win 8, OEMs demand downgrade rights to 7, Ballmer fired. The last one not a sure bet if Billy gets involved but surely another Vista flop will have the board revolt.
Actually I'd say the bigger news would be how nasty are they gonna make the DRM. If they give it some nasty always on DRM that makes you jump through hoops i have a feeling it'll be pirated more than Spore.
Why can't these companies just see the traincars filled with cash that Valve is making and jump on board? Gabe had it right when he said to the effect "Pirates are the competition offering a better product" and he has shown you follow the three simple rules, make it cheap, easy, and convenient and you can turn those pirates into money. Has Valve released the numbers on how much they made during the Xmas sale? because I bet the amount was staggeringly huge. steam has gotten so easy and cheap that frankly if it isn't on steam i don't bother, not even to pirate it, what's the point? I bet i blew through a couple of hundred there just myself because both my boys decided they'd rather have Steam games for Xmas as well as my personal buying. Frankly it was easier to pick up what we wanted on steam than to pirate the things!
But if its one thing we've seen over the years its that the CEO of ActiBlizzard is a massive douchenozzle that happy to screw over his customers if he can "maximize profit potential" while letting him beat an IP into the ground so while i'm happy that there will be a Diablo III as i had a blast with Diablo II if they fill it to the rim with DRM and make you jump through hoops instead of just using steam frankly they can shove it. Its not like there aren't a wealth of Diablo clones out there, some of them quite good, so for me its gonna come down to how big a prick they are gonna be as to whether Diablo III is in my game collection or not.
I can tell you as a retailer why Linux on the desktop is DOA, its a fiddly PITA geeker hobbyist OS that doesn't give a wet fart about consumers or average folks! Lets take what i use to see if a distro is ready, a little test i call "Is it safe?" that just FYI not a SINGLE distro has passed yet, not one.
You take ANY distro and get a copy from THREE years ago, age is key as you'll see in a minute and you install it. Now if you need CLI to get it running? that is okay at this point as you are the OEM now and NOT the consumer. Now once its completed using the GUI and the GUI ONLY you update it to current and see what happens. I've found what you get is an unstable broken mess, with busted drivers and a shitload of CLI fiddling. Now we are talking less than HALF of what Windows gives you for support, yet it can't even manage that? If you were to do that with a distro today you'd find a complete DE changeout, a complete audio changeout to a system that frankly is shit (PulseAudio, what a POS!) and you'd find you video, audio, wireless, and possibly even the Ethernet down which kills their whole "get help on the forums!" bullshit which i would argue there is no damned reason they should NEED your stupid forums and if they do your OS be broken!
As a final note let me give this example that just shows how broken it is. After I had the wireless broken on my "is it safe" test I went to one of the forums and asked for help (which I had thought to bookmark it as it was enlightening) and was given a page and a half of CLI crap that frankly didn't work which i was informed I'd have to "tweak" for the correct hardware. So I said "You guys are Linux gurus right? Pretend I'm Suzy the first time user, now walk me through fixing it with the GUI as I'm clueless and don't know CLI from canoli". They hemmed and hawwed, a couple called me names, until one popped on and said "uuuhhh..you can't do that with a GUI" and I said "BINGO! NOW you see the problem. you expect Suzy the checkout girl to have the skills to analyze a piece Bash code, correctly identify the code that needs to be altered to allow it to correct the problem, and to have the skills and know the syntax well enough to enact said tweaks herself, doesn't anybody smell the fail here?"
And THAT is why Linux is doomed to fail miserably on the desktop. To paraphrase a line from Full Metal Jacket they believe that "Inside every Suzy is a Boris the programmer waiting to get out" but that is as far from reality as it is from here to Europa. Joe and suzy and grandma don't want to learn script and sure as hell aren't gonna be coding in their spare time! they want a box which will work and KEEP on working and the ONLY way that happens in linux is if someoe gives them free lifetime support. since that is about as likely to happen as Reagan rising from the grave to become the first Zombie candidate in US history linux isn't going anywhere. its too fiddly, updates break more than they fix, and the geeks refuse to see that situation isn't compatible with the home market.
And I bet you TRULY believe that Apple "thinks different" and MSFT cares what you want to do today, don't you? Its called MARKETING slick, some companies kick ass at it, some suck, some are in between. what is sad is despite the antitrust investigations, investigations into their rigging search to cut out competitor's products you REALLY believe because somebody slapped a "do no evil" slogan that that somehow makes them better or different than any multinational corporation don't you?
You are a perfect example of treating companies like ballclubs though, I will give you that. I mean when given a choice of Linux netbooks or Windows ones folks chose Windows but because they are in competition with "your" company that can't be right, that HAD to have been market manipulation, yet when Google spams chrome by attaching it to every piece of crapware on the planet, why that's just making the world a better place with a superior browser, isn't it?
Step away from the keyboard and take the koolaid away from your lips friend, Google is NOT "for" you, they frankly don't give a wet fart about you one way or another and i repeat if they could make an extra 15% profit by having you assraped by silver-backs i'd be watching Gorilla loving on YouTube this very day, its about MONEY friend and to get it they use MARKETING which apparently you swallow hook, line, and sinker. Its truly amazing to see someone who otherwise sounds rational treat a corporation as a ballclub, you do make a textbook example of the fanboi though so thanks again for illustrating my point better than i ever could, congrats.
That's funny, you just described my netbook perfectly except i also have access to all the programs for Windows and a keyboard. it weighs less than 3 pounds, when I want to just check email it has an instant on button that fires up a ChromeOS style UI in under 6 seconds, gets 6 hours watching HD video in Win 7 and 8 hours surfing under Expressgate, and at 12 inches isn't any more bulky than a tablet. Oh and I have 300gb worth of space for all my movies and music and it plays L4D and GTA:VC like a champ. Kinda funny as I get backseat drivers at the doctor's office "Hey watch out of that cop on your tail! You better turn! Uh Oh, they got the chopper after you, you are in trouble now!"
The ONLY thing I've found a tablet to be an advantage on is eReader as you can turn them sideways and have a more book like interface, but is that worth an extra $200? Not for me it isn't. My AMD EEE cost $350 with 8gb of RAM (Yeah i know its overkill but it was a whole $6 difference between 4gb and 8Gb so I figured WTF) and again with the overkill this little baby is powerful enough I've been using it to cook up drumbeats in Hydrogen and edit the raw tracks I've been working on in audacity, makes a hell of a portable production unit BTW, I've even run its output to the mixing board and used it as a drum machine to give me a timing when laying tracks.
But as I said tablets will keep selling simply because they haven't reached truly insanely overpowered yet but they will soon. When the tegra is talking 5 cores you are gonna quickly reach a point where there isn't a point buying a new one when they come out because the old one will do everything you want and then the bottom will fall out, just look at that Indian that is gonna have a pad with specs similar to iPad for less than $100. At that price point everyone who wants one will get one and that will be that. hell with my netbook i really have no use for a tablet but at THAT price point? i'll buy one just for shits and giggles.
You are forgetting something friend....how long it takes to go from drawing board to consoles on the shelves. You see there will be NO catch up because by the time the console hits the shelves its parts will be three plus years old. Take for example the new Nintendo console, it has an HD4650 GPU inside. That is literally a $15 after MIR card right now, I should know i bought one for a customer recently. The X720 and PS4 will HAVE to have been in the design phases for over a year and a half which means if they took roughly the same level as the Geforce 7800 they did last time you are looking at something along the lines of an HD5750 or 5770, those are $100 NOW and the consoles are a good year out which means they'll be sub $50 then.
The ONLY reason the devs are pushing the consoles is because they believe it magically protects them from piracy, but in reality every X360 owner I know simply has TWO consoles, the pirated one they play most of their gaming on and a legit one for XBL. hell you can buy pre-cracked X360s loaded with games for less than $100 on my local Craigslist. I believe the consoles will keep the niche they have now, the frat boys and kiddies, while Valve leading the way with Steam will convert a hell of a lot of pirates into legit customers. I'd say the bigger trend will be what I call a "shotgun release" where all the consoles AND the PC ALL get a game at the same time, with the DLC and higher res textures being what makes the PC game whereas the consoles will get DLC "packs" at higher prices.
So I don't think there will be ANY catch up because the 3 to 4 years a console is in the design phase will cause the parts to be old hat by the time they make it to market. I think the next big revolution in PC gaming on the other hand to be the new AMD APUs, where even a bottom of the line box gets a Radeon GPU so that even that box you get at the Wally World will be able to game. I mean when I can play L4D on a fricking $350 netbook? that's a hell of a lot of power in the low end. Have you looked at the steam stats lately? The majority are playing Steam games on duals and the biggest cards are the sub $100 yet these are perfectly acceptable for gaming now. I would argue that it isn't the consoles allowing that so much as there is only so much bling you can add to a game before you get uncanny valley and turn people off. I was playing Just Cause II on a $100 AMD quad with a $60 HD4850 and frankly I had peoples jaws dropping on the floor when i'd set off a load of charges and the smokestakes behind me would start collapsing, tell me how much bling could you possibly add? it already had a world that was 30+ miles across and fully populated, changing weather patterns, hundreds of vehicles, what more could you possibly add to a game like that with more GPU?
I'd argue like PCs graphics have gotten "good enough" and are now into diminishing returns where adding anymore bling pushes you over the 100 million mark and gets harder and harder to recoup your investment. I think we have seen just about as far as we are gonna get in graphics short of some breakthrough that lets them design for MUCH cheaper than it is now, otherwise you are gonna be risking too much money on a single property.
Why are you laughing? MSFT learned their lesson with Vista and scaled back MASSIVELY on their system requirements. My new netbook is a 1.6GHz AMD E-350, that's the slimmed down Bobcat cores so they aren't even considered 'full cores" like the A series, and Win 7 is quite snappy and responsive. My youngest is running Win 7 on a truly ancient Pentium D box from 2006 with 1.5Gb of RAM. That's a six year old piece of kit and its as snappy as can be, in fact I wouldn't even be building him a new box for his BDay if he hadn't picked up LA Noir on the Steam sale.
The days of "What Intel giveth MSFT taketh away" are long over friend. the MHz wars are gone and even a seven year old dual core is insanely overpowered for the latest Windows version. Just for shits and giggles when I got a load of off lease boxes in I played "how low can you go" with Win 7 and slapped HP on a 2.3GHz Celeron with 1gb of RAM. That box has got to be 8 years old if its a day, yet guess what? It ran fine although of course couldn't do Aero on that ancient Intel IGP. Every new build that has left my shop for the past 4 years is a minimum dual core with 2Gb of RAM (mostly 4Gb) and DirectX 9 IGPs, name a thing in the system specs that couldn't run Win 8 now?
And THAT is why its gonna bomb. Google has basically enjoyed "free" content for years with their search, Gmail, etc. Sure they pay for their backend but they aren't about to cut a check to say every video that someone consumes that isn't on Youtube. MSFT and Sony paid a hell of a lot of money to get content for their players and Google think they can basically pull a Google search and get the content for free...ain't happening. Google is gonna end up with their ass blocked for anything worth watching so the ONLY content Google is gonna end up with is YouTube and shit like clog dancing so nobody is gonna care.
Google's entire business model is the "throw it at the wall and see if it sticks" model which doesn't involve paying out big fat checks and the content owners aren't gonna let their media go to Google for free. Google can switch to ARM, MIPS, hell it could run it on fricking hamsters because that isn't what makes the GTV DOA, its the fact that Google is blacklisted across the board. You'd have better odds with a WDTV or a Roku than with a GTV because Google will NEVER pay the money, that would go against their entire "find more ways to monetize search" model which has worked VERY well for them in the past, but content is a whole nother ballgame. Hell just look at all the channels loaded by default in every single Windows box from HP on up under "Internet TV". You think all those companies like CBS just let MSFT copy their website's content and put it in a WMC wrapper? hell no! You can bet MSFT paid a pretty penny indeed to have every one of those channels and Google thinks they can just copy the website address and throw on their own wrapper and make some cash, boy are they in for a shock.
Like it or not Google is dead meat if they don't shell out the bucks and Google has made it pretty clear when the content owners first started blocking them they ain't paying shit, so they ain't getting shit, simple as that. MSFT has had a hard on for the living room since WebTV back in the 90s so they'll pay, Sony knows it helps sell PS3s so they'll shell out too, Google is the one left out in the cold. Frankly I don't blame the owners, they gotta pay for bandwidth too ya know and if Google was allowed to pull this shit they'd get a massive hit with no ROI, whereas MSFT and Sony cut them a check.
Not to mention how many CEOs had Bill Gates' home number and could call and say "Bill give me a hand" and actually have him do it? Oh Gates wasn't doing it to be nice for sure, he knew if Apple went tits up that antitrust was gonna rip him a new asshole, but despite the fact Apple guys HATE to admit this Gates really helped to calm the market and get developers back on board with Apple. Remember at that time the investors were shitting kittens and the stock was doing lousy thanks to all those "Is this the death of Apple?" stories being run at the time but when Gates showed up and said to the effect 'We believe Apple has a bright future so we are gonna invest in their stock and make sure Microsoft software is available to the Mac" a LOT of developers and investors said "Hey, if Gates thinks there is money to be made there maybe there is!". Of course the money was a pittance compared to what Apple had but it was the act that helped to calm the panicked market.
As for TFA? anybody that says the tablet is gonna wipe out the PC has been slurping too much koolaid, it would be like saying 'This new moped will wipe out the trucking industry!" and is just as dumb. Wanna know why PC sales have slowed? Its because PCs have passed "good enough" several miles back and the simple fact is they are now insanely overpowered compared to most of the jobs folks have. I got rid of my full size laptop for a $350 AMD E-350 netbook, why? Because the full size was frankly overkill and in fact the E-350 is overkill for what i need on the road but its smaller and lighter. Hell my mom has the slowest PC in my family and its a fricking 3.06Ghz Celeron and all she does is play Age Of Empires and look up recipes! In just my family we are up to FIVE desktops and THREE laptops, what would we need more PCs for?
Tablets are selling because they are new and there are still folks that want one that haven't got one, that's all. With PCs the OEMs got used to everyone chunking every 3 years thanks to the MHz wars but the wars are over and even the lowest AMD or Intel dual frankly twiddles its thumbs a good 90% of the time because the things folks are using them for simply doesn't need THAT much power. Hell my kids have been gaming for the past 4 years on Pentium Ds and are just now reaching the point where games need more power, I slap in a $120 AMD triple core bundle and they'll probably get at least another year or two before i need to toss their HD4850 GPUs. There just aren't any killer apps that are requiring folks to chunk and with Windows getting a decade or more of support there just isn't a point tossing before EOL anymore. Name one job your average non gaming Joe Blow is gonna have that is gonna stress even the bottom of the line AMD triple huh? Mafia Wars? Farmville? Their FB page? Most of my customers buying now simply won't replace their PCs again until Win 7 hits EOL in 2020 so no shit PCs aren't gonna sell like tablets, there is too much power as it is!
TL:DR? Give tablets a few more years, to where even the bottom of the line one is a dual core or better and does 1080p and watch how quickly the market slows down. Most of my customers that bought tablets are using them for glorified eReaders simply because they fricking hate writing on the things, nothing beats a keyboard for text.
You think YOU'RE weird, I've been using this little program called popsel for years and years and just use it on any machine I use. I made three folders in my tool folder called "Popsel Games' and "Popsel AV" and "Popsel Utilities" and then cooked up three little icons, a red AV on black, a green G for games on white, and a yellow Util on blue and then I just have shortcuts to popsel pinned to the start menu. That way there is never more than 3 clicks to get to ANY app I use, click start>click correct popsel>click name of app. This makes the desktop nice and uncluttered and neat while giving me quick access to everything and of course in Win 7 explorer has a jumplist and that takes care of the folders i use most, makes it all easy peasy.
As for the clipboard I'd recommend you just use Hamsin clipboard as it only take a couple of Kb, you can throw it on a stick and run it from there, and gives you as many clipboard slots as you want. I have mine set to 10 which i think is the default, make it all easy and simple as each clipboard has a key, like Winkey+1, Winkey+2, etc. really makes copy paste fast fast fast. The final tool that is a "must have" for me is simple disc cataloger which if you burn discs is a must. again it'll run from a stick, only take a few Mb depending on how big your Db is ((I have about NINE 100 count spindles on it going back to 2000 and the whole thing is only 33Mb) and it supports wildcards, makes it beyond simple to find where you put something. Now whenever I burn a disc i just fire it up and I label my discs using joilet as (month-date-year) using the excellent IMGBurn and now its trivial to find anything I want when i want it, no matter how far back I need to go.
anyway i hope you enjoy, been using these tool for years and they are rock solid and malware free. i learned years ago there ain't no point in waiting for MSFT to add a feature to Windows because they'll probably half ass it anyway, better to use simple tools designed for simple jobs. All of the above BTW will run on anything from Win2K- Win 7 X64 so it doesn't matter what you are on it all "just works". Enjoy and if you have some weird task you need a tool for just shoot me an email and I can probably point you in the right direction, with my customers constantly wanting software for this job or that I've become pretty good at finding little tools for little jobs.
Its the rules of evidence friend. First he can ONLY use a disc image of the drive in question, the orioginal MUST be kept locked away so the defense can't accuse them of tampering, and then ONLY tools that are on their approved toolkit could be used and those only work on 2K/XP and up NOT Win98.
Now see the reason he asked my help is you ARE allowed to use anything that is native to the OS as long as you don't install, like Windows Explorer or any other tool native to that OS or any already installed by the defendant such as if he had WinRAR you'd be allowed to use that to open zipped folders. Now since he is allowed to use native he is allowed to cook up a batch file on the machine in question but its been so many years since he had to do that he couldn't recall the syntax for the old DOS bat files so that is where I came in, I told him how to cook up a file that would look for common formats like.jpeg,.avi,.mov, etc and since it is only searching, not altering in any form, he wrote it down and now I'm sure if he runs into any that his tools won't work on he'll just type that into a file and run it.
anyway i hope this has answered your question and given you a little insight into the world of PC forensics. There are a ton of rules and hoops he has to jump through but since we are talking about people's lives you can understand the hoop jumping, he has to be able to explain step by step what he had done, why he did it, and what his results were. I give the guy credit, how he could do that from 9-5 and then go home to his family and just forget about is beyond me, I'd have my head royally fucked up having to look at that sick shit all day. But then again he started out as a photographer for the morgue and those guys can eat a sandwich while standing right next to a burnt corpse, yuck! Boy I've got a couple of interesting stories from back then he told me but they'd take too long, but you'd be amazed at the weird and improbable ways people end up getting killed on a daily basis, just weird shit friend.
And people buy Windows computers because they want to run Windows programs, and they buy Apple devices because they are slick...is there a point there junior? Or was the foam spewing from your mouth so badly you had to write "All go to hell except cave 76!" so damned badly you couldn't think?
I'd like to thank you though, you gave almost a texbook typical fanboi response and your post should be used as a great example of treating corps like ballclubs. But I hate to break the news to you, but Google is NOT your friend, they are NOT "for" you, and if they could make an extra 15% by having you assraped by gorillas you'd be getting some gorilla loving at this very moment. The ONLY people Google is for is Google, no different than IBM, or MSFT, or Apple, or Oracle, or any other tech company. So stop treating them like a fucking ballclub, okay?
Ur doing it wrong Mr AC, you go for the "he needed killin" defense. the way you use that defense is you completely empty the gun on him, DO NOT RELOAD as that shows thought, just empty the gun and if there is anyone around make sure you keep pulling the trigger for awhile afterwards so they hear it clicking. Then your lawyer can say you "just snapped" and the event was so traumatic it drove you to it. Its used quite often in the south, especially on rapists and child molesters and the only time I've not seen it work is when they reload or they get arrogant and are saying things like "Yeah that's what you get bitch!" or shit like that. But you do it right you'll get a couple of months talking to Mr Shrink and be back home before summer's over. Not that I'm advocating you blowing them away of course, just saying hypothetically if one were to do such a thing there are ways to do it correctly and ways to do it wrong.
I'd like to know when this whole "Treat corps like ballclubs" shit started and can we all just stop it please? I use products from dozens of companies but frankly i don't give a shit if they go up, if they go down, as long as it does what i want it to I'm gonna use it. If a company acts like a prick, like Intel with their compiler rigging and bribery? i just don't buy their product, is that so damned difficult?
And lets get one thing clear, okay? GOOGLE IS A MONOPOLY when it comes to search PERIOD. You don't have to have 100% of a market, merely be able to cause significant changes in that market. Apple is a monopoly when it comes to PMPs with the iPod having close to 90% of the market, that makes them a monopoly. MSFT is a monopoly when it comes to desktops and Intel is damned close to a monopoly on x86. Does that mean we should break out the pitchforks? Noooo, what that means is these corps need to be watched like a hawk because a monopoly gives a company enormous power which they can then use to slaughter competition. They can try to block competitor's products like the famous "Windows isn't done until Lotus won't run" or in this case give away a product (similar to how MSFT gave away IE) and use it to further lock in their market.
So can we please stop this "All go to hell except for cave 76!" bullshit and just accept ALL corporations are neither good nor evil and are nothing to be rooted for or booed, but simply should be monitored to make sure they don't use their power to destroy the free market? Doesn't that sound nice and rational?
Can I say yay to that idea? i'll gladly give up the right to drive myself if it means there won't be anymore morons with cell phones plowing right through lights because they were busy pushing buttons instead of steering that 2 tons of flying low death on wheels. I nearly lost my dad a couple of years back to a gal that ran a red light in an SUV and hit his 2 ton work van with enough force it rolled three times and it took the jaws of life to cut the driver's door off of him. I was real proud of him that day though, his insurance company was already gonna cover his medical bills and the cost of the van but told him he had an excellent case to sue but when they took the gal and ran X-rays on her it turned out she had a tumor that nobody had caught and it was already inoperable, his doc came in and told him that the gal had maybe 6 months (and naturally no life insurance and three kids with no husband) so dad told his insurance company to drop it, saying 'She got enough problems, no since adding to her burden" and sure enough the poor thing didn't make it through the summer.
as for TFA it sounds like Airbus are doing pretty much all they can do without destroying the planes and starting over. Sadly there just isn't any way to design a 100% safe plane, especially not one that carries the kinds of loads and goes the kinds of heights these commercial airliners do. I'm sure that Airbus doesn't want to get their asses handed to them in a lawsuit so I'm sure they are watching these things like hawks and will pull a unit in to get fixed if it starts getting any worse. personally i'd rather fly on one of these new ones that are being watched than some of the ancient airliners we still have flying in this country. I wonder what the oldest Boeing still being used for commercial flight is up to, 35? 40?
That is why i'm glad my buddy actually has a brain. he'll be the first to tell you he won't be getting past any crypto that won't fall to a rainbow hash or brute force dictionary attack and that with a modern drive you wipe with zeroes that shit is gone friend. just to be safe i do a DoD 3 on all drives that pass through the shop but that is just because i have a box sitting in the corner for drive wiping and a DoD 3 really doesn't add much time over a random wipe and part of the reason why many businesses and schools are willing to donate machines to me to refurb for the poor is i tell them "Any drive that you leave in will be getting wiped to DoD specs" which gives them piece of mind.
And he is damned good in court, I've watched the man work and he is cool as ice, I just don't think i could do that shit. i know the state pays him to see a shrink weekly so he can "data dump" as he calls it but seeing raped kids pics and vids all damned day? man I do NOT want that damned job! In the consumer retail biz i make it a point not to snoop people's drives so i don't have to see any nasty shit, the worst i've had to deal with was some gal that wanted me to back up her erotic pics of herself before I wiped the drive. I swear that gal had dildos big enough you could mount them on a gun rack! But I don't think I could do like he does and sit there all calm while sitting across from some guy I KNOW raped his kid because i saw the pics. not enough brain bleach in the world, i don't care how good the benefits are!
Actually that just shows how full of shit going by anything but actual stats is because i've actually been in Harrison and not only are there black folks but there is a shitload of Mexicans and Cherokee so if the Klan is supposed to be running them out they're doing a really piss poor job. The Klan are actually about 20 miles out of town in a holler and everyone ignores or laughs at them.
MSFT changes driver models once a decade so you got 10 years and THREE OSes out of Acrobat, 2K/XP/2K3 which is actually not bad and if you bought win 7 pro which since you are using Acrobat I'd assume you're a pro that means you could STILL run Acrobat under XP Mode, which is a 100% free copy of XP in a VM provided to you for buying XP. As for your monopoly the Win9X memory management frankly didn't exist and made coders lazy as they could trample on other processes without trouble and 2K/XP finally killed that. Now show me where I can get a Linux distro updated NOT upgraded for 10 years? because as I've found upgrade equals "LOL I made a stinky!" all over your drivers. hell in just testing with my "is it safe?" upgrade a distro from 3 years old to current to simulate what my customers would go through you have a DE shift, you have a complete audio stack replacement (and frankly the replacement is shit) and good luck keeping your drivers running through that without firing up CLI. I had one forum member actually tell me i should get my users to wipe and reinstall every 6 months on release, anybody believe they want to deal with that shit?
One final thing you are completely wrong about win 7 and themes, you can pick any preset and go "advanced' and tweak the RGB values to your hearts content to make it any color you desire. I have a nice two tone black thing going on my netbook as i didn't like Aero using battery power but didn't want Win98 grey. Took me about 6 minutes to get it just the right shade to make me happy and it was as simple as sliding some sliders and unchecking "make Windows transparant" in the advanced tab. Easy peasy.
Not had a chance on the BSD yet, I went nuts on the Steam sale and blew through 100Gb+ and for some reason the ISP didn't ding me so i'm trying to be nice and not suck bandwidth like a drunk at a free bar for a little while. as soon as i get this load of off lease out of here my supplier is supposed to bring in a nice selection of lappys and desktops so i'll probably grab one of each to just give it a more fair shake. As for Ubuntu, you don't know? look up "Ubuntu One" and "Ubuntu CES" to see for yourself. Ubuntu One is a rebadged Amazon cloud with Ubuntu server as a frontend and at CES they are gonna show their Ubuntu tablet which i'm sure is just some CCC (Cheapo Chinese Crapola) with again Ubuntu frontend. I also agree that why anybody would actually WANT this is beyond me, Ubuntu is for noobs and noobs don't run cloud servers and on tablets Android has the low locked up and Apple the high and NOBODY likes Unity so that has the stench of fail on it.
As for typing CMD in the search box, who does that? The justification MSFT is using for getting rid of the start menu in win 8 (Which i think smells like fail, but i heard there is a simple reg trick that turns it into Win 7 with a square start button so that might save it) is thanks to their default help MSFT make Windows better button being checked since Vista they have a huge DB of what people actually do with their systems and both CMD and start>run didn't even end up in the top 20 use cases. They found that as far as windows explorer and the rest of windows goes you could serve more than 90% of the users with just a handful of basics like copy/paste/move/delete. that's it, that's what they do, they just use those commands along with drag and drop. And while I agree that having it is useful for a geek I would argue that it really isn't for the average user who simply won't know the commands and in Linux it has become a crutch. As i posted in another reply when I asked for the forum guys to pretend i'm just Suzy the new user and hand hold me through the GUI they simply couldn't do it because there wasn't a GUI that would let me fix the problem.
In the end I'd say Linux is around 70%-80% there but the problem is to get it the last 20%-30% is gonna be nothing but shitwork and without pay the shitwork just don't get done. You have bugs measured in years on the canonical bug tracker and that is with Canonical losing millions just to get to where they are. they are using this Ubuntu One and UbuntuTab as a Hail Mary to try to get enough ROI to stay afloat and my guess is it'll fail and they'll go tits up. Ultimately the FOSS model works in some cases but not ALL cases and i'd argue from what we've seen consumer desktop is one of the fails. You simply have to have millions spent on polish but without a way to recoup that investment the money won't get spent and without cash incentives trying to herd devs is like herding cats.
Except as we have seen time and time again, including in this very thread, i'm right. As I said I deal with consumers 6 days a week, sometimes on Sunday if its an emergency, so I KNOW how they think, its my fucking JOB to know how they think, to predict what they want and what they don't, and if I fail my ass is going hungry. not only am i not going hungry but my family made out like bandits this Xmas so i must be doing something right, eh?
Hell look above you at the geeks that says 'People will care when they see what you can do with a rooted phone" first of all implying that a rooted phone is like the force or something, two implying that anybody will see one, and three implying that people will know what the fuck they are looking at or actually care. Do they think geeks stand on corners going "Come and see the POWER of the rooted phone!" and people are gonna huddle around like he has discovered fire or something? Give me a break! its a big screen with buttons that does Google, that is what it is to the consumer and therefor it is so. Because there are literally hundreds of thousands of the "screen with Google" people compared to phone rooting geeks it is THEY who set the trend NOT the geek. Just as the other poster that vainly tries to compare jumping off a building thinking they can fly with saying a phone is not a computer is wrong as well because what the phone can and can't do will be dictated by the consumer and if they don't give a flying shit about rooting it and the FOSS phones like OpenMoko don't sell shit guess what? they don't get more made and locked down phones become the standard, that's how it works friend.
In the end the consumer don't give a shit about freedom or being able to hack, they care about "I push this button and it calls, i push this button and i can get Angry birds!" and since they are conditioned to think the phone is disposable and replaced on contract with something different you can sell them Angry birds again with the contract is up. But you ignore the consumer at your own peril, Apple embraced them and became one of the biggest corps on the planet, MSFT only had a token presence in many consumer markets and may have missed the boat. But if you think the consumer thinks like you or cares about the same issues you care about i have a lovely bridge you might be interested in. if its one thing geeks have shown its that they understand consumers even less than they understand women.
I have to wonder how "ahead of the game" the average law enforcement is when it comes to crypto simply because talking to a friend in the state crime lab (he keeps trying to hire me but...damn i don't think i could handle that shit 5 days a week) I have learned that even internet criminals are like most criminals and just very very very very...dumb. I mean stupid on whole never before seen levels of dipshit, just ignorant like you wouldn't believe. I had to cook up a batch file for my buddy last year because all his tools are based on NTFS and he couldn't recall off the top of his head the old DOS commands and they had found a braintrust still using Win98SE! Sure enough Mr Dipshit had hidden enough CP on his drive to get himself 300 years by dropping it in a subfolder in the Windows folder. no crypto, hell not even a password protected zip file, just dropped in a damned folder.
So while I'm sure the NSA and Interpol have some chops simply because they have to deal with foreign powers and spies I have to wonder if the rest simply are up on their game because the "cyber criminals" they have to deal with are about as smart as the dipshit we had rob a bank last year while wearing his workshirt with his name and the name of the company in bold letters right on the front. Hell the lettering was big enough they could just read the shirt right off the security cam and sure enough Mr braintrust showed up for work the very next day and was shocked! Shocked I tell you! That they had managed to catch his brilliant ass.
How do you figure it was "fear" friend? from my chair it looks like companies saw the buzz, said "hey there is a market here and nobody is making money on it" and then they did just that, good old fashioned capitalism at work friend, you find something people want to buy and you make and sell it at a competitive price. i always thought i'd have a full size laptop but then after picking up a couple of those AMD netbooks for customers I was like "Hey, this is light AND it does HD video...sweet!" and ended up getting a EEE and soon after it was bye bye Mr Full size and hello Mr 3 pound netbook that gets 6 hours playing HD video. The cost? $350 with 8Gb of RAM!
So I think the only "fear" the OLPC ever created was fear that the REAL manufacturers wouldn't get to the market before the other guys did because it was clear Negroponte wasn't gonna sell shit. Most don't have the cash to pay double per unit so Negroponte can play Santa and where there is a market somebody is gonna try to provide for it. Hell I walked into the local Wally world the other day and they are selling over a dozen different netbooks by a half a dozen different OEMs, from a 10 inch Atom for $245 up to a fully loaded 12 inch E-450 unit for $450.There is a price point for everybody, I can tell you from my own customers despite what the press says many folks enjoy the hell out of their "cute baby laptops" as they call them, and unlike the OLPC they aren't paying a 100% markup to stroke Negorponte's ego. Ms Hudson above nailed the future with that Indian tablet, give me one with a $10-$15 combo carrying case/keyboard so its like a mini transformer and i'll sell them babies like flapjacks. and unlike the OLPC the economies of scale will work in favor of the Indian tablet letting them crank out several versions at several price points so they can get ever lower prices and serve more folks. Sounds like good old fashioned capitalism to me, make it affordable, crank it out, use the money to make more and get better deals on parts thus lowering your costs. Smart move, too bad the OLPC never seemed to grasp that.
To me it just proves why OLPC will be an ultimate FAIL and end up DOA. A smart group would sell to everyone and use the economies of scale to drive down prices! I mean when you can buy an Atom netbook for $250 with Win 7 Starter at the local Wally World there is no reason if they sold to everyone they couldn't drive prices even lower than $100 since their goal isn't profits but getting these devices in the hands of kids. They don't think america has poor kids? They ought to come down to the delta and see all the tarpaper shacks sometime.
Just as the OLPC could have owned the netbook market by being nearly a year ahead of everyone else and used all that money to drive down prices and create cheaper and better devices for the kids so too are they gonna blow it on the new unit by refusing to sell to the first world except for forced charity which is no charity at all. And if they only sell to governments i hope it'll run Windows as that's what they'll end up needing to put on it just like the OLPC 1 or they aren't gonna get many takers. Governments will want this thing to train future office workers and that means Windows and office.If they would have sold the OLPC 1 to anybody with cash i have no doubt all the homebrew that would have popped up would have cooked up some killer FOSS apps that would have made it an even easier sell, instead they pissed that opportunity away and they'll piss this one away too.
I just hope when they finally go tits up somebody with a brain buys their plans and cranks out their designs for all to use as they do make some cool designs. hell you could probably still find a decent market for the OLPC 1, I mean a rugged laptop that could run Windows or Linux and be charged by cranking a handle and allowed kids in range of each other to collaborate? Sounds like a perfect "my first laptop" for all the poor kids in the delta, hell you could set banks of them up in libraries, you could probably find a thousand places that little thing would be useful and they could probably easily get the price below $200 using the chips they had, hell they could probably slap in an AMD C-Series or E-Series and still get below $200 while giving it enough power to do any basic web tasks with ease! Hell i'd buy it in a heartbeat for a work unit to keep under the seat in my truck and just leave my nice netbook for pleasure.
So I'd say this is a good example of where the FOSS model did NOT fail but was instead screwed by morons who didn't know what they are doing. Negroponte has always come off as an elitist prick, at least from what I've seen and read from him, so it really doesn't surprise me that he doesn't understand even the most basic of economic principles. He has decided "The OLPC shall be thus and ONLY thus" and anything that doesn't fit into that narrow worldview can fuck right off. personally i'm gonna enjoy the failure of the OLPC simply because this guy has been given sweet opportunity after opportunity and has flushed them right down the shitter. Hell you could put a humble little small town retailer like me in charge of the OLPC and I could do a better job than this assclown has!
Thanks. Notice how many insults and attacks on me personally i got? One pretty much accuses me of being some paid astroturfer which if so i'm getting screwed because I haven't seen a single check yet, others actually have the nerve to say Windows isn't polished and neither is OSX (which if that ain't some SERIOUS koolaid chugging i don't know what is) and then others try to use what i call the "move the goalposts and I win!" argument by bringing up things that don't have shit to do with the subject, like Red Hat which i had already covered and which is a SERVER not DESKTOP company, or how Spain is MANDATING Linux which if you tell someone "Use this or enjoy your pink slip" I don't really consider that a fair assessment, do you?
But anyone who has read my past postings know I speak for ONE person and ONE person alone, and that is the CONSUMER. It is the consumer who I work for 6 days a week, its the consumer that I constantly strive to make things easier and better for, its the consumer in the end that puts bread in my children's mouths and a roof over our heads and its the consumer whom the Linux community as a whole gives a Goatse to just as the posts above (or even worse, last critical of Linux posting I did i was modbombed for two weeks and had a psycho follow me around all over the net just so he could post "Die you fat fucker die" over and over) but in the end truth is truth.
Let me end with this final example of how the community just "doesn't get it" when it comes to consumers. I use a test to see if a distro has finally made a usable version called "is it safe?" and it goes like this: Take whatever distro you want to test, get a version from THREE years ago (this is key, you'll see why in a minute) and then if you need CLI to set it up go ahead since you are the BUILDER not the USER at this point. Now to simulate what my customer would go through let the OS update through whatever GUI mechanism it uses. Try it, see what happened? OS fall down and go BOOM! Real hard. Now before someone says "You can't do that with Windows!" I point out that that is like comparing apples to Apple pie as windows has a MINIMUM of 7 years of support, usually longer. Windows 7 will be supported until July 2020, show me ANY Linux that will continue to get updates for THAT long. you can't so there you go why you have to upgrade. Now the last one i tried this with took a big shit on the wireless, so I did what they tell you to do and went to the forums. What i got was a page and a half mess of CLI bullshit that ME the consumer was supposed to "tweak" because its made for rev A firmware g and I had Rev d firmware F. So I said "Humor me for a minute, you guys are like linux gurus right? pretend i'm Suzy the checkout girl, hold my hand and walk me through the GUI to fix this problem" and you know what happened? They tried one twist after another before someone finally came on and said "Uhhhh..you can't do that with the GUI".
and THAT, that right there, is the problem with Linux in a nutshell. without long term support you HAVE to upgrade, upgrade shits on drivers, and no GUI exists to find driver or rollback drivers when things go wrong. Windows has had those two features for a decade, WTF? I was actually told by one snooty community member "Stop thinking like Windows, Linux can run forever without any updates so just disable them"? Seriously if THAT level of koolaid drinking is considered acceptable, because not a single person said "running old unpatched OSes and software is probably not a good idea" that just proves the level of disconnect there is in the community. One even told me I swear to God i just wished i'd have bookmarked it, that I should "teach my users to embrace the POWER of CLI" like it was the God damned force. I don't know why i still bother, maybe because i am old enough to remember when there was GEM and Amiga and DOS and having competition was good. But here it is 2012 already, the off lease XP boxes are starting to pile up, and here I am having to scramble for extra RAM sticks and hoping
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah and my left leg plays jingle bells if you jiggle it! I don't see anybody else having that problem so they need an always on Internet connection, do you? Valve solved that problem years ago with the banhammer. you pull shit in MP? enjoy your banhammering.
i predict that Razr1911 or one of the other groups will have it hacked before release and the massive amount of piracy will be truly staggering to behold. nothing pisses off the hackers more than always phoning home DRM so they just painted a big ass bullseye right on their forehead. Me if it ain't on steam I don't want it, I'm sure as hell not having yet another service sucking bandwidth and calling home with God knows what information, no thanks. it isn't like there aren't thousands of Diablo clones out there to choose from and I bet we have a good 2 dozen released at the same time as DIII. Too bad ActiBlizzard as I'd like to give you my money but I don't pay to get kicked in the crotch, thanks ever so.
It doesn't matter as that turkey is gonna bomb so hard it'll finally make MSFT Bob look good!
Think about it friends, the way to know a thing is to understand it, now why do people buy Windows machines? Why to run WINDOWS programs of course! And guess what don't run on ARM? The 25 damned years worth of X86 Windows programs that everybody buys fricking windows for in the first place!
I can tell you what is gonna happen because i saw a dry run of it last Xmas, a local merchant was selling "Windows tablets!" and it looked like XP, but had in the corner a little "Compact Edition" label. Do you think ANYBODY knew what the fuck that meant? Hell no, they can't keep up with all the Windows versions anyway! So many bought the things and took them home, tried them and when they found they wouldn't actually run WINDOWS programs on a "Windows Tablet" they were brought back EN MASSE. The merchant ended up having to stick a sticker over the Windows part and sell them for a loss as a generic tablet.
And THAT dear children is what is gonna happen with Windows 8, Ballmer is trying to force a cell phone OS onto the desktop which doesn't have touch screens for 99.5% of the units being sold and at the same time fool developers into thinking "Hey if I write for Win 8 i can sell anywhere!" which of course is complete horseshit as X86 and ARM devices are about as different as mopeds and semi trucks. one you have to be ultra light and give a shit about resources, the other? Meh they got multicores and assloads of RAM anyway right?
The only thing that makes sense to me is that Ballmer is hated enough by the engineers they are gonna let the sweaty monkey hang himself by his own stupid ideas, otherwise somebody would have called captain obvious to save the day. Everyone knows since he has been CEO its been one clusterfuck after another with only the fact they brought in the office guys to gut Vista and rebuild it from the ground up into a decent OS keeping them from back to back flops. I mean look at his track record, rushing X360 with a fatal flaw costing billions, Zune, killing playsforsure for Zune market, kin, WinPhone looks to be another WinMo flop, hell i could probably go on all day. Any company that is stupid enough to waste resources on Windows 8 development deserves to fail. the smart money says everyone sticks with Win 7 which will hopefully get the monkey FIRED and bring in someone like Ozzie that has a brain. Lets face it if he wasn't billy's little buddy he'd already be shitcanned, he's cost them dump trucks worth of money trying to be Apple.
Final prediction? Win 8 total flop, win 7 sells like mad as people scramble to keep from getting stuck with win 8, OEMs demand downgrade rights to 7, Ballmer fired. The last one not a sure bet if Billy gets involved but surely another Vista flop will have the board revolt.
Actually I'd say the bigger news would be how nasty are they gonna make the DRM. If they give it some nasty always on DRM that makes you jump through hoops i have a feeling it'll be pirated more than Spore.
Why can't these companies just see the traincars filled with cash that Valve is making and jump on board? Gabe had it right when he said to the effect "Pirates are the competition offering a better product" and he has shown you follow the three simple rules, make it cheap, easy, and convenient and you can turn those pirates into money. Has Valve released the numbers on how much they made during the Xmas sale? because I bet the amount was staggeringly huge. steam has gotten so easy and cheap that frankly if it isn't on steam i don't bother, not even to pirate it, what's the point? I bet i blew through a couple of hundred there just myself because both my boys decided they'd rather have Steam games for Xmas as well as my personal buying. Frankly it was easier to pick up what we wanted on steam than to pirate the things!
But if its one thing we've seen over the years its that the CEO of ActiBlizzard is a massive douchenozzle that happy to screw over his customers if he can "maximize profit potential" while letting him beat an IP into the ground so while i'm happy that there will be a Diablo III as i had a blast with Diablo II if they fill it to the rim with DRM and make you jump through hoops instead of just using steam frankly they can shove it. Its not like there aren't a wealth of Diablo clones out there, some of them quite good, so for me its gonna come down to how big a prick they are gonna be as to whether Diablo III is in my game collection or not.
I can tell you as a retailer why Linux on the desktop is DOA, its a fiddly PITA geeker hobbyist OS that doesn't give a wet fart about consumers or average folks! Lets take what i use to see if a distro is ready, a little test i call "Is it safe?" that just FYI not a SINGLE distro has passed yet, not one.
You take ANY distro and get a copy from THREE years ago, age is key as you'll see in a minute and you install it. Now if you need CLI to get it running? that is okay at this point as you are the OEM now and NOT the consumer. Now once its completed using the GUI and the GUI ONLY you update it to current and see what happens. I've found what you get is an unstable broken mess, with busted drivers and a shitload of CLI fiddling. Now we are talking less than HALF of what Windows gives you for support, yet it can't even manage that? If you were to do that with a distro today you'd find a complete DE changeout, a complete audio changeout to a system that frankly is shit (PulseAudio, what a POS!) and you'd find you video, audio, wireless, and possibly even the Ethernet down which kills their whole "get help on the forums!" bullshit which i would argue there is no damned reason they should NEED your stupid forums and if they do your OS be broken!
As a final note let me give this example that just shows how broken it is. After I had the wireless broken on my "is it safe" test I went to one of the forums and asked for help (which I had thought to bookmark it as it was enlightening) and was given a page and a half of CLI crap that frankly didn't work which i was informed I'd have to "tweak" for the correct hardware. So I said "You guys are Linux gurus right? Pretend I'm Suzy the first time user, now walk me through fixing it with the GUI as I'm clueless and don't know CLI from canoli". They hemmed and hawwed, a couple called me names, until one popped on and said "uuuhhh..you can't do that with a GUI" and I said "BINGO! NOW you see the problem. you expect Suzy the checkout girl to have the skills to analyze a piece Bash code, correctly identify the code that needs to be altered to allow it to correct the problem, and to have the skills and know the syntax well enough to enact said tweaks herself, doesn't anybody smell the fail here?"
And THAT is why Linux is doomed to fail miserably on the desktop. To paraphrase a line from Full Metal Jacket they believe that "Inside every Suzy is a Boris the programmer waiting to get out" but that is as far from reality as it is from here to Europa. Joe and suzy and grandma don't want to learn script and sure as hell aren't gonna be coding in their spare time! they want a box which will work and KEEP on working and the ONLY way that happens in linux is if someoe gives them free lifetime support. since that is about as likely to happen as Reagan rising from the grave to become the first Zombie candidate in US history linux isn't going anywhere. its too fiddly, updates break more than they fix, and the geeks refuse to see that situation isn't compatible with the home market.
And I bet you TRULY believe that Apple "thinks different" and MSFT cares what you want to do today, don't you? Its called MARKETING slick, some companies kick ass at it, some suck, some are in between. what is sad is despite the antitrust investigations, investigations into their rigging search to cut out competitor's products you REALLY believe because somebody slapped a "do no evil" slogan that that somehow makes them better or different than any multinational corporation don't you?
You are a perfect example of treating companies like ballclubs though, I will give you that. I mean when given a choice of Linux netbooks or Windows ones folks chose Windows but because they are in competition with "your" company that can't be right, that HAD to have been market manipulation, yet when Google spams chrome by attaching it to every piece of crapware on the planet, why that's just making the world a better place with a superior browser, isn't it?
Step away from the keyboard and take the koolaid away from your lips friend, Google is NOT "for" you, they frankly don't give a wet fart about you one way or another and i repeat if they could make an extra 15% profit by having you assraped by silver-backs i'd be watching Gorilla loving on YouTube this very day, its about MONEY friend and to get it they use MARKETING which apparently you swallow hook, line, and sinker. Its truly amazing to see someone who otherwise sounds rational treat a corporation as a ballclub, you do make a textbook example of the fanboi though so thanks again for illustrating my point better than i ever could, congrats.
That's funny, you just described my netbook perfectly except i also have access to all the programs for Windows and a keyboard. it weighs less than 3 pounds, when I want to just check email it has an instant on button that fires up a ChromeOS style UI in under 6 seconds, gets 6 hours watching HD video in Win 7 and 8 hours surfing under Expressgate, and at 12 inches isn't any more bulky than a tablet. Oh and I have 300gb worth of space for all my movies and music and it plays L4D and GTA:VC like a champ. Kinda funny as I get backseat drivers at the doctor's office "Hey watch out of that cop on your tail! You better turn! Uh Oh, they got the chopper after you, you are in trouble now!"
The ONLY thing I've found a tablet to be an advantage on is eReader as you can turn them sideways and have a more book like interface, but is that worth an extra $200? Not for me it isn't. My AMD EEE cost $350 with 8gb of RAM (Yeah i know its overkill but it was a whole $6 difference between 4gb and 8Gb so I figured WTF) and again with the overkill this little baby is powerful enough I've been using it to cook up drumbeats in Hydrogen and edit the raw tracks I've been working on in audacity, makes a hell of a portable production unit BTW, I've even run its output to the mixing board and used it as a drum machine to give me a timing when laying tracks.
But as I said tablets will keep selling simply because they haven't reached truly insanely overpowered yet but they will soon. When the tegra is talking 5 cores you are gonna quickly reach a point where there isn't a point buying a new one when they come out because the old one will do everything you want and then the bottom will fall out, just look at that Indian that is gonna have a pad with specs similar to iPad for less than $100. At that price point everyone who wants one will get one and that will be that. hell with my netbook i really have no use for a tablet but at THAT price point? i'll buy one just for shits and giggles.
You are forgetting something friend....how long it takes to go from drawing board to consoles on the shelves. You see there will be NO catch up because by the time the console hits the shelves its parts will be three plus years old. Take for example the new Nintendo console, it has an HD4650 GPU inside. That is literally a $15 after MIR card right now, I should know i bought one for a customer recently. The X720 and PS4 will HAVE to have been in the design phases for over a year and a half which means if they took roughly the same level as the Geforce 7800 they did last time you are looking at something along the lines of an HD5750 or 5770, those are $100 NOW and the consoles are a good year out which means they'll be sub $50 then.
The ONLY reason the devs are pushing the consoles is because they believe it magically protects them from piracy, but in reality every X360 owner I know simply has TWO consoles, the pirated one they play most of their gaming on and a legit one for XBL. hell you can buy pre-cracked X360s loaded with games for less than $100 on my local Craigslist. I believe the consoles will keep the niche they have now, the frat boys and kiddies, while Valve leading the way with Steam will convert a hell of a lot of pirates into legit customers. I'd say the bigger trend will be what I call a "shotgun release" where all the consoles AND the PC ALL get a game at the same time, with the DLC and higher res textures being what makes the PC game whereas the consoles will get DLC "packs" at higher prices.
So I don't think there will be ANY catch up because the 3 to 4 years a console is in the design phase will cause the parts to be old hat by the time they make it to market. I think the next big revolution in PC gaming on the other hand to be the new AMD APUs, where even a bottom of the line box gets a Radeon GPU so that even that box you get at the Wally World will be able to game. I mean when I can play L4D on a fricking $350 netbook? that's a hell of a lot of power in the low end. Have you looked at the steam stats lately? The majority are playing Steam games on duals and the biggest cards are the sub $100 yet these are perfectly acceptable for gaming now. I would argue that it isn't the consoles allowing that so much as there is only so much bling you can add to a game before you get uncanny valley and turn people off. I was playing Just Cause II on a $100 AMD quad with a $60 HD4850 and frankly I had peoples jaws dropping on the floor when i'd set off a load of charges and the smokestakes behind me would start collapsing, tell me how much bling could you possibly add? it already had a world that was 30+ miles across and fully populated, changing weather patterns, hundreds of vehicles, what more could you possibly add to a game like that with more GPU?
I'd argue like PCs graphics have gotten "good enough" and are now into diminishing returns where adding anymore bling pushes you over the 100 million mark and gets harder and harder to recoup your investment. I think we have seen just about as far as we are gonna get in graphics short of some breakthrough that lets them design for MUCH cheaper than it is now, otherwise you are gonna be risking too much money on a single property.
Why are you laughing? MSFT learned their lesson with Vista and scaled back MASSIVELY on their system requirements. My new netbook is a 1.6GHz AMD E-350, that's the slimmed down Bobcat cores so they aren't even considered 'full cores" like the A series, and Win 7 is quite snappy and responsive. My youngest is running Win 7 on a truly ancient Pentium D box from 2006 with 1.5Gb of RAM. That's a six year old piece of kit and its as snappy as can be, in fact I wouldn't even be building him a new box for his BDay if he hadn't picked up LA Noir on the Steam sale.
The days of "What Intel giveth MSFT taketh away" are long over friend. the MHz wars are gone and even a seven year old dual core is insanely overpowered for the latest Windows version. Just for shits and giggles when I got a load of off lease boxes in I played "how low can you go" with Win 7 and slapped HP on a 2.3GHz Celeron with 1gb of RAM. That box has got to be 8 years old if its a day, yet guess what? It ran fine although of course couldn't do Aero on that ancient Intel IGP. Every new build that has left my shop for the past 4 years is a minimum dual core with 2Gb of RAM (mostly 4Gb) and DirectX 9 IGPs, name a thing in the system specs that couldn't run Win 8 now?
And THAT is why its gonna bomb. Google has basically enjoyed "free" content for years with their search, Gmail, etc. Sure they pay for their backend but they aren't about to cut a check to say every video that someone consumes that isn't on Youtube. MSFT and Sony paid a hell of a lot of money to get content for their players and Google think they can basically pull a Google search and get the content for free...ain't happening. Google is gonna end up with their ass blocked for anything worth watching so the ONLY content Google is gonna end up with is YouTube and shit like clog dancing so nobody is gonna care.
Google's entire business model is the "throw it at the wall and see if it sticks" model which doesn't involve paying out big fat checks and the content owners aren't gonna let their media go to Google for free. Google can switch to ARM, MIPS, hell it could run it on fricking hamsters because that isn't what makes the GTV DOA, its the fact that Google is blacklisted across the board. You'd have better odds with a WDTV or a Roku than with a GTV because Google will NEVER pay the money, that would go against their entire "find more ways to monetize search" model which has worked VERY well for them in the past, but content is a whole nother ballgame. Hell just look at all the channels loaded by default in every single Windows box from HP on up under "Internet TV". You think all those companies like CBS just let MSFT copy their website's content and put it in a WMC wrapper? hell no! You can bet MSFT paid a pretty penny indeed to have every one of those channels and Google thinks they can just copy the website address and throw on their own wrapper and make some cash, boy are they in for a shock.
Like it or not Google is dead meat if they don't shell out the bucks and Google has made it pretty clear when the content owners first started blocking them they ain't paying shit, so they ain't getting shit, simple as that. MSFT has had a hard on for the living room since WebTV back in the 90s so they'll pay, Sony knows it helps sell PS3s so they'll shell out too, Google is the one left out in the cold. Frankly I don't blame the owners, they gotta pay for bandwidth too ya know and if Google was allowed to pull this shit they'd get a massive hit with no ROI, whereas MSFT and Sony cut them a check.
Not to mention how many CEOs had Bill Gates' home number and could call and say "Bill give me a hand" and actually have him do it? Oh Gates wasn't doing it to be nice for sure, he knew if Apple went tits up that antitrust was gonna rip him a new asshole, but despite the fact Apple guys HATE to admit this Gates really helped to calm the market and get developers back on board with Apple. Remember at that time the investors were shitting kittens and the stock was doing lousy thanks to all those "Is this the death of Apple?" stories being run at the time but when Gates showed up and said to the effect 'We believe Apple has a bright future so we are gonna invest in their stock and make sure Microsoft software is available to the Mac" a LOT of developers and investors said "Hey, if Gates thinks there is money to be made there maybe there is!". Of course the money was a pittance compared to what Apple had but it was the act that helped to calm the panicked market.
As for TFA? anybody that says the tablet is gonna wipe out the PC has been slurping too much koolaid, it would be like saying 'This new moped will wipe out the trucking industry!" and is just as dumb. Wanna know why PC sales have slowed? Its because PCs have passed "good enough" several miles back and the simple fact is they are now insanely overpowered compared to most of the jobs folks have. I got rid of my full size laptop for a $350 AMD E-350 netbook, why? Because the full size was frankly overkill and in fact the E-350 is overkill for what i need on the road but its smaller and lighter. Hell my mom has the slowest PC in my family and its a fricking 3.06Ghz Celeron and all she does is play Age Of Empires and look up recipes! In just my family we are up to FIVE desktops and THREE laptops, what would we need more PCs for?
Tablets are selling because they are new and there are still folks that want one that haven't got one, that's all. With PCs the OEMs got used to everyone chunking every 3 years thanks to the MHz wars but the wars are over and even the lowest AMD or Intel dual frankly twiddles its thumbs a good 90% of the time because the things folks are using them for simply doesn't need THAT much power. Hell my kids have been gaming for the past 4 years on Pentium Ds and are just now reaching the point where games need more power, I slap in a $120 AMD triple core bundle and they'll probably get at least another year or two before i need to toss their HD4850 GPUs. There just aren't any killer apps that are requiring folks to chunk and with Windows getting a decade or more of support there just isn't a point tossing before EOL anymore. Name one job your average non gaming Joe Blow is gonna have that is gonna stress even the bottom of the line AMD triple huh? Mafia Wars? Farmville? Their FB page? Most of my customers buying now simply won't replace their PCs again until Win 7 hits EOL in 2020 so no shit PCs aren't gonna sell like tablets, there is too much power as it is!
TL:DR? Give tablets a few more years, to where even the bottom of the line one is a dual core or better and does 1080p and watch how quickly the market slows down. Most of my customers that bought tablets are using them for glorified eReaders simply because they fricking hate writing on the things, nothing beats a keyboard for text.
You think YOU'RE weird, I've been using this little program called popsel for years and years and just use it on any machine I use. I made three folders in my tool folder called "Popsel Games' and "Popsel AV" and "Popsel Utilities" and then cooked up three little icons, a red AV on black, a green G for games on white, and a yellow Util on blue and then I just have shortcuts to popsel pinned to the start menu. That way there is never more than 3 clicks to get to ANY app I use, click start>click correct popsel>click name of app. This makes the desktop nice and uncluttered and neat while giving me quick access to everything and of course in Win 7 explorer has a jumplist and that takes care of the folders i use most, makes it all easy peasy.
As for the clipboard I'd recommend you just use Hamsin clipboard as it only take a couple of Kb, you can throw it on a stick and run it from there, and gives you as many clipboard slots as you want. I have mine set to 10 which i think is the default, make it all easy and simple as each clipboard has a key, like Winkey+1, Winkey+2, etc. really makes copy paste fast fast fast. The final tool that is a "must have" for me is simple disc cataloger which if you burn discs is a must. again it'll run from a stick, only take a few Mb depending on how big your Db is ((I have about NINE 100 count spindles on it going back to 2000 and the whole thing is only 33Mb) and it supports wildcards, makes it beyond simple to find where you put something. Now whenever I burn a disc i just fire it up and I label my discs using joilet as (month-date-year) using the excellent IMGBurn and now its trivial to find anything I want when i want it, no matter how far back I need to go.
anyway i hope you enjoy, been using these tool for years and they are rock solid and malware free. i learned years ago there ain't no point in waiting for MSFT to add a feature to Windows because they'll probably half ass it anyway, better to use simple tools designed for simple jobs. All of the above BTW will run on anything from Win2K- Win 7 X64 so it doesn't matter what you are on it all "just works". Enjoy and if you have some weird task you need a tool for just shoot me an email and I can probably point you in the right direction, with my customers constantly wanting software for this job or that I've become pretty good at finding little tools for little jobs.
Its the rules of evidence friend. First he can ONLY use a disc image of the drive in question, the orioginal MUST be kept locked away so the defense can't accuse them of tampering, and then ONLY tools that are on their approved toolkit could be used and those only work on 2K/XP and up NOT Win98.
Now see the reason he asked my help is you ARE allowed to use anything that is native to the OS as long as you don't install, like Windows Explorer or any other tool native to that OS or any already installed by the defendant such as if he had WinRAR you'd be allowed to use that to open zipped folders. Now since he is allowed to use native he is allowed to cook up a batch file on the machine in question but its been so many years since he had to do that he couldn't recall the syntax for the old DOS bat files so that is where I came in, I told him how to cook up a file that would look for common formats like .jpeg, .avi,.mov, etc and since it is only searching, not altering in any form, he wrote it down and now I'm sure if he runs into any that his tools won't work on he'll just type that into a file and run it.
anyway i hope this has answered your question and given you a little insight into the world of PC forensics. There are a ton of rules and hoops he has to jump through but since we are talking about people's lives you can understand the hoop jumping, he has to be able to explain step by step what he had done, why he did it, and what his results were. I give the guy credit, how he could do that from 9-5 and then go home to his family and just forget about is beyond me, I'd have my head royally fucked up having to look at that sick shit all day. But then again he started out as a photographer for the morgue and those guys can eat a sandwich while standing right next to a burnt corpse, yuck! Boy I've got a couple of interesting stories from back then he told me but they'd take too long, but you'd be amazed at the weird and improbable ways people end up getting killed on a daily basis, just weird shit friend.
And people buy Windows computers because they want to run Windows programs, and they buy Apple devices because they are slick...is there a point there junior? Or was the foam spewing from your mouth so badly you had to write "All go to hell except cave 76!" so damned badly you couldn't think?
I'd like to thank you though, you gave almost a texbook typical fanboi response and your post should be used as a great example of treating corps like ballclubs. But I hate to break the news to you, but Google is NOT your friend, they are NOT "for" you, and if they could make an extra 15% by having you assraped by gorillas you'd be getting some gorilla loving at this very moment. The ONLY people Google is for is Google, no different than IBM, or MSFT, or Apple, or Oracle, or any other tech company. So stop treating them like a fucking ballclub, okay?
Ur doing it wrong Mr AC, you go for the "he needed killin" defense. the way you use that defense is you completely empty the gun on him, DO NOT RELOAD as that shows thought, just empty the gun and if there is anyone around make sure you keep pulling the trigger for awhile afterwards so they hear it clicking. Then your lawyer can say you "just snapped" and the event was so traumatic it drove you to it. Its used quite often in the south, especially on rapists and child molesters and the only time I've not seen it work is when they reload or they get arrogant and are saying things like "Yeah that's what you get bitch!" or shit like that. But you do it right you'll get a couple of months talking to Mr Shrink and be back home before summer's over. Not that I'm advocating you blowing them away of course, just saying hypothetically if one were to do such a thing there are ways to do it correctly and ways to do it wrong.
I'd like to know when this whole "Treat corps like ballclubs" shit started and can we all just stop it please? I use products from dozens of companies but frankly i don't give a shit if they go up, if they go down, as long as it does what i want it to I'm gonna use it. If a company acts like a prick, like Intel with their compiler rigging and bribery? i just don't buy their product, is that so damned difficult?
And lets get one thing clear, okay? GOOGLE IS A MONOPOLY when it comes to search PERIOD. You don't have to have 100% of a market, merely be able to cause significant changes in that market. Apple is a monopoly when it comes to PMPs with the iPod having close to 90% of the market, that makes them a monopoly. MSFT is a monopoly when it comes to desktops and Intel is damned close to a monopoly on x86. Does that mean we should break out the pitchforks? Noooo, what that means is these corps need to be watched like a hawk because a monopoly gives a company enormous power which they can then use to slaughter competition. They can try to block competitor's products like the famous "Windows isn't done until Lotus won't run" or in this case give away a product (similar to how MSFT gave away IE) and use it to further lock in their market.
So can we please stop this "All go to hell except for cave 76!" bullshit and just accept ALL corporations are neither good nor evil and are nothing to be rooted for or booed, but simply should be monitored to make sure they don't use their power to destroy the free market? Doesn't that sound nice and rational?
Can I say yay to that idea? i'll gladly give up the right to drive myself if it means there won't be anymore morons with cell phones plowing right through lights because they were busy pushing buttons instead of steering that 2 tons of flying low death on wheels. I nearly lost my dad a couple of years back to a gal that ran a red light in an SUV and hit his 2 ton work van with enough force it rolled three times and it took the jaws of life to cut the driver's door off of him. I was real proud of him that day though, his insurance company was already gonna cover his medical bills and the cost of the van but told him he had an excellent case to sue but when they took the gal and ran X-rays on her it turned out she had a tumor that nobody had caught and it was already inoperable, his doc came in and told him that the gal had maybe 6 months (and naturally no life insurance and three kids with no husband) so dad told his insurance company to drop it, saying 'She got enough problems, no since adding to her burden" and sure enough the poor thing didn't make it through the summer.
as for TFA it sounds like Airbus are doing pretty much all they can do without destroying the planes and starting over. Sadly there just isn't any way to design a 100% safe plane, especially not one that carries the kinds of loads and goes the kinds of heights these commercial airliners do. I'm sure that Airbus doesn't want to get their asses handed to them in a lawsuit so I'm sure they are watching these things like hawks and will pull a unit in to get fixed if it starts getting any worse. personally i'd rather fly on one of these new ones that are being watched than some of the ancient airliners we still have flying in this country. I wonder what the oldest Boeing still being used for commercial flight is up to, 35? 40?
That is why i'm glad my buddy actually has a brain. he'll be the first to tell you he won't be getting past any crypto that won't fall to a rainbow hash or brute force dictionary attack and that with a modern drive you wipe with zeroes that shit is gone friend. just to be safe i do a DoD 3 on all drives that pass through the shop but that is just because i have a box sitting in the corner for drive wiping and a DoD 3 really doesn't add much time over a random wipe and part of the reason why many businesses and schools are willing to donate machines to me to refurb for the poor is i tell them "Any drive that you leave in will be getting wiped to DoD specs" which gives them piece of mind.
And he is damned good in court, I've watched the man work and he is cool as ice, I just don't think i could do that shit. i know the state pays him to see a shrink weekly so he can "data dump" as he calls it but seeing raped kids pics and vids all damned day? man I do NOT want that damned job! In the consumer retail biz i make it a point not to snoop people's drives so i don't have to see any nasty shit, the worst i've had to deal with was some gal that wanted me to back up her erotic pics of herself before I wiped the drive. I swear that gal had dildos big enough you could mount them on a gun rack! But I don't think I could do like he does and sit there all calm while sitting across from some guy I KNOW raped his kid because i saw the pics. not enough brain bleach in the world, i don't care how good the benefits are!
Actually that just shows how full of shit going by anything but actual stats is because i've actually been in Harrison and not only are there black folks but there is a shitload of Mexicans and Cherokee so if the Klan is supposed to be running them out they're doing a really piss poor job. The Klan are actually about 20 miles out of town in a holler and everyone ignores or laughs at them.
MSFT changes driver models once a decade so you got 10 years and THREE OSes out of Acrobat, 2K/XP/2K3 which is actually not bad and if you bought win 7 pro which since you are using Acrobat I'd assume you're a pro that means you could STILL run Acrobat under XP Mode, which is a 100% free copy of XP in a VM provided to you for buying XP. As for your monopoly the Win9X memory management frankly didn't exist and made coders lazy as they could trample on other processes without trouble and 2K/XP finally killed that. Now show me where I can get a Linux distro updated NOT upgraded for 10 years? because as I've found upgrade equals "LOL I made a stinky!" all over your drivers. hell in just testing with my "is it safe?" upgrade a distro from 3 years old to current to simulate what my customers would go through you have a DE shift, you have a complete audio stack replacement (and frankly the replacement is shit) and good luck keeping your drivers running through that without firing up CLI. I had one forum member actually tell me i should get my users to wipe and reinstall every 6 months on release, anybody believe they want to deal with that shit?
One final thing you are completely wrong about win 7 and themes, you can pick any preset and go "advanced' and tweak the RGB values to your hearts content to make it any color you desire. I have a nice two tone black thing going on my netbook as i didn't like Aero using battery power but didn't want Win98 grey. Took me about 6 minutes to get it just the right shade to make me happy and it was as simple as sliding some sliders and unchecking "make Windows transparant" in the advanced tab. Easy peasy.
Not had a chance on the BSD yet, I went nuts on the Steam sale and blew through 100Gb+ and for some reason the ISP didn't ding me so i'm trying to be nice and not suck bandwidth like a drunk at a free bar for a little while. as soon as i get this load of off lease out of here my supplier is supposed to bring in a nice selection of lappys and desktops so i'll probably grab one of each to just give it a more fair shake. As for Ubuntu, you don't know? look up "Ubuntu One" and "Ubuntu CES" to see for yourself. Ubuntu One is a rebadged Amazon cloud with Ubuntu server as a frontend and at CES they are gonna show their Ubuntu tablet which i'm sure is just some CCC (Cheapo Chinese Crapola) with again Ubuntu frontend. I also agree that why anybody would actually WANT this is beyond me, Ubuntu is for noobs and noobs don't run cloud servers and on tablets Android has the low locked up and Apple the high and NOBODY likes Unity so that has the stench of fail on it.
As for typing CMD in the search box, who does that? The justification MSFT is using for getting rid of the start menu in win 8 (Which i think smells like fail, but i heard there is a simple reg trick that turns it into Win 7 with a square start button so that might save it) is thanks to their default help MSFT make Windows better button being checked since Vista they have a huge DB of what people actually do with their systems and both CMD and start>run didn't even end up in the top 20 use cases. They found that as far as windows explorer and the rest of windows goes you could serve more than 90% of the users with just a handful of basics like copy/paste/move/delete. that's it, that's what they do, they just use those commands along with drag and drop. And while I agree that having it is useful for a geek I would argue that it really isn't for the average user who simply won't know the commands and in Linux it has become a crutch. As i posted in another reply when I asked for the forum guys to pretend i'm just Suzy the new user and hand hold me through the GUI they simply couldn't do it because there wasn't a GUI that would let me fix the problem.
In the end I'd say Linux is around 70%-80% there but the problem is to get it the last 20%-30% is gonna be nothing but shitwork and without pay the shitwork just don't get done. You have bugs measured in years on the canonical bug tracker and that is with Canonical losing millions just to get to where they are. they are using this Ubuntu One and UbuntuTab as a Hail Mary to try to get enough ROI to stay afloat and my guess is it'll fail and they'll go tits up. Ultimately the FOSS model works in some cases but not ALL cases and i'd argue from what we've seen consumer desktop is one of the fails. You simply have to have millions spent on polish but without a way to recoup that investment the money won't get spent and without cash incentives trying to herd devs is like herding cats.
Except as we have seen time and time again, including in this very thread, i'm right. As I said I deal with consumers 6 days a week, sometimes on Sunday if its an emergency, so I KNOW how they think, its my fucking JOB to know how they think, to predict what they want and what they don't, and if I fail my ass is going hungry. not only am i not going hungry but my family made out like bandits this Xmas so i must be doing something right, eh?
Hell look above you at the geeks that says 'People will care when they see what you can do with a rooted phone" first of all implying that a rooted phone is like the force or something, two implying that anybody will see one, and three implying that people will know what the fuck they are looking at or actually care. Do they think geeks stand on corners going "Come and see the POWER of the rooted phone!" and people are gonna huddle around like he has discovered fire or something? Give me a break! its a big screen with buttons that does Google, that is what it is to the consumer and therefor it is so. Because there are literally hundreds of thousands of the "screen with Google" people compared to phone rooting geeks it is THEY who set the trend NOT the geek. Just as the other poster that vainly tries to compare jumping off a building thinking they can fly with saying a phone is not a computer is wrong as well because what the phone can and can't do will be dictated by the consumer and if they don't give a flying shit about rooting it and the FOSS phones like OpenMoko don't sell shit guess what? they don't get more made and locked down phones become the standard, that's how it works friend.
In the end the consumer don't give a shit about freedom or being able to hack, they care about "I push this button and it calls, i push this button and i can get Angry birds!" and since they are conditioned to think the phone is disposable and replaced on contract with something different you can sell them Angry birds again with the contract is up. But you ignore the consumer at your own peril, Apple embraced them and became one of the biggest corps on the planet, MSFT only had a token presence in many consumer markets and may have missed the boat. But if you think the consumer thinks like you or cares about the same issues you care about i have a lovely bridge you might be interested in. if its one thing geeks have shown its that they understand consumers even less than they understand women.
I have to wonder how "ahead of the game" the average law enforcement is when it comes to crypto simply because talking to a friend in the state crime lab (he keeps trying to hire me but...damn i don't think i could handle that shit 5 days a week) I have learned that even internet criminals are like most criminals and just very very very very...dumb. I mean stupid on whole never before seen levels of dipshit, just ignorant like you wouldn't believe. I had to cook up a batch file for my buddy last year because all his tools are based on NTFS and he couldn't recall off the top of his head the old DOS commands and they had found a braintrust still using Win98SE! Sure enough Mr Dipshit had hidden enough CP on his drive to get himself 300 years by dropping it in a subfolder in the Windows folder. no crypto, hell not even a password protected zip file, just dropped in a damned folder.
So while I'm sure the NSA and Interpol have some chops simply because they have to deal with foreign powers and spies I have to wonder if the rest simply are up on their game because the "cyber criminals" they have to deal with are about as smart as the dipshit we had rob a bank last year while wearing his workshirt with his name and the name of the company in bold letters right on the front. Hell the lettering was big enough they could just read the shirt right off the security cam and sure enough Mr braintrust showed up for work the very next day and was shocked! Shocked I tell you! That they had managed to catch his brilliant ass.
How do you figure it was "fear" friend? from my chair it looks like companies saw the buzz, said "hey there is a market here and nobody is making money on it" and then they did just that, good old fashioned capitalism at work friend, you find something people want to buy and you make and sell it at a competitive price. i always thought i'd have a full size laptop but then after picking up a couple of those AMD netbooks for customers I was like "Hey, this is light AND it does HD video...sweet!" and ended up getting a EEE and soon after it was bye bye Mr Full size and hello Mr 3 pound netbook that gets 6 hours playing HD video. The cost? $350 with 8Gb of RAM!
So I think the only "fear" the OLPC ever created was fear that the REAL manufacturers wouldn't get to the market before the other guys did because it was clear Negroponte wasn't gonna sell shit. Most don't have the cash to pay double per unit so Negroponte can play Santa and where there is a market somebody is gonna try to provide for it. Hell I walked into the local Wally world the other day and they are selling over a dozen different netbooks by a half a dozen different OEMs, from a 10 inch Atom for $245 up to a fully loaded 12 inch E-450 unit for $450.There is a price point for everybody, I can tell you from my own customers despite what the press says many folks enjoy the hell out of their "cute baby laptops" as they call them, and unlike the OLPC they aren't paying a 100% markup to stroke Negorponte's ego. Ms Hudson above nailed the future with that Indian tablet, give me one with a $10-$15 combo carrying case/keyboard so its like a mini transformer and i'll sell them babies like flapjacks. and unlike the OLPC the economies of scale will work in favor of the Indian tablet letting them crank out several versions at several price points so they can get ever lower prices and serve more folks. Sounds like good old fashioned capitalism to me, make it affordable, crank it out, use the money to make more and get better deals on parts thus lowering your costs. Smart move, too bad the OLPC never seemed to grasp that.
To me it just proves why OLPC will be an ultimate FAIL and end up DOA. A smart group would sell to everyone and use the economies of scale to drive down prices! I mean when you can buy an Atom netbook for $250 with Win 7 Starter at the local Wally World there is no reason if they sold to everyone they couldn't drive prices even lower than $100 since their goal isn't profits but getting these devices in the hands of kids. They don't think america has poor kids? They ought to come down to the delta and see all the tarpaper shacks sometime.
Just as the OLPC could have owned the netbook market by being nearly a year ahead of everyone else and used all that money to drive down prices and create cheaper and better devices for the kids so too are they gonna blow it on the new unit by refusing to sell to the first world except for forced charity which is no charity at all. And if they only sell to governments i hope it'll run Windows as that's what they'll end up needing to put on it just like the OLPC 1 or they aren't gonna get many takers. Governments will want this thing to train future office workers and that means Windows and office.If they would have sold the OLPC 1 to anybody with cash i have no doubt all the homebrew that would have popped up would have cooked up some killer FOSS apps that would have made it an even easier sell, instead they pissed that opportunity away and they'll piss this one away too.
I just hope when they finally go tits up somebody with a brain buys their plans and cranks out their designs for all to use as they do make some cool designs. hell you could probably still find a decent market for the OLPC 1, I mean a rugged laptop that could run Windows or Linux and be charged by cranking a handle and allowed kids in range of each other to collaborate? Sounds like a perfect "my first laptop" for all the poor kids in the delta, hell you could set banks of them up in libraries, you could probably find a thousand places that little thing would be useful and they could probably easily get the price below $200 using the chips they had, hell they could probably slap in an AMD C-Series or E-Series and still get below $200 while giving it enough power to do any basic web tasks with ease! Hell i'd buy it in a heartbeat for a work unit to keep under the seat in my truck and just leave my nice netbook for pleasure.
So I'd say this is a good example of where the FOSS model did NOT fail but was instead screwed by morons who didn't know what they are doing. Negroponte has always come off as an elitist prick, at least from what I've seen and read from him, so it really doesn't surprise me that he doesn't understand even the most basic of economic principles. He has decided "The OLPC shall be thus and ONLY thus" and anything that doesn't fit into that narrow worldview can fuck right off. personally i'm gonna enjoy the failure of the OLPC simply because this guy has been given sweet opportunity after opportunity and has flushed them right down the shitter. Hell you could put a humble little small town retailer like me in charge of the OLPC and I could do a better job than this assclown has!
Thanks. Notice how many insults and attacks on me personally i got? One pretty much accuses me of being some paid astroturfer which if so i'm getting screwed because I haven't seen a single check yet, others actually have the nerve to say Windows isn't polished and neither is OSX (which if that ain't some SERIOUS koolaid chugging i don't know what is) and then others try to use what i call the "move the goalposts and I win!" argument by bringing up things that don't have shit to do with the subject, like Red Hat which i had already covered and which is a SERVER not DESKTOP company, or how Spain is MANDATING Linux which if you tell someone "Use this or enjoy your pink slip" I don't really consider that a fair assessment, do you?
But anyone who has read my past postings know I speak for ONE person and ONE person alone, and that is the CONSUMER. It is the consumer who I work for 6 days a week, its the consumer that I constantly strive to make things easier and better for, its the consumer in the end that puts bread in my children's mouths and a roof over our heads and its the consumer whom the Linux community as a whole gives a Goatse to just as the posts above (or even worse, last critical of Linux posting I did i was modbombed for two weeks and had a psycho follow me around all over the net just so he could post "Die you fat fucker die" over and over) but in the end truth is truth.
Let me end with this final example of how the community just "doesn't get it" when it comes to consumers. I use a test to see if a distro has finally made a usable version called "is it safe?" and it goes like this: Take whatever distro you want to test, get a version from THREE years ago (this is key, you'll see why in a minute) and then if you need CLI to set it up go ahead since you are the BUILDER not the USER at this point. Now to simulate what my customer would go through let the OS update through whatever GUI mechanism it uses. Try it, see what happened? OS fall down and go BOOM! Real hard. Now before someone says "You can't do that with Windows!" I point out that that is like comparing apples to Apple pie as windows has a MINIMUM of 7 years of support, usually longer. Windows 7 will be supported until July 2020, show me ANY Linux that will continue to get updates for THAT long. you can't so there you go why you have to upgrade. Now the last one i tried this with took a big shit on the wireless, so I did what they tell you to do and went to the forums. What i got was a page and a half mess of CLI bullshit that ME the consumer was supposed to "tweak" because its made for rev A firmware g and I had Rev d firmware F. So I said "Humor me for a minute, you guys are like linux gurus right? pretend i'm Suzy the checkout girl, hold my hand and walk me through the GUI to fix this problem" and you know what happened? They tried one twist after another before someone finally came on and said "Uhhhh..you can't do that with the GUI".
and THAT, that right there, is the problem with Linux in a nutshell. without long term support you HAVE to upgrade, upgrade shits on drivers, and no GUI exists to find driver or rollback drivers when things go wrong. Windows has had those two features for a decade, WTF? I was actually told by one snooty community member "Stop thinking like Windows, Linux can run forever without any updates so just disable them"? Seriously if THAT level of koolaid drinking is considered acceptable, because not a single person said "running old unpatched OSes and software is probably not a good idea" that just proves the level of disconnect there is in the community. One even told me I swear to God i just wished i'd have bookmarked it, that I should "teach my users to embrace the POWER of CLI" like it was the God damned force. I don't know why i still bother, maybe because i am old enough to remember when there was GEM and Amiga and DOS and having competition was good. But here it is 2012 already, the off lease XP boxes are starting to pile up, and here I am having to scramble for extra RAM sticks and hoping