Ahhh...another XLT owner, congrats! I have the XLT as well, just loooove that extra room! I put a trunk on mine so i can haul gro or anything else in the rain and just pop it off if i have to haul big loads, its just too damned sweet. I figure i get around 18MPG city and around 22-24MPG highway depending on how bad i leadfoot it. Yeah that sucks but you know what? Its built like a damned tank and just soooo comfortable! It costs me a good $50 to go spend the weekend with my GF's family up north but I figure WTF. Funny my GF warned me when we fist went up there, she was like "My dad is ex Army and has NEVER liked ANY man I dated, just don't be intimidated, okay?" and I pull up and he's like "IS that a 2000 Ranger XLT? You got good taste boy, My truck is a 99 XLT!" and within 5 minutes we've got our hoods popped comparing engines and she just rolled her eyes and said "Men and their trucks..." LOL!
Me I haven't owned a car since 1989 when my Camaro which I had to use a net to catch the falling parts gave out. Since then i've owned just about every kind of truck, Chevy and Ford, a couple of Nissan king cabs (not very comfortable but GREAT on gas BTW) but out of all my trucks I'll take the Ranger. I think with all the beating and banging down the backroads i'll probably have to have the ball joints replaced this spring but other than that she's been a sweetie and I can't really blame her for that as the first thing we had to do when my dad got the oldest his S10 was change out the ball joints. AR roads kill them things deader than dixie but for comfort and ease of driving and just plain old fun you really can't beat a Ranger. I got a nice CD/MP3 player in mine and there is nothing like that long run up to Branson just enjoying the open road in my Ranger. Let them city slickers keep their little beep beep cars we got shit to haul dammit!
I mentioned Linus not because i think the man is doing a bad job, although I do disagree on the subject of an ABI because the rest of the OSes have had them for nearly a decade and their drivers don't break nearly as often, no why I mention Torvalds is if I had put in that many years and had MY name attached to something they keep royally fucking up? Man I would be PISSED with a capital P!
Lets face it if Linus was to have a royal shitfit, put his foot down and say "Look, I'm REALLY tired of you taking my hard work and pissing on it, okay? So here is how its gonna be" and made it damned clear that there were gonna be standards that everyone could agree on and get behind and all those that don't follow the standards don't get diddly shit from the community? People WOULD rally behind the man. RMS comes off as too much of a religious zealot, what with his refusing interviews unless you speak "GNUSpeak" and all, but Torvalds is well respected, he's damned smart, he's got clout.
I truly believe that many of the Linux community are tired of the endless bullshit just as I am. I figured when i first started trying Linux in 04 we'd have penguins on boxes and little Tux stickers on desktops and laptops in the Wally World by now, but instead if anything things have gone backward thanks to shit like PulseAudio and lousy testing and a myriad of dick waving by devs and everyone just acting like 4 year olds. I bet if Torvalds would just put his foot down, get together with some of those superbrains that work with him, and announce some solid steps to take things forward and fix a lot of the shit? the community would be more than happy to support the man, that's all I'm saying.
In the end the buck has to stop somewhere and whether he likes it or not Torvalds is the one that started the whole ecosystem. If he would stand up like Jobs did at Apple and not be afraid to kick some butts i bet things would get a LOT better a LOT quicker, the community just needs someone they can rally behind with some good solid ideas and I bet Linus could be that man, what do you think?
Why don't geeks have the ability to understand consumers? is it like a lesion in the brain that simply blinds them to everyone not like them? As someone who builds and sells all matter of electronic gizmos to the consumer I'll be happy to tell you why they really don't give a shit how locked down a phone is, you ready?
Get this, it'll blow your mind...a phone is not a computer to them you see, not at all, its "A screen with buttons that Googles and is disposable" and that's IT. That's all it is, its a screen with buttons that does Google and they throw it in a drawer when their contract is up and get another one. This is why the carriers can do any damned thing they want, because a phone is just a phone to the consumer. Its also why they don't care about Windows on a tablet because a tablet is not a computer its "a screen i poke that does Google, lets me read books and plays Angry birds" and I can tell you with most of the consumers I've seen they rarely use it for even Google, its a fancy book reader that plays Angry Birds. same as ARM and MIPS netbooks won't go anywhere because a netbook is not a general computing device its a "cute baby laptop" and as such should do everything a big laptop does only slower, because babies are littler than grown ups and so not as strong you see?
So you see its isn't about Linux VS MSFT VS Apple or any of that shit, not to the million upon millions actually getting the things, its a phone that does Google. You wanna know why iPhone is so popular? It looks cool and plays lots of games real good like...Angry Birds. Do you think even 10% of them can name what OS it runs? And people like my dad are getting Android not because they give a flying fuck about freedom to tinker, they saw "that cute little green dancing thingie" and it looks nice and plays Angry Birds. this is why MSFT is having a hell of a time getting into mobile because people see the Windows or MSFT name and think "Why would I want Windows on my phone? I don't want to play Farmville or the sims on my phone" and they ignore it. You see consumers are strange and curious creatures, nothing like the geek in any way shape or form.
Seen that CAT have you? Sad things indeed, most are pushing 30 and falling apart, just junk. But you should NOT complain about subsidizing the rural folks because guess where your food comes from? Ever had KFC? that's Tyson chickens you've been enjoying friend, fresh grown right here in bumfuck AR. Corn, rice, beef, pork, strawberries, all of that has to be grown somewhere and AR is closer to Brazil in climate than the rest of the US which makes it excellent for growing pretty much anything, hell its Jan and its 55 degrees here right now. I'd also point out that another reason folks are so spread out here is the huge national park system that taking up a LOT of land, would you advocate turning it into megacities? I personally like the fact that you can go out and enjoy huge scenic views unspoiled by the hand of man myself.
Finally as for USF I personally think it should be switched to broadband because we have reached the point where Internet is becoming as required for basic functionality in this society as water and electricity. Look at how schools are adding online courses left and right so how will these kids do their work? and what about access to state services and resources? It cost millions in waste and is bad for the environment to generate all those tons of papers that need to be on hand to pass out for those without Internet. Everything from tagging your car to paying your taxes can all be done online and the quicker we have it so ALL can enjoy the wealth that the net provides the better I say. In my area the absolute cheapest Internet is $60 a month with a $120 upfront cost which means the poor simply can't access it. In my building of over 90 apts I was told I'm the only one with cable net and there is exactly ONE other person with any net at all!
So unless you want to be like on Judge Dredd and eat recycled food you kinda need all these rural areas as its us who are putting the bread you eat on the shelves. There is a reason why rural life has survived the industrial age and that's because unless you want processed food product you need folks out here growing it and others fixing the pipes and others running the electrical lines and guys like me fixing the busted computers. You kill the ability for the rural areas to survive you'll be cutting your own throats and will watch in horror as milk hits $15 a gallon and a burger costs you more than the finest steak does now.
Funny you should mention dell because they are actually a poster child for how broken Linux is a consumer platform is because Dell have to run their own repos just to keep there teeny tiny subset of hardware from being shat on when the devs scratch their itches. I will bet my very last dollar if Dell will publish their numbers (which they won't BTW, I even asked them out of curiosity and they won't give you the numbers) that Dell is LOSING money on Ubuntu because the costs of keeping a dev team to do nothing but maintain their own repo is costing more than they are making on the machines. Do you propose that ALL the OEMs lose money hand over fist to support you? Did you know that ASUS, the ones that started the whole Linux on tiny machines aka netbook craze has given up on Linux and no longer sells any Linux machines? or that a decade old Windows stomped Linux on netbooks or that even canonical admitted that returns were FOUR TIMES higher than Windows? do you think ALL of these people are lying? That they "just don't git it"?
Its really simple friend, to get the level of polish required to make Linux work on the desktop, where suzy the checkout girl won't have to learn bash or how to navigate a CLI when things break, where frankly things WON'T break in the first place, is gonna cost north of a hundred million easy and the FOSS model simply won't allow you to make that amount in the consumer market. Look at canonical, they haven't made a single cent, not one penny, on the desktop. if you figure in how much shuttleworth sunk in they have lost millions without a single dime of ROI, you think that is sustainable? in fact I'd bet my last buck that canonical will be out of desktops in less than 5 years, probably less than 3, simply because they won't be able to generate the operating capital. RMS may think you can have a utopia where everyone works for free towards the common good but that is a fallacy because we human like doing fun jobs and HATE doing shitty jobs and in the FOSS model the busted shitters don't get fixed. The FOSS model works in business because business is used to buying support contracts and they make money off their machines so spending money to make money is fine by them. the consumer market simply doesn't work like that and without the steady income you can't herd the devs and if you don't herd the devs you get what you have now, with bugs measured in years, updates that fix one thing and break three, hell I have Windows units out in the field that have been running since 2002 on a single install. can you imagine trying to update a Linux desktop from 2002 to current and still have it functional on the other end? it won't happen friend, hell take a distro disc from just 3 years ago and apt-dist-upgrade to current and watch things fall apart.
Sorry you and the other poster got modded down friend, but I intended and expected to be modbombed as i call it like I see it and truth rarely follows groupthink. The simple fact that so many here refuse to accept (Notice how many said "Windows and OSX isn't polished" which if that isn't koolaid chugging I don't know what is) is that the level of integration you are talking with Windows and OSX, where EVERYTHING follows strict conventions, like scrollbar goes here and icons must be like so and keyboards shortcuts should be thus, all of that COSTS MONEY because without it? You get what you have now which is rampant itch scratching. Just look at your average "consumer friendly" Linux like Mint or PCLOS. You have apps that follow the Mac way, some follow the Windows way, some go for the old school UNIX methods of doing things. There is NO consistency there AT ALL. Why is that? Its because the devs are working for free and frankly don't give a fuck about jumping through some hoop if they don't want to and because they aren't getting paid you can take it or leave it friend, because they are just scratching an itch, not like they can be fired for not following the rules.
Then you have the horrible bugs and driver breaking. Just look at the Canonical bugtracker where many bugs are measured in YEARS without being fixed. Some have thousands of complaints yet they sit, why? no payments to devs mean they don't want to do shit works for free, its simple human nature. if i'm gonna give up my own free time I'm gonna be doing something FUN and coding is fun, bug fixing? Not fun, not even a little fun, in fact it sucks ass. I mean when Dell, one of the biggest OEMs on the entire planet, has to run their own repos because if they don't the whole thing shits itself and dies? You got serious problems friend. Why does it do that? Why would the bog standard boring ass hardware that Dell uses, the same Realtek and Intel and ATI and Nvidia chips that are in more than 85% of the computers on the planet still break, even though these are well known hardware? Its simple because the rampant itch scratching of the devs from Torvalds on down simply are worried about scratching their own little itches instead of worrying about the big picture and what their changes do to the ecosystem. Go to ANY forum after a release and see how many "Update foo broke my drivers!" posts you'll find. Just for the hell of it i tried counting on the Ubuntu forum after the last release and I quit at over 700 and there were literally page after page I didn't bother counting. Now realize for every ONE complaint you probably have a couple of hundred that just got frustrated and either went somewhere else or gave up completely and went to Windows or OSX. One of the long time posters on LinuxInsider has been a Linux server admin for over a decade and she recently gave up and is looking at either BSD or Mac, why? because the latest apt-dist-upgrade wiped out her email and left her with a broken machine. Data loss in this stage of the game is unacceptable people!
What I'm trying to get at folks is the FOSS model works in SOME cases but not ALL cases and trying to fit the FOSS model into all cases is a giant FAIL and consumers are one of those fail cases. like I said consumers won't buy support contracts, so how do you make the hundreds of millions required to pay the devs to get the busted shitters fixed? you don't which is why we have the mess we have. mark my words in less than 5 years Canonical will be OUT of the desktops biz because they can't keep losing money and Shuttleworth made it clear there won't be any more checks. that's why at CES there is gonna be an UbuntuTablet and you see more and more spent on Ubuntu Server and by extension less on Ubuntu desktop. Everyone is gonna have to face the fact that the tin cup model simply doesn't provide the millions in steady income required to build a world class desktop and if you want to compete with Apple and MSFT
And you just hit the nail on the head on why there aren't any Linux desktops that can compete with the polish and intuitiveness of OSX and Windows. to bring Linux up to that level would cost tens if not hundreds of millions of dollar because the only way to herd developers is by paying them, otherwise you get what you have now with everyone scratching their own personal itches and then none of the "busted shitters" as i call them get fixed. When folks are doing work for free they are gonna do what they consider fun, nobody wants to be the guy that goes and fixes the busted shitters. just look at how many bugs on canonical is over two years, over three, i think the oldest ones are going on six years now because nobody wants the shitty jobs so they just don't get done.
Well when you are building a consumer OS guess what? there are literally THOUSANDS of truly shitty thankless lousy jobs that need doing. there is bug fixing and QA and regression testing and making sure all the UIs match the OS standard and maintaining your own kernel because God knows when Torvalds will get an itch and break all your drivers and writing all the help files and documentation and I'm sure if i sat here a couple of minutes i could easily name a dozen or two more truly lousy, boring, shitty, thankless jobs that HAVE to be done if you want a world class highly polished OS where everything "Just works" and is so simple and intuitive that Suzy the checkout girl can work it. This is why Apple and MSFT pay a metric shitload of money to developers, because they won't do those shitty jobs for free.
And THAT, that right there, is the problem. Consumers won't buy support contracts so the Red Hat method of making money is right out and why should the OEMs pay you shit when they can just "pull a CentOS" and have the thing for free? Gotta look out for the shareholders you know. i'm sure dell threw a few bucks Canonical's way but I seriously doubt it was even 1/10th what they were spending to build Ubuntu. Has Canonical even made a dime in profit yet? and the much vaunted community won't back you up, just look at how ATI bent over backwards to open up their code, even hiring driver developers to work for the free driver group out of their own pocket only to have every forum covered with posts that read "LOL use Nvidia" or the simple fact that more than a THIRD of the webservers on the entire planet are not using RHEL but, survey says....CentOS, an OS created by a bunch of cheapskates that used to sell an appliance that required RHEL who said "Fuck 'em, we'll just cut out the copyrights and then we won't have to pay shit!" and now of course they don't pay shit, not when compared to the RHEL licenses they used to buy.
How many here have cut a check to canonical? How many have sent money to their favorite distro? despite the BS I'm sure this post will get i bet if you looked at the numbers you are talking maybe 1 in 10,000 if you are lucky. So don't complain when Linux on the desktop goes exactly nowhere, just look at how canonical is now gonna be selling some tablet starting at CES and is spending an increasing amount of their limited resources on the server. its simply because with the FOSS model there isn't any money to be made on consumers and if anyone was to sink the hundreds of millions required to make a world class rock solid picture perfect Linux desktop it wouldn't be five minutes before just like Mint you had a knockoff stealing all the users thanks to being 'free as in beer" but without the work and money required to bring it up to OSX and Win 7 its 'free as in worthless" and despite the modbombing i'm sure to get for pointing out the truth THAT is why Linux isn't gaining shit on the desktop. I mean when MSFT puts out a flaming turd like Vista and the OS with a $1000 barrier to entry gains like mad and the "free as in beer" OS don't gain shit, how big of a cluebat do you have to be hit by to see the FOSS model don't work in this case? Home users don't care about freedom or CLI or DIY they care about "its just works and keeps working and is easy to use" and I'm sorry but Linux is still a long way from that friends and I don't see it getting any better, if anything all the itch scratching by the DE devs has made it worse.
Got the V6 have you? You go to any of the Ford sites and you'll hear tons of stories of guys with insane mileage on the V6. that is one of the reasons i got mine, I'm barely up to 122,000 on mine but with that Vulcan i should be able to get 300,000 easy before needing a rebuild and after rebuild get ANOTHER 300,000 on it! I just need to get me a bit of sandpaper and a paint pen as these roads throw up pebbles like crazy and i have a couple of ping dents that are starting to get a little rust but other than that she is still as good as the day she rolled off the line. Real bitch to find in a parking lot though, I swear company white was the color a good 95% of the Rangers came in so I have to be careful to remember which lane I'm in or I'm screwed LOL!
But its a damned shame the idiots at Ford killed the Ranger because its a hell of a great little work truck. if they would have bothered to update it occasionally like they did the Explorer they'd probably still be selling but that works for me as there is nearly 7 years worth of Rangers i can interchange parts with. But those idiots at Ford and Chevy obviously never went down to the deep south because in any parking lot its Rangers and S10s as far as the eye can see. and just about every place that had to send workers, from the cableco to Napa to Orkin ALL used the Ranger. Kinda funny that Ford is gonna have to wait to get the last Ranger to put in their little museum as Orkin bought it the second it rolled off the line.
But I'll be keeping my Ranger until either it dies or I do and I'm hoping that will be quite a long time.
Well if you have a couple of trillion to build a mass transit system for the entire rural south or wouldn't mind taxes going up to say...ohh about 70% then i'm sure we could get rid of those nasty old fossil fuels tomorrow. The problem is all those foods you take for granted on your shelves? grown in places like AR and LA where its lots of two lane roads and pretty much zipola when it comes to mass transit. I can tell you that in AR you have a very old bus system that covers maybe half the state capital and...well that's it. and believe me the places it covers are NOT places you want to actually live, not unless you like gunfire for a lullaby.
Just remember the USA isn't the EU, with everyone packed together in little clumps, you are talking a HUGE area with people spread out all over the place. to make the cities safe enough you could actually move those people into them would cost trillions for the cops and high-rises alone, not even counting the transportation and infrastructure that would have to be built. So we better hope someone comes up with a source of energy that works as well as gas because you want to watch the USA fall apart just keep raising the gas prices.
As for TFA well duh the cars were lighter, 1980s cars were the worst of everything! You had plastic everything but hardly any knowledge of how to make any of it safe so that when one of those 80s cars go into a wreck it was just a nasty mangled mess. Cars are heavier now because safety weighs folks, steel bands and crumple zones all add weight. Sure we could make a car that weighed like an early 80s B210 that would get great gas mileage and if anybody hit you they could use the car as a coffin because good luck cutting you out of that mess! Maybe in another decade we'll have composites down good enough you can build a truly lightweight car that is as safe as a modern SUV or family car but as of right now I simply haven't seen anything close, noth that wouldn't make the car so expensive nobody but the uber rich could afford the thing.
It seems like the smarter move would be to simply mod the car yourself and just happen to 'forget' to hook up the back box when you were done. It seems more plausible than taking a tire iron to the box after the fact and would be easier to explain. does anybody know if the newer pickup trucks even HAVE black boxes on them? if so i doubt many of them in my area are hooked up as the good old boys just love to mod the hell out of their trucks.I don't see how they could ding you if you could show you had been modding as long as there wasn't a clause in the insurance that specifically prohibited modding the vehicle.
Bah y'all can keep your fancy schmancy new fangled automobiles, i'll stick with my old ranger. it may get shitty gas mileage but the cast iron Vulcan V6 is built like a tank and purrs like a kitten. I can't believe how many of the good old boys yank a Vulcan to drop a Ford Mustang V8 in the ranger but I give 'em credit with that much horsepower they make a hell of a mudder! And boy could that have sounded anymore redneck? If I don't watch it the next thing i know i'll have those mudflaps with the silver babes on them!
AMD has usually been good about getting the latest codecs supported so if 10 bit becomes the mainstream i have no doubt it'll be supported. After all with modern GPUs its pretty trivial to flash them to update the chip and with even the lowest chips and APUs having 80 stream processors that should be more than enough horsepower once the latest routine has been coded.
And I looked at the 13 series and frankly I find them to be a bad value as you can buy a black edition quad for less money than an i3 and when you figure in the cost of the board you are talking nearly 60% higher build costs in some cases depending on which chip you go for. Its trivial to underclock the Athlon and Phenom chips and with most boards supporting core unlock even on the low end its quite possible to get a 3.2GHz Athlon X3 that'll unlock to quad for less than $75 shipped. With it unlocked you can drop the volts and have a 2.2Ghz quad for that price and any benchmark will tell you for transcoding more cores beat HT any day of the week. The ONLY places where I've found the i series makes sense is for those trying to win benchmarks and those that are having a lot of work that is heavily single threaded. Hell if you don't mind using an older chip (which since we are talking about an HTPC and not gaming really doesn't matter as transcoding again only cares about cores) you can pick up a CULV Phenom X4 for $55 which you can then slap into either a Shuttle case or one of the many mATX VCR style cases and end up with a nice HTPC for sub $350 if you shop around. I've actually used that chip in both an HTPC and in an office box where they wanted peace and quiet and I can tell you that its pretty easy to cool that chip with a passive Zalman HS or a thin copper HSF.
But for a thin and small HTPC I really doubt you're gonna find anything that will match the bang per buck of the E-350 because you can get a nice board for less than $100 with the E-350 so if you DIY sub $300 HTPCs that do 1080p is easily doable which you just aren't gonna get anywhere near that price point with the i series, hell i doubt you'd be able to hit that price point going with the older Core chips. If we were talking gamer PC then there are some use cases where the lower end i series makes sense, for example some shooters tend to favor single threaded performance above all so in those cases the lower end i series would make sense over Athlon but in HTPCs the i series just uses too many bucks and not enough bang IMHO, better to have more cores and a better GPU. But of course again that is only if you want the box to also transcode, for an HTPC that is gonna be used primarily for streaming and playback an E-350 is the much more affordable route. I've hooked one in a VCR style case to a 55 inch 1080P and the customer couldn't be happier, with a full Win 7 HP he is able to watch anything on the web as well as enjoy his entire media library, all from the comfort of his easy chair. Now the only problem he has is getting his wife off the thing as she loves using her FB from that fat TV screen!
But at $100 for the board plus chip if you have an older machine you'd like to upgrade you really ought to give one a spin. at that price i've been using them for low cost office machines and you really can't beat the bang for the buck. a few months back I upgraded the print shop down the street with all E-350s except for the three units where they are doing heavy graphics work which i built some Phenom IIs with Radeon HD5670s and they couldn't be happier with the performance and the secretaries are just raving about how much nicer it is, and of course the owner was raving about how much lower his electric bill became when they switched because now the average worker is using less than 70w under load and most times using less than 45w and that's including monitor. like I said you ought to give one a try, they are cheap enough that it doesn't hurt your wallet and having a machine so quiet that the only thing you hear is the clicking of your keyboard IS nice.
Then how do YOU explain why a 1.7Ghz P4 without HT will stomp an Athlon X2 when it comes to page load, memory usage, CPU usage, on the same pages when the ONLY difference in the systems is the CPU? I'm really tired of FF fanbois waving their flags and sticking their fingers in their ears. How many years have we been complaining about the memory leaks only to get told by the devs "They don't exist, you're crazy' right up until they said "We fixed the leak BTW LOL!"?
If you don't believe me break out a stopwatch and use Chrome's built in memory tool which will show you REAL memory and CPU load and try it yourself why don't you? you'll find that a 5 year old Intel chip will stomp a brand new AMD chip and if you believe that is factually true I have a bridge to nowhere you might be interested in. if they aren't using the Intel Cripple compiler than i bet they are using Intel profiles on their builds because as it is now FF is unsuitable for purpose on AMD chips!
Not to mention ever since that judge came out and said "Iran did 9/11" (look it up, I'm not shitting you. That's THREE different groups so far they've blamed for their little false flag in 01, hell maybe they can blame WikiLeaks next!) you've been seeing an endless stream of "We've always been at war with Eastasia" propaganda. I mean how long has it been since we've NOT see an "Iran is the bogeyman and burns babies ZOMFG!" story? Personally after NDAA (and PATRIOT and TSA AND Constitution free zones) I don't think we have any right to talk.
This is why even though I lean socialist I support Ron Paul as he is the ONLY one that doesn't advocate endless wars and spending billions propping up dictators! Let AIPAC and the American Jews pay for Israel and let them go to war with Iran if they want to but its NOT our job to be their pitbull and waste trillions of dollars and our kid's lives just because some neocons believe that "If there ain't no Jews in Zion Jebus won't come back! Come back Jebus come back!" . So how about we tell them where they can stick their obvious propaganda designed to get the people ready for yet another debt busting war and instead mind our own fucking business and worry about the millions of out of work Americans and the endless attacks on our civil liberties, how about that?
Wouldn't boot into safe mode, wouldn't even boot into CLI actually. it turned out that all Nvidia boards lack some pretty basic features like AHCI and NCQ which means if Windows was installed with a more modern northbridge you can give it up as you'll need to do a full wipe, there is simply no way to fix it.Lucky for me they had a nice Asrock board that had an almost identical chipset (My ECS was a SB700, the Asrock a SB710) while supporting my 8Gb of DDR 2 and the ability to run pretty much any AM3 CPU including Thuban. I ended up taking my old quad and the nvidia board and making a nice new desktop for my sweetie so it isn't like i lost anything.
I DID learn a valuable lesson though.....ECS is full of shit! It turns out ECS strictly goes by the wattage when determining if a chip is supported WITHOUT actually testing said chip so even though their website said that the board would take Thuban x6 as well as Zosma X4s IRL those chips will NEVER run on that board, BIOS updated or not, because ECS didn't bother to check and see that the Thuban and Zosma have a VERY different power curve compared to Deneb thanks to supporting turbocore and intelligent power scaling. The older chips only have C&Q which simply scales back the CPU across the board, not redirecting power from unused cores to used cores like turbocore does.
So I learned my lesson, from now on its Asrock or Gigabyte for the gamer builds and Foxconn and Biostar for the budget builds, no more ECS for me!
Correct and on both XP and Win 7 FF is like a bad joke. If its the Intel Cripple compiler this should give everyone the evidence that Intel ties a boat anchor to any code compiled on their compiler that is run on AMD processors because when you see an old non HT P4 stomp an Athlon X2 you know something stinks. Since I don't run Linux I'll have to take your word for it but it really doesn't surprise me as i found that most of the other browsers like Dragon, QTWeb, Safari, Opera, and Chromium are pretty much CPU agnostic but FF should come with a "For Intel processors ONLY!" warning because its pretty much unusable on AMD chips, at least from what I saw.
Not to mention the ugly little secret they gloss over which i found out after some of my HTPC customers got one which is that it seems a good 30%-50% of those that try it get massive headaches at least from my admittedly small sampling but talking to my fellow builders and HTPC fans online it seems to be about the right number. I myself tried watching it and within a half an hour it felt like I had been punched in the head, with this dull throbbing right behind the eyes that took hours and a couple of BC powders to get rid of.
So who would want to go 3D when the odds are good at least one of your family members will get sickening headaches from the thing? With the ones that got 3D TVs over the holidays and called me to help config their HDTVs I don't think there was a single one that didn't have at least one member sickened by it, in a couple it was the wife, one the husband, another the elder child, there was ALWAYS somebody that ended up with a skullthumper from using it. Now they are only using it when that person isn't in the home or isn't gonna watch simply because they don't want to admit they spent all that money on tech they can't use but they were telling me they were gonna tell their family and friends to steer clear. I don't know if its something about the vision, as I have better than 20/20 and it gave me a headache but the oldest has to wear glasses for nearsightedness and he sees it just fine, but if you can't sit down as a family and enjoy it what's the point?
Maybe they are just writing code that doesn't run well on anything but Intel? Or are using intel based profiling during testing? Because i can tell you that I compared a first gen 1.7GHz Pentium 4 to a 3GHz AMD Athlon and it was pretty startling at least to me how badly FF favors the Intel CPU. Loading the same pages in both machines i noticed the memory spiking was MUCH more dramatic on an AMD CPU, and its CPU footprint was just insane.
As i said this 1.8GHz Sempron i'm typing on makes a wonderfully low powered nettop for the shop, lets me download drivers and check my mail without skipping a beat or ever hitting above 60% CPU on Dragon or QTWeb and that is during SD videos, but FF will slam the CPU to 100% for up to a minute launching a new tab and give it up when it comes to SD video as with FF it jerks so damned badly its better to download the video and run it than it is to attempt to watch in FF. And it isn't that QTWeb or Dragon are passing off to the GPU either as this unit has a truly ancient TNT Vanta 32Mb card I slapped in there just so i could run my 1600x900 LCD at native resolution so it simply doesn't have the horse to be offloading squat. hell i don't even think the old Vanta had support for MPEG 2 acceleration back then.
So I don't know what they did to it but FF is like night and day when it comes to AMD VS Intel CPUs, which considering i became an AMD only shop after the compiler rigging and OEM bribing came out makes FF unusable for me. Why would I want a browser that runs like you tied a boat anchor to it if its run on anything but Genuine Intel? Maybe someone ought to try switching their CPUID to Genuine Intel and comparing the performance to see if its some sort of intel based profiling on the part of FF because it certainly don't like AMD CPUs.
If you are on windows you should try Comodo Dragon which has ABP and I would argue with the combination of its default settings which has the browser and ONLY the browser use the comodo Secure DNS malware site filtering along with low rights mode NoScript isn't really needed. There is NotScript if you want to replicate similar functionality but frankly i tried to get a win 7 install using Dragon infected for shits and giggles and while a few nasty sites could crash the browser not a single one managed to infect the system which i confirmed with several offline and online scans. Its a HELL of a lot faster than FF is now and unlike FF which sucks balls on AMD chips Dragon is completely CPU agnostic, there is even a checkbox on first install that will make a portable version and install it to your thumbdrive. Its really nice, give it a spin. it'll even import all your FF bookmarks, passwords, etc if you ask it to so switching is trivial.
I agree though that FF nuked the fridge after version 3, in my case i believe the nuking occurred after versions 3.0.x which were the last versions that seemed to be truly CPU agnostic and weren't Ziggy Piggies when it came to CPU and RAM usage. Like I said i tried the latest and greatest on my EEE E-350 netbook and watching as a good 40 minutes of battery went down the shitter thanks to FF hogging the CPU. On my XP box I have AnVir Task Manager and just typing in a text box I can watch the CPU jump all over the place from FF. Seriously typing in a textbox causes huge spikes in CPU usage? WTF? But I have to support a WIDE range of customers, from late model P4 office boxes and first gen netbooks to the latest AMD multicores and frankly FF is just unsuitable for purpose anymore. it was the complaints from customers about how their machines would "jerk and hang" when going to common sites like Gmail and FB that told me if I didn't want them going back to IE i had better get on it and find a new browser and after testing more than a half a dozen, from Kmeleon to Opera I found the Dragon has the best mix of security and performance for me and my customers. I just recently installed it on a customers Xmas prezzie from her BF which is an AMD C Series netbook and even with an APU that is only 1GHz the Dragon is snappy and lets her use FB while running her IM without any lagging and while getting over 5 hours on a battery. That for me speaks volumes and is why FF is no longer in my standard install package.
Not to mention if it was real that would just show we needed to kick some nerd scientist butt! Dammit them little white coat wearing geeks been promising us flying cars and sexbots since Steve Austin was kicking Fembot booty back in 74, so WTF? You can waste all that money putting a flag on the dang moon but you can't give us the single most revolutionary invention in all of mankind, the perfect sexbot? get off your damned asses and quit playing with model cars ya damned geeks! I want to come home and find an Alyson Hannigan sexbot making me steak already! So quit playing with your damned toys and get cloning us perfect women like Alyson Hannigan and Scarlett Johansson instead of goofing off with your damned toys, which FYI they are toys and NOT action fricking figures!! We ain't getting any younger ya know! How much ya wanna bet if one of their cells go off they wander around confused because they ALL have the damed Star Wars theme as a ringtone? NERDS!
The problem is what good is your right to speak if you have no way to be heard? i think its obvious to all now that the handful of uberrich that control our media outlets crank out propaganda like there is no tomorrow just look at how quickly the Tea Party was suddenly switched for whackos to celebrated when the Koch bros rolled out their astroturf "Tea Party Express" and took the thing over. The viral nature of the Internet makes it the last truly free place for getting out speech that isn't corporate approved which is why due to the consolidation of power we have seen here and in the rest of the west i'm sure they will do their damnedest to make it just another cable channel spewing doubleplusgood corporate messages.
That is why we must defend it just as vigorously as anything in our bill of rights because with propaganda and free speech zones and NDAA its just too damned easy to make the message (as well as the messenger) just disappear while using their massive MSM weapon to destroy anyone who doesn't follow their program. For a good example just look at how the MSM in the USA all tripped over themselves to label Assange an "evil rapist terrorist monster" while not saying squat about the documents showing the USA hiring murderers and covering up for defense contractors selling children for sex to get contracts. if it weren't for WikiLeaks letting those docs be accessed by the world we would have never heard a thing about it, instead we would have gotten "four alarm fire makes way for GLORIOUS new tractor factory!". BTW how sad is it that we win the Cold war only to end up the USSR with Pravda style bullshit rammed down our throats?
That's funny, I have an original XP install on the nettop going back to 2004 and no troubles, and the Win 7 install on this machine is from Oct 09, again no worries, but then again i don't go downloading and installing stupid kitteh screensavers and every other POS buggy freeware and trialware i find on the web like some customers i know. But I've been doing a similar trick for years with windows thanks to Comodo Time Machine which gives the user a button to push at boot which will let them restore it even if they manage to bork the OS. Since I have all their docs and data set up on a Data partition they can restore it without losing squat, even their bookmarks are taken care of by FF sync or Dragon Sync so no hassles.
I do have a question though, will this restore be board agnostic? Because I damned near had to do a Windows 7 wipe and reinstall after having to change boards because ECS lied their asses off and said my board supported Thuban 6 cores and it didn't. I tried a Biostar Nvidia board i had laying around and it would take the Thuban fine but Windows did NOT like going from an ATI to an Nvidia chipset and would just reboot before it would get to desktop. since I wasn't thrilled about having to toss my 8Gb of RAM I said to hell with it and found an Asrock board that would take Thuban while still having an ATI chipset and voila! problem solved. But it would be nice IMHO to be able to just use this restore trick and have it work even when I switch boards.
For those that would like a nice cross platform browser and don't mind going off the beaten path a bit, may i make a suggestion? try QTWeb which is just what you think it is, a browser made with the QT framework and Webkit rendering engine. It works in Windows, OSX, and Linux, runs quite well from a thumbstick and is pretty nice and zippy.
I agree with everything you posted BTW and would only add the thing that finally broke me was how bad later releases ran on AMD CPUs. I don't know if they are using the Intel Cripple Compiler or what but the performance difference between AMD and Intel CPUs when it came to FF was pretty startling, with my losing a good 30-40 minutes on the battery using FF on my E-350 compared to using Comodo Dragon or QTWeb, both of which seem to be CPU agnostic. On the older AMD CPUs like my Sempron nettop FF slams the CPU to the point it is unsuitable for purpose yet both Dragon and QTWeb give the 1.8GHz Sempron new life and make it an excellent low power nettop. if I would have stayed with FF I'd have had to shitcan the box and built something more powerful which when we are talking about a fricking web browser is pretty crazy.
To the FF devs, what did you do when you switched from 3.0.x to later versions? Because whatever you did you need to undo it. 3.0.x was just fine on any AMD or Intel chip, the 3.5 and 3.6 branches were okay but not great with the spiking starting, and 4 and everything after was just shite on a crusty roll. The latest version is a little better but when you are talking about going from a 100% CPU spike for nearly 2 minutes to a 98% CPU spike for a minute that still isn't really good and makes the machine unusable until FF quits slamming the chip. Now when i can take the exact same system and under Dragon be using a good 40% less CPU, or get better performance from QTWeb when its on a thumbstick than I do from your browser when its natively installed? then to steal a line from an old K's Choice song "Something's Wrong". But I recommend Dragon and QTWeb and install both on new builds whereas I used to install FF before doing anything else. FF is just too power hungry and the performance simply isn't there which i think is a damned shame, it was truly a great browser before all this craziness.
Firefox has to run as admin to update, strike one. It doesn't have low rights mode like chrome and IE, strike two. Its crazy release schedule means zero testing before deployment, strike three and you're outta there!
As someone who used FF before it was even called FF and the suite before that i hated to see it go but go it had to as its performance has been getting worse it seems as far as CPU spiking and RAM leaking, extensions were breaking everywhere and the final straw was that XSS bug that allowed malware writers to spam yahoo mail accounts from FF. If you got a bunch of spam emails from friends with Yahoo accounts, all consisting of a single word or sentence and a driveby malware link? that was the FF XSS bug. With low rights mode its damned near impossible to pull crap like that since the browser runs even lower than a user it simply can't get the permissions to do a lot of nastiness. Low rights mode was released with vista in 2007 BTW and here it is 2012 and Firefox STILL doesn't have it. But hey they have personas right?
I truly hope the FF devs will stop going Goatse at their users and get back to their original mission statement which was to build a small, fast, and light browser with good security because I do miss NoScript although I don't know if its really needed with low rights mode and sandboxing. But if you think IT are "worthless" for not deploying a less securable browser that requires admin rights to install and isn't easy at all to set up GPOs that can't be trivially bypassed by the user? Then I'd personally hate to see what the admins are like you'd consider competent, probably the type that just gives everyone admin rights and cleans up after the messes.
You're talking software and I'm talking hardware friend. back then they gave out full docs and specs for the chip in the floppy disc drive (which could then be hacked to speed up I/O) and with all the specs on every I/O on the board you could hack together all kinds of hardware from printers to modems with a soldering gun and a little time.
That is one thing people take for granted we just didn't have, and that is how easy the hardware today is to use. Today everything is plug and play and pretty much everything is USB while we had to deal with IRQ conflicts and one of a half a dozen different proprietary connections. Folks just don't realize how proprietary things were back then, there was no sharing of printers or frankly anything else without hacking and it was a royal PITA. I still remember the "fun" of playing "Which IRQ is making the PC shit itself?" and spending crazy amounts of time while now its "plug in USB, wait a minute while the driver loads, there is no step three' and away you go. Of course even now one can go overboard with it like my dad who has 18! ( not an exaggeration, he had 6 on the back and 4 on the front and then he had me add in a card and 2.5 USB internal so he got an extra 4 on the back and 4 in the front) USB ports because according to him "everything should be USB".
But you really forget how well we have it now until you see an article like TFA and remember what we were running. Your average $1 watch at Fred's has more CPU power than the VIC and C64 did and you could fit the entire contents of my first 6 HDDs completely into the RAM on my current system with plenty of room left over and my current machine cost less than the average IBM 5150 yet could run every single OS I had from 1982-2000 in VMs faster than they ran on the original hardware. The fact we get that kind of power so damned cheap just amazes the living hell out of me. If you would have told me when I got my first IBM PC compatible waaay back in the days of the 386SX that i would one day have multiple CPUs in a portable that would do high def video for less than the cost of my VIC and which would get 6 hours on a battery while weighing 3 pounds, or that I would come home to a machine with SIX CPUs and that both it and the portable would have 8Gb of RAM, while i was sitting there trying to make every byte count? I'd have asked you to lay off the dope as it was rotting your brain and yet now my kids play games on hand me downs that have Gbs of RAM and 800 stream GPUs? Its just incredible how far we've come folks, just incredible.
I can't tell you for certain but i'm pretty sure they fixed that one but again can't be 100% sure as I haven't had a chance to check in again with the one using E-350 and Netflix but his was playing just fine on his TV last I checked but its a 720p set so I don't know if that'll make a difference with silverlight. In both that and your other issue frankly it really doesn't matter as the E-350 supports hybrid crossfire and nearly all the E-350 HTPC boards comes with a PCIe X16 so adding a cheap Radeon HD card is beyond simple and no IGP will ever compare to discrete graphics. i recently got a customer an HD4650 1Gb on sale for $10 after MIR so it isn't like it'll break the bank to add a Radeon discrete. He is quite happy with his new card and it offloads most codecs so again I really doubt that would be a problem.
For me what sells the E-350 is how quietly it runs, both in HTPCs and mobile situations. They are also VERY low power and low heat which with the rising electricity costs is a nice bonus. Finally in just about every test I've seen the E-350 gives better performance than Atom + ION for often less cost. I mean you can buy a E-350 board that'll hold 8Gb of RAM starting at just $70 on Newegg which for a dual core APU with Radeon graphics is beyond cheap which is why I've also been using it in low cost office and home PCs. I've had nothing but good luck and happy customers with the E-350 and even with a full win 7 HP its snappy and easily has enough power for all the tasks your average Joe or Jane is using a PC for.
I liked the handling and quiet of the E-350 enough i put my money where my mouth is and sold my laptop for a EEE E-350 netbook and frankly couldn't be happier. while I don't do netflix so I can't comment there I can tell you with my EEE I'm getting 6 hours watching 720p video and when i go by my dad's place I can plug it in via HDMI to the TV so he and I can sit down and watch a new action or western at 1080p which is nice. it has enough kick I'm actually using it with Hydrogen and Audacity to lay drum beats and edit multitrack recordings which for a unit that only weighs 3 pounds and cost me $350 with 8Gb of RAM is pretty impressive in my book. But at $70 you really ought to give one a try, at that price its a dirt cheap way to upgrade any older box to give it some kick.
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Ahhh...another XLT owner, congrats! I have the XLT as well, just loooove that extra room! I put a trunk on mine so i can haul gro or anything else in the rain and just pop it off if i have to haul big loads, its just too damned sweet. I figure i get around 18MPG city and around 22-24MPG highway depending on how bad i leadfoot it. Yeah that sucks but you know what? Its built like a damned tank and just soooo comfortable! It costs me a good $50 to go spend the weekend with my GF's family up north but I figure WTF. Funny my GF warned me when we fist went up there, she was like "My dad is ex Army and has NEVER liked ANY man I dated, just don't be intimidated, okay?" and I pull up and he's like "IS that a 2000 Ranger XLT? You got good taste boy, My truck is a 99 XLT!" and within 5 minutes we've got our hoods popped comparing engines and she just rolled her eyes and said "Men and their trucks..." LOL!
Me I haven't owned a car since 1989 when my Camaro which I had to use a net to catch the falling parts gave out. Since then i've owned just about every kind of truck, Chevy and Ford, a couple of Nissan king cabs (not very comfortable but GREAT on gas BTW) but out of all my trucks I'll take the Ranger. I think with all the beating and banging down the backroads i'll probably have to have the ball joints replaced this spring but other than that she's been a sweetie and I can't really blame her for that as the first thing we had to do when my dad got the oldest his S10 was change out the ball joints. AR roads kill them things deader than dixie but for comfort and ease of driving and just plain old fun you really can't beat a Ranger. I got a nice CD/MP3 player in mine and there is nothing like that long run up to Branson just enjoying the open road in my Ranger. Let them city slickers keep their little beep beep cars we got shit to haul dammit!
I mentioned Linus not because i think the man is doing a bad job, although I do disagree on the subject of an ABI because the rest of the OSes have had them for nearly a decade and their drivers don't break nearly as often, no why I mention Torvalds is if I had put in that many years and had MY name attached to something they keep royally fucking up? Man I would be PISSED with a capital P!
Lets face it if Linus was to have a royal shitfit, put his foot down and say "Look, I'm REALLY tired of you taking my hard work and pissing on it, okay? So here is how its gonna be" and made it damned clear that there were gonna be standards that everyone could agree on and get behind and all those that don't follow the standards don't get diddly shit from the community? People WOULD rally behind the man. RMS comes off as too much of a religious zealot, what with his refusing interviews unless you speak "GNUSpeak" and all, but Torvalds is well respected, he's damned smart, he's got clout.
I truly believe that many of the Linux community are tired of the endless bullshit just as I am. I figured when i first started trying Linux in 04 we'd have penguins on boxes and little Tux stickers on desktops and laptops in the Wally World by now, but instead if anything things have gone backward thanks to shit like PulseAudio and lousy testing and a myriad of dick waving by devs and everyone just acting like 4 year olds. I bet if Torvalds would just put his foot down, get together with some of those superbrains that work with him, and announce some solid steps to take things forward and fix a lot of the shit? the community would be more than happy to support the man, that's all I'm saying.
In the end the buck has to stop somewhere and whether he likes it or not Torvalds is the one that started the whole ecosystem. If he would stand up like Jobs did at Apple and not be afraid to kick some butts i bet things would get a LOT better a LOT quicker, the community just needs someone they can rally behind with some good solid ideas and I bet Linus could be that man, what do you think?
Why don't geeks have the ability to understand consumers? is it like a lesion in the brain that simply blinds them to everyone not like them? As someone who builds and sells all matter of electronic gizmos to the consumer I'll be happy to tell you why they really don't give a shit how locked down a phone is, you ready?
Get this, it'll blow your mind...a phone is not a computer to them you see, not at all, its "A screen with buttons that Googles and is disposable" and that's IT. That's all it is, its a screen with buttons that does Google and they throw it in a drawer when their contract is up and get another one. This is why the carriers can do any damned thing they want, because a phone is just a phone to the consumer. Its also why they don't care about Windows on a tablet because a tablet is not a computer its "a screen i poke that does Google, lets me read books and plays Angry birds" and I can tell you with most of the consumers I've seen they rarely use it for even Google, its a fancy book reader that plays Angry Birds. same as ARM and MIPS netbooks won't go anywhere because a netbook is not a general computing device its a "cute baby laptop" and as such should do everything a big laptop does only slower, because babies are littler than grown ups and so not as strong you see?
So you see its isn't about Linux VS MSFT VS Apple or any of that shit, not to the million upon millions actually getting the things, its a phone that does Google. You wanna know why iPhone is so popular? It looks cool and plays lots of games real good like...Angry Birds. Do you think even 10% of them can name what OS it runs? And people like my dad are getting Android not because they give a flying fuck about freedom to tinker, they saw "that cute little green dancing thingie" and it looks nice and plays Angry Birds. this is why MSFT is having a hell of a time getting into mobile because people see the Windows or MSFT name and think "Why would I want Windows on my phone? I don't want to play Farmville or the sims on my phone" and they ignore it. You see consumers are strange and curious creatures, nothing like the geek in any way shape or form.
Seen that CAT have you? Sad things indeed, most are pushing 30 and falling apart, just junk. But you should NOT complain about subsidizing the rural folks because guess where your food comes from? Ever had KFC? that's Tyson chickens you've been enjoying friend, fresh grown right here in bumfuck AR. Corn, rice, beef, pork, strawberries, all of that has to be grown somewhere and AR is closer to Brazil in climate than the rest of the US which makes it excellent for growing pretty much anything, hell its Jan and its 55 degrees here right now. I'd also point out that another reason folks are so spread out here is the huge national park system that taking up a LOT of land, would you advocate turning it into megacities? I personally like the fact that you can go out and enjoy huge scenic views unspoiled by the hand of man myself.
Finally as for USF I personally think it should be switched to broadband because we have reached the point where Internet is becoming as required for basic functionality in this society as water and electricity. Look at how schools are adding online courses left and right so how will these kids do their work? and what about access to state services and resources? It cost millions in waste and is bad for the environment to generate all those tons of papers that need to be on hand to pass out for those without Internet. Everything from tagging your car to paying your taxes can all be done online and the quicker we have it so ALL can enjoy the wealth that the net provides the better I say. In my area the absolute cheapest Internet is $60 a month with a $120 upfront cost which means the poor simply can't access it. In my building of over 90 apts I was told I'm the only one with cable net and there is exactly ONE other person with any net at all!
So unless you want to be like on Judge Dredd and eat recycled food you kinda need all these rural areas as its us who are putting the bread you eat on the shelves. There is a reason why rural life has survived the industrial age and that's because unless you want processed food product you need folks out here growing it and others fixing the pipes and others running the electrical lines and guys like me fixing the busted computers. You kill the ability for the rural areas to survive you'll be cutting your own throats and will watch in horror as milk hits $15 a gallon and a burger costs you more than the finest steak does now.
Funny you should mention dell because they are actually a poster child for how broken Linux is a consumer platform is because Dell have to run their own repos just to keep there teeny tiny subset of hardware from being shat on when the devs scratch their itches. I will bet my very last dollar if Dell will publish their numbers (which they won't BTW, I even asked them out of curiosity and they won't give you the numbers) that Dell is LOSING money on Ubuntu because the costs of keeping a dev team to do nothing but maintain their own repo is costing more than they are making on the machines. Do you propose that ALL the OEMs lose money hand over fist to support you? Did you know that ASUS, the ones that started the whole Linux on tiny machines aka netbook craze has given up on Linux and no longer sells any Linux machines? or that a decade old Windows stomped Linux on netbooks or that even canonical admitted that returns were FOUR TIMES higher than Windows? do you think ALL of these people are lying? That they "just don't git it"?
Its really simple friend, to get the level of polish required to make Linux work on the desktop, where suzy the checkout girl won't have to learn bash or how to navigate a CLI when things break, where frankly things WON'T break in the first place, is gonna cost north of a hundred million easy and the FOSS model simply won't allow you to make that amount in the consumer market. Look at canonical, they haven't made a single cent, not one penny, on the desktop. if you figure in how much shuttleworth sunk in they have lost millions without a single dime of ROI, you think that is sustainable? in fact I'd bet my last buck that canonical will be out of desktops in less than 5 years, probably less than 3, simply because they won't be able to generate the operating capital. RMS may think you can have a utopia where everyone works for free towards the common good but that is a fallacy because we human like doing fun jobs and HATE doing shitty jobs and in the FOSS model the busted shitters don't get fixed. The FOSS model works in business because business is used to buying support contracts and they make money off their machines so spending money to make money is fine by them. the consumer market simply doesn't work like that and without the steady income you can't herd the devs and if you don't herd the devs you get what you have now, with bugs measured in years, updates that fix one thing and break three, hell I have Windows units out in the field that have been running since 2002 on a single install. can you imagine trying to update a Linux desktop from 2002 to current and still have it functional on the other end? it won't happen friend, hell take a distro disc from just 3 years ago and apt-dist-upgrade to current and watch things fall apart.
Sorry you and the other poster got modded down friend, but I intended and expected to be modbombed as i call it like I see it and truth rarely follows groupthink. The simple fact that so many here refuse to accept (Notice how many said "Windows and OSX isn't polished" which if that isn't koolaid chugging I don't know what is) is that the level of integration you are talking with Windows and OSX, where EVERYTHING follows strict conventions, like scrollbar goes here and icons must be like so and keyboards shortcuts should be thus, all of that COSTS MONEY because without it? You get what you have now which is rampant itch scratching. Just look at your average "consumer friendly" Linux like Mint or PCLOS. You have apps that follow the Mac way, some follow the Windows way, some go for the old school UNIX methods of doing things. There is NO consistency there AT ALL. Why is that? Its because the devs are working for free and frankly don't give a fuck about jumping through some hoop if they don't want to and because they aren't getting paid you can take it or leave it friend, because they are just scratching an itch, not like they can be fired for not following the rules.
Then you have the horrible bugs and driver breaking. Just look at the Canonical bugtracker where many bugs are measured in YEARS without being fixed. Some have thousands of complaints yet they sit, why? no payments to devs mean they don't want to do shit works for free, its simple human nature. if i'm gonna give up my own free time I'm gonna be doing something FUN and coding is fun, bug fixing? Not fun, not even a little fun, in fact it sucks ass. I mean when Dell, one of the biggest OEMs on the entire planet, has to run their own repos because if they don't the whole thing shits itself and dies? You got serious problems friend. Why does it do that? Why would the bog standard boring ass hardware that Dell uses, the same Realtek and Intel and ATI and Nvidia chips that are in more than 85% of the computers on the planet still break, even though these are well known hardware? Its simple because the rampant itch scratching of the devs from Torvalds on down simply are worried about scratching their own little itches instead of worrying about the big picture and what their changes do to the ecosystem. Go to ANY forum after a release and see how many "Update foo broke my drivers!" posts you'll find. Just for the hell of it i tried counting on the Ubuntu forum after the last release and I quit at over 700 and there were literally page after page I didn't bother counting. Now realize for every ONE complaint you probably have a couple of hundred that just got frustrated and either went somewhere else or gave up completely and went to Windows or OSX. One of the long time posters on LinuxInsider has been a Linux server admin for over a decade and she recently gave up and is looking at either BSD or Mac, why? because the latest apt-dist-upgrade wiped out her email and left her with a broken machine. Data loss in this stage of the game is unacceptable people!
What I'm trying to get at folks is the FOSS model works in SOME cases but not ALL cases and trying to fit the FOSS model into all cases is a giant FAIL and consumers are one of those fail cases. like I said consumers won't buy support contracts, so how do you make the hundreds of millions required to pay the devs to get the busted shitters fixed? you don't which is why we have the mess we have. mark my words in less than 5 years Canonical will be OUT of the desktops biz because they can't keep losing money and Shuttleworth made it clear there won't be any more checks. that's why at CES there is gonna be an UbuntuTablet and you see more and more spent on Ubuntu Server and by extension less on Ubuntu desktop. Everyone is gonna have to face the fact that the tin cup model simply doesn't provide the millions in steady income required to build a world class desktop and if you want to compete with Apple and MSFT
And you just hit the nail on the head on why there aren't any Linux desktops that can compete with the polish and intuitiveness of OSX and Windows. to bring Linux up to that level would cost tens if not hundreds of millions of dollar because the only way to herd developers is by paying them, otherwise you get what you have now with everyone scratching their own personal itches and then none of the "busted shitters" as i call them get fixed. When folks are doing work for free they are gonna do what they consider fun, nobody wants to be the guy that goes and fixes the busted shitters. just look at how many bugs on canonical is over two years, over three, i think the oldest ones are going on six years now because nobody wants the shitty jobs so they just don't get done.
Well when you are building a consumer OS guess what? there are literally THOUSANDS of truly shitty thankless lousy jobs that need doing. there is bug fixing and QA and regression testing and making sure all the UIs match the OS standard and maintaining your own kernel because God knows when Torvalds will get an itch and break all your drivers and writing all the help files and documentation and I'm sure if i sat here a couple of minutes i could easily name a dozen or two more truly lousy, boring, shitty, thankless jobs that HAVE to be done if you want a world class highly polished OS where everything "Just works" and is so simple and intuitive that Suzy the checkout girl can work it. This is why Apple and MSFT pay a metric shitload of money to developers, because they won't do those shitty jobs for free.
And THAT, that right there, is the problem. Consumers won't buy support contracts so the Red Hat method of making money is right out and why should the OEMs pay you shit when they can just "pull a CentOS" and have the thing for free? Gotta look out for the shareholders you know. i'm sure dell threw a few bucks Canonical's way but I seriously doubt it was even 1/10th what they were spending to build Ubuntu. Has Canonical even made a dime in profit yet? and the much vaunted community won't back you up, just look at how ATI bent over backwards to open up their code, even hiring driver developers to work for the free driver group out of their own pocket only to have every forum covered with posts that read "LOL use Nvidia" or the simple fact that more than a THIRD of the webservers on the entire planet are not using RHEL but, survey says....CentOS, an OS created by a bunch of cheapskates that used to sell an appliance that required RHEL who said "Fuck 'em, we'll just cut out the copyrights and then we won't have to pay shit!" and now of course they don't pay shit, not when compared to the RHEL licenses they used to buy.
How many here have cut a check to canonical? How many have sent money to their favorite distro? despite the BS I'm sure this post will get i bet if you looked at the numbers you are talking maybe 1 in 10,000 if you are lucky. So don't complain when Linux on the desktop goes exactly nowhere, just look at how canonical is now gonna be selling some tablet starting at CES and is spending an increasing amount of their limited resources on the server. its simply because with the FOSS model there isn't any money to be made on consumers and if anyone was to sink the hundreds of millions required to make a world class rock solid picture perfect Linux desktop it wouldn't be five minutes before just like Mint you had a knockoff stealing all the users thanks to being 'free as in beer" but without the work and money required to bring it up to OSX and Win 7 its 'free as in worthless" and despite the modbombing i'm sure to get for pointing out the truth THAT is why Linux isn't gaining shit on the desktop. I mean when MSFT puts out a flaming turd like Vista and the OS with a $1000 barrier to entry gains like mad and the "free as in beer" OS don't gain shit, how big of a cluebat do you have to be hit by to see the FOSS model don't work in this case? Home users don't care about freedom or CLI or DIY they care about "its just works and keeps working and is easy to use" and I'm sorry but Linux is still a long way from that friends and I don't see it getting any better, if anything all the itch scratching by the DE devs has made it worse.
Got the V6 have you? You go to any of the Ford sites and you'll hear tons of stories of guys with insane mileage on the V6. that is one of the reasons i got mine, I'm barely up to 122,000 on mine but with that Vulcan i should be able to get 300,000 easy before needing a rebuild and after rebuild get ANOTHER 300,000 on it! I just need to get me a bit of sandpaper and a paint pen as these roads throw up pebbles like crazy and i have a couple of ping dents that are starting to get a little rust but other than that she is still as good as the day she rolled off the line. Real bitch to find in a parking lot though, I swear company white was the color a good 95% of the Rangers came in so I have to be careful to remember which lane I'm in or I'm screwed LOL!
But its a damned shame the idiots at Ford killed the Ranger because its a hell of a great little work truck. if they would have bothered to update it occasionally like they did the Explorer they'd probably still be selling but that works for me as there is nearly 7 years worth of Rangers i can interchange parts with. But those idiots at Ford and Chevy obviously never went down to the deep south because in any parking lot its Rangers and S10s as far as the eye can see. and just about every place that had to send workers, from the cableco to Napa to Orkin ALL used the Ranger. Kinda funny that Ford is gonna have to wait to get the last Ranger to put in their little museum as Orkin bought it the second it rolled off the line.
But I'll be keeping my Ranger until either it dies or I do and I'm hoping that will be quite a long time.
Well if you have a couple of trillion to build a mass transit system for the entire rural south or wouldn't mind taxes going up to say...ohh about 70% then i'm sure we could get rid of those nasty old fossil fuels tomorrow. The problem is all those foods you take for granted on your shelves? grown in places like AR and LA where its lots of two lane roads and pretty much zipola when it comes to mass transit. I can tell you that in AR you have a very old bus system that covers maybe half the state capital and...well that's it. and believe me the places it covers are NOT places you want to actually live, not unless you like gunfire for a lullaby.
Just remember the USA isn't the EU, with everyone packed together in little clumps, you are talking a HUGE area with people spread out all over the place. to make the cities safe enough you could actually move those people into them would cost trillions for the cops and high-rises alone, not even counting the transportation and infrastructure that would have to be built. So we better hope someone comes up with a source of energy that works as well as gas because you want to watch the USA fall apart just keep raising the gas prices.
As for TFA well duh the cars were lighter, 1980s cars were the worst of everything! You had plastic everything but hardly any knowledge of how to make any of it safe so that when one of those 80s cars go into a wreck it was just a nasty mangled mess. Cars are heavier now because safety weighs folks, steel bands and crumple zones all add weight. Sure we could make a car that weighed like an early 80s B210 that would get great gas mileage and if anybody hit you they could use the car as a coffin because good luck cutting you out of that mess! Maybe in another decade we'll have composites down good enough you can build a truly lightweight car that is as safe as a modern SUV or family car but as of right now I simply haven't seen anything close, noth that wouldn't make the car so expensive nobody but the uber rich could afford the thing.
It seems like the smarter move would be to simply mod the car yourself and just happen to 'forget' to hook up the back box when you were done. It seems more plausible than taking a tire iron to the box after the fact and would be easier to explain. does anybody know if the newer pickup trucks even HAVE black boxes on them? if so i doubt many of them in my area are hooked up as the good old boys just love to mod the hell out of their trucks.I don't see how they could ding you if you could show you had been modding as long as there wasn't a clause in the insurance that specifically prohibited modding the vehicle.
Bah y'all can keep your fancy schmancy new fangled automobiles, i'll stick with my old ranger. it may get shitty gas mileage but the cast iron Vulcan V6 is built like a tank and purrs like a kitten. I can't believe how many of the good old boys yank a Vulcan to drop a Ford Mustang V8 in the ranger but I give 'em credit with that much horsepower they make a hell of a mudder! And boy could that have sounded anymore redneck? If I don't watch it the next thing i know i'll have those mudflaps with the silver babes on them!
AMD has usually been good about getting the latest codecs supported so if 10 bit becomes the mainstream i have no doubt it'll be supported. After all with modern GPUs its pretty trivial to flash them to update the chip and with even the lowest chips and APUs having 80 stream processors that should be more than enough horsepower once the latest routine has been coded.
And I looked at the 13 series and frankly I find them to be a bad value as you can buy a black edition quad for less money than an i3 and when you figure in the cost of the board you are talking nearly 60% higher build costs in some cases depending on which chip you go for. Its trivial to underclock the Athlon and Phenom chips and with most boards supporting core unlock even on the low end its quite possible to get a 3.2GHz Athlon X3 that'll unlock to quad for less than $75 shipped. With it unlocked you can drop the volts and have a 2.2Ghz quad for that price and any benchmark will tell you for transcoding more cores beat HT any day of the week. The ONLY places where I've found the i series makes sense is for those trying to win benchmarks and those that are having a lot of work that is heavily single threaded. Hell if you don't mind using an older chip (which since we are talking about an HTPC and not gaming really doesn't matter as transcoding again only cares about cores) you can pick up a CULV Phenom X4 for $55 which you can then slap into either a Shuttle case or one of the many mATX VCR style cases and end up with a nice HTPC for sub $350 if you shop around. I've actually used that chip in both an HTPC and in an office box where they wanted peace and quiet and I can tell you that its pretty easy to cool that chip with a passive Zalman HS or a thin copper HSF.
But for a thin and small HTPC I really doubt you're gonna find anything that will match the bang per buck of the E-350 because you can get a nice board for less than $100 with the E-350 so if you DIY sub $300 HTPCs that do 1080p is easily doable which you just aren't gonna get anywhere near that price point with the i series, hell i doubt you'd be able to hit that price point going with the older Core chips. If we were talking gamer PC then there are some use cases where the lower end i series makes sense, for example some shooters tend to favor single threaded performance above all so in those cases the lower end i series would make sense over Athlon but in HTPCs the i series just uses too many bucks and not enough bang IMHO, better to have more cores and a better GPU. But of course again that is only if you want the box to also transcode, for an HTPC that is gonna be used primarily for streaming and playback an E-350 is the much more affordable route. I've hooked one in a VCR style case to a 55 inch 1080P and the customer couldn't be happier, with a full Win 7 HP he is able to watch anything on the web as well as enjoy his entire media library, all from the comfort of his easy chair. Now the only problem he has is getting his wife off the thing as she loves using her FB from that fat TV screen!
But at $100 for the board plus chip if you have an older machine you'd like to upgrade you really ought to give one a spin. at that price i've been using them for low cost office machines and you really can't beat the bang for the buck. a few months back I upgraded the print shop down the street with all E-350s except for the three units where they are doing heavy graphics work which i built some Phenom IIs with Radeon HD5670s and they couldn't be happier with the performance and the secretaries are just raving about how much nicer it is, and of course the owner was raving about how much lower his electric bill became when they switched because now the average worker is using less than 70w under load and most times using less than 45w and that's including monitor. like I said you ought to give one a try, they are cheap enough that it doesn't hurt your wallet and having a machine so quiet that the only thing you hear is the clicking of your keyboard IS nice.
Then how do YOU explain why a 1.7Ghz P4 without HT will stomp an Athlon X2 when it comes to page load, memory usage, CPU usage, on the same pages when the ONLY difference in the systems is the CPU? I'm really tired of FF fanbois waving their flags and sticking their fingers in their ears. How many years have we been complaining about the memory leaks only to get told by the devs "They don't exist, you're crazy' right up until they said "We fixed the leak BTW LOL!"?
If you don't believe me break out a stopwatch and use Chrome's built in memory tool which will show you REAL memory and CPU load and try it yourself why don't you? you'll find that a 5 year old Intel chip will stomp a brand new AMD chip and if you believe that is factually true I have a bridge to nowhere you might be interested in. if they aren't using the Intel Cripple compiler than i bet they are using Intel profiles on their builds because as it is now FF is unsuitable for purpose on AMD chips!
Not to mention ever since that judge came out and said "Iran did 9/11" (look it up, I'm not shitting you. That's THREE different groups so far they've blamed for their little false flag in 01, hell maybe they can blame WikiLeaks next!) you've been seeing an endless stream of "We've always been at war with Eastasia" propaganda. I mean how long has it been since we've NOT see an "Iran is the bogeyman and burns babies ZOMFG!" story? Personally after NDAA (and PATRIOT and TSA AND Constitution free zones) I don't think we have any right to talk.
This is why even though I lean socialist I support Ron Paul as he is the ONLY one that doesn't advocate endless wars and spending billions propping up dictators! Let AIPAC and the American Jews pay for Israel and let them go to war with Iran if they want to but its NOT our job to be their pitbull and waste trillions of dollars and our kid's lives just because some neocons believe that "If there ain't no Jews in Zion Jebus won't come back! Come back Jebus come back!" . So how about we tell them where they can stick their obvious propaganda designed to get the people ready for yet another debt busting war and instead mind our own fucking business and worry about the millions of out of work Americans and the endless attacks on our civil liberties, how about that?
Wouldn't boot into safe mode, wouldn't even boot into CLI actually. it turned out that all Nvidia boards lack some pretty basic features like AHCI and NCQ which means if Windows was installed with a more modern northbridge you can give it up as you'll need to do a full wipe, there is simply no way to fix it.Lucky for me they had a nice Asrock board that had an almost identical chipset (My ECS was a SB700, the Asrock a SB710) while supporting my 8Gb of DDR 2 and the ability to run pretty much any AM3 CPU including Thuban. I ended up taking my old quad and the nvidia board and making a nice new desktop for my sweetie so it isn't like i lost anything.
I DID learn a valuable lesson though.....ECS is full of shit! It turns out ECS strictly goes by the wattage when determining if a chip is supported WITHOUT actually testing said chip so even though their website said that the board would take Thuban x6 as well as Zosma X4s IRL those chips will NEVER run on that board, BIOS updated or not, because ECS didn't bother to check and see that the Thuban and Zosma have a VERY different power curve compared to Deneb thanks to supporting turbocore and intelligent power scaling. The older chips only have C&Q which simply scales back the CPU across the board, not redirecting power from unused cores to used cores like turbocore does.
So I learned my lesson, from now on its Asrock or Gigabyte for the gamer builds and Foxconn and Biostar for the budget builds, no more ECS for me!
Correct and on both XP and Win 7 FF is like a bad joke. If its the Intel Cripple compiler this should give everyone the evidence that Intel ties a boat anchor to any code compiled on their compiler that is run on AMD processors because when you see an old non HT P4 stomp an Athlon X2 you know something stinks. Since I don't run Linux I'll have to take your word for it but it really doesn't surprise me as i found that most of the other browsers like Dragon, QTWeb, Safari, Opera, and Chromium are pretty much CPU agnostic but FF should come with a "For Intel processors ONLY!" warning because its pretty much unusable on AMD chips, at least from what I saw.
Not to mention the ugly little secret they gloss over which i found out after some of my HTPC customers got one which is that it seems a good 30%-50% of those that try it get massive headaches at least from my admittedly small sampling but talking to my fellow builders and HTPC fans online it seems to be about the right number. I myself tried watching it and within a half an hour it felt like I had been punched in the head, with this dull throbbing right behind the eyes that took hours and a couple of BC powders to get rid of.
So who would want to go 3D when the odds are good at least one of your family members will get sickening headaches from the thing? With the ones that got 3D TVs over the holidays and called me to help config their HDTVs I don't think there was a single one that didn't have at least one member sickened by it, in a couple it was the wife, one the husband, another the elder child, there was ALWAYS somebody that ended up with a skullthumper from using it. Now they are only using it when that person isn't in the home or isn't gonna watch simply because they don't want to admit they spent all that money on tech they can't use but they were telling me they were gonna tell their family and friends to steer clear. I don't know if its something about the vision, as I have better than 20/20 and it gave me a headache but the oldest has to wear glasses for nearsightedness and he sees it just fine, but if you can't sit down as a family and enjoy it what's the point?
Maybe they are just writing code that doesn't run well on anything but Intel? Or are using intel based profiling during testing? Because i can tell you that I compared a first gen 1.7GHz Pentium 4 to a 3GHz AMD Athlon and it was pretty startling at least to me how badly FF favors the Intel CPU. Loading the same pages in both machines i noticed the memory spiking was MUCH more dramatic on an AMD CPU, and its CPU footprint was just insane.
As i said this 1.8GHz Sempron i'm typing on makes a wonderfully low powered nettop for the shop, lets me download drivers and check my mail without skipping a beat or ever hitting above 60% CPU on Dragon or QTWeb and that is during SD videos, but FF will slam the CPU to 100% for up to a minute launching a new tab and give it up when it comes to SD video as with FF it jerks so damned badly its better to download the video and run it than it is to attempt to watch in FF. And it isn't that QTWeb or Dragon are passing off to the GPU either as this unit has a truly ancient TNT Vanta 32Mb card I slapped in there just so i could run my 1600x900 LCD at native resolution so it simply doesn't have the horse to be offloading squat. hell i don't even think the old Vanta had support for MPEG 2 acceleration back then.
So I don't know what they did to it but FF is like night and day when it comes to AMD VS Intel CPUs, which considering i became an AMD only shop after the compiler rigging and OEM bribing came out makes FF unusable for me. Why would I want a browser that runs like you tied a boat anchor to it if its run on anything but Genuine Intel? Maybe someone ought to try switching their CPUID to Genuine Intel and comparing the performance to see if its some sort of intel based profiling on the part of FF because it certainly don't like AMD CPUs.
If you are on windows you should try Comodo Dragon which has ABP and I would argue with the combination of its default settings which has the browser and ONLY the browser use the comodo Secure DNS malware site filtering along with low rights mode NoScript isn't really needed. There is NotScript if you want to replicate similar functionality but frankly i tried to get a win 7 install using Dragon infected for shits and giggles and while a few nasty sites could crash the browser not a single one managed to infect the system which i confirmed with several offline and online scans. Its a HELL of a lot faster than FF is now and unlike FF which sucks balls on AMD chips Dragon is completely CPU agnostic, there is even a checkbox on first install that will make a portable version and install it to your thumbdrive. Its really nice, give it a spin. it'll even import all your FF bookmarks, passwords, etc if you ask it to so switching is trivial.
I agree though that FF nuked the fridge after version 3, in my case i believe the nuking occurred after versions 3.0.x which were the last versions that seemed to be truly CPU agnostic and weren't Ziggy Piggies when it came to CPU and RAM usage. Like I said i tried the latest and greatest on my EEE E-350 netbook and watching as a good 40 minutes of battery went down the shitter thanks to FF hogging the CPU. On my XP box I have AnVir Task Manager and just typing in a text box I can watch the CPU jump all over the place from FF. Seriously typing in a textbox causes huge spikes in CPU usage? WTF? But I have to support a WIDE range of customers, from late model P4 office boxes and first gen netbooks to the latest AMD multicores and frankly FF is just unsuitable for purpose anymore. it was the complaints from customers about how their machines would "jerk and hang" when going to common sites like Gmail and FB that told me if I didn't want them going back to IE i had better get on it and find a new browser and after testing more than a half a dozen, from Kmeleon to Opera I found the Dragon has the best mix of security and performance for me and my customers. I just recently installed it on a customers Xmas prezzie from her BF which is an AMD C Series netbook and even with an APU that is only 1GHz the Dragon is snappy and lets her use FB while running her IM without any lagging and while getting over 5 hours on a battery. That for me speaks volumes and is why FF is no longer in my standard install package.
Not to mention if it was real that would just show we needed to kick some nerd scientist butt! Dammit them little white coat wearing geeks been promising us flying cars and sexbots since Steve Austin was kicking Fembot booty back in 74, so WTF? You can waste all that money putting a flag on the dang moon but you can't give us the single most revolutionary invention in all of mankind, the perfect sexbot? get off your damned asses and quit playing with model cars ya damned geeks! I want to come home and find an Alyson Hannigan sexbot making me steak already! So quit playing with your damned toys and get cloning us perfect women like Alyson Hannigan and Scarlett Johansson instead of goofing off with your damned toys, which FYI they are toys and NOT action fricking figures!! We ain't getting any younger ya know! How much ya wanna bet if one of their cells go off they wander around confused because they ALL have the damed Star Wars theme as a ringtone? NERDS!
The problem is what good is your right to speak if you have no way to be heard? i think its obvious to all now that the handful of uberrich that control our media outlets crank out propaganda like there is no tomorrow just look at how quickly the Tea Party was suddenly switched for whackos to celebrated when the Koch bros rolled out their astroturf "Tea Party Express" and took the thing over. The viral nature of the Internet makes it the last truly free place for getting out speech that isn't corporate approved which is why due to the consolidation of power we have seen here and in the rest of the west i'm sure they will do their damnedest to make it just another cable channel spewing doubleplusgood corporate messages.
That is why we must defend it just as vigorously as anything in our bill of rights because with propaganda and free speech zones and NDAA its just too damned easy to make the message (as well as the messenger) just disappear while using their massive MSM weapon to destroy anyone who doesn't follow their program. For a good example just look at how the MSM in the USA all tripped over themselves to label Assange an "evil rapist terrorist monster" while not saying squat about the documents showing the USA hiring murderers and covering up for defense contractors selling children for sex to get contracts. if it weren't for WikiLeaks letting those docs be accessed by the world we would have never heard a thing about it, instead we would have gotten "four alarm fire makes way for GLORIOUS new tractor factory!". BTW how sad is it that we win the Cold war only to end up the USSR with Pravda style bullshit rammed down our throats?
That's funny, I have an original XP install on the nettop going back to 2004 and no troubles, and the Win 7 install on this machine is from Oct 09, again no worries, but then again i don't go downloading and installing stupid kitteh screensavers and every other POS buggy freeware and trialware i find on the web like some customers i know. But I've been doing a similar trick for years with windows thanks to Comodo Time Machine which gives the user a button to push at boot which will let them restore it even if they manage to bork the OS. Since I have all their docs and data set up on a Data partition they can restore it without losing squat, even their bookmarks are taken care of by FF sync or Dragon Sync so no hassles.
I do have a question though, will this restore be board agnostic? Because I damned near had to do a Windows 7 wipe and reinstall after having to change boards because ECS lied their asses off and said my board supported Thuban 6 cores and it didn't. I tried a Biostar Nvidia board i had laying around and it would take the Thuban fine but Windows did NOT like going from an ATI to an Nvidia chipset and would just reboot before it would get to desktop. since I wasn't thrilled about having to toss my 8Gb of RAM I said to hell with it and found an Asrock board that would take Thuban while still having an ATI chipset and voila! problem solved. But it would be nice IMHO to be able to just use this restore trick and have it work even when I switch boards.
For those that would like a nice cross platform browser and don't mind going off the beaten path a bit, may i make a suggestion? try QTWeb which is just what you think it is, a browser made with the QT framework and Webkit rendering engine. It works in Windows, OSX, and Linux, runs quite well from a thumbstick and is pretty nice and zippy.
I agree with everything you posted BTW and would only add the thing that finally broke me was how bad later releases ran on AMD CPUs. I don't know if they are using the Intel Cripple Compiler or what but the performance difference between AMD and Intel CPUs when it came to FF was pretty startling, with my losing a good 30-40 minutes on the battery using FF on my E-350 compared to using Comodo Dragon or QTWeb, both of which seem to be CPU agnostic. On the older AMD CPUs like my Sempron nettop FF slams the CPU to the point it is unsuitable for purpose yet both Dragon and QTWeb give the 1.8GHz Sempron new life and make it an excellent low power nettop. if I would have stayed with FF I'd have had to shitcan the box and built something more powerful which when we are talking about a fricking web browser is pretty crazy.
To the FF devs, what did you do when you switched from 3.0.x to later versions? Because whatever you did you need to undo it. 3.0.x was just fine on any AMD or Intel chip, the 3.5 and 3.6 branches were okay but not great with the spiking starting, and 4 and everything after was just shite on a crusty roll. The latest version is a little better but when you are talking about going from a 100% CPU spike for nearly 2 minutes to a 98% CPU spike for a minute that still isn't really good and makes the machine unusable until FF quits slamming the chip. Now when i can take the exact same system and under Dragon be using a good 40% less CPU, or get better performance from QTWeb when its on a thumbstick than I do from your browser when its natively installed? then to steal a line from an old K's Choice song "Something's Wrong". But I recommend Dragon and QTWeb and install both on new builds whereas I used to install FF before doing anything else. FF is just too power hungry and the performance simply isn't there which i think is a damned shame, it was truly a great browser before all this craziness.
Firefox has to run as admin to update, strike one. It doesn't have low rights mode like chrome and IE, strike two. Its crazy release schedule means zero testing before deployment, strike three and you're outta there!
As someone who used FF before it was even called FF and the suite before that i hated to see it go but go it had to as its performance has been getting worse it seems as far as CPU spiking and RAM leaking, extensions were breaking everywhere and the final straw was that XSS bug that allowed malware writers to spam yahoo mail accounts from FF. If you got a bunch of spam emails from friends with Yahoo accounts, all consisting of a single word or sentence and a driveby malware link? that was the FF XSS bug. With low rights mode its damned near impossible to pull crap like that since the browser runs even lower than a user it simply can't get the permissions to do a lot of nastiness. Low rights mode was released with vista in 2007 BTW and here it is 2012 and Firefox STILL doesn't have it. But hey they have personas right?
I truly hope the FF devs will stop going Goatse at their users and get back to their original mission statement which was to build a small, fast, and light browser with good security because I do miss NoScript although I don't know if its really needed with low rights mode and sandboxing. But if you think IT are "worthless" for not deploying a less securable browser that requires admin rights to install and isn't easy at all to set up GPOs that can't be trivially bypassed by the user? Then I'd personally hate to see what the admins are like you'd consider competent, probably the type that just gives everyone admin rights and cleans up after the messes.
You're talking software and I'm talking hardware friend. back then they gave out full docs and specs for the chip in the floppy disc drive (which could then be hacked to speed up I/O) and with all the specs on every I/O on the board you could hack together all kinds of hardware from printers to modems with a soldering gun and a little time.
That is one thing people take for granted we just didn't have, and that is how easy the hardware today is to use. Today everything is plug and play and pretty much everything is USB while we had to deal with IRQ conflicts and one of a half a dozen different proprietary connections. Folks just don't realize how proprietary things were back then, there was no sharing of printers or frankly anything else without hacking and it was a royal PITA. I still remember the "fun" of playing "Which IRQ is making the PC shit itself?" and spending crazy amounts of time while now its "plug in USB, wait a minute while the driver loads, there is no step three' and away you go. Of course even now one can go overboard with it like my dad who has 18! ( not an exaggeration, he had 6 on the back and 4 on the front and then he had me add in a card and 2.5 USB internal so he got an extra 4 on the back and 4 in the front) USB ports because according to him "everything should be USB".
But you really forget how well we have it now until you see an article like TFA and remember what we were running. Your average $1 watch at Fred's has more CPU power than the VIC and C64 did and you could fit the entire contents of my first 6 HDDs completely into the RAM on my current system with plenty of room left over and my current machine cost less than the average IBM 5150 yet could run every single OS I had from 1982-2000 in VMs faster than they ran on the original hardware. The fact we get that kind of power so damned cheap just amazes the living hell out of me. If you would have told me when I got my first IBM PC compatible waaay back in the days of the 386SX that i would one day have multiple CPUs in a portable that would do high def video for less than the cost of my VIC and which would get 6 hours on a battery while weighing 3 pounds, or that I would come home to a machine with SIX CPUs and that both it and the portable would have 8Gb of RAM, while i was sitting there trying to make every byte count? I'd have asked you to lay off the dope as it was rotting your brain and yet now my kids play games on hand me downs that have Gbs of RAM and 800 stream GPUs? Its just incredible how far we've come folks, just incredible.
I can't tell you for certain but i'm pretty sure they fixed that one but again can't be 100% sure as I haven't had a chance to check in again with the one using E-350 and Netflix but his was playing just fine on his TV last I checked but its a 720p set so I don't know if that'll make a difference with silverlight. In both that and your other issue frankly it really doesn't matter as the E-350 supports hybrid crossfire and nearly all the E-350 HTPC boards comes with a PCIe X16 so adding a cheap Radeon HD card is beyond simple and no IGP will ever compare to discrete graphics. i recently got a customer an HD4650 1Gb on sale for $10 after MIR so it isn't like it'll break the bank to add a Radeon discrete. He is quite happy with his new card and it offloads most codecs so again I really doubt that would be a problem.
For me what sells the E-350 is how quietly it runs, both in HTPCs and mobile situations. They are also VERY low power and low heat which with the rising electricity costs is a nice bonus. Finally in just about every test I've seen the E-350 gives better performance than Atom + ION for often less cost. I mean you can buy a E-350 board that'll hold 8Gb of RAM starting at just $70 on Newegg which for a dual core APU with Radeon graphics is beyond cheap which is why I've also been using it in low cost office and home PCs. I've had nothing but good luck and happy customers with the E-350 and even with a full win 7 HP its snappy and easily has enough power for all the tasks your average Joe or Jane is using a PC for.
I liked the handling and quiet of the E-350 enough i put my money where my mouth is and sold my laptop for a EEE E-350 netbook and frankly couldn't be happier. while I don't do netflix so I can't comment there I can tell you with my EEE I'm getting 6 hours watching 720p video and when i go by my dad's place I can plug it in via HDMI to the TV so he and I can sit down and watch a new action or western at 1080p which is nice. it has enough kick I'm actually using it with Hydrogen and Audacity to lay drum beats and edit multitrack recordings which for a unit that only weighs 3 pounds and cost me $350 with 8Gb of RAM is pretty impressive in my book. But at $70 you really ought to give one a try, at that price its a dirt cheap way to upgrade any older box to give it some kick.