I would have NO problem with that IF they were actually held accountable when they "pull a BP" but as my friend laid it out they won't be because the entire company is a scam. they lease everything from the mineral rights to the office furniture from shell corps they control so that if they end up creating a disaster they can just burn the company down and be right back in business tomorrow with another shell leasing the same assets.
So you see i wouldn't mind if they accepted the RISK as well as the REWARD but today they have figured out how to privatize the reward while making the risks public and THAT is what needs to be stopped. As it is there is simply no reason to worry about safety for these wildcatters because they have nothing at risk, its all profit.
Exactly, just look at that poll a few years ago that stated over a quarter of the people thought Iraq had helped plan 9/11, where do you think they got that idea? Innuendo floated by talking heads in the MSM, that's where. Now we have a judge saying Iran did 9/11 which i'm sure soon the talking heads we be parroting over and over AND OVER until they have the public believing that too. Don't forget there are FBI memos stating that Fast & Furious was a great false flag that would be useful for helping to "curb" the second amendment, yet even Fox News doesn't hardly say a thing even though a juicey story like that you would think would make them cream their pants in delight?
Its very simple and doesn't have a thing to do with RMS or Thom's trollbait articles, it has to do with the fact that our entire MSM is owned by so few that you could put them in a small town HS gym and not even fill half the seats. these owners are all on each others boards, they all play golf with each other or see each other at the country club, the whole 'right VS left" thing is as fake as pro wrestling. Buffet got it right years ago when he said "class warfare has been going on for years and we are winning" and the whole point of the garbage being passed now is the 1% that TRULY hold the strings see that their current system is unsustainable and want to have a way to deal with them dirty peasants to make sure there isn't an Arab Spring here. But I got news for them, the soldiers? the pilots? they have a hell of a lot more in common with the poor than they do their masters. I have a feeling when the day comes and those in power tell them to roll the tanks they are gonna be quite shocked at how many patriot soldiers point the barrels at them.
Ya know, maybe its just me but I never did get the whole 'Must rule teh benches!" crap. I had a customer who would pay me to strip down his Windows installs just to get a few more FPS in the benches and i swear this guy went through so much hardware his grandma was on a skulltrail because that was the weakest hand me down he had!
But all the benchmark bragging kinda ignores what the chip makers really don't want to talk about and that is chips have been "good enough" for the vast majority for quite some time now. Thanks to the long tail of the consoles even the gamers have been able to stay with hardware for years and there just hasn't been any real "killer apps" come along in quite some time that needed a huge hardware increase which is why you see ATI pushing Eyefinity and Nvidia pushing CUDA because there just hasn't been any major need...well except for those wanting to win benches and stuff like TFA, but really how big of a niche is that?
I know I ended up getting rid of my full size notebook for a EEE E-350 netbook because i found when i'm out and about it was more than good enough for the tasks i had, and its taken nearly 5 years for the games to finally use enough CPU I'm gonna have to build the kids new triples or quads to replace their duals, so seriously what real good would you get from an aggressive OC like that besides winning some score? And are they bragging about less than 6GHz? Didn't AMD hit a record of 7 something last year at one of those OC contests? Seems a bit low to be bragging about.
Personally i'm glad things have slowed down, its nice being able to game on a $60 HD4850 and still have plenty of purty on my 1600x900 LCD, its nice not having to spend but around $100 each to upgrade the kids from Pentium Ds to AMD triples (may go with a quad, does anybody know if a 3.2GHz triple or a 2.2GHz quad would be the better route? both are the same price and I'm thinking clock will matter more, am I wrong?) and they can keep their HD4850s probably another year. So if that's your thing have fun, everybody needs a hobby, but it just seems a little pointless to me when i haven't seen a consumer app be CPU bound in ages.
Because all of that is hidden behind a nice GUI that doesn't exist in Linux? tell me where is the "roll back drivers" button? or the find drivers button for that matter? Windows has had those since 1999 yet they still don't exist in Linux because at its core Linux is a CLI OS that has a GUI tacked on. this is why its trivial to change DEs, DEs are second class citizens and Linux will run without a DE at all if you so chose. With linux at the end of the day if ANYTHING goes wrong the ONLY answer you can get is "open up bash and type" because frankly often that is the only answer available. I was once given this huge CLI mess for a wireless card and I wrote "You guys are all smart and knowledgeable yes? Treat me like I'm one of my customers and give me a NON CLI solution to the problem, think of me as little Suzy the checkout girl and hold my hand and walk me through the GUI" and there were several long drawn out attempts at pulling it off in a GUI before one finally admitted "You can't do that in a GUI" and THAT is the problem in a nutshell, you can't do that in a GUI is often the state of affairs in Linux.
Never before in history have users been more online centric in their computer usage but Linux if anything has worse numbers than ever, why? Does the web not work in Linux? of course it does but people today are used to and demand GUI answers to their problems and those GUIs simply haven't been written yet or are written VERY poorly in Linux. Frankly the GUIs for networking and sound especially are like something out of Windows 95 instead of a 2012 OS and if anything the developers all getting bad attitudes towards 'noobs" means that if anything the GUIs are getting LESS useful not more. I wish it weren't so but frankly Linux was making slow but steady progress then Canonical came along and threw the whole community into chaos and now its just a mess, it couldn't be a bigger clusterfuck if the head of canonical had been secretly placed there by gates himself.
Go to the forums and they have a high def mod, slap that puppy in there and run it and 2500 resolution and you better have some liquid cooling and a hell of an OC or you are looking at a slideshow. the easy way to tell though what the "benchtards" as i call them are gonna pirate is to see whatever Anandtech and Tom's are using for their benches as that is what the benchtards will use.
Ya know i never got the whole "must win teh benches!" crap, I mean who the fuck cares? I actually used to do some work for one of them stripping down his OS and I swear he was so damned obsessed with benches his fricking grandma was on a skulltrail because that was the weakest hand me down he had! Me I have my new AMD 6 core i got for Xmas which I probably wouldn't have even gotten if it hadn't come out AMD had killed the AM3 line and it would give me an excuse to build a new box for my GF around my quad, I have 8Gb of RAM and an HD4850 which frankly gives me tons of purty on my 1600x900 at native res, so why would i give a crap about benches?
But what I CAN tell you is ANY game that is on the Anandtech or Tom's benchmark list is gonna be pirated up the ass because benchtards spend frankly insane amounts on their hardware only to run a pirate version of Windows and hot games on it. I've seen these guys drop $500+ on a single GPU or SSD but balk at the cost of a Windows CAL or copy of some game. That's why i don't work for those types anymore as they are really cheap bastards when it comes to anything but hardware. But last i checked the crysis games were on the Anandtech list so no shit they're gonna be the most pirated, benchtards want to beat the latest numbers and you can't bench without the benching software.
Well as a socialist going back generations (my grandfather was actually a card carrying socialist back in the 20s) I believe true socialism would work but I'll be the first to admit we've never actually had a socialist country anymore than we've ever had a capitalist country because again once you try it on a national scale here comes the bribes. look at what many would call the closest we have ever gotten to "true" capitalism, the 1800s. Even then a few at the top used their massive wealth to rig markets such as the gold manipulation scandal or standard oil, the "age of the robber barons" came about because all you had to do was buy a handful of men in the right positions and you ended up with a market where you couldn't lose, hell many of them even hired their own private armies to control the workers and end strikes with the barrel of a gun!
The problem with trying to scale ANYTHING to a national level is it concentrates power and makes it easy for the wealthy to rig the game. At the local or even state level what you end up with is "big fish in small ponds' because the simple logistics of having to bribe so many quickly makes it a losing proposition but on a national level all it takes is a few hundred checks and you've bought one of the three branches, one more check buys the second, and since judges are appointed in many areas that just gave you a percentage of the third. its just too easy at a national level with any ism my friend, that is why the end result no matter what ism you choose, from Nazism to communism to capitalism always seems to be corruption.
Not really, after all the rich can afford water harvested from icebergs and food grown in protected greenhouses and if the peasants don't survive long enough to become a burden? So much the better. I have a feeling we are headed towards another dark age feudal period where the wealthy get to live a long time while gorging themselves to excess while the poor live in such squalor that they are lucky to survive to 40 which again is just about the perfect age for the corps as by then you have worked them to the point they can't output like an 18 year old can, better to just kill them and get a fresh new cog for the machine.
Yeah did you see some of their indie bundles? We are talking 30 or 40 games for $39! Steam has it right, give a game legs, make it a good value, and people WILL buy. Me and my boys probably got a dozen games a piece simply because you had to pass the daily sale page to get to the objectives and I'd know when the kids went by because my steam messenger (another value from valve, makes it easy to play games and schedule battles together) would pop up with one of the boys going "Hey did you know this game is on sale? i'd really like that" and of course i gifted myself quite a few like Dark Athena (2 games for $5? sold) Just Cause II (with ALL the DLC for $7.50? Sold) and the ENTIRE HL:2 saga for just $7? Easy sold!
If you like indies you ought to try Teraria, Rochard, and Orcs Must Die. my boys got those and just love the hell out of them. me with all the games i have now just don't have time! Have you ever tried Just Cause II? I swear the world in that game is literally 30 something miles across! We are talking mountains and rivers and jungles and cities, all fully populated with tons to do. Makes GTA IMHO look like a sandbox for babies, I mean when i can have a police car chasing me and hook it to the back of my car, drive off the side of a cliff, fall for like 3 and a half minutes towards the sea, and at the last minute bail with my chute and grab a passing Lear Jet and ride that sucker like something out of Strangelove? Now THAT is a fun sandbox!
Yeah there is no "may be' to it either. A friend was hired to build the model used by the wildcatters to sell to investors and was handed all the data on the area. In my area the college had been monitoring for quakes since 1947 and found you were looking at a 2 every decade because the whole area is pretty solid, then here come the wildcatters. my friend overlaid a map of the wells with a map of the quakes and at every. single. site. of a fracking well you were looking at size 3 to 4 every 6 to 8 weeks. The worst part is he said the way these companies are set up they can 'burn the company" if they are ever indicted or cause major damage as they lease everything from the equipment to the office furniture and most importantly the mineral rights from shell companies they have set up. they can cause as much environmental damage as they please and never have to worry because if the crap hits the fan they burn the company and the victims get nothing while they keep all the assets with a shell company and start again.
Sadly with all the corp ass kissing we get from both sides of the aisle now i doubt anything will be done until its too late and some major quake that kills thousands or some water table poisoning that destroys millions of gallons of fresh water. Nowadays its all screw everything but the profits, environment and lives be damned. personally i'm waiting on our own Bhopal which i figure will happen within the decade despite all the corps complaining they are having too many regulations to deal with.
You DO realize that they could pop up a message that has buried in the EULA "FYI we are gonna come by and bang your wife and sell your kids into slavery" and people would pick "Yes please give me the funny screensaver LOL!" don't you? ALL you are doing is adding an extra step, the same extra step that Windows has been adding since 07, the same extra step Linux has been adding for ages, and it still doesn't work because in the end you have to have a user that 1.-actually gives a shit, and 2.- has taken the time to actually understand what is being asked of him/her which we have seen is MAYBE 3% of the population, the rest will click on whatever pops up and be pissed AT YOU for making them have to click.
But please read this article as Atwood at coding horror lays out the problem better than I ever could. if you don't believe this is real and applies to the VAST MAJORITY you really should stop in your local mom & pop shop and ask them to tell you about stupid and or dangerous users, we have stories that would turn your hair white! For the first time in my history I had to be rude to a customer last year and tell him to take his business elsewhere because after I explicitly spelled out that the program he wanted had been shut down by court order and that anything calling itself "the new limewire" was a virus he promptly took his machine home, searched for "the new limewire" and when the AV wouldn't let him install it uninstalled the AV and promptly got infected to the tune of over 100 pieces of malware than had the gall to get pissy because i couldn't magically make this non existent software work!
Why did that happen? Because he LIKED Limewire, he WANTED Limewire, and every single thing that didn't involve him getting it went in one ear and out the other. Now I'm lucky in that I've "trained" for lack of a better word, my customers to "When it doubt call my guy and see what he says" and unlike some of the more scummy guys in the biz I do my damnedest to steer them away from the nasties. But if you think you can permission your way out of this again it all boils down to TWO choices, 1.- The user has the right to elevate permissions which means no matter how many roadblocks and passwords you put if the user wants to see the bunny they WILL install it, or 2.-You give the rights ONLY to the corporates which quickly turn it into "That against corporate interests" and then you get the horror stories like you read here constantly of being trapped having to do something back asswards because some BOFH decided that having common sense is against policy.
I really wish there was a door number three, i really do, but after doing this line of work since the days of Win 3.x and looking my ass off I sure as hell haven't found it.
Then you obviously don't remember your history because MSFT just came out from under antitrust and as long as there is competition MSFT can do whatever they want, just like their competitors. Besides as another pointed out MSFT gets paid for a large chunk of those Android phones, they don't get squat for the iPhone. That said i think a big reason why MSFT has embraced HTML V5 is thanks to MPEG-LA having complete and total control over H.26x they and Apple could split that market and the rest will "have to pay their $699 license fee" to borrow from an old meme.
Personally, and you'd think the majority here would agree if ACs weren't infected this place like a cancer, I hope the WinPhone carves out a nice just as i hope RIM doesn't die and WebOS finds a home. Competition is GOOD folks, its what gives us low prices and new innovations because if you sit on your ass your market share dries up and blows away, just ask the IE team. The more competitors we have in the mobile field the better as far as I'm concerned because ultimately its good for the consumer to have plenty of choices. I mean can you imagine if it ends up just Android and iOS? apple will use the courts to kill all the higher priced units so you end up with the iPhone VS CCC (Cheapo Chinese Crapola) which will give them a monopoly on the high end. Say what you want about MSFT but their lawyers are just as nasty as any of the Nazgul they have working in Apple legal and Apple would be fools to try to lock WinPhone out of the market.
So I hope we end up with a healthy market even if my guts tell me it'll end up a three way race. But of course I'm not an AC going "Everyone go to hell except cave 76!" and I don't treat OSes like ball clubs, hell I don't treat ball clubs like ball clubs. If/. wants to reverse their declining numbers how about instead of giving me the option to remove ads they give me the option to remove AC posts from my view? I bet the conversations would be MUCH more civil. Hell we might even get like we used to where you'd have long back and forth posts talking about subjects intelligently based on merits and demerits instead of all this AC horseshit ruining the flow.
You are an ACtard but since you were the last to waddle your fat ass under the wire before i instituted by "Don't bother with ACTards"policy its only fair you should get the final AC slapping. What games do the benchmarking sites use? What games to sites like Tom's hardware and Anandtech use to benchmark new chips and cards? Survey says.....Call of Honor Crysis Edition III!
Its actually VERY simple mr "I'm too lazy to make an account" ACtard, benchtards use whatever game the benching sites use, and at the moment that's the Crysis games, along with Battlefield III and Skyrim and there is a couple of other big names at the top but since i don't follow those sites since it came out that most benchmark suites use the Intel crippled compiler or ICC I can't tell you the others. i'm sure you know them since you actually bothered to look up which engines were written for which systems which means yo are probably one of the benchtards I was laughing at. tell me how's that pirated version of crysis II working out? what did your new chip bench out at with it? I'd say inquiring minds want to know but i really couldn't care less, sorry. Feel proud though as you are the very last AC that will ever get a response from me, enjoy!
Actually I'd say that's true of all "isms" including capitalism as we see what a corrupt mess we have in DC now. The problem with scaling an ism to nation size is it lets power concentrate and where power is concentrated its more easily purchased. I do find it kinda funny though that the right uses the word socialist like kiddie fiddler when we've had socialism for the rich in this country for decades. just look at how the banks can treat Wall Street like Las Vegas and keep their profits win they win (using tricks like double dutch and Irish whip tax dodges) and pass the "losses" onto the American people with a too big to fail bailout. Being able to never lose money must be nice, too bad it doesn't work for the peasants.
As for TFA since every company that can is either sending jobs overseas as fast as they can close the factories, to the tune of 21,000 factories in a single decade or using the "how NOT to hire an American" as a how to video I really don't think it matters whether the Chinese bought it directly or they got it from Dell do you? Nearly 10% of the Chinese farmland is so poisoned by heavy metals the food coming from them is toxic, their rivers are so filled with toxins I'm waiting for one to catch fire, and 9 out of the 10 most cancerous places to live on the planet are in China, that last one on the list an abandoned Soviet chemical factory town. Ain't capitalism grand? Kinda hard to compete with those that will drink cancer straight from the tap and send their kids out to play wearing gas masks while taking $200 a month wages for the top workers isn't it? Welcome to the race to the bottom folks, enjoy your place in the unemployment line.
Yep i know what you are talking about, I was talking to a very nice lady Linux admin that had been running Linux since the early 00s but is now gonna end up giving BSD a spin before most likely ending up on Mac (I told her she needs to try Win 7 as it IS really nice) and what caused her to run away? A simple upgrade ended up taking a giant shit on the whole machine and ended up wiping out her emails for the last 4 years. Sure she has backups but that don't change the fact it will take her a good week to get everything back the way she had it and that coupled with the breakage she experienced the last four upgrades just soured her on the whole thing.
Personally i blame canonical. When i first started playing with Linux around 03 I truly thought by 2010 at the latest we'd see penguins on boxes and Linux machines right next to Windows and Macs in stores. it was a slow but steady progress, drivers got better each year, things got more stable...and then came Canonical who went "LOL Goatse!" and fucked the whole thing up. Suddenly they were getting all the press and everyone jumped on an insane 6 month release schedule, instead of bugs getting fixed and steady progress made everything began to feel like bleeding edge alpha quality software and the few that were left that didn't adopt that model are frankly so far in the other direction their progress is measured in eons and their distros feel like running Win98.
This is why I truly believe there will never be a Linux on the desktop as Canonical came along and trolled the community and like an excellent troll got everyone against everyone else and just left the whole thing a fractured mess. I mean when you have dell, one of the biggest OEMs on the planet and they have to develop and support their own repos because they can't even get enough QA from Canonical and the community not to have the drivers shit themselves, even though we are talking about only a teeny tiny subset of the hardware they sell? That's a bad sign friend, a VERY bad sign. I have XP boxes in the field nearly a decade old, sold as a rock and purring like a kitten. that is nearly 5000 patches and not a SINGLE broken driver, not one. can you imagine taking a Linux from 2001 and upgrading to current without wiping the whole thing each time, what kind of mess you'd get? I personally know you'd have a nightmare as I've tried it with 3 year old discs of distros on spare boxes and watched the broken mess that came out the end. i tried Ubuntu/Mint, PCLOS, Mepis, and Fedora and ALL ended up broken nasty messes. but if i point that out all i'll ever get is "Use distro X!" which considering there is like over 500 maintained distros right now would literally take me around 3 years and several Tb in bandwidth just to prove each "use distro X!" to be a fail.
But you nailed it friend, there is NO direction or common goals anymore, its all fanboi flag waving and "my idea is cooler than yours!" and nobody bothering to care about anything but their one little project. I mean just check out the defaults on ANY distro, you got programs that behave like Mac, like Windows, like old school Unix, hell there aren't any real guidelines being followed and the DE and sound fronts are a fricking mess. I mean who would have thought the DE developers would turn bizarro and go "Quick things am stable and people am happy! We'll break everything and come up with new stuff that don't look or act or work with the old stuff and make big mess! Users will have to be leet again and do lots of work, that'll teach 'em!"?
I swear if I didn't know any better I'd think that the heads of many major distros and projects had been replaced by Apple and MSFT plants because they sure couldn't make things any better for them with all this mess if they tried, but then i'll get a post like the one the other day where i get called a fat fuck and the poster hopes my kids get groped by the TSA for daring to point out that GPL adoption nosediving means RMS probably went too far on the restrictions and remember what we are dealing with now.
And this will work on a personal cell phone....how exactly? Are you gonna take away people's right to own their machines and instead have to get approval from a Google "Genius" or whatever you want to call them before they are allowed to modify their own devices? i think that is pretty much 180 degrees in opposition to the stated purpose of FOSS which was to give the USERS and not the manufacturers control of the system, going all the way back to that first printer RMS wasn't allowed to have the code for.
Lets face it folks it really does come down to only TWO choices, one you let the user decide and then just like real life dumb users will do dumb things and smart users smart things, just like on Windows now, or you let the corporations have COMPLETE control which as we've seen time and time again turns into "its for your own good" which always ends up translating to "its in corporate interests".
Sorry but Linux isn't a magical woobie that keeps nasty old viruses away, its an OS just like any other and TFA proves that given enough users it WILL get pwned just like any other OS. We are talking millions of lines of code folks, and guys that make serious bank when they find a flaw in that code, this really shouldn't be surprising to anyone but the same type that thought because Apple "thought different" they were immune to all bugs too. We have a term for that, its called "magical thinking" and while its made several companies rich with sales pitches like "Just use (insert product) and never have to worry about security again!" IRL it simply doesn't work. there is no magical OS, no magical pill, that will make all flaws disappear and give all users degrees in Internet Security.
Personally I'd rather deal with dumb users than have to give up the right to choose what to run on my systems, wouldn't you?
Problem with your theory is the vast majority of cams save as.MP4 which Nbox don't play, sorry. Lets be honest okay? its a player for rippers. YOU know that and I know that and the ones selling Nbox and those $30 DivX players sure as hell know that. I mean look at the reviews on amazon and its chock full of "Just load all your movies on this with a 300gb HDD and there you go!" and "Now when the grandkids come over they just bring their favorite movies over on flash stick and they are ready to go!".
This is one genie they can give it the fuck up with, he's not only out of the bottle he's down the street sleeping with the CxO's wife! Seriously if you have clueless friends or family? Give 'em the combo of an Nbox with a USB drive (just make sure it is an external powered one as the USB port doesn't have enough juice to drive a 2.5) and Tipard DVD Ripper. It literally is as simple as "push button to get movie" which they just drag onto the drive and voila! Instant movie. One of the reasons i got a 6 core for Xmas was my dad who said "Is there anything that will make it so you can rip movies quicker?" because he constantly buys DVDs and has become too spoiled on his Nbox. When he found out a 6 core would let me rip a movie in 20 minutes flat he got me that and a massive cooler and handed it to me along with another pile of DVDs he bought from Amazon and said "There you go son, do you need my drive or can you just bring them on your stick?" LOL!
You should really try one though, they are great for bedroom TVs, kids, hell even the main set if you are like my dad and don't care about steaming. Being able to just plop down in front of the set, push a single button, and have every movie you've ever bought all preloaded and commercial free is just too damned nice and is why I have given up on even keeping an Nbox for a display model because as soon as it comes in somebody comes in and says "Can you get me one of those TV movie things like (insert one of the many people I've sold them to) has got? You know the thing where you can load all your DVDs on it and just push the button to play them?" and there it goes again. The MPAA really needs to pull their head out of their asses and give the people what they want as my dad would probably buy 3 times the amount of movies he does now if he could just go to Amazon and buy a DivX 5 like he does MP3s.
Bimbo Newton Crosby they NEVER mention the losses that came from losing steam. it has gotten to the point if it isn't just DIRT cheap on Amazon like the Kane & Lynch II I picked up for a dollar just to see if it stunk as bad as the reviews (it does BTW) I stick to Steam and GOG because.....why bother? Its "push button and get game" and while I too could have trivially pirated each and every single game i got on the Steam sale (I currently have 20 games in Steam with Hunted:Demon's Forge dloading which was gifted to me by my youngest who won AGAIN and decided that wasn't his cup o tea) which just FYI one of them I had pirated a couple of months before because the reviews said it was hit and miss with regards to System reqs and I wanted to see whether it would run decently.
So why I did I buy it and the 8 other games? they were cheap, they came with the DLC (which the pirate versions don't) they gave me MP, they are kept updated for me without me lifting a finger, in short because they gave me more value than piracy for my money and THAT is how you kill piracy, not with a club but with a cookie. Look at how fucking brilliant Valve was with the Steam sale, each day different objections which you just happened to have to see the front page with all the latest sales (including the countdown to their end of sale) to get to. I bought games i hadn't even thought of simply because i was going to get to the daily contest objectives (which BTW while myself and my oldest didn't win shit but some coal and coupons my youngest won four fricking games in four days and then logged onto his brother's box to help him finish his objectives and won AGAIN, from now on the little twerp is picking powerball numbers I swear to God) and I'd see some game and go "Hey that's a good game...what do you mean its $5? sold!" and the same thing happened with my boys, I'd get a text from the oldest in Steam that said "Hey Dark Athena is on sale and I really liked Butcher bay, would you mind?" which when I saw it had an HD Butcher Bay included bought it for myself as well, and the youngest just yesterday texted "Hey did you know L.A. Noir is on sale for $12.50? I'd kill for that game and promise i won't ask for more if you could get it for me, pretty please?"
So as I sit here downloading my free copy of Demon's Forge gifted to me by the youngest from his big pile of win on Steam I really have a hard time feeling sorry for poor old EA for getting pirated when they have been such douchebags with regards to their customers. Like I said I picked up one of the whole "Call of Honor Crysis edition" games when I spotted it in the $20 bin (MoH anniversary) and not only did they have all this hoop jumping just to get the things set up but when i finally get them all installed I hopped on MP just to give it a spin and they were ALL dead or deserted, every single one! That broke me of buying anymore EA shooters because i enjoy going back and having a little frag for fun and it was clear EA makes sure nobody is playing anything but "Call of Honor Crysis Edition II now with triple cost DLC" and that means the games have NO legs and thus no value for me. I mean when i can STILL get on Bioshock II and find people to throw plasmids at, or as I pointed out TEN YEAR OLD Valve games and find tons of people happily ramming rockets up each others asses that screams to me "this game has value! This is worth the money!" but EA do their damnedest to kill their old games when the nw comes out. Just look at their EOL list sometime and see how many games barely a year and a half old have their MP killed by EA.
And EA can shove Origin right up their asses as far as I'm concerned because it isn't shit compared to Steam and I doubt it ever will be. the horror stories are already pouring in of people having trouble with it and then when they go to point out problems getting banhammered and LOSING THEIR GAMES which I've NEVER heard of Valve doing EVER, only of banning those that cheat with wallhacks and other MP ruining troll crap from the game they w
Can someone PLEASE tell me where the hidden setting is to block ACs, please? because I swear their fanboi bleating and flag waving must knock a good point or two off any IQ that dares to read their bullshit.
Newsflash: sandboxes WILL be broken and no matter how smart your precious Google is (which if you think running native code in a browser is just JavaScript can i have some of what you are smoking?) the malware guys are ALWAYS smarter, always. look at how badly Google has gotten assraped in Android market with malware, everytime they think they have a handle on it something new comes out and stomps them down again.
In the end just like JavaScript you are talking about running third party untrusted code and hoping the sandbox holds which we've seen time and time again is a BAD assumption to make. Even with all the testing JavaScript STILL gets "JavaScript malware o' the day" yet you think that running native code on top of that is SAFER? I'm sorry but if you were any more full of shit your post would smell like a porta-potty in July.
They should embrace the valve model, especially since they don't have to deal with retail packaging, shipping, returns, etc and make it cheap, easy and convenient. I mean does anybody know how much money went through steam on the Xmas sale? i bet it was garbage trucks just full of money because its so simple and cheap, just "whip out CC, push button, get game'. The problem with "call of honor crysis edition" style games is the publishers have deliberately made their games to have no legs as everyone knows once "call of honor crysis edition II" comes out nobody will be playing the first one and since they are appealing to the "must win teh benches!" tards who frankly spend every last dime they can get on supercoolers for their massive OCs they simply don't spend $60 a pop on games that will be tossed next quarter.
Make it follow the valve model, give the game some real legs, and frankly they'll never have to give a wet fart what the benches tards do because that single game can be making them money year after year AFTER year. I mean how old is HL: Deathmatch now? valve was nice enough to throw it in for the fuck of it with the complete HL:2 pack I picked up on the sale and that thing STILL has tons of people playing it. They are also still selling and making cash on CS and Day of defeat and those things are older than dirt yet because they have legs they are still full of players.
I want to feel sorry for them but its kinda hard when you pick up the game in the $30 bin and find its deserted or worse EA has pulled the plug on MP which i think ought to at least force EA to put out a sticker to be placed on boxes saying MP doesn't work anymore. If they let folks host their own servers more and threw out the occasional update with a new map here or there for the older games then the long tail on sales would mean the benchtards could be ignored. Gabe had it right IMHO when he said to the effect "piracy is your competitor offering a better product" because that means the price is too high, the game doesn't have long enough legs, you simply aren't hitting the sweet spot. Now if you'll excuse me there is this one little shit in HL:DM that keeps jamming a rocket up my ass and i think I'm gonna introduce him to Mr Python. Kinda sad though when i've had more fun with a 10 year old game than I did the last "call of honor crysis edition" I played.
Funny as I actually was given Vista as a beta tester and ended up giving it away as i could not STAND the bloated POS and instead stayed with XP x64 (which is still a damned nice OS BTW, my youngest is still running it, solid as a rock) until Oct 09 when Win 7 went OEM. I agree that Win 7 does rock as everytime I'm forced to use XP I feel like I'm back on Win98, man I miss jumplists and breadcrumbs and libraries. That don't change the fact though that MSFT could have ended OS piracy in the west with the $50 HP upgrade and I wonder if we'll see the same upsurge and if they'll do a similar deal with Windows 8 which frankly i think makes Vista look good. I mean who the fuck wants a tablet OS on their desktop? One of my customers said it best when she said "That's nice, is that Android? i've heard of that....what do you mean Windows? Windows what? Well that's just stupid! Why would I want a cell phone on my PC?"
What's sad is just like with DVD-Rs and and MP3 players the *.A.A are gonna have to be drug kicking and screaming to the MONEY TROUGH because as we saw with everything from VCRs to digital recorders the *.A.A ended up making MORE bank and having a BETTER year than before when they quit dragging their heels. If they would embrace the Valve model, make it cheap, easy, and convenient they would find that just as valve is making obscene levels of money and bringing game publishers tons of customers that humans follow the path of least resistance and if you make it easy and cheap enough folks will buy instead of pirate. Take myself and my own family for instance, the Steam sale had so many bargains that myself and my boys ended up with something like 20 games a piece simply because it was so easy. Even games I had once upon a time pirated i ended up buying on steam because it was cheaper and easier than messing with cracks and digging out install discs, it was all "push button and get game" and the sale and chance to win prizes (which my little one ended up winning 4 games in 4 days, i swear the little twerp won more than he spent this year, we gotta get him picking numbers for powerball!) just made whipping out the CC all the easier to justify. Everything is in one place, its always patched and updated, hell it even takes care of my GPU drivers so i don't have to look for updates anymore.
If both MSFT and the *.A.A just accept what valve accepted years ago that while you'll never completely eliminate piracy you CAN convert a huge number into paying customers simply by finding the right price and making it simple to pay i'm sure both would be posting record profits right now. Selling a $50 Win HP or even a $35 Win 7 starter wouldn't affect their OEM sales as people who buy OEMs sure as hell aren't installing their OS but it WOULD make the price low enough to drag all those pirates into the fold while at the same time eliminating what has been a giant embarrassment for MSFT, the zombie which I've found is usually a pirated box that hasn't been patched in years. The same can be applied to the *.A.A which is they were selling at a quarter or even a dime a song would wipe out piracy overnight just as the MPAA could eliminate movie piracy by simply selling.AVIs of all the older movies at a couple of bucks a pop. None of these draconian laws have EVER affected pirates, it just makes things worse for paying customers and I'd argue drives more to piracy simply because the other options suck ass. Like Wil Wheaton complained about when he bought some Doctor Who episodes off of Amazon and then found they wouldn't work when he crossed a border "If I had just went to TPB I'd be watching Doctor Who right now".
How so? While there can be disputes as to his overall character what happened with the electric chair and his frying animals using AC to "prove" it was a menace is well documented, most by Edison's own hand in fact. There is NO dispute the electric Chair was Edison, there is NO dispute he fried several animals including an elephant (there is even pictures to document that) and there is NO dispute that Edison long after everyone else realized that DC wouldn't scale was pushing for neighborhood generators rather than admit that it would take AC to power something the size of New York. IIRC there are still a couple of places in Boston and NYC where power is converted to DC because they were some of the original blocks set up by ConEd to run on neighborhood generators.
Nobody is saying the man wasn't brilliant, nobody is saying he didn't change the world as we know it, its simply pointing out that he was neither saint nor sinner and at his core he was no different than Jobs or Gates or Ellison, a ruthless businessman that had NO problem with doing something nasty to further his own goals. How would YOU explain away or condone slowing roasting a man alive, to the point his flesh literally begins to smolder and which one witness said "Would have been more humane to have taken an axe to him" simply to "prove" that a rival's design was too dangerous for the home? If that ain't ruthless frankly I don't know what would qualify for that title.
Won't happen and here is why: For Linux to become a top notch world class desktop OS millions, more likely hundreds of millions, will have to be spent getting rid of the itch scratching and making it all a seamless cohesive unit and that is not only never gonna happen because with GPL its damned near impossible to build on top of and charge money for the product itself (as RH found out desktop users generally don't buy support contracts) and because the community would fight it tooth and nail every step of the way because they would consider it "dumbing down for the noobs" like being a PITA is a badge of honor or something.
The best way to understand a thing IMHO is to look at its core so what IS Linux, what is its design and function? Well at its heart its a whole bunch of different smaller applications designed to pass text between each other using pipes simply because there are so many different groups working on so many different things pipes is the one "universal language' they can all agree on. Now this design works great in servers where you have guys paid good money to learn and understand the language but folks have to remember the consumer is NOT a geek, will NEVER be a geek, have NO desire to learn your geek languages or customs, in short they have about as much in common as a current Linux desktop user as your backyard has in common with Europa.
It would take a complete tossing out of the current way of doing things and a HEAVILY user centric approach replacing it for Linux to suddenly be able to take on OSX and WinX as equals. Either a 10 year cycle would have to be adopted or a hardware ABI (Which Torvalds has made it clear won't be happening until he retires) brought in to fix the driver issues so little Suzy doesn't have hunt forums when Torvalds latest kernel tweak screws up her printer, you would have to have something like Apple or MSFT's GUI guidelines adopted across the entire ecosystem with STRICT enforcement rules and you would have to depreciate the living hell out of CLI to the point that like on Windows its buried in the back and never used by anybody anymore. hell the last couple of years HP sold Windows Home machines many were sold without even access to CLI because someone had deleted it by accident off the disc images and nobody even noticed that its access from the GUI was completely gone.
To do these changes would frankly take away what many in the community like which is the ability to strip, fiddle, and hot rod the OS down to the lowest level to their heart's content. Let's face it folks a lot of what comes out of the linux community can be boiled down to some developer not liking what was available and scratching a personal itch which is fine and dandy but software developers are NOT designers of good GUIs and frankly never will be. You'd either have a GUI heavy "one size fits all" ala Apple or a VERY limited number of choices like Home, Workstation, Server, and embedded ala the MSFT way and that just goes against the grain for the community as it stands. that is why the ONLY gains you have seen is in places like Android where some corporation simply takes Linux away from the community and enforces its own rules. After all what IS Android? Its all GUI, no CLI, clicky clicky easy peasy with a very strictly controlled underpinning that costs Google close to a billion a year last I had heard. I just don't see any corporation spending that kind of money on a Linux desktop nor the community embracing it.
Uhhh...because no matter how smart Google engineers THINK they are the malware writers are smarter? As the first poster said look at the history of ActiveX. When it first came out it was like a Godsend, an easy to use way to just host an app on your server and have ALL the branches instantly have access to it or to do the same for your customers. No rollout headaches or compatibility problems it all "just worked" but before you could say "Oh shit!" every malware writer and his cat and his cat's squeaky toy figured out how to get around the security and use it as a one stop malware drop. MSFT spent something like 4 years trying to plug the holes but it was like whack a mole.
Personally I really really REALLY don't want native code running on my browser, thanks ever so. sandboxes can and have been broken out of and its just too risky a vector IMHO. While they've had a few sharp ideas (if anyone hasn't tried it chrome remote desktop makes taking control of a system for support work pretty damned simple) I really don't think this is the brightest idea they've had. I suppose we shall see but I wouldn't be surprised if the malware guys figure out how to jump out the sandbox just like they figured out how to get past FF's XSS protection and then this will be all kinds of nasty, especially on older systems that may not have all their patches up to date.
Yep, try Memphis, its combat driving central, although Dallas/Houston is worse. LR is actually pleasant, folks will let you in if you signal but Memphis you might as well not bother as nobody cares. It always seemed like in TX they went out of their way to be assholes though, you had to charge and gun it to get anywhere at all, whereas Memphis they honestly just don't pay attention to shit. And if you want to get anywhere this year avoid MS as I swear its like old person with a hat central down there. you don't know slow until you get old guy in a hat or blue hair lady whose so short all you see is knuckles and the beehive, man you could walk faster. Nicest place i found was the Ozarks up around Branson, plenty of passing lanes, slow cars stay right, people let you pass, nice smooth roads.
But will it detect crap in the road, or potholes that could bury a dog? Because sometimes you NEED to drift if you are on a poorly maintained road and there isn't any traffic, better to drift and avoid the giant potholes or blown semi tire pieces than end up with a blow out or screwed front end alignment.
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I would have NO problem with that IF they were actually held accountable when they "pull a BP" but as my friend laid it out they won't be because the entire company is a scam. they lease everything from the mineral rights to the office furniture from shell corps they control so that if they end up creating a disaster they can just burn the company down and be right back in business tomorrow with another shell leasing the same assets.
So you see i wouldn't mind if they accepted the RISK as well as the REWARD but today they have figured out how to privatize the reward while making the risks public and THAT is what needs to be stopped. As it is there is simply no reason to worry about safety for these wildcatters because they have nothing at risk, its all profit.
Exactly, just look at that poll a few years ago that stated over a quarter of the people thought Iraq had helped plan 9/11, where do you think they got that idea? Innuendo floated by talking heads in the MSM, that's where. Now we have a judge saying Iran did 9/11 which i'm sure soon the talking heads we be parroting over and over AND OVER until they have the public believing that too. Don't forget there are FBI memos stating that Fast & Furious was a great false flag that would be useful for helping to "curb" the second amendment, yet even Fox News doesn't hardly say a thing even though a juicey story like that you would think would make them cream their pants in delight?
Its very simple and doesn't have a thing to do with RMS or Thom's trollbait articles, it has to do with the fact that our entire MSM is owned by so few that you could put them in a small town HS gym and not even fill half the seats. these owners are all on each others boards, they all play golf with each other or see each other at the country club, the whole 'right VS left" thing is as fake as pro wrestling. Buffet got it right years ago when he said "class warfare has been going on for years and we are winning" and the whole point of the garbage being passed now is the 1% that TRULY hold the strings see that their current system is unsustainable and want to have a way to deal with them dirty peasants to make sure there isn't an Arab Spring here. But I got news for them, the soldiers? the pilots? they have a hell of a lot more in common with the poor than they do their masters. I have a feeling when the day comes and those in power tell them to roll the tanks they are gonna be quite shocked at how many patriot soldiers point the barrels at them.
Ya know, maybe its just me but I never did get the whole 'Must rule teh benches!" crap. I had a customer who would pay me to strip down his Windows installs just to get a few more FPS in the benches and i swear this guy went through so much hardware his grandma was on a skulltrail because that was the weakest hand me down he had!
But all the benchmark bragging kinda ignores what the chip makers really don't want to talk about and that is chips have been "good enough" for the vast majority for quite some time now. Thanks to the long tail of the consoles even the gamers have been able to stay with hardware for years and there just hasn't been any real "killer apps" come along in quite some time that needed a huge hardware increase which is why you see ATI pushing Eyefinity and Nvidia pushing CUDA because there just hasn't been any major need...well except for those wanting to win benches and stuff like TFA, but really how big of a niche is that?
I know I ended up getting rid of my full size notebook for a EEE E-350 netbook because i found when i'm out and about it was more than good enough for the tasks i had, and its taken nearly 5 years for the games to finally use enough CPU I'm gonna have to build the kids new triples or quads to replace their duals, so seriously what real good would you get from an aggressive OC like that besides winning some score? And are they bragging about less than 6GHz? Didn't AMD hit a record of 7 something last year at one of those OC contests? Seems a bit low to be bragging about.
Personally i'm glad things have slowed down, its nice being able to game on a $60 HD4850 and still have plenty of purty on my 1600x900 LCD, its nice not having to spend but around $100 each to upgrade the kids from Pentium Ds to AMD triples (may go with a quad, does anybody know if a 3.2GHz triple or a 2.2GHz quad would be the better route? both are the same price and I'm thinking clock will matter more, am I wrong?) and they can keep their HD4850s probably another year. So if that's your thing have fun, everybody needs a hobby, but it just seems a little pointless to me when i haven't seen a consumer app be CPU bound in ages.
Because all of that is hidden behind a nice GUI that doesn't exist in Linux? tell me where is the "roll back drivers" button? or the find drivers button for that matter? Windows has had those since 1999 yet they still don't exist in Linux because at its core Linux is a CLI OS that has a GUI tacked on. this is why its trivial to change DEs, DEs are second class citizens and Linux will run without a DE at all if you so chose. With linux at the end of the day if ANYTHING goes wrong the ONLY answer you can get is "open up bash and type" because frankly often that is the only answer available. I was once given this huge CLI mess for a wireless card and I wrote "You guys are all smart and knowledgeable yes? Treat me like I'm one of my customers and give me a NON CLI solution to the problem, think of me as little Suzy the checkout girl and hold my hand and walk me through the GUI" and there were several long drawn out attempts at pulling it off in a GUI before one finally admitted "You can't do that in a GUI" and THAT is the problem in a nutshell, you can't do that in a GUI is often the state of affairs in Linux.
Never before in history have users been more online centric in their computer usage but Linux if anything has worse numbers than ever, why? Does the web not work in Linux? of course it does but people today are used to and demand GUI answers to their problems and those GUIs simply haven't been written yet or are written VERY poorly in Linux. Frankly the GUIs for networking and sound especially are like something out of Windows 95 instead of a 2012 OS and if anything the developers all getting bad attitudes towards 'noobs" means that if anything the GUIs are getting LESS useful not more. I wish it weren't so but frankly Linux was making slow but steady progress then Canonical came along and threw the whole community into chaos and now its just a mess, it couldn't be a bigger clusterfuck if the head of canonical had been secretly placed there by gates himself.
Go to the forums and they have a high def mod, slap that puppy in there and run it and 2500 resolution and you better have some liquid cooling and a hell of an OC or you are looking at a slideshow. the easy way to tell though what the "benchtards" as i call them are gonna pirate is to see whatever Anandtech and Tom's are using for their benches as that is what the benchtards will use.
Ya know i never got the whole "must win teh benches!" crap, I mean who the fuck cares? I actually used to do some work for one of them stripping down his OS and I swear he was so damned obsessed with benches his fricking grandma was on a skulltrail because that was the weakest hand me down he had! Me I have my new AMD 6 core i got for Xmas which I probably wouldn't have even gotten if it hadn't come out AMD had killed the AM3 line and it would give me an excuse to build a new box for my GF around my quad, I have 8Gb of RAM and an HD4850 which frankly gives me tons of purty on my 1600x900 at native res, so why would i give a crap about benches?
But what I CAN tell you is ANY game that is on the Anandtech or Tom's benchmark list is gonna be pirated up the ass because benchtards spend frankly insane amounts on their hardware only to run a pirate version of Windows and hot games on it. I've seen these guys drop $500+ on a single GPU or SSD but balk at the cost of a Windows CAL or copy of some game. That's why i don't work for those types anymore as they are really cheap bastards when it comes to anything but hardware. But last i checked the crysis games were on the Anandtech list so no shit they're gonna be the most pirated, benchtards want to beat the latest numbers and you can't bench without the benching software.
Well as a socialist going back generations (my grandfather was actually a card carrying socialist back in the 20s) I believe true socialism would work but I'll be the first to admit we've never actually had a socialist country anymore than we've ever had a capitalist country because again once you try it on a national scale here comes the bribes. look at what many would call the closest we have ever gotten to "true" capitalism, the 1800s. Even then a few at the top used their massive wealth to rig markets such as the gold manipulation scandal or standard oil, the "age of the robber barons" came about because all you had to do was buy a handful of men in the right positions and you ended up with a market where you couldn't lose, hell many of them even hired their own private armies to control the workers and end strikes with the barrel of a gun!
The problem with trying to scale ANYTHING to a national level is it concentrates power and makes it easy for the wealthy to rig the game. At the local or even state level what you end up with is "big fish in small ponds' because the simple logistics of having to bribe so many quickly makes it a losing proposition but on a national level all it takes is a few hundred checks and you've bought one of the three branches, one more check buys the second, and since judges are appointed in many areas that just gave you a percentage of the third. its just too easy at a national level with any ism my friend, that is why the end result no matter what ism you choose, from Nazism to communism to capitalism always seems to be corruption.
Not really, after all the rich can afford water harvested from icebergs and food grown in protected greenhouses and if the peasants don't survive long enough to become a burden? So much the better. I have a feeling we are headed towards another dark age feudal period where the wealthy get to live a long time while gorging themselves to excess while the poor live in such squalor that they are lucky to survive to 40 which again is just about the perfect age for the corps as by then you have worked them to the point they can't output like an 18 year old can, better to just kill them and get a fresh new cog for the machine.
Yeah did you see some of their indie bundles? We are talking 30 or 40 games for $39! Steam has it right, give a game legs, make it a good value, and people WILL buy. Me and my boys probably got a dozen games a piece simply because you had to pass the daily sale page to get to the objectives and I'd know when the kids went by because my steam messenger (another value from valve, makes it easy to play games and schedule battles together) would pop up with one of the boys going "Hey did you know this game is on sale? i'd really like that" and of course i gifted myself quite a few like Dark Athena (2 games for $5? sold) Just Cause II (with ALL the DLC for $7.50? Sold) and the ENTIRE HL:2 saga for just $7? Easy sold!
If you like indies you ought to try Teraria, Rochard, and Orcs Must Die. my boys got those and just love the hell out of them. me with all the games i have now just don't have time! Have you ever tried Just Cause II? I swear the world in that game is literally 30 something miles across! We are talking mountains and rivers and jungles and cities, all fully populated with tons to do. Makes GTA IMHO look like a sandbox for babies, I mean when i can have a police car chasing me and hook it to the back of my car, drive off the side of a cliff, fall for like 3 and a half minutes towards the sea, and at the last minute bail with my chute and grab a passing Lear Jet and ride that sucker like something out of Strangelove? Now THAT is a fun sandbox!
Yeah there is no "may be' to it either. A friend was hired to build the model used by the wildcatters to sell to investors and was handed all the data on the area. In my area the college had been monitoring for quakes since 1947 and found you were looking at a 2 every decade because the whole area is pretty solid, then here come the wildcatters. my friend overlaid a map of the wells with a map of the quakes and at every. single. site. of a fracking well you were looking at size 3 to 4 every 6 to 8 weeks. The worst part is he said the way these companies are set up they can 'burn the company" if they are ever indicted or cause major damage as they lease everything from the equipment to the office furniture and most importantly the mineral rights from shell companies they have set up. they can cause as much environmental damage as they please and never have to worry because if the crap hits the fan they burn the company and the victims get nothing while they keep all the assets with a shell company and start again.
Sadly with all the corp ass kissing we get from both sides of the aisle now i doubt anything will be done until its too late and some major quake that kills thousands or some water table poisoning that destroys millions of gallons of fresh water. Nowadays its all screw everything but the profits, environment and lives be damned. personally i'm waiting on our own Bhopal which i figure will happen within the decade despite all the corps complaining they are having too many regulations to deal with.
You DO realize that they could pop up a message that has buried in the EULA "FYI we are gonna come by and bang your wife and sell your kids into slavery" and people would pick "Yes please give me the funny screensaver LOL!" don't you? ALL you are doing is adding an extra step, the same extra step that Windows has been adding since 07, the same extra step Linux has been adding for ages, and it still doesn't work because in the end you have to have a user that 1.-actually gives a shit, and 2.- has taken the time to actually understand what is being asked of him/her which we have seen is MAYBE 3% of the population, the rest will click on whatever pops up and be pissed AT YOU for making them have to click.
But please read this article as Atwood at coding horror lays out the problem better than I ever could. if you don't believe this is real and applies to the VAST MAJORITY you really should stop in your local mom & pop shop and ask them to tell you about stupid and or dangerous users, we have stories that would turn your hair white! For the first time in my history I had to be rude to a customer last year and tell him to take his business elsewhere because after I explicitly spelled out that the program he wanted had been shut down by court order and that anything calling itself "the new limewire" was a virus he promptly took his machine home, searched for "the new limewire" and when the AV wouldn't let him install it uninstalled the AV and promptly got infected to the tune of over 100 pieces of malware than had the gall to get pissy because i couldn't magically make this non existent software work!
Why did that happen? Because he LIKED Limewire, he WANTED Limewire, and every single thing that didn't involve him getting it went in one ear and out the other. Now I'm lucky in that I've "trained" for lack of a better word, my customers to "When it doubt call my guy and see what he says" and unlike some of the more scummy guys in the biz I do my damnedest to steer them away from the nasties. But if you think you can permission your way out of this again it all boils down to TWO choices, 1.- The user has the right to elevate permissions which means no matter how many roadblocks and passwords you put if the user wants to see the bunny they WILL install it, or 2.-You give the rights ONLY to the corporates which quickly turn it into "That against corporate interests" and then you get the horror stories like you read here constantly of being trapped having to do something back asswards because some BOFH decided that having common sense is against policy.
I really wish there was a door number three, i really do, but after doing this line of work since the days of Win 3.x and looking my ass off I sure as hell haven't found it.
Then you obviously don't remember your history because MSFT just came out from under antitrust and as long as there is competition MSFT can do whatever they want, just like their competitors. Besides as another pointed out MSFT gets paid for a large chunk of those Android phones, they don't get squat for the iPhone. That said i think a big reason why MSFT has embraced HTML V5 is thanks to MPEG-LA having complete and total control over H.26x they and Apple could split that market and the rest will "have to pay their $699 license fee" to borrow from an old meme.
Personally, and you'd think the majority here would agree if ACs weren't infected this place like a cancer, I hope the WinPhone carves out a nice just as i hope RIM doesn't die and WebOS finds a home. Competition is GOOD folks, its what gives us low prices and new innovations because if you sit on your ass your market share dries up and blows away, just ask the IE team. The more competitors we have in the mobile field the better as far as I'm concerned because ultimately its good for the consumer to have plenty of choices. I mean can you imagine if it ends up just Android and iOS? apple will use the courts to kill all the higher priced units so you end up with the iPhone VS CCC (Cheapo Chinese Crapola) which will give them a monopoly on the high end. Say what you want about MSFT but their lawyers are just as nasty as any of the Nazgul they have working in Apple legal and Apple would be fools to try to lock WinPhone out of the market.
So I hope we end up with a healthy market even if my guts tell me it'll end up a three way race. But of course I'm not an AC going "Everyone go to hell except cave 76!" and I don't treat OSes like ball clubs, hell I don't treat ball clubs like ball clubs. If /. wants to reverse their declining numbers how about instead of giving me the option to remove ads they give me the option to remove AC posts from my view? I bet the conversations would be MUCH more civil. Hell we might even get like we used to where you'd have long back and forth posts talking about subjects intelligently based on merits and demerits instead of all this AC horseshit ruining the flow.
You are an ACtard but since you were the last to waddle your fat ass under the wire before i instituted by "Don't bother with ACTards"policy its only fair you should get the final AC slapping. What games do the benchmarking sites use? What games to sites like Tom's hardware and Anandtech use to benchmark new chips and cards? Survey says.....Call of Honor Crysis Edition III!
Its actually VERY simple mr "I'm too lazy to make an account" ACtard, benchtards use whatever game the benching sites use, and at the moment that's the Crysis games, along with Battlefield III and Skyrim and there is a couple of other big names at the top but since i don't follow those sites since it came out that most benchmark suites use the Intel crippled compiler or ICC I can't tell you the others. i'm sure you know them since you actually bothered to look up which engines were written for which systems which means yo are probably one of the benchtards I was laughing at. tell me how's that pirated version of crysis II working out? what did your new chip bench out at with it? I'd say inquiring minds want to know but i really couldn't care less, sorry. Feel proud though as you are the very last AC that will ever get a response from me, enjoy!
Actually I'd say that's true of all "isms" including capitalism as we see what a corrupt mess we have in DC now. The problem with scaling an ism to nation size is it lets power concentrate and where power is concentrated its more easily purchased. I do find it kinda funny though that the right uses the word socialist like kiddie fiddler when we've had socialism for the rich in this country for decades. just look at how the banks can treat Wall Street like Las Vegas and keep their profits win they win (using tricks like double dutch and Irish whip tax dodges) and pass the "losses" onto the American people with a too big to fail bailout. Being able to never lose money must be nice, too bad it doesn't work for the peasants.
As for TFA since every company that can is either sending jobs overseas as fast as they can close the factories, to the tune of 21,000 factories in a single decade or using the "how NOT to hire an American" as a how to video I really don't think it matters whether the Chinese bought it directly or they got it from Dell do you? Nearly 10% of the Chinese farmland is so poisoned by heavy metals the food coming from them is toxic, their rivers are so filled with toxins I'm waiting for one to catch fire, and 9 out of the 10 most cancerous places to live on the planet are in China, that last one on the list an abandoned Soviet chemical factory town. Ain't capitalism grand? Kinda hard to compete with those that will drink cancer straight from the tap and send their kids out to play wearing gas masks while taking $200 a month wages for the top workers isn't it? Welcome to the race to the bottom folks, enjoy your place in the unemployment line.
Yep i know what you are talking about, I was talking to a very nice lady Linux admin that had been running Linux since the early 00s but is now gonna end up giving BSD a spin before most likely ending up on Mac (I told her she needs to try Win 7 as it IS really nice) and what caused her to run away? A simple upgrade ended up taking a giant shit on the whole machine and ended up wiping out her emails for the last 4 years. Sure she has backups but that don't change the fact it will take her a good week to get everything back the way she had it and that coupled with the breakage she experienced the last four upgrades just soured her on the whole thing.
Personally i blame canonical. When i first started playing with Linux around 03 I truly thought by 2010 at the latest we'd see penguins on boxes and Linux machines right next to Windows and Macs in stores. it was a slow but steady progress, drivers got better each year, things got more stable...and then came Canonical who went "LOL Goatse!" and fucked the whole thing up. Suddenly they were getting all the press and everyone jumped on an insane 6 month release schedule, instead of bugs getting fixed and steady progress made everything began to feel like bleeding edge alpha quality software and the few that were left that didn't adopt that model are frankly so far in the other direction their progress is measured in eons and their distros feel like running Win98.
This is why I truly believe there will never be a Linux on the desktop as Canonical came along and trolled the community and like an excellent troll got everyone against everyone else and just left the whole thing a fractured mess. I mean when you have dell, one of the biggest OEMs on the planet and they have to develop and support their own repos because they can't even get enough QA from Canonical and the community not to have the drivers shit themselves, even though we are talking about only a teeny tiny subset of the hardware they sell? That's a bad sign friend, a VERY bad sign. I have XP boxes in the field nearly a decade old, sold as a rock and purring like a kitten. that is nearly 5000 patches and not a SINGLE broken driver, not one. can you imagine taking a Linux from 2001 and upgrading to current without wiping the whole thing each time, what kind of mess you'd get? I personally know you'd have a nightmare as I've tried it with 3 year old discs of distros on spare boxes and watched the broken mess that came out the end. i tried Ubuntu/Mint, PCLOS, Mepis, and Fedora and ALL ended up broken nasty messes. but if i point that out all i'll ever get is "Use distro X!" which considering there is like over 500 maintained distros right now would literally take me around 3 years and several Tb in bandwidth just to prove each "use distro X!" to be a fail.
But you nailed it friend, there is NO direction or common goals anymore, its all fanboi flag waving and "my idea is cooler than yours!" and nobody bothering to care about anything but their one little project. I mean just check out the defaults on ANY distro, you got programs that behave like Mac, like Windows, like old school Unix, hell there aren't any real guidelines being followed and the DE and sound fronts are a fricking mess. I mean who would have thought the DE developers would turn bizarro and go "Quick things am stable and people am happy! We'll break everything and come up with new stuff that don't look or act or work with the old stuff and make big mess! Users will have to be leet again and do lots of work, that'll teach 'em!"?
I swear if I didn't know any better I'd think that the heads of many major distros and projects had been replaced by Apple and MSFT plants because they sure couldn't make things any better for them with all this mess if they tried, but then i'll get a post like the one the other day where i get called a fat fuck and the poster hopes my kids get groped by the TSA for daring to point out that GPL adoption nosediving means RMS probably went too far on the restrictions and remember what we are dealing with now.
And this will work on a personal cell phone....how exactly? Are you gonna take away people's right to own their machines and instead have to get approval from a Google "Genius" or whatever you want to call them before they are allowed to modify their own devices? i think that is pretty much 180 degrees in opposition to the stated purpose of FOSS which was to give the USERS and not the manufacturers control of the system, going all the way back to that first printer RMS wasn't allowed to have the code for.
Lets face it folks it really does come down to only TWO choices, one you let the user decide and then just like real life dumb users will do dumb things and smart users smart things, just like on Windows now, or you let the corporations have COMPLETE control which as we've seen time and time again turns into "its for your own good" which always ends up translating to "its in corporate interests".
Sorry but Linux isn't a magical woobie that keeps nasty old viruses away, its an OS just like any other and TFA proves that given enough users it WILL get pwned just like any other OS. We are talking millions of lines of code folks, and guys that make serious bank when they find a flaw in that code, this really shouldn't be surprising to anyone but the same type that thought because Apple "thought different" they were immune to all bugs too. We have a term for that, its called "magical thinking" and while its made several companies rich with sales pitches like "Just use (insert product) and never have to worry about security again!" IRL it simply doesn't work. there is no magical OS, no magical pill, that will make all flaws disappear and give all users degrees in Internet Security.
Personally I'd rather deal with dumb users than have to give up the right to choose what to run on my systems, wouldn't you?
Problem with your theory is the vast majority of cams save as .MP4 which Nbox don't play, sorry. Lets be honest okay? its a player for rippers. YOU know that and I know that and the ones selling Nbox and those $30 DivX players sure as hell know that. I mean look at the reviews on amazon and its chock full of "Just load all your movies on this with a 300gb HDD and there you go!" and "Now when the grandkids come over they just bring their favorite movies over on flash stick and they are ready to go!".
This is one genie they can give it the fuck up with, he's not only out of the bottle he's down the street sleeping with the CxO's wife! Seriously if you have clueless friends or family? Give 'em the combo of an Nbox with a USB drive (just make sure it is an external powered one as the USB port doesn't have enough juice to drive a 2.5) and Tipard DVD Ripper. It literally is as simple as "push button to get movie" which they just drag onto the drive and voila! Instant movie. One of the reasons i got a 6 core for Xmas was my dad who said "Is there anything that will make it so you can rip movies quicker?" because he constantly buys DVDs and has become too spoiled on his Nbox. When he found out a 6 core would let me rip a movie in 20 minutes flat he got me that and a massive cooler and handed it to me along with another pile of DVDs he bought from Amazon and said "There you go son, do you need my drive or can you just bring them on your stick?" LOL!
You should really try one though, they are great for bedroom TVs, kids, hell even the main set if you are like my dad and don't care about steaming. Being able to just plop down in front of the set, push a single button, and have every movie you've ever bought all preloaded and commercial free is just too damned nice and is why I have given up on even keeping an Nbox for a display model because as soon as it comes in somebody comes in and says "Can you get me one of those TV movie things like (insert one of the many people I've sold them to) has got? You know the thing where you can load all your DVDs on it and just push the button to play them?" and there it goes again. The MPAA really needs to pull their head out of their asses and give the people what they want as my dad would probably buy 3 times the amount of movies he does now if he could just go to Amazon and buy a DivX 5 like he does MP3s.
Bimbo Newton Crosby they NEVER mention the losses that came from losing steam. it has gotten to the point if it isn't just DIRT cheap on Amazon like the Kane & Lynch II I picked up for a dollar just to see if it stunk as bad as the reviews (it does BTW) I stick to Steam and GOG because.....why bother? Its "push button and get game" and while I too could have trivially pirated each and every single game i got on the Steam sale (I currently have 20 games in Steam with Hunted:Demon's Forge dloading which was gifted to me by my youngest who won AGAIN and decided that wasn't his cup o tea) which just FYI one of them I had pirated a couple of months before because the reviews said it was hit and miss with regards to System reqs and I wanted to see whether it would run decently.
So why I did I buy it and the 8 other games? they were cheap, they came with the DLC (which the pirate versions don't) they gave me MP, they are kept updated for me without me lifting a finger, in short because they gave me more value than piracy for my money and THAT is how you kill piracy, not with a club but with a cookie. Look at how fucking brilliant Valve was with the Steam sale, each day different objections which you just happened to have to see the front page with all the latest sales (including the countdown to their end of sale) to get to. I bought games i hadn't even thought of simply because i was going to get to the daily contest objectives (which BTW while myself and my oldest didn't win shit but some coal and coupons my youngest won four fricking games in four days and then logged onto his brother's box to help him finish his objectives and won AGAIN, from now on the little twerp is picking powerball numbers I swear to God) and I'd see some game and go "Hey that's a good game...what do you mean its $5? sold!" and the same thing happened with my boys, I'd get a text from the oldest in Steam that said "Hey Dark Athena is on sale and I really liked Butcher bay, would you mind?" which when I saw it had an HD Butcher Bay included bought it for myself as well, and the youngest just yesterday texted "Hey did you know L.A. Noir is on sale for $12.50? I'd kill for that game and promise i won't ask for more if you could get it for me, pretty please?"
So as I sit here downloading my free copy of Demon's Forge gifted to me by the youngest from his big pile of win on Steam I really have a hard time feeling sorry for poor old EA for getting pirated when they have been such douchebags with regards to their customers. Like I said I picked up one of the whole "Call of Honor Crysis edition" games when I spotted it in the $20 bin (MoH anniversary) and not only did they have all this hoop jumping just to get the things set up but when i finally get them all installed I hopped on MP just to give it a spin and they were ALL dead or deserted, every single one! That broke me of buying anymore EA shooters because i enjoy going back and having a little frag for fun and it was clear EA makes sure nobody is playing anything but "Call of Honor Crysis Edition II now with triple cost DLC" and that means the games have NO legs and thus no value for me. I mean when i can STILL get on Bioshock II and find people to throw plasmids at, or as I pointed out TEN YEAR OLD Valve games and find tons of people happily ramming rockets up each others asses that screams to me "this game has value! This is worth the money!" but EA do their damnedest to kill their old games when the nw comes out. Just look at their EOL list sometime and see how many games barely a year and a half old have their MP killed by EA.
And EA can shove Origin right up their asses as far as I'm concerned because it isn't shit compared to Steam and I doubt it ever will be. the horror stories are already pouring in of people having trouble with it and then when they go to point out problems getting banhammered and LOSING THEIR GAMES which I've NEVER heard of Valve doing EVER, only of banning those that cheat with wallhacks and other MP ruining troll crap from the game they w
Can someone PLEASE tell me where the hidden setting is to block ACs, please? because I swear their fanboi bleating and flag waving must knock a good point or two off any IQ that dares to read their bullshit.
Newsflash: sandboxes WILL be broken and no matter how smart your precious Google is (which if you think running native code in a browser is just JavaScript can i have some of what you are smoking?) the malware guys are ALWAYS smarter, always. look at how badly Google has gotten assraped in Android market with malware, everytime they think they have a handle on it something new comes out and stomps them down again.
In the end just like JavaScript you are talking about running third party untrusted code and hoping the sandbox holds which we've seen time and time again is a BAD assumption to make. Even with all the testing JavaScript STILL gets "JavaScript malware o' the day" yet you think that running native code on top of that is SAFER? I'm sorry but if you were any more full of shit your post would smell like a porta-potty in July.
They should embrace the valve model, especially since they don't have to deal with retail packaging, shipping, returns, etc and make it cheap, easy and convenient. I mean does anybody know how much money went through steam on the Xmas sale? i bet it was garbage trucks just full of money because its so simple and cheap, just "whip out CC, push button, get game'. The problem with "call of honor crysis edition" style games is the publishers have deliberately made their games to have no legs as everyone knows once "call of honor crysis edition II" comes out nobody will be playing the first one and since they are appealing to the "must win teh benches!" tards who frankly spend every last dime they can get on supercoolers for their massive OCs they simply don't spend $60 a pop on games that will be tossed next quarter.
Make it follow the valve model, give the game some real legs, and frankly they'll never have to give a wet fart what the benches tards do because that single game can be making them money year after year AFTER year. I mean how old is HL: Deathmatch now? valve was nice enough to throw it in for the fuck of it with the complete HL:2 pack I picked up on the sale and that thing STILL has tons of people playing it. They are also still selling and making cash on CS and Day of defeat and those things are older than dirt yet because they have legs they are still full of players.
I want to feel sorry for them but its kinda hard when you pick up the game in the $30 bin and find its deserted or worse EA has pulled the plug on MP which i think ought to at least force EA to put out a sticker to be placed on boxes saying MP doesn't work anymore. If they let folks host their own servers more and threw out the occasional update with a new map here or there for the older games then the long tail on sales would mean the benchtards could be ignored. Gabe had it right IMHO when he said to the effect "piracy is your competitor offering a better product" because that means the price is too high, the game doesn't have long enough legs, you simply aren't hitting the sweet spot. Now if you'll excuse me there is this one little shit in HL:DM that keeps jamming a rocket up my ass and i think I'm gonna introduce him to Mr Python. Kinda sad though when i've had more fun with a 10 year old game than I did the last "call of honor crysis edition" I played.
Funny as I actually was given Vista as a beta tester and ended up giving it away as i could not STAND the bloated POS and instead stayed with XP x64 (which is still a damned nice OS BTW, my youngest is still running it, solid as a rock) until Oct 09 when Win 7 went OEM. I agree that Win 7 does rock as everytime I'm forced to use XP I feel like I'm back on Win98, man I miss jumplists and breadcrumbs and libraries. That don't change the fact though that MSFT could have ended OS piracy in the west with the $50 HP upgrade and I wonder if we'll see the same upsurge and if they'll do a similar deal with Windows 8 which frankly i think makes Vista look good. I mean who the fuck wants a tablet OS on their desktop? One of my customers said it best when she said "That's nice, is that Android? i've heard of that....what do you mean Windows? Windows what? Well that's just stupid! Why would I want a cell phone on my PC?"
What's sad is just like with DVD-Rs and and MP3 players the *.A.A are gonna have to be drug kicking and screaming to the MONEY TROUGH because as we saw with everything from VCRs to digital recorders the *.A.A ended up making MORE bank and having a BETTER year than before when they quit dragging their heels. If they would embrace the Valve model, make it cheap, easy, and convenient they would find that just as valve is making obscene levels of money and bringing game publishers tons of customers that humans follow the path of least resistance and if you make it easy and cheap enough folks will buy instead of pirate. Take myself and my own family for instance, the Steam sale had so many bargains that myself and my boys ended up with something like 20 games a piece simply because it was so easy. Even games I had once upon a time pirated i ended up buying on steam because it was cheaper and easier than messing with cracks and digging out install discs, it was all "push button and get game" and the sale and chance to win prizes (which my little one ended up winning 4 games in 4 days, i swear the little twerp won more than he spent this year, we gotta get him picking numbers for powerball!) just made whipping out the CC all the easier to justify. Everything is in one place, its always patched and updated, hell it even takes care of my GPU drivers so i don't have to look for updates anymore.
If both MSFT and the *.A.A just accept what valve accepted years ago that while you'll never completely eliminate piracy you CAN convert a huge number into paying customers simply by finding the right price and making it simple to pay i'm sure both would be posting record profits right now. Selling a $50 Win HP or even a $35 Win 7 starter wouldn't affect their OEM sales as people who buy OEMs sure as hell aren't installing their OS but it WOULD make the price low enough to drag all those pirates into the fold while at the same time eliminating what has been a giant embarrassment for MSFT, the zombie which I've found is usually a pirated box that hasn't been patched in years. The same can be applied to the *.A.A which is they were selling at a quarter or even a dime a song would wipe out piracy overnight just as the MPAA could eliminate movie piracy by simply selling .AVIs of all the older movies at a couple of bucks a pop. None of these draconian laws have EVER affected pirates, it just makes things worse for paying customers and I'd argue drives more to piracy simply because the other options suck ass. Like Wil Wheaton complained about when he bought some Doctor Who episodes off of Amazon and then found they wouldn't work when he crossed a border "If I had just went to TPB I'd be watching Doctor Who right now".
How so? While there can be disputes as to his overall character what happened with the electric chair and his frying animals using AC to "prove" it was a menace is well documented, most by Edison's own hand in fact. There is NO dispute the electric Chair was Edison, there is NO dispute he fried several animals including an elephant (there is even pictures to document that) and there is NO dispute that Edison long after everyone else realized that DC wouldn't scale was pushing for neighborhood generators rather than admit that it would take AC to power something the size of New York. IIRC there are still a couple of places in Boston and NYC where power is converted to DC because they were some of the original blocks set up by ConEd to run on neighborhood generators.
Nobody is saying the man wasn't brilliant, nobody is saying he didn't change the world as we know it, its simply pointing out that he was neither saint nor sinner and at his core he was no different than Jobs or Gates or Ellison, a ruthless businessman that had NO problem with doing something nasty to further his own goals. How would YOU explain away or condone slowing roasting a man alive, to the point his flesh literally begins to smolder and which one witness said "Would have been more humane to have taken an axe to him" simply to "prove" that a rival's design was too dangerous for the home? If that ain't ruthless frankly I don't know what would qualify for that title.
Won't happen and here is why: For Linux to become a top notch world class desktop OS millions, more likely hundreds of millions, will have to be spent getting rid of the itch scratching and making it all a seamless cohesive unit and that is not only never gonna happen because with GPL its damned near impossible to build on top of and charge money for the product itself (as RH found out desktop users generally don't buy support contracts) and because the community would fight it tooth and nail every step of the way because they would consider it "dumbing down for the noobs" like being a PITA is a badge of honor or something.
The best way to understand a thing IMHO is to look at its core so what IS Linux, what is its design and function? Well at its heart its a whole bunch of different smaller applications designed to pass text between each other using pipes simply because there are so many different groups working on so many different things pipes is the one "universal language' they can all agree on. Now this design works great in servers where you have guys paid good money to learn and understand the language but folks have to remember the consumer is NOT a geek, will NEVER be a geek, have NO desire to learn your geek languages or customs, in short they have about as much in common as a current Linux desktop user as your backyard has in common with Europa.
It would take a complete tossing out of the current way of doing things and a HEAVILY user centric approach replacing it for Linux to suddenly be able to take on OSX and WinX as equals. Either a 10 year cycle would have to be adopted or a hardware ABI (Which Torvalds has made it clear won't be happening until he retires) brought in to fix the driver issues so little Suzy doesn't have hunt forums when Torvalds latest kernel tweak screws up her printer, you would have to have something like Apple or MSFT's GUI guidelines adopted across the entire ecosystem with STRICT enforcement rules and you would have to depreciate the living hell out of CLI to the point that like on Windows its buried in the back and never used by anybody anymore. hell the last couple of years HP sold Windows Home machines many were sold without even access to CLI because someone had deleted it by accident off the disc images and nobody even noticed that its access from the GUI was completely gone.
To do these changes would frankly take away what many in the community like which is the ability to strip, fiddle, and hot rod the OS down to the lowest level to their heart's content. Let's face it folks a lot of what comes out of the linux community can be boiled down to some developer not liking what was available and scratching a personal itch which is fine and dandy but software developers are NOT designers of good GUIs and frankly never will be. You'd either have a GUI heavy "one size fits all" ala Apple or a VERY limited number of choices like Home, Workstation, Server, and embedded ala the MSFT way and that just goes against the grain for the community as it stands. that is why the ONLY gains you have seen is in places like Android where some corporation simply takes Linux away from the community and enforces its own rules. After all what IS Android? Its all GUI, no CLI, clicky clicky easy peasy with a very strictly controlled underpinning that costs Google close to a billion a year last I had heard. I just don't see any corporation spending that kind of money on a Linux desktop nor the community embracing it.
Uhhh...because no matter how smart Google engineers THINK they are the malware writers are smarter? As the first poster said look at the history of ActiveX. When it first came out it was like a Godsend, an easy to use way to just host an app on your server and have ALL the branches instantly have access to it or to do the same for your customers. No rollout headaches or compatibility problems it all "just worked" but before you could say "Oh shit!" every malware writer and his cat and his cat's squeaky toy figured out how to get around the security and use it as a one stop malware drop. MSFT spent something like 4 years trying to plug the holes but it was like whack a mole.
Personally I really really REALLY don't want native code running on my browser, thanks ever so. sandboxes can and have been broken out of and its just too risky a vector IMHO. While they've had a few sharp ideas (if anyone hasn't tried it chrome remote desktop makes taking control of a system for support work pretty damned simple) I really don't think this is the brightest idea they've had. I suppose we shall see but I wouldn't be surprised if the malware guys figure out how to jump out the sandbox just like they figured out how to get past FF's XSS protection and then this will be all kinds of nasty, especially on older systems that may not have all their patches up to date.
Yep, try Memphis, its combat driving central, although Dallas/Houston is worse. LR is actually pleasant, folks will let you in if you signal but Memphis you might as well not bother as nobody cares. It always seemed like in TX they went out of their way to be assholes though, you had to charge and gun it to get anywhere at all, whereas Memphis they honestly just don't pay attention to shit. And if you want to get anywhere this year avoid MS as I swear its like old person with a hat central down there. you don't know slow until you get old guy in a hat or blue hair lady whose so short all you see is knuckles and the beehive, man you could walk faster. Nicest place i found was the Ozarks up around Branson, plenty of passing lanes, slow cars stay right, people let you pass, nice smooth roads.
But will it detect crap in the road, or potholes that could bury a dog? Because sometimes you NEED to drift if you are on a poorly maintained road and there isn't any traffic, better to drift and avoid the giant potholes or blown semi tire pieces than end up with a blow out or screwed front end alignment.