Lets be honest folks we ALL know what is causing this, hell its the same thing that is causing the drop in GPL code we saw posted here a little while back, and that is this: RMS went too damned far with GPL V3 and this is the backlash. With GPL V1 and V2 there were big enough loopholes that a corporation wouldn't feel directly threatened for using it, but with GPL V3 RMS might as well have sent a Goatse to every corporation on the planet with a note saying "Here is what i think of capitalist pigs!".
Personally i think RMS went too far and the GPL has had it. The MPL, AGPL, BSD, one of the other licenses out there that doesn't fling shit at companies will end up taking over and RMS can go play in a corner somewhere with his "pure' Loongson ARM netbook and I think that's a good and healthy thing. Isn't that what's supposed to happen in FOSS land when something goes the way the majority don't agree in, it forks? That is what we are seeing here as developers don't seem to have the seething hatred for companies that RMS has since they are the ones paying their bills and all. So i personally believe we'll see GPL V3 go the way of the 8 track and after this backlash is over we'll see another permissive license become number one, personally I'd bet on Apache or MPL but there are several that wouldn't give the bird to companies while still giving the people access to the code.
The you sir are what I call one of the "lucky bastards' whom caffeine doesn't affect. My youngest is like that, he can drink cokes all week and then not touch one for a month, no side effects. my oldest on the other hand when he misses his daily caffeine is seriously hurting with a MAJOR skullthumper. I've had him come in between classes at the college and go "Man i forgot my coke and spent all my money on gas, can i have a coke and a BC?".
For those that get the caffeine headaches? BC Powders ALWAYS have some. its a 50/50 mix of caffeine and aspirin and kills the caffeine headsplitter but quick. Now once a month I go and get the 50 pack from the Wally world and split them up among the family that way if anybody misses their caffeine or gets a skullthumper they're set.
The sad part is how many don't actually know that Narconon is CoS, Hey Anon? THAT is what you need to be spreading the word about okay? We used to have a local judge that would sentence people to Narconon until I waited outside his courtroom (it helped that my family knows his family) and I told him "Judge you DO realize you are giving money to the church of Scientology, right?" being church of Christ needless to say he was NOT happy about that news, but he had honestly thought it was just a drug version of AA.
So if there is ANY good that could come from the Anons i'd say it was this: PLEASE use your podium to spread the word that Narconon is NOT AA, okay? You've gotten enough press that you can get the word out and if you did we might get judges across the country to stop sentencing people to them thinking its an offshoot of AA.
Then you just don't know where to look friend as i haven't seen any of the AMD netbooks coming with starter, they all come with HP. i just got finished setting up a C series for a customer, nice little Acer Aspire and it came with 250gb HDD and 2gb of RAM along with Win 7 HP X64, in fact damned near all the AMD netbooks come with Win 7 X64 so you can go up to 8Gb of RAM like I did in my EEE. MSFT put the 2gb limit in starter because their old friends at Intel was scared netbooks would cut into their Celeron business but since AMD don't cripple their chips the OEMs have been using HP X64.
So you just need to look at something besides Intel friend, Intel don't want you buying netbooks in the first place and only got into the biz after AMD gave the OLPC the Geode chip and people started asking about that "cute baby laptop'. Funny that to this very day that is what all my customers call netbooks, cute baby laptops. But I'd suggest if you don't want a 2gb RAM limit you look at the EEE or Acer Aspires as both have AMD units that will hold 4Gb and the EEE holds 8Gb. Since the price difference between 4Gb and 8Gb was only $6 I splurged and went 8Gb on my EEE and couldn't be happier, superfetch really screams with that much RAM to play with and all my apps run instantly thanks to running in RAM. Oh and for those that like playing with VMs the AMD netbooks have VT support so you can have hardware supported VMs which makes them run that much nicer.
Geez are the mods stoned? insightful for a "Microsoft burns babies ZOMFG!" post? FYI it didn't have a damned thing to do with Microsoft it was INTEL that put the limits on Atom to keep it from competing with their more profitable Celeron. if it had a damned thing to do with MSFT you wouldn't be able to buy 10 and 12 inch AMD netbooks that hold 4-8Gb of RAM which I can tell you first hand you can. my EEE 1215b has the E series APU and has 8Gb of RAM and it came with win 7 HP instead of the low end starter, and that with a 320Gb HDD was only $350 pre flood and is about $430 now. So in this case you are blaming the wrong guy chuck, MSFT killed XP because it is a fricking decade old and is just too damned long in the tooth to continue patching the thing (what are they up to now, something like 5000 patches counting the service packs?) and Intel pre-cripples the atom to keep from damaging more profitable markets. Buy AMD if you want a netbook that isn't crippled and has full support for VMs and plenty of RAM.
As for ARM? Its making money hand over fist because its disposable, nothing more. How many have multiple cell phones sitting in a drawer? my family probably has like 30 of the things piled in a drawer like old socks. You get a new one with contract, old one goes in junk drawer. But ARM won't replace x86 simply because there is millions of x86 programs people want to run and when you need to get real work done you can't beat x86 on performance without destroying the only advantage ARM has which is its ULV power sipping. Make an ARM CPU that performs even at the level of a first gen Core2Quad or Phenom and watch the power skyrocket as the arch simply was never designed to crank out the kind of FLOPs you get on x86. Folks have simply slowed down on buying X86 as unlike ARM they don't shitcan the unit every 2 years, that's all. Hell I got rid of my big power hungry laptop for the EEE simply because i found when i'm mobile even the Bobcat APU is more power than i really need, so why should folks go out and buy the new 8 cores when they aren't even stressing their dual cores? Hell I bought the Thuban 6 core when i found out they quit making 'em just so I could have my board maxed out, but did i need it? Nope my quad was frankly overpowered to begin with and in this new build I gave my GF will be insanely overpowered for anything she can think up.
ARM will continue to sell as long as carriers pass them out like candy and there are people that still haven't gotten a tablet that wants one. Give it a few more years and ARM will be just as overpowered and over-saturated as X86 is now and then watch the market take a nosedive. Hell I wouldn't be surprised if a third of the ARM business now isn't the carriers passing out smartphones like the bank hands out suckers simply because they make out like bandits on data plans. However once we are down to only a couple of carriers and they just collude instead of compete that will be over and the free phones will go the way of free checking. But saying ARM is gonna kill x86 is like saying mopeds are gonna kill the trucking industry, its just THAT delusional.
Am I the only one that misses old twitter? sure he was batshit but he was a damned entertaining kind of batshit. I mean you could have a post on shoes and within a single paragraph he could twist that into a plot by Bill Gates and the Illuminati to destroy FOSS that would ALMOST make fridge logic. Sadly all we get now is fangirls and C list trolls that wouldn't qualify to read old twitter's posts, no style, no class, just "nigger faggot" aka "Shill astroturfer' thrown around at everyone that doesn't drink whatever koolaid the poster finds refreshing, no skill or artistry involved at all.
As for TFA bye bye GoDaddy you won't be missed. Reminds me of the douche that told Gabe at pennyarcade to go fuck himself and is now writing real nice apologies that end with "please make it stop!". Well GoDaddy is finding out the hard way the web can bring the pain when you stand up for douchebaggery like SOPA. I bet the braintrust that announced their support is SO fired right now. Won't matter though as domain hosting is a nerd's job and nerds don't like SOPA so their ass is grass. Hell they might as well have put "We think all nerds should eat shit and die and RMS is a filthy hippie that should be dumped in the nearest garbage truck" on their front page and probably would have done less damage to their business than what they did. Stupid move GoDaddy but what do you expect from a company that hires Joan Rivers to sell domain hosting.
Yeah try it buddy and see how that skullsplitter feels. i know that if i don't have my 3 cokes a day here comes the pain, it feels like a hammer slammed into my head right between the eyes. My GF quit for ages until she hooked up with me but the first weekend she stayed over and all I had was cokes and coffee got her hooked again. Now when we do our morning chat before she goes to work I have to give her time to go get her morning cup doctored because she just can't function without her coffee anymore than I can without my cokes. Caffeine is a bitch, just try quitting cold turkey and see!
As someone who has lost a couple of kinfolks to diseases where medical futility came into play, including a sister at just 36, I can see why they would rather just let it go. I've seen first hand there is a difference between prolonging life and prolonging death and frankly I'd rather just be given some painkillers and spend my last days comfortable than end up sick as a dog from chemo and radiation that isn't gonna do anything but prolong the sickness. if you get 50/50 odds or better that's one thing, but a lot of those illnesses (think pancreatic cancer) you are only increasing your 5 year survival odds from 5% to 10% and are gonna feel like death the entire time. No thanks.
The problem is it WILL be a disaster but not for the reasons people think of, it'll be the flyover states that cause the disaster. Frankly the pay for IT in right to work states is so damned bad nobody bothers learning more than the bare minimum and the corps sure as fuck aren't gonna pay for courses on their dime, so you have poorly trained worker with zero incentive to learn this new tech. Add to this the shitty pay and even shittier hours have caused most of the older guys like myself to run to the hills and get away from the bullshit equals a perfect storm where the old guys that could have picked it up easily are gone and the new guys hate their jobs and are doing the bare minimum until they can find another line of work.
So my prediction is while the coasts will work everything in between will rapidly fall apart. problems that would have taken an hour or two under IPV4 and which will take the same time under IPV6 on the coasts will take days or weeks simply because the skilled manpower isn't there and frankly won't be forthcoming because corps have screwed IT so badly here nobody is taking the courses anymore. My local college is thinking about dropping the IT related courses simply because everyone is in medical or law, nobody is bothering with IT as its seen as a dead end. Basically the corps made the bed but we're all gonna get to lie in it when everything that has to cross the flyover states goes to shit. Hell I called my local ISPs the other day and even their tech guys didn't know jack shit about IPV6 nor could they give me a timetable, NOT a good sign folks and talking to friends in neighboring states they are hearing the same thing.
Wow reading comprehension not taught to ACs huh? If someone could tell me where the hidden setting is to block ACs I'd be grateful as I must lose an IQ point every time I deal with one. As to answer your question if you would have bothered reading the parent post I was responding to he said "There has been a sub $200 tablet on the market, its called the Kindle and they lose money on every unit" implying that there simply is no way to have a functional unit at that price point without taking a bath. I of course pointed out that Kindle was never designed to make money, it was designed to push Ebooks because Amazon makes an incredible profit from Ebooks so losing a few bucks on kindle units means nothing. Last i heard the sale of just three books puts kindle into the black and everything after 4 is pure profit. With numbers like that personally i'm shocked Amazon doesn't go lower, i'd drop the price to the point where it took 5 books to break even because what good is an Ereader without books?
next time try reading the parent before jumping in okay? The new layout makes it beyond simple to follow a conversation back to the parent where you would have easily seen that your post was completely pointless in the context of the thread. nobody said the kindle was a bad unit, simply that it followed the razor and blades model instead of the retail model which means it, like your post, was pointless when discussing sub $200 tablets.
The problem with ARM MR AC is the same problem that has left Linux in last place, which is this: There is ALWAYS something, some program which there is simply no equivalent that is a must have. With businesses its all those one off and small company apps, everything from inventory to medical billing, and of course Quickbooks is god for a reason, its so easy it lets a single QB girl (and its ALWAYS a girl, i swear you'd think they had a union or something) run an entire SMB, everything from payroll to taxes, with just a single PC. On the home side there is games, the app that came with their printers, the lack of drivers for said printers and other gear, its ALWAYS something. That's why MSFT hasn't had to change its $100 price tag in 30 damned years, because they know folks ain't going nowhere.
I'd say what Intel needs to be worrying about is AMD in the consumer and mainstream market because lets face it, the "Must win teh benches!" types are an itty bitty portion of the market and for the vast majority PCs have gone past good enough and into insanely overpowered by now. Hell my 71 year old dad has a fricking quad! Does he need a quad? Oh hell no but AMD quads were so cheap that there wasn't any point going dual.
Which brings us to TFA and where Intel royally fucked up, and that was cutting off Nvidia to the point Nvidia bailed from the chipset market. For those that don't know Nvidia is now out of the chipset biz, all they are selling is old designs for as long as somebody will pay for them. that means no ION 3, no new features, hell most Nvidia boards won't even support NCQ which means your losing about 30% performance on an HDD. What Intel needs to worry about with Atom isn't ARM but those nice and cheap AMD E series which frankly have been selling out so fast AMD killed the entire AM3 line two quarters early so they could devote the fabs to cranking Bobcats. As someone who bought a EEE E-350 I can see why they are selling out, 6 hours on a battery watching full HD, doesn't get hot even under load, and with enough power i use mine as a portable music creation studio with Audacity. Intel never has figured out how to make truly kick ass GPUs and with AMD integrating ATI into APUs you get frankly insane levels of power for cheap money. I just finished setting up a C series for a customer and frankly it spanks the hell out of the Atom units and has enough power i was able to remote in using Remote Assistance to do the final tweaks while she sat at home. All that for $300 with Win 7 HP instead of crappy starter like you get on atom netbooks? Yeah Intel should worry.
Go to Tiger and look up the E-350 and see how the OEMs have gone nuts with AMD chips (now that Intel can't bribe them anymore) and have slapped E series into everything, they have HTPCs, netbooks, laptops, and all in ones ALL using the E series chips. Intel screwed themselves both by crippling Atom for fear of losing Celeron sales and by killing the Nvidia chipset business which ION was the only thing that made Atom units worth having. Personally I wouldn't be surprised if Intel kills atom within a year and a half and just uses it for embedded while having Celeron try to fill the gap because trying some of the newer chips (last one I tried was the 525) frankly without ION its painfully slow to use. Stupid move Intel, you should have welcomed Nvidia instead of attacking them.
The Kindle was NEVER made to make money on the unit, it was clear from the start Amazon was going for the razor and blades model because they make out like a damned bandit on Ebooks. If one wanted to go that route with a tablet one clearly could but i believe that by shopping around and doing as Cook did (which i give that man credit, it was a brilliant move) and locking in chips at a set price point one could easily make a profitable sub $200 tablet with decent performance. i mean Asus was selling E-350 12 inch EEEs for just $300 before the flood and making money on every single unit so I don't see why changing the screen to resistive would raise the price above $350 while keeping the same profit margins. BTW the EEE series now comes with Expressgate built in which actually has a nice appstore and ebook sales and reader so i have no doubt Asus is not only making profits on the unit but on sale of games and books as well.
In the end though American companies are just too greedy. Look at Lenovo which has made money year after year on the business IBM threw away, or how the last CEO of HP wanted to get rid of the #1 selling PC division because it was making "only" 7% profits. If you are moving a hell of a lot of merchandise that 7% profit can still be a seriously fat number and even on smaller sales you are making a good steady income. But just as so many companies destroyed themselves in the 70s by ignoring good markets to try to beat IBM at its own game so too are companies lining up to shoot themselves in the head dreaming of iMoney just like all these idiot game publishers that try to beat Warcraft and end up going tits up. In the end there can only be one Apple and they have spent 30 years building themselves up to be the Prada of home electronics and I don't care how good the specs are competing with Apple at the same price point is suicide. to use a/. car analogy it would be like Ford thinking they could compete with Ferrari by putting out a souped up Mustang at the Ferrari price point. Stupid is as stupid does I suppose and its pretty clear that if any of the HP board had an original thought they would probably have their head explode.
Uhhh...I don't know where you got your data but your post is incorrect. OS/2 wasn't broken by win 3.X it was simply the fact that as part of the original deal IBM had the right to Win16 and when Win32 came along they refused to pay the license fee for it and thus was trapped in a dead end. I mean seriously who thought that 16 bit was gonna last as long as 8 bit did with the clones and the rapidly dropping price of chips? IBM thought they could sell it just by having the name IBM on it, just as they thought they could stick by the cheaper 286 chip and charge full price which left a door as wide as Texas for Compaq to roll out 386 clones and slaughter them.
As for "do no evil" frankly it amazes the shit out of me how otherwise rational geeks actually believed that horseshit. Do they think apple "thinks different" as well? its a slogan folks, its marketing. Google does WHAT'S BEST FOR GOOGLE and if that fits your definition of good fine and dandy, if it don't? tough shit. I don't see them opening up GoogleFS or big Tables or anything else that might give a competitor an advantage nor did I see anyone but an eye when one of the Android developers tweeted "Android is open (for the OEMs)" implying quite clearly that whether its open for the users or not is not a big concern.
In the end these companies are neither "good" nor "evil" (Well Halliburton and Goldman Sachs notwithstanding of course) as they are just creations to maximise shareholder value and make money. if that fits someone's model of good or evil more power to 'em but I doubt VERY seriously you'd see Google throw away a multibillion dollar deal because it didn't fit their little slogan.
Lets not forget the check MSFT cut to Apple. Sure it wasn't much but the main thing it did along with promising to keep writing software for Apple was it calmed spooked investors who said "Well if Microsoft thinks there is money to be made there, maybe they know something we don't?" but in the end it was as you say an excuse to keep from painting a big bullseye on its back. Just as i have no doubt if AMD wouldn't have started picking up and selling out of chips Intel would have found some way to keep them afloat as a low cost CPU vendor if nothing else to also keep from getting branded a monopoly.
But on the Google deal i think you are wrong and here is why: To improve their services Bing needs two things 1.- Lots of data from searches so they can tweak their search algorithms and 2.-plenty of eyeballs giving them feedback and using their product so they can learn what works and what don't. Now Google don't want MSFT getting that from Firefox if they can help it and even with their lowering by the quarters numbers there is a HELL of a lot of eyeballs using FF, so they paid through the nose rather than let a competitor have it. This is the same reason why MSFT paid for the rights to yahoo's search as a huge amount of the public users Yahoo portal as their home page and use yahoo mail and that gives them more eyeballs to use their engine and to sell ads to.
In the end it was just a good business decision, nothing more. I just wish they would have had the balls to cut the "making the web a better place" crap and just said "We make money from searches, Firefox brings us users, what's to understand?" and left it at that. Personally I'd be more likely to use their search instead of yahoo if they would have just been honest about it.
I think the problem is everyone is dreaming of iMoney and thus making them overpowered and thus expensive. I mean think about it, what does the typical consumer do with a pad? They check their email, play Angry birds, and watch video. Now the video could be easily taken care of with a broadcom chip which is cheap, especially when you are buying in bulk, I doubt Angry birds is that big of a CPU hog, and email and webpages aren't gonna need much if you disallow flash support.
So I don't see why someone couldn't make a really nice tablet in the $180-$200 price range and make around $10-$15 a unit on them. A dualcore ARM CPU in the 1GHz range isn't that high and resistive will work fine for the screen as long as the OS is tweaked for it instead of just using a vanilla OS unoptimized for the platform like many are doing with android now. So while $100 might not be doable I don't see why sub $200 while still doing the tasks folks want a tablet for couldn't be achieved.
Personally i thought Dell had the right idea with that convertible netbook/tablet but screwed up with the choice of chip and the price which was too high for an atom based unit. Make it an AMD E-50 so it has enough power to do 1080P over HDMI, it'll also play games and even let them run their Windows programs, and price it for around $350 and the things would sell like hotcakes. Sadly american companies have all looked at Apple and see iMoney and frankly just won't accept 5%-8% profits on sales anymore as they all want to be Apple and make mounds of iCash anymore. But there is only one Apple and if this past year and a half has proved anything its that if you set your price equal or better than the iPad people will go with the more recognized brand. But if they were to target the masses with a machine that's "good enough" at the right price point there isn't any reason they can't make good steady profits year after year.
Then explain the KDELook bug Pug, which was there for over a year unnoticed? or the Quake bug? your logic fails as you automatically assume that because someone CAN do something that means it DOES get done, which just the two above bugs proves is total horseshit. And reverse engineering for security research is quite legal friend, don't know where you got your info but all the major AV firms do that 5 days a week and nobody says squat. Hell it was Russinovich at MSFT Research that came up with the info on the Sony rootkits and published exactly how it worked by reverse engineering and i didn't see anybody knocking on his door.
But frankly all this flag waving and fangirl horseshit really doesn't surprise me anymore, mikey 400 accounts is right that/. = stagnated. Hell they might as well change the name to boycott Novell for all the FOSSie trollbait bullshit they post here now. Lets be honest a minute, okay? your OS has less users than JavaME, a shitty cell phone OS used by Fred's on $10 phones. No how many top shelf researchers and programmers are bothering to ON THEIR OWN TIME look through millions of lines of code for a hidden bug? Not to mention the "Whose watching the watchers" problem of hidden code in the compiler could make any inspection shit so you'll have to write your own compiler while you're at it. I stand by my statement as the above bugs and the hacks Linux has seen lately (which I'll be happy to link to BTW, I could wallpaper the page with them if you wish) shows that just because you have the code don't make it a damned bit safer or more secure than anything else.
Wow, shows how badly broken the slashdot mod system is when an obviously OT LinTroll is modded +5. Can we have a button to just mark fanbois or something please?
As for your "point" Mr LinTroll that is the reason why linux isn't getting any better, its all itch scratching because nobody will invest the money required to make it a world class desktop that can keep up with OSX and Windows. Hell has Canonical even made a dime yet? Its been what? 6 years now? And 20 years of Linux as an OS and the numbers are still this bad? I mean when you give a product away for free and can't even beat shitty JavaME that is pretty damned sad, but its understandable as i can wallpaper this page with links from major OEMs and retailers that tried Linux and ran away because it was unstable, drivers breaking pretty much every time the upgrade deathmarch rolled around, and a community that answers every problem with works for me no no seriously it does! well what can you expect? No money means no direction, no focus, all itch scratching all the time.
Now as for TFA they like pretty much everyone else that sells code online should be taking a lesson from Valve and adopting the short period sale model. you'd be surprised how many games that I was sitting on a fence over I bought during the Steam sale, i even threw more money in my account so me and the boys can do more snatching on the Steam sale. By having short period sales you take away that indecision because you can justify it as "Meh it was on sale" so even if you don't care for it later it doesn't bother you. hell i bought Kane & Lynch II, which is widely panned as worst game of the year, simply because someone had in new in box for a dollar and I figured "Well for a buck I can MST3K the thing and get a buck's worth of entertainment out of it". BTW for those that want to MST3K a game? do NOT choose K&L II as it isn't even worth MSTing, pick "You Are Empty" instead as it at least has 30 foot mutant attack chickens. K&L II would have been an alright game if the moron who designed the gun didn't make them so inaccurate that you have to stick the barrel to the guys chest to score a guaranteed kill. What idiot thought a 12 guage slug doesn't travel 6 feet in a straight line?
But you can have short period sales and fix the buyer's remorse quite easily. there is nothing the human animal loves more than getting a deal on something, even if its crap they can't use. Just look at Black Friday for an example where normal people went total apeshit for tech crap that frankly in most cases wasn't priced that well to start with. I told my dad to wait a week and sure enough i found him a nice AMD netbook for his GF for $25 cheaper than anybody had it on BF, yet on BF they sold out within minutes! Attach the word sale and watch the units go.
"Everyone go to hell except cave 76!" sorry to steal from Mel Brooks but fanbois like you just make me think of that bit. Frankly ARM sucks on instructions per cycle and simply can't do the amount of work even a CULV Intel or AMD chip can without blowing their power advantage all to shit. That is why you don't see anybody in the top 10 supercomputers running ARM chips, its a cell phone and embedded chip and simply wasn't built for real performance.
X86 frankly stomps ARM in performance, ARM stomps X86 when all you care about is power consumption like in say a smartphone. Personally I like the way AMD is going about it with Bobcat where you use a simpler X86 core paired with a more powerful GPU but since i use and work with media a lot maybe that's just me. But thinking ARM is gonna take over the world is frankly more than a little delusional as by the time you ramp it up to the level of performance of even a Core2Quad or Phenom II you've blown any advantage you had for running ARM in the first place.
Finally if you think desktops and laptops are going anywhere I have a lovely bridge you may be interested in. The reason PC sales have slowed is actually quite simple and doesn't have a damned thing to do with ARM, it has to do with the fact that X86 chips have become so insanely overpowered that they passed "good enough" for the jobs the masses have several years ago and people have more computers than they can use. In my own family we are up to 6 desktops and 3 laptops for a family of four, my boys are playing games on Pentium D desktops and with a $50 HD4850 a piece they are able to play at 1600x900 (native for their 20 inchers) and still have plenty of purty, so why buy new machines? ARM sells because its a disposable unit and if you don't believe that just ask around and see how many people you know have drawers full of old cell phones. Contract is up, old phone is shitcanned and new phone is used. It doesn't have a damned thing to do with advancements of ARM and everything to do with carrier contracts.
TL:DR? ARM is for cell phones and embedded, x86 is for desktop and laptops and servers that have to do lots of number crunching. If you think ARM has a chance in hell of getting rid of x86 you are totally batshit but if Intel can get the power low enough X86 could easily trump ARM on performance.
Conservative political blog would be perfect for that, hell that was what i thought it was the first time i heard it. my question is what is keeping them from just starting a new company and trolling all over again? After all if they have incorporated they can just walk away, let the shell burn and start another. we all know this was Stephens media's little proxy so what is gonna keep Stephens from just doing it again? keep some lawyers on retainer and you have the perfect SLAPP weapon, just keep trolling and if you make money fine, if you don't you'll still scare many people from using anything that has ever been on a Stephens website for fear of being dragged into court. After all if they win its not like they're gonna get squat and I bet the poor guy that won never even covers his court costs.
Personally I'd be glad if Slashdot would quit putting trollbait on the front page. Hell they might as well put on trollface for the icon and U Mad bro? for the tag. This is no different than " Will (insert Linux distro or FOSS in general) have a (insert massive fail or massive success) in (insert position)" or "Microsoft (insert buys company, kicks puppies) and thereby (insert horrible scenario) for the (insert web, country, or FOSS)". All it is is designed to stir up shit, nothing more. There is a ton of software where there is NO FOSS equivalent, what are you gonna do tell the boss "Sorry i can't do my job, they don't make a free software for that" or not be able to get a job done simply because there is no FOSS that will do it?
Lets be honest folks, this is not only trollbait its horseshit. do you know how many researchers there are looking at every popular piece of software with a fine tooth comb to see what it does? hell look at when Sony and Real tried to hide nasty shit in their CDs and player respectively and look at how they were not only found out but the shit hit the fan with the net blasting the fuck out of them.
Finally its horseshit because there is maybe 0.01% of the users of FOSS software that actually have enough skills to read source code and make heads or tails of it and MAYBE 1/20th of those actually bother because they have shit to do. After all the code was right there for the KDELook bug, it was right there for that infected Quake that was on the repo for...what? like a year and a half? the ability to inspect the source means diddly squat unless some actually DOES it, and when you are talking the amount of LOC in just your average distro, much less the myriad of third party software bundled by said distros, you'd be lucky if your average program gets its code looked at by anybody other than the developers AT ALL. Quick, how many have looked at the code for the LO updater and can tell us with some authority EXACTLY what info is being sent? How many have studied Synaptic and can tell us with authority EXACTLY what its doing? thought so.
Just because you CAN do something doesn't mean it actually gets done you know. I'd say your odds are about the same when we are talking proprietary and FOSS as to whether anybody catches a hidden nasty in the millions of LOC we are talking about here.
The E-350 is on average 25% cheaper while getting 30% more performance so there really isn't a reason to go atom + ION anymore. Intel really slit their own throats by hamstringing Nvidia to the point they got out of the chipset business. For those that don't know there will be NO chipset updates from Nvidia, no new chips, what you see is what you get. nearly their entire line is so out of date they don't support NCQ which means you are slowing down your drives by using ION, as new versions of Windows come out I seriously doubt they'll be spending hardly any money on QA for a line that is dead so you are looking at no drivers or shoddy drivers, meanwhile the new AMD E-Series have Radeon 6310 chips with full support for decoding every popular format in use today.
So I'm sorry friend but atom is history for HTPCs. the ONLY reason they get any score at all is from rigging the benches with their ICC cripple code which as one reviewer on a new netbook I was looking at said "For some reason the Atom seems to score highly on the benches, better than the E-350, but real world usage just doesn't bear the numbers out" yeah that is because they might as well call the benches quack.exe for all the use they are now!
But the new AMD E-Series gives you more graphics power, more memory (Atom is usually limited to 2Gb or 4Gb by Intel to cripple it compared to Celeron while the AMD E-series supports 8Gb-16Gb) and an out of order CPU with VM support for less money. The only thing Atom is good for is those $60 bottom of the line boards that make okay office boxes, nothing more. ION thanks to Intel's cutting off Nvidia's access is a dead end system simply being sold for as long as someone will give them a buck for it, but no new investments in the platform will be made. its a dead end, not worth wasting money on.
That's the whole point of BASIC and TouchDevelop. You don't have to know about the APIs, libraries, and how to load all that stuff together so that you would actually get something done. The whole purpose is to be easy to use and something that can be used to quickly throw something together, without worrying about the details. This approach does come with limitations, but it doesn't matter.
Why the fuck did this guy get modded troll? Ya know the FOSSie fangirl BS really does get old. Its fricking operating systems NOT ball clubs okay? You fangirls remind me of that old Mel brooks bit "Let them all go to hell except cave 76 rah!" and is about as fricking useful.
FYI for those that don't wear Saint iGNUcious buttons what he is talking about is damned near 20 years old now, which is the windows way of programming VS the Unix way. with Windows its all about GUIs and letting the IDE take care of the low level stuff, with unix based you get a command prompt and a list of commands. BOTH have their places, BOTH have their strengths and weaknesses, in this case he is pointing out that for the target platform (touchphones) that the Windows way takes a lot of the work out of it for the programmer.
Man I miss the days when we could actually discuss things like costs VS benefits for various programming methods, file systems, designs, ya know actual tech shit? Now its nothing but ACs everywhere and more fangirls squeeing and squicking than at a fricking Justin Beiber concert. How fucking sad it is and how far/. has fallen when something as old and as well known as Windows VS Unix program design gets modded down because the fangirls can't fucking stand any post that has the word Microsoft in it unless its followed by "They burn babies and kill kittehs ZOMFG!". In the old days one would have pointed out that ease of use comes with an overhead cost and then there would have been a discussion on how much overhead and whether it was worth it, but not now, ooooh no. its all flag waving fangirl crap now.
Does anybody know where the actual geeks went so I can actually read insightful comments and intelligent discussions again? because i swear all the fangirls and flag waving is making my head hurt and I sure as fuck ain't learning anything here anymore.
Uhhh...I think Since Google has their own mobile OS in the game that kind of stunt would probably get the feds showing up demanding records for an antitrust investigation. That would be like hearing "To support freedom Microsoft has announced they will support the boycott of Apple with an update that makes sure that Windows isn't done unless iTunes don't run". Yeah i don't really think that would fly.
As for TFA, yeah that site might as well have a trollface icon and a tag that reads "U Mad Bro?" but lets cut through the bullshit and be honest okay? Apple has ALWAYS been dickish, its not like this is some amazing news, anymore than the revelation that the Ballmer monkey is a shitty CEO that goes through underarm deodorant like its going out of style, Gates plays the little nerd while being a truly vicious businessman, Larry Ellison IS a rich asshole, Torvalds cares more about itch scratching than stability and RMS is a militant. Seriously is there ANYONE who doesn't know these things? Its like saying Bozo the clown wears big shoes!
Jobs was a control freak, Jobs wanted Google DOA. He like Gates was a truly vicious competitor, total A personality and had no problem letting his lawyers off the chain. Now the new guy is simply copying the Jobs playbook like Ballmer would love nothing more than to be Gates with a bigger BMI. why is any of this shocking? Did you think Apple was a bunch of granola eating hippies wearing Birkenstocks and petting kittens? As the CEO of Commodore put it in the early 80s "business is war" and Apple is gonna do everything they can to crush any and all competitors. if you look at the list of companies they went after pretty much all the $500 tablets they went after because they know the iPad isn't competing with some $150 POS from China. And while i personally don't buy Apple because I've never liked the whole "one size fits all" and all the fashion design layouts being surprised at Apple being nasty is like being surprised when the sun shines or rain falls down instead of up.
I'm old enough to have actually been around for the birth of the PC (IBM 5150) and frankly Apple really wasn't any different back then, at least going back to when Woz left. I mean for the love of Pete way back then Jobs screwed Woz by lying to him on how much Atari gave them for a game and NOW you expect them to play nice? Sheesh.
Put a cablecard into any mATX case (there are several that look like TiVos) along with win 7 HP and tada! Easy Peasy. Windows media center frankly kicks ass as a DVR, I've been running my cable into it since Oct 09 and its as simple and easy as one can get. I can tell it to record a show or record a series with a single click, it automatically downloads two weeks worth of scheduling and keeps itself updated (I have mine set to 7AM, it turns the PC on from sleep, updates and then goes back to sleep) and makes it butt simple with homegroups to share with the rest of my machines.
So just do it yourself friend, it couldn't be simpler. modern boards come with fricking pictures so you don't even have to Habla English to put together a PC, there are plenty of nice mATX cases that are perfect for HTPCs, you can use one of the new AMD E-350 boards (which last I checked are like $90 from Newegg) if you want it ultra low power with hardware decode or for $10-$15 more depending on which HSF you choose you can get a Phenom I quad ( just go to Starmicro.net and pick one out) for $55 and an AM2+ board is beyond cheap. then just load it out any way you like with regards to RAM and HDD, hell if you don't mind a standard black case (I've built a couple of them and they look quite nice in a slot in the entertainment center and most of the customers i'd found would rather have more power than a baby case) you can go nuts and get a 6 core for $300 after rebate with everything you'll need and more than enough power to transcode any format you wish. You could even slap in a cheap refurb HD4830 or HD4850 along with the wireless X360 controller and make a pretty kick ass game machine. I have a customer that went that route and all his friends just drool when he fires up Batman:AA or Just Cause II on that fat 50 inch TV. Go DIY and you save a ton and can have it YOUR way with what YOU want.
As for TFA....uhhh....who cares? XBMC isn't going anywhere, and you also have MediaPortal and of course WMC to go along with it, so it isn't like we don't have a wealth of choices here. If anything I'd say its never been easier to go HTPC, there is a ton of software, you can get cases in any shape and style, if you stick with AMD you can get insane horsepower for dirt cheap, for those of us that want to use our PCs for TVs or DVRs life is good.
The sad part to me is the Jewish people are in the same boat we are and are pretty powerless to stop the ultra right Zionists anymore than we are able to stop the powermongering neocons because their media is likewise controlled.
I mean look at what is happening in the Repub race now that it looks like Paul might actually win a primary, the MSM are calling him everything but kiddie fiddler and I frankly wouldn't be surprised if he wins Iowa that they use that smear as well. I personally don't support many of his policies but i'll be the first to admit he was the only candidate that didn't come off as just another corporate shill. Oh and expect his votes to disappear in NH because its a Diebold state.
In the end the warmongers in Israel and the USA will just keep starting wars because killing brown people is not only profitable but it keeps everyone focused on the boogeyman of the week instead of the raiding of the countries money supply and assets by the money men. they'll keep it up until there is not another brown person they can kill because they have stolen everything that isn't nailed down and then they'll take their blood money and hope the last choppers out while the countries burn.
While I don't believe in God and the devil I DO believe in pure evil, vicious monsters that frankly wouldn't give a second thought to stomping babies if it furthered their agenda and sadly it looks like that is increasingly all we have in the corridors of power, truly evil malicious men.
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Lets be honest folks we ALL know what is causing this, hell its the same thing that is causing the drop in GPL code we saw posted here a little while back, and that is this: RMS went too damned far with GPL V3 and this is the backlash. With GPL V1 and V2 there were big enough loopholes that a corporation wouldn't feel directly threatened for using it, but with GPL V3 RMS might as well have sent a Goatse to every corporation on the planet with a note saying "Here is what i think of capitalist pigs!".
Personally i think RMS went too far and the GPL has had it. The MPL, AGPL, BSD, one of the other licenses out there that doesn't fling shit at companies will end up taking over and RMS can go play in a corner somewhere with his "pure' Loongson ARM netbook and I think that's a good and healthy thing. Isn't that what's supposed to happen in FOSS land when something goes the way the majority don't agree in, it forks? That is what we are seeing here as developers don't seem to have the seething hatred for companies that RMS has since they are the ones paying their bills and all. So i personally believe we'll see GPL V3 go the way of the 8 track and after this backlash is over we'll see another permissive license become number one, personally I'd bet on Apache or MPL but there are several that wouldn't give the bird to companies while still giving the people access to the code.
The you sir are what I call one of the "lucky bastards' whom caffeine doesn't affect. My youngest is like that, he can drink cokes all week and then not touch one for a month, no side effects. my oldest on the other hand when he misses his daily caffeine is seriously hurting with a MAJOR skullthumper. I've had him come in between classes at the college and go "Man i forgot my coke and spent all my money on gas, can i have a coke and a BC?".
For those that get the caffeine headaches? BC Powders ALWAYS have some. its a 50/50 mix of caffeine and aspirin and kills the caffeine headsplitter but quick. Now once a month I go and get the 50 pack from the Wally world and split them up among the family that way if anybody misses their caffeine or gets a skullthumper they're set.
The sad part is how many don't actually know that Narconon is CoS, Hey Anon? THAT is what you need to be spreading the word about okay? We used to have a local judge that would sentence people to Narconon until I waited outside his courtroom (it helped that my family knows his family) and I told him "Judge you DO realize you are giving money to the church of Scientology, right?" being church of Christ needless to say he was NOT happy about that news, but he had honestly thought it was just a drug version of AA.
So if there is ANY good that could come from the Anons i'd say it was this: PLEASE use your podium to spread the word that Narconon is NOT AA, okay? You've gotten enough press that you can get the word out and if you did we might get judges across the country to stop sentencing people to them thinking its an offshoot of AA.
Then you just don't know where to look friend as i haven't seen any of the AMD netbooks coming with starter, they all come with HP. i just got finished setting up a C series for a customer, nice little Acer Aspire and it came with 250gb HDD and 2gb of RAM along with Win 7 HP X64, in fact damned near all the AMD netbooks come with Win 7 X64 so you can go up to 8Gb of RAM like I did in my EEE. MSFT put the 2gb limit in starter because their old friends at Intel was scared netbooks would cut into their Celeron business but since AMD don't cripple their chips the OEMs have been using HP X64.
So you just need to look at something besides Intel friend, Intel don't want you buying netbooks in the first place and only got into the biz after AMD gave the OLPC the Geode chip and people started asking about that "cute baby laptop'. Funny that to this very day that is what all my customers call netbooks, cute baby laptops. But I'd suggest if you don't want a 2gb RAM limit you look at the EEE or Acer Aspires as both have AMD units that will hold 4Gb and the EEE holds 8Gb. Since the price difference between 4Gb and 8Gb was only $6 I splurged and went 8Gb on my EEE and couldn't be happier, superfetch really screams with that much RAM to play with and all my apps run instantly thanks to running in RAM. Oh and for those that like playing with VMs the AMD netbooks have VT support so you can have hardware supported VMs which makes them run that much nicer.
Geez are the mods stoned? insightful for a "Microsoft burns babies ZOMFG!" post? FYI it didn't have a damned thing to do with Microsoft it was INTEL that put the limits on Atom to keep it from competing with their more profitable Celeron. if it had a damned thing to do with MSFT you wouldn't be able to buy 10 and 12 inch AMD netbooks that hold 4-8Gb of RAM which I can tell you first hand you can. my EEE 1215b has the E series APU and has 8Gb of RAM and it came with win 7 HP instead of the low end starter, and that with a 320Gb HDD was only $350 pre flood and is about $430 now. So in this case you are blaming the wrong guy chuck, MSFT killed XP because it is a fricking decade old and is just too damned long in the tooth to continue patching the thing (what are they up to now, something like 5000 patches counting the service packs?) and Intel pre-cripples the atom to keep from damaging more profitable markets. Buy AMD if you want a netbook that isn't crippled and has full support for VMs and plenty of RAM.
As for ARM? Its making money hand over fist because its disposable, nothing more. How many have multiple cell phones sitting in a drawer? my family probably has like 30 of the things piled in a drawer like old socks. You get a new one with contract, old one goes in junk drawer. But ARM won't replace x86 simply because there is millions of x86 programs people want to run and when you need to get real work done you can't beat x86 on performance without destroying the only advantage ARM has which is its ULV power sipping. Make an ARM CPU that performs even at the level of a first gen Core2Quad or Phenom and watch the power skyrocket as the arch simply was never designed to crank out the kind of FLOPs you get on x86. Folks have simply slowed down on buying X86 as unlike ARM they don't shitcan the unit every 2 years, that's all. Hell I got rid of my big power hungry laptop for the EEE simply because i found when i'm mobile even the Bobcat APU is more power than i really need, so why should folks go out and buy the new 8 cores when they aren't even stressing their dual cores? Hell I bought the Thuban 6 core when i found out they quit making 'em just so I could have my board maxed out, but did i need it? Nope my quad was frankly overpowered to begin with and in this new build I gave my GF will be insanely overpowered for anything she can think up.
ARM will continue to sell as long as carriers pass them out like candy and there are people that still haven't gotten a tablet that wants one. Give it a few more years and ARM will be just as overpowered and over-saturated as X86 is now and then watch the market take a nosedive. Hell I wouldn't be surprised if a third of the ARM business now isn't the carriers passing out smartphones like the bank hands out suckers simply because they make out like bandits on data plans. However once we are down to only a couple of carriers and they just collude instead of compete that will be over and the free phones will go the way of free checking. But saying ARM is gonna kill x86 is like saying mopeds are gonna kill the trucking industry, its just THAT delusional.
Am I the only one that misses old twitter? sure he was batshit but he was a damned entertaining kind of batshit. I mean you could have a post on shoes and within a single paragraph he could twist that into a plot by Bill Gates and the Illuminati to destroy FOSS that would ALMOST make fridge logic. Sadly all we get now is fangirls and C list trolls that wouldn't qualify to read old twitter's posts, no style, no class, just "nigger faggot" aka "Shill astroturfer' thrown around at everyone that doesn't drink whatever koolaid the poster finds refreshing, no skill or artistry involved at all.
As for TFA bye bye GoDaddy you won't be missed. Reminds me of the douche that told Gabe at pennyarcade to go fuck himself and is now writing real nice apologies that end with "please make it stop!". Well GoDaddy is finding out the hard way the web can bring the pain when you stand up for douchebaggery like SOPA. I bet the braintrust that announced their support is SO fired right now. Won't matter though as domain hosting is a nerd's job and nerds don't like SOPA so their ass is grass. Hell they might as well have put "We think all nerds should eat shit and die and RMS is a filthy hippie that should be dumped in the nearest garbage truck" on their front page and probably would have done less damage to their business than what they did. Stupid move GoDaddy but what do you expect from a company that hires Joan Rivers to sell domain hosting.
Yeah try it buddy and see how that skullsplitter feels. i know that if i don't have my 3 cokes a day here comes the pain, it feels like a hammer slammed into my head right between the eyes. My GF quit for ages until she hooked up with me but the first weekend she stayed over and all I had was cokes and coffee got her hooked again. Now when we do our morning chat before she goes to work I have to give her time to go get her morning cup doctored because she just can't function without her coffee anymore than I can without my cokes. Caffeine is a bitch, just try quitting cold turkey and see!
As someone who has lost a couple of kinfolks to diseases where medical futility came into play, including a sister at just 36, I can see why they would rather just let it go. I've seen first hand there is a difference between prolonging life and prolonging death and frankly I'd rather just be given some painkillers and spend my last days comfortable than end up sick as a dog from chemo and radiation that isn't gonna do anything but prolong the sickness. if you get 50/50 odds or better that's one thing, but a lot of those illnesses (think pancreatic cancer) you are only increasing your 5 year survival odds from 5% to 10% and are gonna feel like death the entire time. No thanks.
The problem is it WILL be a disaster but not for the reasons people think of, it'll be the flyover states that cause the disaster. Frankly the pay for IT in right to work states is so damned bad nobody bothers learning more than the bare minimum and the corps sure as fuck aren't gonna pay for courses on their dime, so you have poorly trained worker with zero incentive to learn this new tech. Add to this the shitty pay and even shittier hours have caused most of the older guys like myself to run to the hills and get away from the bullshit equals a perfect storm where the old guys that could have picked it up easily are gone and the new guys hate their jobs and are doing the bare minimum until they can find another line of work.
So my prediction is while the coasts will work everything in between will rapidly fall apart. problems that would have taken an hour or two under IPV4 and which will take the same time under IPV6 on the coasts will take days or weeks simply because the skilled manpower isn't there and frankly won't be forthcoming because corps have screwed IT so badly here nobody is taking the courses anymore. My local college is thinking about dropping the IT related courses simply because everyone is in medical or law, nobody is bothering with IT as its seen as a dead end. Basically the corps made the bed but we're all gonna get to lie in it when everything that has to cross the flyover states goes to shit. Hell I called my local ISPs the other day and even their tech guys didn't know jack shit about IPV6 nor could they give me a timetable, NOT a good sign folks and talking to friends in neighboring states they are hearing the same thing.
Wow reading comprehension not taught to ACs huh? If someone could tell me where the hidden setting is to block ACs I'd be grateful as I must lose an IQ point every time I deal with one. As to answer your question if you would have bothered reading the parent post I was responding to he said "There has been a sub $200 tablet on the market, its called the Kindle and they lose money on every unit" implying that there simply is no way to have a functional unit at that price point without taking a bath. I of course pointed out that Kindle was never designed to make money, it was designed to push Ebooks because Amazon makes an incredible profit from Ebooks so losing a few bucks on kindle units means nothing. Last i heard the sale of just three books puts kindle into the black and everything after 4 is pure profit. With numbers like that personally i'm shocked Amazon doesn't go lower, i'd drop the price to the point where it took 5 books to break even because what good is an Ereader without books?
next time try reading the parent before jumping in okay? The new layout makes it beyond simple to follow a conversation back to the parent where you would have easily seen that your post was completely pointless in the context of the thread. nobody said the kindle was a bad unit, simply that it followed the razor and blades model instead of the retail model which means it, like your post, was pointless when discussing sub $200 tablets.
The problem with ARM MR AC is the same problem that has left Linux in last place, which is this: There is ALWAYS something, some program which there is simply no equivalent that is a must have. With businesses its all those one off and small company apps, everything from inventory to medical billing, and of course Quickbooks is god for a reason, its so easy it lets a single QB girl (and its ALWAYS a girl, i swear you'd think they had a union or something) run an entire SMB, everything from payroll to taxes, with just a single PC. On the home side there is games, the app that came with their printers, the lack of drivers for said printers and other gear, its ALWAYS something. That's why MSFT hasn't had to change its $100 price tag in 30 damned years, because they know folks ain't going nowhere.
I'd say what Intel needs to be worrying about is AMD in the consumer and mainstream market because lets face it, the "Must win teh benches!" types are an itty bitty portion of the market and for the vast majority PCs have gone past good enough and into insanely overpowered by now. Hell my 71 year old dad has a fricking quad! Does he need a quad? Oh hell no but AMD quads were so cheap that there wasn't any point going dual.
Which brings us to TFA and where Intel royally fucked up, and that was cutting off Nvidia to the point Nvidia bailed from the chipset market. For those that don't know Nvidia is now out of the chipset biz, all they are selling is old designs for as long as somebody will pay for them. that means no ION 3, no new features, hell most Nvidia boards won't even support NCQ which means your losing about 30% performance on an HDD. What Intel needs to worry about with Atom isn't ARM but those nice and cheap AMD E series which frankly have been selling out so fast AMD killed the entire AM3 line two quarters early so they could devote the fabs to cranking Bobcats. As someone who bought a EEE E-350 I can see why they are selling out, 6 hours on a battery watching full HD, doesn't get hot even under load, and with enough power i use mine as a portable music creation studio with Audacity. Intel never has figured out how to make truly kick ass GPUs and with AMD integrating ATI into APUs you get frankly insane levels of power for cheap money. I just finished setting up a C series for a customer and frankly it spanks the hell out of the Atom units and has enough power i was able to remote in using Remote Assistance to do the final tweaks while she sat at home. All that for $300 with Win 7 HP instead of crappy starter like you get on atom netbooks? Yeah Intel should worry.
Go to Tiger and look up the E-350 and see how the OEMs have gone nuts with AMD chips (now that Intel can't bribe them anymore) and have slapped E series into everything, they have HTPCs, netbooks, laptops, and all in ones ALL using the E series chips. Intel screwed themselves both by crippling Atom for fear of losing Celeron sales and by killing the Nvidia chipset business which ION was the only thing that made Atom units worth having. Personally I wouldn't be surprised if Intel kills atom within a year and a half and just uses it for embedded while having Celeron try to fill the gap because trying some of the newer chips (last one I tried was the 525) frankly without ION its painfully slow to use. Stupid move Intel, you should have welcomed Nvidia instead of attacking them.
The Kindle was NEVER made to make money on the unit, it was clear from the start Amazon was going for the razor and blades model because they make out like a damned bandit on Ebooks. If one wanted to go that route with a tablet one clearly could but i believe that by shopping around and doing as Cook did (which i give that man credit, it was a brilliant move) and locking in chips at a set price point one could easily make a profitable sub $200 tablet with decent performance. i mean Asus was selling E-350 12 inch EEEs for just $300 before the flood and making money on every single unit so I don't see why changing the screen to resistive would raise the price above $350 while keeping the same profit margins. BTW the EEE series now comes with Expressgate built in which actually has a nice appstore and ebook sales and reader so i have no doubt Asus is not only making profits on the unit but on sale of games and books as well.
In the end though American companies are just too greedy. Look at Lenovo which has made money year after year on the business IBM threw away, or how the last CEO of HP wanted to get rid of the #1 selling PC division because it was making "only" 7% profits. If you are moving a hell of a lot of merchandise that 7% profit can still be a seriously fat number and even on smaller sales you are making a good steady income. But just as so many companies destroyed themselves in the 70s by ignoring good markets to try to beat IBM at its own game so too are companies lining up to shoot themselves in the head dreaming of iMoney just like all these idiot game publishers that try to beat Warcraft and end up going tits up. In the end there can only be one Apple and they have spent 30 years building themselves up to be the Prada of home electronics and I don't care how good the specs are competing with Apple at the same price point is suicide. to use a /. car analogy it would be like Ford thinking they could compete with Ferrari by putting out a souped up Mustang at the Ferrari price point. Stupid is as stupid does I suppose and its pretty clear that if any of the HP board had an original thought they would probably have their head explode.
Uhhh...I don't know where you got your data but your post is incorrect. OS/2 wasn't broken by win 3.X it was simply the fact that as part of the original deal IBM had the right to Win16 and when Win32 came along they refused to pay the license fee for it and thus was trapped in a dead end. I mean seriously who thought that 16 bit was gonna last as long as 8 bit did with the clones and the rapidly dropping price of chips? IBM thought they could sell it just by having the name IBM on it, just as they thought they could stick by the cheaper 286 chip and charge full price which left a door as wide as Texas for Compaq to roll out 386 clones and slaughter them.
As for "do no evil" frankly it amazes the shit out of me how otherwise rational geeks actually believed that horseshit. Do they think apple "thinks different" as well? its a slogan folks, its marketing. Google does WHAT'S BEST FOR GOOGLE and if that fits your definition of good fine and dandy, if it don't? tough shit. I don't see them opening up GoogleFS or big Tables or anything else that might give a competitor an advantage nor did I see anyone but an eye when one of the Android developers tweeted "Android is open (for the OEMs)" implying quite clearly that whether its open for the users or not is not a big concern.
In the end these companies are neither "good" nor "evil" (Well Halliburton and Goldman Sachs notwithstanding of course) as they are just creations to maximise shareholder value and make money. if that fits someone's model of good or evil more power to 'em but I doubt VERY seriously you'd see Google throw away a multibillion dollar deal because it didn't fit their little slogan.
Lets not forget the check MSFT cut to Apple. Sure it wasn't much but the main thing it did along with promising to keep writing software for Apple was it calmed spooked investors who said "Well if Microsoft thinks there is money to be made there, maybe they know something we don't?" but in the end it was as you say an excuse to keep from painting a big bullseye on its back. Just as i have no doubt if AMD wouldn't have started picking up and selling out of chips Intel would have found some way to keep them afloat as a low cost CPU vendor if nothing else to also keep from getting branded a monopoly.
But on the Google deal i think you are wrong and here is why: To improve their services Bing needs two things 1.- Lots of data from searches so they can tweak their search algorithms and 2.-plenty of eyeballs giving them feedback and using their product so they can learn what works and what don't. Now Google don't want MSFT getting that from Firefox if they can help it and even with their lowering by the quarters numbers there is a HELL of a lot of eyeballs using FF, so they paid through the nose rather than let a competitor have it. This is the same reason why MSFT paid for the rights to yahoo's search as a huge amount of the public users Yahoo portal as their home page and use yahoo mail and that gives them more eyeballs to use their engine and to sell ads to.
In the end it was just a good business decision, nothing more. I just wish they would have had the balls to cut the "making the web a better place" crap and just said "We make money from searches, Firefox brings us users, what's to understand?" and left it at that. Personally I'd be more likely to use their search instead of yahoo if they would have just been honest about it.
I think the problem is everyone is dreaming of iMoney and thus making them overpowered and thus expensive. I mean think about it, what does the typical consumer do with a pad? They check their email, play Angry birds, and watch video. Now the video could be easily taken care of with a broadcom chip which is cheap, especially when you are buying in bulk, I doubt Angry birds is that big of a CPU hog, and email and webpages aren't gonna need much if you disallow flash support.
So I don't see why someone couldn't make a really nice tablet in the $180-$200 price range and make around $10-$15 a unit on them. A dualcore ARM CPU in the 1GHz range isn't that high and resistive will work fine for the screen as long as the OS is tweaked for it instead of just using a vanilla OS unoptimized for the platform like many are doing with android now. So while $100 might not be doable I don't see why sub $200 while still doing the tasks folks want a tablet for couldn't be achieved.
Personally i thought Dell had the right idea with that convertible netbook/tablet but screwed up with the choice of chip and the price which was too high for an atom based unit. Make it an AMD E-50 so it has enough power to do 1080P over HDMI, it'll also play games and even let them run their Windows programs, and price it for around $350 and the things would sell like hotcakes. Sadly american companies have all looked at Apple and see iMoney and frankly just won't accept 5%-8% profits on sales anymore as they all want to be Apple and make mounds of iCash anymore. But there is only one Apple and if this past year and a half has proved anything its that if you set your price equal or better than the iPad people will go with the more recognized brand. But if they were to target the masses with a machine that's "good enough" at the right price point there isn't any reason they can't make good steady profits year after year.
Then explain the KDELook bug Pug, which was there for over a year unnoticed? or the Quake bug? your logic fails as you automatically assume that because someone CAN do something that means it DOES get done, which just the two above bugs proves is total horseshit. And reverse engineering for security research is quite legal friend, don't know where you got your info but all the major AV firms do that 5 days a week and nobody says squat. Hell it was Russinovich at MSFT Research that came up with the info on the Sony rootkits and published exactly how it worked by reverse engineering and i didn't see anybody knocking on his door.
But frankly all this flag waving and fangirl horseshit really doesn't surprise me anymore, mikey 400 accounts is right that /. = stagnated. Hell they might as well change the name to boycott Novell for all the FOSSie trollbait bullshit they post here now. Lets be honest a minute, okay? your OS has less users than JavaME, a shitty cell phone OS used by Fred's on $10 phones. No how many top shelf researchers and programmers are bothering to ON THEIR OWN TIME look through millions of lines of code for a hidden bug? Not to mention the "Whose watching the watchers" problem of hidden code in the compiler could make any inspection shit so you'll have to write your own compiler while you're at it. I stand by my statement as the above bugs and the hacks Linux has seen lately (which I'll be happy to link to BTW, I could wallpaper the page with them if you wish) shows that just because you have the code don't make it a damned bit safer or more secure than anything else.
Wow, shows how badly broken the slashdot mod system is when an obviously OT LinTroll is modded +5. Can we have a button to just mark fanbois or something please?
As for your "point" Mr LinTroll that is the reason why linux isn't getting any better, its all itch scratching because nobody will invest the money required to make it a world class desktop that can keep up with OSX and Windows. Hell has Canonical even made a dime yet? Its been what? 6 years now? And 20 years of Linux as an OS and the numbers are still this bad? I mean when you give a product away for free and can't even beat shitty JavaME that is pretty damned sad, but its understandable as i can wallpaper this page with links from major OEMs and retailers that tried Linux and ran away because it was unstable, drivers breaking pretty much every time the upgrade deathmarch rolled around, and a community that answers every problem with works for me no no seriously it does! well what can you expect? No money means no direction, no focus, all itch scratching all the time.
Now as for TFA they like pretty much everyone else that sells code online should be taking a lesson from Valve and adopting the short period sale model. you'd be surprised how many games that I was sitting on a fence over I bought during the Steam sale, i even threw more money in my account so me and the boys can do more snatching on the Steam sale. By having short period sales you take away that indecision because you can justify it as "Meh it was on sale" so even if you don't care for it later it doesn't bother you. hell i bought Kane & Lynch II, which is widely panned as worst game of the year, simply because someone had in new in box for a dollar and I figured "Well for a buck I can MST3K the thing and get a buck's worth of entertainment out of it". BTW for those that want to MST3K a game? do NOT choose K&L II as it isn't even worth MSTing, pick "You Are Empty" instead as it at least has 30 foot mutant attack chickens. K&L II would have been an alright game if the moron who designed the gun didn't make them so inaccurate that you have to stick the barrel to the guys chest to score a guaranteed kill. What idiot thought a 12 guage slug doesn't travel 6 feet in a straight line?
But you can have short period sales and fix the buyer's remorse quite easily. there is nothing the human animal loves more than getting a deal on something, even if its crap they can't use. Just look at Black Friday for an example where normal people went total apeshit for tech crap that frankly in most cases wasn't priced that well to start with. I told my dad to wait a week and sure enough i found him a nice AMD netbook for his GF for $25 cheaper than anybody had it on BF, yet on BF they sold out within minutes! Attach the word sale and watch the units go.
"Everyone go to hell except cave 76!" sorry to steal from Mel Brooks but fanbois like you just make me think of that bit. Frankly ARM sucks on instructions per cycle and simply can't do the amount of work even a CULV Intel or AMD chip can without blowing their power advantage all to shit. That is why you don't see anybody in the top 10 supercomputers running ARM chips, its a cell phone and embedded chip and simply wasn't built for real performance.
X86 frankly stomps ARM in performance, ARM stomps X86 when all you care about is power consumption like in say a smartphone. Personally I like the way AMD is going about it with Bobcat where you use a simpler X86 core paired with a more powerful GPU but since i use and work with media a lot maybe that's just me. But thinking ARM is gonna take over the world is frankly more than a little delusional as by the time you ramp it up to the level of performance of even a Core2Quad or Phenom II you've blown any advantage you had for running ARM in the first place.
Finally if you think desktops and laptops are going anywhere I have a lovely bridge you may be interested in. The reason PC sales have slowed is actually quite simple and doesn't have a damned thing to do with ARM, it has to do with the fact that X86 chips have become so insanely overpowered that they passed "good enough" for the jobs the masses have several years ago and people have more computers than they can use. In my own family we are up to 6 desktops and 3 laptops for a family of four, my boys are playing games on Pentium D desktops and with a $50 HD4850 a piece they are able to play at 1600x900 (native for their 20 inchers) and still have plenty of purty, so why buy new machines? ARM sells because its a disposable unit and if you don't believe that just ask around and see how many people you know have drawers full of old cell phones. Contract is up, old phone is shitcanned and new phone is used. It doesn't have a damned thing to do with advancements of ARM and everything to do with carrier contracts.
TL:DR? ARM is for cell phones and embedded, x86 is for desktop and laptops and servers that have to do lots of number crunching. If you think ARM has a chance in hell of getting rid of x86 you are totally batshit but if Intel can get the power low enough X86 could easily trump ARM on performance.
Conservative political blog would be perfect for that, hell that was what i thought it was the first time i heard it. my question is what is keeping them from just starting a new company and trolling all over again? After all if they have incorporated they can just walk away, let the shell burn and start another. we all know this was Stephens media's little proxy so what is gonna keep Stephens from just doing it again? keep some lawyers on retainer and you have the perfect SLAPP weapon, just keep trolling and if you make money fine, if you don't you'll still scare many people from using anything that has ever been on a Stephens website for fear of being dragged into court. After all if they win its not like they're gonna get squat and I bet the poor guy that won never even covers his court costs.
Personally I'd be glad if Slashdot would quit putting trollbait on the front page. Hell they might as well put on trollface for the icon and U Mad bro? for the tag. This is no different than " Will (insert Linux distro or FOSS in general) have a (insert massive fail or massive success) in (insert position)" or "Microsoft (insert buys company, kicks puppies) and thereby (insert horrible scenario) for the (insert web, country, or FOSS)". All it is is designed to stir up shit, nothing more. There is a ton of software where there is NO FOSS equivalent, what are you gonna do tell the boss "Sorry i can't do my job, they don't make a free software for that" or not be able to get a job done simply because there is no FOSS that will do it?
Lets be honest folks, this is not only trollbait its horseshit. do you know how many researchers there are looking at every popular piece of software with a fine tooth comb to see what it does? hell look at when Sony and Real tried to hide nasty shit in their CDs and player respectively and look at how they were not only found out but the shit hit the fan with the net blasting the fuck out of them.
Finally its horseshit because there is maybe 0.01% of the users of FOSS software that actually have enough skills to read source code and make heads or tails of it and MAYBE 1/20th of those actually bother because they have shit to do. After all the code was right there for the KDELook bug, it was right there for that infected Quake that was on the repo for...what? like a year and a half? the ability to inspect the source means diddly squat unless some actually DOES it, and when you are talking the amount of LOC in just your average distro, much less the myriad of third party software bundled by said distros, you'd be lucky if your average program gets its code looked at by anybody other than the developers AT ALL. Quick, how many have looked at the code for the LO updater and can tell us with some authority EXACTLY what info is being sent? How many have studied Synaptic and can tell us with authority EXACTLY what its doing? thought so.
Just because you CAN do something doesn't mean it actually gets done you know. I'd say your odds are about the same when we are talking proprietary and FOSS as to whether anybody catches a hidden nasty in the millions of LOC we are talking about here.
The E-350 is on average 25% cheaper while getting 30% more performance so there really isn't a reason to go atom + ION anymore. Intel really slit their own throats by hamstringing Nvidia to the point they got out of the chipset business. For those that don't know there will be NO chipset updates from Nvidia, no new chips, what you see is what you get. nearly their entire line is so out of date they don't support NCQ which means you are slowing down your drives by using ION, as new versions of Windows come out I seriously doubt they'll be spending hardly any money on QA for a line that is dead so you are looking at no drivers or shoddy drivers, meanwhile the new AMD E-Series have Radeon 6310 chips with full support for decoding every popular format in use today.
So I'm sorry friend but atom is history for HTPCs. the ONLY reason they get any score at all is from rigging the benches with their ICC cripple code which as one reviewer on a new netbook I was looking at said "For some reason the Atom seems to score highly on the benches, better than the E-350, but real world usage just doesn't bear the numbers out" yeah that is because they might as well call the benches quack.exe for all the use they are now!
But the new AMD E-Series gives you more graphics power, more memory (Atom is usually limited to 2Gb or 4Gb by Intel to cripple it compared to Celeron while the AMD E-series supports 8Gb-16Gb) and an out of order CPU with VM support for less money. The only thing Atom is good for is those $60 bottom of the line boards that make okay office boxes, nothing more. ION thanks to Intel's cutting off Nvidia's access is a dead end system simply being sold for as long as someone will give them a buck for it, but no new investments in the platform will be made. its a dead end, not worth wasting money on.
That's the whole point of BASIC and TouchDevelop. You don't have to know about the APIs, libraries, and how to load all that stuff together so that you would actually get something done. The whole purpose is to be easy to use and something that can be used to quickly throw something together, without worrying about the details. This approach does come with limitations, but it doesn't matter.
Why the fuck did this guy get modded troll? Ya know the FOSSie fangirl BS really does get old. Its fricking operating systems NOT ball clubs okay? You fangirls remind me of that old Mel brooks bit "Let them all go to hell except cave 76 rah!" and is about as fricking useful.
FYI for those that don't wear Saint iGNUcious buttons what he is talking about is damned near 20 years old now, which is the windows way of programming VS the Unix way. with Windows its all about GUIs and letting the IDE take care of the low level stuff, with unix based you get a command prompt and a list of commands. BOTH have their places, BOTH have their strengths and weaknesses, in this case he is pointing out that for the target platform (touchphones) that the Windows way takes a lot of the work out of it for the programmer.
Man I miss the days when we could actually discuss things like costs VS benefits for various programming methods, file systems, designs, ya know actual tech shit? Now its nothing but ACs everywhere and more fangirls squeeing and squicking than at a fricking Justin Beiber concert. How fucking sad it is and how far /. has fallen when something as old and as well known as Windows VS Unix program design gets modded down because the fangirls can't fucking stand any post that has the word Microsoft in it unless its followed by "They burn babies and kill kittehs ZOMFG!". In the old days one would have pointed out that ease of use comes with an overhead cost and then there would have been a discussion on how much overhead and whether it was worth it, but not now, ooooh no. its all flag waving fangirl crap now.
Does anybody know where the actual geeks went so I can actually read insightful comments and intelligent discussions again? because i swear all the fangirls and flag waving is making my head hurt and I sure as fuck ain't learning anything here anymore.
Uhhh...I think Since Google has their own mobile OS in the game that kind of stunt would probably get the feds showing up demanding records for an antitrust investigation. That would be like hearing "To support freedom Microsoft has announced they will support the boycott of Apple with an update that makes sure that Windows isn't done unless iTunes don't run". Yeah i don't really think that would fly.
As for TFA, yeah that site might as well have a trollface icon and a tag that reads "U Mad Bro?" but lets cut through the bullshit and be honest okay? Apple has ALWAYS been dickish, its not like this is some amazing news, anymore than the revelation that the Ballmer monkey is a shitty CEO that goes through underarm deodorant like its going out of style, Gates plays the little nerd while being a truly vicious businessman, Larry Ellison IS a rich asshole, Torvalds cares more about itch scratching than stability and RMS is a militant. Seriously is there ANYONE who doesn't know these things? Its like saying Bozo the clown wears big shoes!
Jobs was a control freak, Jobs wanted Google DOA. He like Gates was a truly vicious competitor, total A personality and had no problem letting his lawyers off the chain. Now the new guy is simply copying the Jobs playbook like Ballmer would love nothing more than to be Gates with a bigger BMI. why is any of this shocking? Did you think Apple was a bunch of granola eating hippies wearing Birkenstocks and petting kittens? As the CEO of Commodore put it in the early 80s "business is war" and Apple is gonna do everything they can to crush any and all competitors. if you look at the list of companies they went after pretty much all the $500 tablets they went after because they know the iPad isn't competing with some $150 POS from China. And while i personally don't buy Apple because I've never liked the whole "one size fits all" and all the fashion design layouts being surprised at Apple being nasty is like being surprised when the sun shines or rain falls down instead of up.
I'm old enough to have actually been around for the birth of the PC (IBM 5150) and frankly Apple really wasn't any different back then, at least going back to when Woz left. I mean for the love of Pete way back then Jobs screwed Woz by lying to him on how much Atari gave them for a game and NOW you expect them to play nice? Sheesh.
Put a cablecard into any mATX case (there are several that look like TiVos) along with win 7 HP and tada! Easy Peasy. Windows media center frankly kicks ass as a DVR, I've been running my cable into it since Oct 09 and its as simple and easy as one can get. I can tell it to record a show or record a series with a single click, it automatically downloads two weeks worth of scheduling and keeps itself updated (I have mine set to 7AM, it turns the PC on from sleep, updates and then goes back to sleep) and makes it butt simple with homegroups to share with the rest of my machines.
So just do it yourself friend, it couldn't be simpler. modern boards come with fricking pictures so you don't even have to Habla English to put together a PC, there are plenty of nice mATX cases that are perfect for HTPCs, you can use one of the new AMD E-350 boards (which last I checked are like $90 from Newegg) if you want it ultra low power with hardware decode or for $10-$15 more depending on which HSF you choose you can get a Phenom I quad ( just go to Starmicro.net and pick one out) for $55 and an AM2+ board is beyond cheap. then just load it out any way you like with regards to RAM and HDD, hell if you don't mind a standard black case (I've built a couple of them and they look quite nice in a slot in the entertainment center and most of the customers i'd found would rather have more power than a baby case) you can go nuts and get a 6 core for $300 after rebate with everything you'll need and more than enough power to transcode any format you wish. You could even slap in a cheap refurb HD4830 or HD4850 along with the wireless X360 controller and make a pretty kick ass game machine. I have a customer that went that route and all his friends just drool when he fires up Batman:AA or Just Cause II on that fat 50 inch TV. Go DIY and you save a ton and can have it YOUR way with what YOU want.
As for TFA....uhhh....who cares? XBMC isn't going anywhere, and you also have MediaPortal and of course WMC to go along with it, so it isn't like we don't have a wealth of choices here. If anything I'd say its never been easier to go HTPC, there is a ton of software, you can get cases in any shape and style, if you stick with AMD you can get insane horsepower for dirt cheap, for those of us that want to use our PCs for TVs or DVRs life is good.
The sad part to me is the Jewish people are in the same boat we are and are pretty powerless to stop the ultra right Zionists anymore than we are able to stop the powermongering neocons because their media is likewise controlled.
I mean look at what is happening in the Repub race now that it looks like Paul might actually win a primary, the MSM are calling him everything but kiddie fiddler and I frankly wouldn't be surprised if he wins Iowa that they use that smear as well. I personally don't support many of his policies but i'll be the first to admit he was the only candidate that didn't come off as just another corporate shill. Oh and expect his votes to disappear in NH because its a Diebold state.
In the end the warmongers in Israel and the USA will just keep starting wars because killing brown people is not only profitable but it keeps everyone focused on the boogeyman of the week instead of the raiding of the countries money supply and assets by the money men. they'll keep it up until there is not another brown person they can kill because they have stolen everything that isn't nailed down and then they'll take their blood money and hope the last choppers out while the countries burn.
While I don't believe in God and the devil I DO believe in pure evil, vicious monsters that frankly wouldn't give a second thought to stomping babies if it furthered their agenda and sadly it looks like that is increasingly all we have in the corridors of power, truly evil malicious men.