Meh, I bet I could get Win 7 OR XP purring like a kitten on that baby. here is what you do: Download and run SIW (free and no need to install it, just a single.exe for the portable) and find out what the hardware is and then simply bypass the OEM and go straight to the vendors. If I had to guess you are looking at an AMD GPU with Realtek sound, download the latest drivers straight from Realtek and AMD and you are good to go.
But I have several machines where the vendor said "We don't support OS (insert Windows version)" where I just said "meh" and went right around the stupid OEMs. All run just fine, purr like little kittens. Hell look up "Windows ultimate driver DVD" and throw that on a stick if you want an easier time, you'll just have to let Windows take about a half an hour to scan the stick and load the correct drivers. its really not hard Drinkypoo, just takes a little geek know how and a hearty "fuck your crappy support Mr OEM" attitude.
That is what is both funny and sad, Intel pushes the celery for the low end while at the same time crippling its power saving ability to try to force you to get a better chip. Staples seems to be the worst when it comes for pushing the celery and i don't know how many times i've had customers come in with "Hey i got this new machine, can you make it last longer on a battery?" and give them my usual 'Sure, just get a nice car battery and put in on a trolley".
I wonder if that is why both Best Buy and Walmart seems to have abandoned Intel on all their low and midrange units? I walked into Walmart the other day and frankly didn't see a single sub $1000 Intel unit in the store, it was AMD Fusion stickers as far as the eye can see. Not that I blame them, I have a EEE E-350 and the battery life is great (6 hours plus) without dragging ass like the Atom or killing batteries dead like the celery. I'm just glad it looks like AMD has pretty much killed the sempy, now maybe the celery will die and we can finally get rid of the shitty crippled CPUs once and for all.
Oh and I know you're joking but sadly you aren't far off, I had a customer bring in a unit she got last year at the staples Black Friday the weekend after she got it wanting to know "What's wrong with this?" and when I fired it up that celery went from a full charge to dead battery in 33 minutes! I told her "I hope you have a really REALLY long extension cord, because you sure ain't gonna be running this heifer on a battery". she was so pissed she sold it on Craigslist and had me get her a little Athlon dual that got about 4.5 hours with Wifi and screen brightness cranked. After seeing how badly that celery sucked the power I won't take another celery unit, even if it is offered to me dirt cheap!
Question: If the current units works well, why not just get another battery? One of the things I looked at before buying my EEE (12 inch E-350 model) was batteries and frankly the Asus models have plenty of third party battery makers. hell i think they even offer a 10 or 12 cell version for your model which would give you something like 14 hours on a charge.
Personally i'm a big believer in "if it ain't broke" and it sounds like your unit is still doing great. BTW if you do decide to switch you ought to look at the EEE E-350 12 inchers which IMHO is just the perfect size and screen res (1366x768) and weighs less than 3 pounds. Oh and the Zacate dual core frankly stomps the Atom when it comes to performance and is pretty damned good for battery life. i get around 6 hours plus on my 6 cell watching 720p videos on it, just a great little unit.
Notice how the ONLY answer you can come up with is "nigger faggot cocksucker" aka "troll shill astroturfer"? that is what happens when an OS becomes a religion. Nowadays the ONLY correct thing you can say to appease the FOSSies is "Gee isn't Linux doubleplusgood? Why it sure is biff, and RMS' farts cure cancer!"
And I personally have a Win 7 netbook, the EEE E-350 and frankly its as snappy as can be. It runs so good i use it as a portable music creation studio with Audacity, Acid, and Hydrogen, and that is with the full win 7 HP. for Atom netbooks Win 7 Starter is quite snappy as well although frankly there is only so much you can do when you are talking about a chip as weak as Atom. unless of course all you want is a bash prompt in which case here is a beagleboard, knock yourself out. Personally for Atom based i simply copy the tricks employed by the "Tiny 7" guy who frankly needs to be hired STAT by MSFT as he has Win 7 running damned nice on a 1GHz with less than 512Mb of RAM, faster than WinXP on the same hardware in fact due to Win 7 having better memory management.
But in the end numbers don't lie and when BOTH the OEMS AND the retailers, from little shops like mine to the megacorps like walmart STILL won't take your shit even when its free? its time to take a good long hard look in the mirror and ask yourself the most important question, which is "What are my competitors doing right that I'm doing wrong?" but then you'd have to admit your precious bash is a throwback to the age of disco that nobody but you gives a shit about and the community would rather lick RMS' underwear than admit the truth.
BTW did you know that Win 7 doesn't even have start>run or CMD anymore? Its now buried waaaaay in the back of accessories as a depreciated tech, it simply isn't needed anymore. While I don't have an OSX machine to check I wouldn't doubt if the same is true for the latest version of Apple's OS as well. Doesn't that give you a clue? doesn't that ring ANY bells? Nope you'll just say "CLI is leet!" and promptly sit down in the middle of the racetrack to write a bash script while Windows and OSX stroll across the finish line. I mean when an OS that has a $1000 barrier to entry gains share during the Vista debacle and you don't gain jack shit, doesn't that FINALLY light that little bulb over your head? or do you think its a vast conspiracy by Gates and the Illuminati to bury your precious GNU?
I used to laugh at crazy old RMS, now I think he's just a sad reflection of the community as a whole. Did you know he STILL addresses audiences as "hackers" like its 1978 and he is at a homebrew club? Sadly that is linux in a nutshell, a bunch of sad little programmers that long for the days when computers were special and they in turn were special for being able to use them, while the rest of the world has moved on decades ago. Its not 1978 anymore, just FYI.
Well I don't believe in letting bitter sad old troll like Oaktrail ruin you day. i mean the poor guy has been following me around off and on for months just so he can post "die you fat fucker" or variations on that theme for months, but why should that bother me? Life is good man, i have a great family, my oldest is on the dean's list and top of the class and everyone talks about what a great guy he is, my family is doing well, I usually have more business than i can handle, and I have a sweet little Cherokee princess that loves to cook for me. Oh and all my PCs are maxed out and insanely overpowered. What's not to like?
I've found you wanna just ruin a troll's day? Just let 'em know you are happy, wish them a nice day, and let them stew in their hate. life is good man, don't let the haters ruin your happy. I've got a great songwriting partner, working on a new album, business and home life is going good, and I spend my weekends with just the sweetest gal you'd ever want to meet. What do I have to be unhappy about? Life is too short, enjoy the goodness and let the haters rot, they phase me not at all. We Wish You A Merry Thuban,We Wish You A Merry Thuban,We Wish You A Merry Thuban, and a happy six coooorrrres!
While I agree that the E-450 isn't a bad chip if it were me I'd be looking at something like this E-350 board for less than $100 that not only takes 8gb of DDR 3 (cheap ATM) but also has a PCIe slot so you can even go hybrid crossfire later to get even more performance out of it.
But you are absolutely 100% correct when it comes to Intel not having anything in that price range. I tried several Atom units and frankly even with XP they were painful to use, and with Win 7 Starter it was just awful. My E-350 is frankly delightful to use, is always snappy, and with 8Gb of RAM superfetch keeps ALL my apps preloaded into memory, ready to go instantly. All the Atom units I saw had 2Gb RAM limitations thanks to Intel being afraid of killing their shitastic Celeron sales.
Frankly that is why i don't understand everyone saying "Herp derp AMD can't compete herp derp" when frankly the ultra top end market has ALWAYS been a teeny tiny niche compared to mainstream and value which is a HUGE market. And lets face it as you said its not the CPU that is the bottleneck in most apps, its the GPU and/or the HDD. I think AMD has gone down the right route in making sure that even their low end have damn nice GPUs because the world is becoming more multimedia heavy by the day and with OpenCL more and more apps are gonna be able to take advantage of that GPU
I'm just glad I scored my EEE when I did along with picking up a Thuban 6 core earlier this month when I found out they have killed the AM3 socket. i don't know if you heard but the Bobcat and Bulldozer sales were so fricking huge (which really doesn't sound like "they can't compete" to me) that they went ahead and killed AM3 a couple of quarters early just so they could give that fab capacity to Bobcat and Bulldozer. I walk into Best Buy or Walmart and where once was Intel all the way down frankly there is only a couple of $1000+ Intel units and ALL the rest of their stock is AMD. And you look at Tiger or Newegg and they have the Bobcat in everything from netbooks to HTPCs to all in ones.
So I personally would say the numbers are showing AMD is competing just fine. After all you can't sell more chips than you can make and AMD has both TMSC and GloFlo cranking chips as fast as they possibly can and still can't meet demand. HP and Gateway are cranking out A Series laptops like there is no tomorrow and Asus and Acer are cranking out E and C series netbooks as fast as they can roll them out the factory. I know that trying to score one on Cyber monday was impossible, while Atom laptops were going for as low as $189 I never saw them go out of stock. meanwhile I went everywhere from Amazon to tiger looking to score an E or C series for a family friend and all I saw from 2AM on on cyber Monday was "sold out". I'd say the numbers are showing both that netbooks still have plenty of life with good chips and that AMD putting powerful GPUs in their units is the right way to go.
Of course you ought to see the looks on people's faces when i'm doing sweet jumps in Vice City or bashing zombies in L4D on my little EEE, I've even had a few ask me why I was watching a video of a game because they simply can't believe a little unit like that can game!
Exactly. Word is the kid he was originally grooming to be the next strong man ended up in China after trying to sneak into Japan so Dear leader was left with a third string bastard kid he had with some dancer to be the heir. Word has been for years that the military wasn't too keen on the idea of a third chapter to the Kim dynasty and the little third stringer doesn't have the brass balls nor the power base to stand up to the generals. And let us not forget it was those very same generals that are pushing for the nukes at any cost.
My guess is after a set mourning period, say 60 or 90 days depending on how impatient the generals are, the third stringer will be declared an "enemy of the Juce ideal" and be promptly exiled or possibly shot, followed by a serious power struggle between the top brass. If China was smart they'd use that opportunity to put their own puppet in power, after all they have to deal with sharing a border with NK.
Either way i have the feeling the NK people are about to get it even worse than they did under Dear leader. Kim may have been nuts but his generals are pretty damned brutal and a fight for the throne between them will be seriously ugly and I doubt the third stringer can rally enough support to take the big chair. let us not forget we are talking about a seriously unstable regime with nukes, not a good combo IMHO.
Thank you, but I'm just a humble retailer that got tired of being lied to. I mean if their OS was actually good then why has ASUS has given up on Linux? If it is so stable then why does Dell have to run their own repos even though we are talking a teeny tiny subset of hardware? If it is so secure then
So you see somewhere on the way to be a good OS Linux quit being an OS and became a religion. Admittance of the myriad of problems is NOT allowed, anymore that you could question the Koran or Bible in the home of a fundie. Frankly Canonical could change the default picture to Goatse and we'd see apologists come out of the woodwork to explain that is actually a biting social commentary on our times.
Here are some facts: Fact 1- All the major OEMs frankly ignore Linux not because of some secret M$ Ninja conspiracy, but because its so damned unstable thanks to Torvalds treating the kernel as his own playground. this attitude which is expressed by the man himself right here mean a company either has to do like dell and pay a team to basically run their OWN distro, no small task, or deal with a broken mess when Torvalds goes 'Lol Goatse!" and breaks shit. this is why even Canonical admitted there is a FOUR TIMES higher return rate for Ubuntu netbooks which makes linux a money LOSER for any company foolish enough to try. Walmart, Asus, these companies don't just abandon a product willy nilly you know, they did it because of the reasons i listed.
The sad part? All the basic parts are there, a modern kernel, DEs that with some serious polish could be great, plenty of drivers, but the zealots and itch scratching devs make sure Linux goes exactly nowhere. the ONLY reason it has gotten anywhere on servers is MSFT's frankly ass raping prices on CALs. If MSFT dropped the price of WinServer to $100 and the price of CALs to a buck a pop Linux would dry up and blow away, anybody that was honest would admit this. As a Linux admin i know put it "if you give a Windows and Linux admin the same job that the Linux guy has done repeatedly then the Linux admin WILL win, but if its a completely new task? the windows admin will be home making a sandwich before the Linux admin is done Googling".
But instead of admitting that CLIs are for servers and GUIs for desktops you'll get 300 page treaties on how "CLI is leet!" and how much better the world would be if "They would only embrace the POWER of CLI" like its the god damned force. So instead all you get is flag waving and fangirls. notice how many above me rushed to say "And I'm not a fanboi"? Every time you read that the translation should be "I'm such a fangirl I squee like a tweener at a Beiber concert when i see a Bash prompt!"
Ultimately though their denial can't change reality and the simple fact is their precious awesome OS lower than JavaME , a shitty third rate cellphone OS. Why? If it is sooo good why is it so low? Because it ISN'T good, its a buggy, fiddly, unfriendly, unintuitive, CLI heavy fiddly bitch that is about as far from the level of polish from OSX and Win 7 as it is from here to Europa. If they weren't so busy drooling over bash prompts maybe they'd ask the most important question, which is "What are our competitors doing right that we are doing wrong?' but that would mean admitting 70s terminals are as out as Disco, and they'd rather choke on RMS's sandals that admit that little truth.
Hi Oaktrail! Did you run your main account into the toilet again with your crazy conspiracy theories? Sorry to hear about that. Hey did you hear my business is doing so well i treated myself to a nice new AMD 6 core AND a new Asrock gamer board AND i'm building my GF a quad? yeah things are going great, let me leave you with my new song! We Wish You A Merry Thuban,We Wish You A Merry Thuban,We Wish You A Merry Thuban and a happy six coooorrres!
I'm sorry you're a bitter fanboi who backed a dead horse but look on the bright side, in 2014 I'm sure they be plenty of old XP junkers nobody wants you can dumpster dive! Merry Xmas!
Uhhh...I'm pretty sure that all of Ron Paul's beliefs come down to "Its up to the states' which was how the founding fathers meant it to be in the first place.
If one state wants to make pot legal or abortion illegal or support gay marriage then that is the will of the people of that state and if you don't like it? Well there is no law that says you have to stay in a state you don't agree with. this is one of the few places where i believe the invisible hand actually works as you can simply boycott doing business with a state, gay folks can refuse to vacation there, etc and you can affect change. Frankly I think its the ultra right wing fringe that keeps the issue in the media anyway, most of the rest of us frankly don't give a shit who you sleep with. I mean here I am living dead center in the deep south and our state capital has a large and very nice gay district. Everybody knows, nobody tries to hide it, nobody cares.
So frankly although i'm as left as left can be, hell my grandfather was a card carrying socialist, I have to say i do agree with Paul that the feds frankly have no business deciding such things that it should be up to the states. if you want to change things you gather petitions, get a measure put on the ballot, and try to get out the vote to change things. That is how it is supposed to work and at the state level it still can, its just that the federal level is got so much big money (as in TFA) that they simply ignore the will of the people. You throw out the bums and the next bunch is cashing their checks before they even get sworn in. I agree with Paul that if we are gonna change anything it needs to go back to having the power at the state level where the people can rally and vote, not at the federal level where you'll need sackfuls of money to even get heard.
Sadly though he wants to get rid of the fed which means the money men would NEVER let him be president. I mean look at what happened to the last one that tried to bring back the silver cert and get rid of the fed, he didn't get out of Dallas alive. Nowadays they don't even have to do that, they can just make sure their pets in the MSM just pretend the man doesn't exist. I mean look at how many polls the man has won or how much he has been able to raise and the media completely acts like he doesn't even exist while pushing ones like Newt or Mittens which they know have ZERO chance of winning jack shit. hell they might as well call it "The race to lose to Obama" and call it a day.
Well I can tell you that while it of course isn't gonna compete with my 6 core with an HD4850 it is a pretty damned nice mobile unit IMHO and frankly I'd say it beats Atom+ION as far as battery life + performance goes.
For $350 I got a EEE with an 8gb of RAM upgrade and 320gb of HDD space that has full VM capabilities, is powerful enough i use it as a mini music studio (thanks to Audacity, Acid, and hydrogen) and even under load it barely gets warm to the touch and I get around 6 hours of watching HD video or music creation out of it, what's not to like?
I'd say the reason the Dells bombed is they stuck with the lower end Atom chips and without ION frankly those things are just painful to use. while i'm sure they make Intel money simply because they are so damned cheap to make they really aren't nice to use either on Linux or Windows. The E-350 units on the other hand are quite pleasant, so much so that after trying a couple of them i had picked up for customers I sold my Athlon dual for the EEE and frankly haven't regretted it for a second.
So I think netbooks still have plenty of sales left, just not with shitty Intel Atom chips. Although it may simply be the fact that Dell just can't score the chips to compete and chose to bail instead. its pretty well known that Bobcat and bulldozer are proving to be so popular for AMD they haven't been able to keep up with demand and according to The Reg they quit making AM3 chips so they could use that capacity for Bobcat and Bulldozer. I wouldn't be surprised if Asus and HP already had contracts in place that got them first shot at the chips and Dell which has been typically an Intel only shop simply couldn't score any Bobcats.
But if you haven't tried one of the E-350 units i heartily recommend them. I mean where else you gonna get a sub $400 machine that only weighs 3 pounds, gets 6 hours on a battery, easily takes 8Gb of RAM, has full VT support, and even does 1080p over HDMI?
I haven't seen any laptop close to those specs without shelling out more money or dealing with a bigger clunkier unit. All the Dell units I looked at were Atom units which after trying several customer's netbooks (which they always brought me asking "Can you make it faster?") frankly I wouldn't take Atom on a bet. With the EEE I can surf, watch a video and have a chat window open and its still snappy, with the Atom units they always felt like they were struggling. So if all Dell could come with was the Atom goodbye Inspiron, I doubt you'll be missed.
Ask them to quickly rattle off some stupid age appropriate trivia? if its one thing we older folks have its too damned much stupid trivia, like "name three lame songs from early MTV" (my answer, Safety dance, Video killed the radio star, I always feel like somebody's watching me) or "What was the name of Captain Kangaroo's sidekick? "(Mr Greenjeans). See how easy that is? We have so damned much lame ass trivia to draw on it ain't even funny. Make it multiple choice with different stupid trivia each time and if they nail 90%+ in under 2 minutes you can be pretty damned sure there's an old fart on the other end of the line.
Personally i think Google in this case is full of shit simply because they are advertising to the kiddies and then saying they don't want them? make up your fucking mind Google, either you want them or you don't. Hotmail and Yahoo don't seem to have a problem with COPPA then why do you? Are you admitting you just don't have the ability? Surely with as much money as you have Google you can crank out a "Gmail for kids" yes?
Don't have the 125w friend, I have the 95w 1035t. I just did as you suggested, Prime 95 64bit let it run for about 15 minutes and it maxed out at 97. I could hear the fans kick up when it did but that was it Once i killed the test it dropped down to 73f in less than 2 minutes which is damned near room temp in my apt. The room is about 72f BTW in case you're curious. gotta say i'm impressed, that is pretty damned good for a $35 cooler IMHO. Hell I could take a pic if you want, my last chip was hitting 139f on stock cooling so fankly anything below that would have made me happy but the combo of coolermaster plus arctic silver seems to be kicking some serious booty.
And WHY do you think they said that EXACTLY? I'll tell you why: because Ballmer has such a raging hard on for Apple that if you show him an iPad he creams in his pants, that's why! They KNOW the desktop and laptop is gonna simply be a "replace it when it dies" market as PCs have become so insanely overpowered that nobody changes unless theirs goes tits up. They also know that Apple has found a hell of a cash cow in the mobile space because people toss every time their contract is up and in the case of the iShiny they toss every time there is a new model.
You bookmark this post and come back 6 months after Win 8 is released and watch it come true! Win 8 will make Vista look like Win95, the users won't want a cell phone GUI for a desktop so they'll stick with Win 7, the tablets will be returned en masse thanks to everyone bring their WinTabs home only to find Windows doesn't actually run Windows programs (WTF?) anymore, and Ballmer will "pursue other interests" to keep from being fired by the board when Win 8 goes down in flames. have YOU tried it? Its slow suck ass POS that is ONLY good for grandma. Anyone else will be annoyed as hell at all the resources all those damned constantly updating widgets suck and the attack vector that is having every win 8 desktop tied straight into IE will be a malware writers wet dream.
Mark my words the reason MSFT is saying this is because WinPhone has bombed and Ballmer thinks by sticking the Windows name on wintab he can get stupid developers to code for it, unlike WinPhone which is been ignored. but developers aren't retards, the public knows a cell phone when they look at it, and the ONLY reason to run Windows anything is WINDOWS PROGRAMS which naturally will run like shit with all those widgets on X86 and won't run at all on ARM. This is gonna be a clusterfuck they talk about for decades like bob only a hell of a lot more expensive, mark my words. Its a shame Jobs ain't here to see it because he'd be laughing his ass off at the uberfail.
Uhhh...I paid $300 for my EEE with the AMD E-350 dual core in Aug (well $350 after I threw in 8Gb of RAM and a nice briefcase style case for it) and it plays L4D, does full 1080P over HDMI, hell i'm even using it to edit audio multi-tracks with Audacity. What EXACTLY do you call a "real processor" anyway?
Re:next we'll hear that Dell is in trouble...
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Dell Ditches Netbooks
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· Score: 4, Insightful
My guess is they are getting their ass kicked by Asus and don't want to admit they make a lousy product. The EEEs are damned nice little machines, especially the AMD Fusion models and talking to one of the guys I know at the local Walmart he said they are moving those things like there is no tomorrow. 6 hours on a battery charge under Windows 7, 8 hours under Expressgate, plenty of power, plays full 1080p over HDMI, sweet little units. If the Dell Inspiron mini is anything like their Inspiron laptops i can see why folks simply ain't buying, they're junk.
Maybe they just can't compete with the likes of HP and Asus, who knows. I know I was amazed I could get a fully loaded EEE while adding 8Gb of RAM and a nice little case for it for only $350 but of course that was before the flood, last i checked they are like $439. Maybe they can't score the drives and have given up? In any case i don't think Asus and HP will mind taking the business from dell, not one bit.
Not to mention Mr Coward the so called "Metro UI" that everybody hates can be turned COMPLETELY OFF with a simple registry switch, same as you can take Win 7 now and have it in Win 98 grey if that is what floats your boat. That's one thing MSFT has always been good about and that's making sure conservative businesses have a way of either using the old DE or even using the old OS with software assurance licenses. With the reg switch flipped all you get is Win 7 with a square start button instead of round. oh the horror! I must go out and buy thousands of dollars of Macbooks to escape the square button o' doom ZOMG!
I can see why so many post as AC now, hell maybe I ought to start posting as AC too. This site used to be the home of damned smart discussions, where arguments over file systems or GUI design could last 200 postings and even when you lost you damned well learned something, now its fanboi central and every argument ends in "nigger faggot cocksucker" aka "Shill troll astroturfer". Its all fanbois and bullshit and flag waving. I hate to say it but I have to agree with Mikey 400+ accounts "Slashdot = stagnated" No damned wonder taco ran away, he probably got sick of the BS too.
Not to mention the coward was talking about multi-billion dollar corps. Corps that size having to hire an army of coders to write custom apps, or paying a couple of hundred guys to convert files? Wouldn't even make line 23 of the budget proposal. When you are talking THAT level of business frankly short terms costs are rarely considered which is the exact opposite of most businesses or even small governments.
As we have seen several times on/. those that simply looked at Linux as "free as in beer" and didn't figure in migration costs ended up running back to Windows because the initial switch will cost you MORE than simply staying with what you have. This is simply common sense, a major arch or OS switch will always be more expensive than sticking with what you have, especially when MSFT sells site licenses. You have all those gotchas that nobody has figured in, like incompatible hardware, data conversion costs, having to have written a FOSS version of some proprietary app that simply won't run in Wine or paying the Wine guys to add support, etc.
Change is ALWAYS more expensive that staying where you are, which is why as you say you costs is only a small part and as I say you should change for the RIGHT reasons and not simply the bottom line.
I'll get hate for wading in with such obvious fanbois but WTF, truth is truth> You wanna know why Linux is dead last and going exactly nowhere? Its because you people really really REALLY suck at GUIs, you really do. While you may think some damned 70s terminal is the essence of nirvana the rest of the world has moved on dude, and nobody wants to play with your damned blinking cursor crap.
I mean holy fuck you are missing features that Windows had a fricking decade ago and while I don't have an OSX machine to confirm I wouldn't be surprised if Apple had them even longer. Where the fuck is the roll back drivers button? How about the find drivers button? You expect the user to magically know the make/model/rev of any and all pieces of hardware and go do the "find a fix" forum dance which ALWAYS ends with "open up bash and type" aka "We suck balls at GUIs so please take our shitty terminal again" with NO thought of ease of use or intuitiveness.
So you can make your little comments about how Windows and OSX is for "noobs" or how they "suck" but you know what? Apple and MSFT could raise their prices 300% and YOU WOULD NOT GAIN A SINGLE POINT because your designs are backwards, they are NOT intuitive, they are as unfriendly as can possibly be, and the GUIs frankly are extremely basic and often barely functional as I found out when network manager wouldn't take changes in the GUI, tossing them on each reboot. Guess what the solution was? We suck balls at GUIs so please take our terminal. Every. single. time you see "Open up bash and type" you have just written "We suck and are full of fail" because nobody else wants that lame shit but you.
The sad part is you have most of the pieces, a kernel that does everything a modern kernel should, several (partially) functional DEs that with some polish could be damned nice, and drivers for most hardware, but frankly you couldn't put all these pieces together into a solid intuitive OS if someone put a gun to the head of RMS and told you "do it or the hippie gets it". You know what Linux at this stage reminds me of? Windows 98. What was Win98? It was a CLI OS with a GUI shell bolted on top that kinda sorta worked but for anything more than basic tasks failed, was buggy as fuck, and to get anything complicated done you had to go CLI which you could even bypass the GUI shell completely and just go CLI. What is Linux now? It is a CLI OS with a GUI shell bolted on top that kinda sorta works but for anything more than basic tasks fails, is buggy as fuck, and to get anything complicated done you need to go CLI which you can even bypass the GUI shell completely and just go CLI.
Apple and MSFT are bringing their A games, which is why MSFT had one of its biggest quarters EVAR just recently and Apple is now one of the biggest corps ON THE PLANET and what do you bring? DE wars and CLI and Mickey Mouse amateur hour bugs. Sorry but there is a reason why you can't give your OS away, and it ain't no conspiracy, its the same reason every OEM from Asus who started Linux on netbooks to retailers like Walmart run away from your OS. Its not stable, its buggy, its too damned fiddly, it lacks polish, its too dependent on 70s terminals. In other words you are bringing your D game and everyone knows it. Now stick THAT in your terminal and compile it!
Funny you should mention that because what really turned me off of RMS was his fawning over communist leaders and talking about "software freedom' in places where strongmen like Chavez would happily crack your head in for actually asking for REAL freedom but to hear RMS tell it these places were paradises.
I have to wonder after reading some of his treaties about how his ultimate goal is to completely destroy all proprietary software that old RMS doesn't actually believe a communist utopia is possible. After all having true freedom means having the right to choose something that others may not like but RMS makes it clear you shouldn't have THAT freedom, only the freedom to use "free software" that fits HIS definition of free.
Like I said when the man is so damned militant he first tosses the Wifi in his OLPC because it has non free firmware before ditching the OLPC completely because its BIOS isn't free enough, only to replace it with some uber rare Loongson (who is sponsored by the Chinese government BTW) netbook because according to him that is the ONLY device on the planet that meets his definition of free? Well I have to think the man has gone so militant that including him in discussions about the future of FOSS would be like calling Fred Phelps to be a part of a conference on inter-faith cooperation. And of course there is this video which shows as the man gets older he is obviously getting a little...off. I mean seriously doesn't he realize that video is a MSFT salesman's wet dream? He makes the whole FOSS movement look batshit!
So let me get this straight: You switched because of an alpha build that nobody but programmers should even bother playing with and which most users will just skip like Vista? Okay that makes NO sense. you DO know that Win 7 is supported until 2020 yes? Or that it is quite easy to simply skip a Windows release, like going from XP to 7 yes?
If you'd have said you wanted more control over the code THAT I could understand but throwing out your entire infrastructure because of a developer's preview of an OS that most businesses will probably skip anyway just strikes me as a little nutty or just an excuse. Can't say as i blame you because I hear the new macbooks are quite nice.
Well anyone who has seen Steve Ballmer hooting like a madman while leaving sweat pools across the stage would know that Ballmer is waaaay more offensive than Goatse. Frankly i think he makes the Pepsi guy that ran Apple look like a fricking genius.You know its bad when Gates actually had to come out and say "I'm not coming back to MSFT, quit with the rumors already' because so many are unhappy with Ballmer they were hoping for a Jobs style saving of the company.
As for TFA its nice to see that some that try switching aren't doing it for the WRONG reasons, because they always seem to lead to failure. if you want to switch to Linux because its open? Because it lets YOU decide how long support will last? Because it allows you to look at and modify the code to suit YOUR needs? Congratulations you have switched for the RIGHT reasons and will most likely succeed. Where you see Linux fail time and time again is at these companies where they only care about "free as in beer" and they quickly find out that if all you want Linux for is to save money you are gonna lose and lose big.
Lets face it folks Linux isn't gonna save you a dime, not in the short or medium term anyway. You are gonna need more expensive Linux admins instead of dirt cheap MCSEs, you are gonna have to hire developers to code FOSS versions of any and all niche programs you have, you are gonna have to pay people to get your files out of proprietary formats and into FOSS ones, its not gonna be cheap friends. That is why the ones that ONLY care about price are doomed to fail, as when they don't see their budgets magically drop by half and in fact see costs initially rise they are gonna bail.
But if you do it for the right reasons listed above you will stick with it and end up probably better off than you were before since you won't be tied into any products by proprietary vendors like Adobe or MSFT and buy hiring internal coders and admins will be able to DIY instead of going out and buying solutions that will have to be re-bought when the support date ends.
So its nice to see someone looking like they are gonna have a happy outcome by doing it for the right reasons after all the stories we have seen of Linux being used for the wrong reasons and failing. I bet if you looked at their budget they probably haven't saved squat yet and possibly have even had the price go up as they have paid for all of the above that I listed, but they now have more control and can pay to have it customized any way they desire.
Well if all they care about is cheap, why aren't they using morphine? Morphine is old as dirt so I seriously doubt there are patents for plain old morphine anymore, they have a version called MS Contin which is just a timed release formula, and if you are in pain MS Contin doesn't get you high it just blocks the pain. I have a relative that's been on it something like 25 years after a horrific car wreck messed his back and knees all up and the guy has been on the same dose all this time, never more, never less. Hell he even lives on the second floor of an apt building now and I honestly thought he'd be lucky to dress himself after the wreck.
So if all they care about is cheap they should just use the natural stuff. Frankly the artificial drugs we cook up always seem to do more damage than the natural compounds and its obvious from TFA that this Methadone may be cheap but its also nasty.
I know they are using the form factor, doesn't change what I said. personally i'd love to have all kinds of cool little cards i could plug into a card reader the way we used to use PCMCIA. Nowadays unless you spend out the wazoo they simply don't include anything other than USB and while USB is great (hell my dad now has 23 USB ports on his PC, he believes EVERYTHING should be USB) it would still be nice to be able to just plug in say a little digital tuner card or other device through the card reader that every unit seems to have now.
And i'm glad you like Ninite, its a Godsend for those that need to load up a new box or laptop as you found out. i hope you don't mind another suggestion, but if you put together a machine more than once or twice a year WSUS Offline is your friend too. With WSUS Offline you can have ALL the Windows updates PLUS Service Packs PLUS.NET PLUS any version of MS Office updates ALL in one easy to use handy dandy tool. it'll make an offline updater out of a thumbstick or DVD, no "install reboot install" mess, you can tell it with a single checkbox to shut down or reboot when its done, just a nice little tool to have. I have everything from XP - Win 7 X64 in mine, just run it once a month to get the latest updates which since it has all previous updates it takes very little time to get it current.
Oh and one other final bit of advice, well two actually. 1.- if you need a cheap CPU upgrade for an older box? Go here as their service is top notch and the chips are some of the cheapest prices around. I can't count the number of machines I've upgraded thanks to Starmicro chips and you can't beat a place that has Pentium Ds for $18 and AMD quads starting at $55. 2.- If you or anybody else here runs into the "No device under sound" problem in windows, even though you KNOW you've installed the driver? Feel free to email me, i have a simple reg file that fixes that problem instantly. It simply resets the Windows sound server back to its default state. simply clicky clicky, reboot and voila! Instant sound. I've had this little reg file for years and I can confirm it works on ANY Windows from Win2K- Win 7 X64. Just put in the subject line "Sound reg file" so i know what its about.
Anyway i'm glad you enjoyed Ninite, its the little handy dandy tools that make life so much easier, and i hope your stepdaughter enjoys her new PC! I'll be using Ninite myself the middle of next week, i'll be building my GF a nice AMD quad for Xmas and she'll be getting the full Ninite treatment. man I can't wait until she sees it, all black and red and silver, it'll be the first new box my baby has had in something like 6 years.
Noooo...RMS has said repeatedly the ultimate goal of GPL is to kill proprietary software. You can look up his "GPL VS LGPL" for just one example, but there are several others out there.
We're all adults here right? so lets cut to brass tacks gentlemen, RMS is a militant and seems to get more militant as he gets older. compare GPL V1 - V3 to see how he tries his damnedest to make sure there is NO way you can use GPL unless YOUR PROGRAM is likewise GPL. He also says this in his GPL VS LGPL essay.
You have to remember folks that old RMS doesn't see this as a software thing, he sees it as some "good VS evil" battle where you are either FOR him or AGAINST him, there is no shades of grey, no compromises. Now while he is perfectly within his right to hold that view i think the numbers show that most developers don't see the world that way, otherwise the change to GPL V3 would have saw an uptick not a nosedive.
While the rational thing to do would be to sit down with developers from all walks of life, talk to them to find out what they don't like about the current GPL, and then fix it, sadly the problem with zealotry is there isn't any room for compromises like that and honestly from reading the man's writings I doubt it'd bother him in the least if he was the only one using GPL as long as it remained 'pure'. Remember we are talking about a guy who got rid of his OLPC because the BIOS wasn't GPL and is now using some rare loongson netbook simply because that was the ONLY device he could find that met his definition of GPL compliance.
So the fact that the GPL is going down the shitter as far as usage is concerned really doesn't surprise me and frankly i expect that trend to get worse not better. Life simply isn't black and white and when even Torvalds won't use GPL V3 because its too restrictive that should let you know RMS simply went too far. While i like the idea of FOSS and use it quite often i also know that companies have to make money and developers need to eat But it seems that RMS doesn't feel the same. Of course he is a self proclaimed "squatter at MIT" so he doesn't really have to worry about kids, a car, house payments, etc so its probably easier for him to live in a black and white world than it is for the rest of us.
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Meh, I bet I could get Win 7 OR XP purring like a kitten on that baby. here is what you do: Download and run SIW (free and no need to install it, just a single .exe for the portable) and find out what the hardware is and then simply bypass the OEM and go straight to the vendors. If I had to guess you are looking at an AMD GPU with Realtek sound, download the latest drivers straight from Realtek and AMD and you are good to go.
But I have several machines where the vendor said "We don't support OS (insert Windows version)" where I just said "meh" and went right around the stupid OEMs. All run just fine, purr like little kittens. Hell look up "Windows ultimate driver DVD" and throw that on a stick if you want an easier time, you'll just have to let Windows take about a half an hour to scan the stick and load the correct drivers. its really not hard Drinkypoo, just takes a little geek know how and a hearty "fuck your crappy support Mr OEM" attitude.
That is what is both funny and sad, Intel pushes the celery for the low end while at the same time crippling its power saving ability to try to force you to get a better chip. Staples seems to be the worst when it comes for pushing the celery and i don't know how many times i've had customers come in with "Hey i got this new machine, can you make it last longer on a battery?" and give them my usual 'Sure, just get a nice car battery and put in on a trolley".
I wonder if that is why both Best Buy and Walmart seems to have abandoned Intel on all their low and midrange units? I walked into Walmart the other day and frankly didn't see a single sub $1000 Intel unit in the store, it was AMD Fusion stickers as far as the eye can see. Not that I blame them, I have a EEE E-350 and the battery life is great (6 hours plus) without dragging ass like the Atom or killing batteries dead like the celery. I'm just glad it looks like AMD has pretty much killed the sempy, now maybe the celery will die and we can finally get rid of the shitty crippled CPUs once and for all.
Oh and I know you're joking but sadly you aren't far off, I had a customer bring in a unit she got last year at the staples Black Friday the weekend after she got it wanting to know "What's wrong with this?" and when I fired it up that celery went from a full charge to dead battery in 33 minutes! I told her "I hope you have a really REALLY long extension cord, because you sure ain't gonna be running this heifer on a battery". she was so pissed she sold it on Craigslist and had me get her a little Athlon dual that got about 4.5 hours with Wifi and screen brightness cranked. After seeing how badly that celery sucked the power I won't take another celery unit, even if it is offered to me dirt cheap!
Question: If the current units works well, why not just get another battery? One of the things I looked at before buying my EEE (12 inch E-350 model) was batteries and frankly the Asus models have plenty of third party battery makers. hell i think they even offer a 10 or 12 cell version for your model which would give you something like 14 hours on a charge.
Personally i'm a big believer in "if it ain't broke" and it sounds like your unit is still doing great. BTW if you do decide to switch you ought to look at the EEE E-350 12 inchers which IMHO is just the perfect size and screen res (1366x768) and weighs less than 3 pounds. Oh and the Zacate dual core frankly stomps the Atom when it comes to performance and is pretty damned good for battery life. i get around 6 hours plus on my 6 cell watching 720p videos on it, just a great little unit.
Notice how the ONLY answer you can come up with is "nigger faggot cocksucker" aka "troll shill astroturfer"? that is what happens when an OS becomes a religion. Nowadays the ONLY correct thing you can say to appease the FOSSies is "Gee isn't Linux doubleplusgood? Why it sure is biff, and RMS' farts cure cancer!"
And I personally have a Win 7 netbook, the EEE E-350 and frankly its as snappy as can be. It runs so good i use it as a portable music creation studio with Audacity, Acid, and Hydrogen, and that is with the full win 7 HP. for Atom netbooks Win 7 Starter is quite snappy as well although frankly there is only so much you can do when you are talking about a chip as weak as Atom. unless of course all you want is a bash prompt in which case here is a beagleboard, knock yourself out. Personally for Atom based i simply copy the tricks employed by the "Tiny 7" guy who frankly needs to be hired STAT by MSFT as he has Win 7 running damned nice on a 1GHz with less than 512Mb of RAM, faster than WinXP on the same hardware in fact due to Win 7 having better memory management.
But in the end numbers don't lie and when BOTH the OEMS AND the retailers, from little shops like mine to the megacorps like walmart STILL won't take your shit even when its free? its time to take a good long hard look in the mirror and ask yourself the most important question, which is "What are my competitors doing right that I'm doing wrong?" but then you'd have to admit your precious bash is a throwback to the age of disco that nobody but you gives a shit about and the community would rather lick RMS' underwear than admit the truth.
BTW did you know that Win 7 doesn't even have start>run or CMD anymore? Its now buried waaaaay in the back of accessories as a depreciated tech, it simply isn't needed anymore. While I don't have an OSX machine to check I wouldn't doubt if the same is true for the latest version of Apple's OS as well. Doesn't that give you a clue? doesn't that ring ANY bells? Nope you'll just say "CLI is leet!" and promptly sit down in the middle of the racetrack to write a bash script while Windows and OSX stroll across the finish line. I mean when an OS that has a $1000 barrier to entry gains share during the Vista debacle and you don't gain jack shit, doesn't that FINALLY light that little bulb over your head? or do you think its a vast conspiracy by Gates and the Illuminati to bury your precious GNU?
I used to laugh at crazy old RMS, now I think he's just a sad reflection of the community as a whole. Did you know he STILL addresses audiences as "hackers" like its 1978 and he is at a homebrew club? Sadly that is linux in a nutshell, a bunch of sad little programmers that long for the days when computers were special and they in turn were special for being able to use them, while the rest of the world has moved on decades ago. Its not 1978 anymore, just FYI.
Well I don't believe in letting bitter sad old troll like Oaktrail ruin you day. i mean the poor guy has been following me around off and on for months just so he can post "die you fat fucker" or variations on that theme for months, but why should that bother me? Life is good man, i have a great family, my oldest is on the dean's list and top of the class and everyone talks about what a great guy he is, my family is doing well, I usually have more business than i can handle, and I have a sweet little Cherokee princess that loves to cook for me. Oh and all my PCs are maxed out and insanely overpowered. What's not to like?
I've found you wanna just ruin a troll's day? Just let 'em know you are happy, wish them a nice day, and let them stew in their hate. life is good man, don't let the haters ruin your happy. I've got a great songwriting partner, working on a new album, business and home life is going good, and I spend my weekends with just the sweetest gal you'd ever want to meet. What do I have to be unhappy about? Life is too short, enjoy the goodness and let the haters rot, they phase me not at all. We Wish You A Merry Thuban,We Wish You A Merry Thuban,We Wish You A Merry Thuban, and a happy six coooorrrres!
While I agree that the E-450 isn't a bad chip if it were me I'd be looking at something like this E-350 board for less than $100 that not only takes 8gb of DDR 3 (cheap ATM) but also has a PCIe slot so you can even go hybrid crossfire later to get even more performance out of it.
But you are absolutely 100% correct when it comes to Intel not having anything in that price range. I tried several Atom units and frankly even with XP they were painful to use, and with Win 7 Starter it was just awful. My E-350 is frankly delightful to use, is always snappy, and with 8Gb of RAM superfetch keeps ALL my apps preloaded into memory, ready to go instantly. All the Atom units I saw had 2Gb RAM limitations thanks to Intel being afraid of killing their shitastic Celeron sales.
Frankly that is why i don't understand everyone saying "Herp derp AMD can't compete herp derp" when frankly the ultra top end market has ALWAYS been a teeny tiny niche compared to mainstream and value which is a HUGE market. And lets face it as you said its not the CPU that is the bottleneck in most apps, its the GPU and/or the HDD. I think AMD has gone down the right route in making sure that even their low end have damn nice GPUs because the world is becoming more multimedia heavy by the day and with OpenCL more and more apps are gonna be able to take advantage of that GPU
I'm just glad I scored my EEE when I did along with picking up a Thuban 6 core earlier this month when I found out they have killed the AM3 socket. i don't know if you heard but the Bobcat and Bulldozer sales were so fricking huge (which really doesn't sound like "they can't compete" to me) that they went ahead and killed AM3 a couple of quarters early just so they could give that fab capacity to Bobcat and Bulldozer. I walk into Best Buy or Walmart and where once was Intel all the way down frankly there is only a couple of $1000+ Intel units and ALL the rest of their stock is AMD. And you look at Tiger or Newegg and they have the Bobcat in everything from netbooks to HTPCs to all in ones.
So I personally would say the numbers are showing AMD is competing just fine. After all you can't sell more chips than you can make and AMD has both TMSC and GloFlo cranking chips as fast as they possibly can and still can't meet demand. HP and Gateway are cranking out A Series laptops like there is no tomorrow and Asus and Acer are cranking out E and C series netbooks as fast as they can roll them out the factory. I know that trying to score one on Cyber monday was impossible, while Atom laptops were going for as low as $189 I never saw them go out of stock. meanwhile I went everywhere from Amazon to tiger looking to score an E or C series for a family friend and all I saw from 2AM on on cyber Monday was "sold out". I'd say the numbers are showing both that netbooks still have plenty of life with good chips and that AMD putting powerful GPUs in their units is the right way to go.
Of course you ought to see the looks on people's faces when i'm doing sweet jumps in Vice City or bashing zombies in L4D on my little EEE, I've even had a few ask me why I was watching a video of a game because they simply can't believe a little unit like that can game!
Exactly. Word is the kid he was originally grooming to be the next strong man ended up in China after trying to sneak into Japan so Dear leader was left with a third string bastard kid he had with some dancer to be the heir. Word has been for years that the military wasn't too keen on the idea of a third chapter to the Kim dynasty and the little third stringer doesn't have the brass balls nor the power base to stand up to the generals. And let us not forget it was those very same generals that are pushing for the nukes at any cost.
My guess is after a set mourning period, say 60 or 90 days depending on how impatient the generals are, the third stringer will be declared an "enemy of the Juce ideal" and be promptly exiled or possibly shot, followed by a serious power struggle between the top brass. If China was smart they'd use that opportunity to put their own puppet in power, after all they have to deal with sharing a border with NK.
Either way i have the feeling the NK people are about to get it even worse than they did under Dear leader. Kim may have been nuts but his generals are pretty damned brutal and a fight for the throne between them will be seriously ugly and I doubt the third stringer can rally enough support to take the big chair. let us not forget we are talking about a seriously unstable regime with nukes, not a good combo IMHO.
Thank you, but I'm just a humble retailer that got tired of being lied to. I mean if their OS was actually good then why has ASUS has given up on Linux? If it is so stable then why does Dell have to run their own repos even though we are talking a teeny tiny subset of hardware? If it is so secure then
how, do you explain these?
So you see somewhere on the way to be a good OS Linux quit being an OS and became a religion. Admittance of the myriad of problems is NOT allowed, anymore that you could question the Koran or Bible in the home of a fundie. Frankly Canonical could change the default picture to Goatse and we'd see apologists come out of the woodwork to explain that is actually a biting social commentary on our times.
Here are some facts: Fact 1- All the major OEMs frankly ignore Linux not because of some secret M$ Ninja conspiracy, but because its so damned unstable thanks to Torvalds treating the kernel as his own playground. this attitude which is expressed by the man himself right here mean a company either has to do like dell and pay a team to basically run their OWN distro, no small task, or deal with a broken mess when Torvalds goes 'Lol Goatse!" and breaks shit. this is why even Canonical admitted there is a FOUR TIMES higher return rate for Ubuntu netbooks which makes linux a money LOSER for any company foolish enough to try. Walmart, Asus, these companies don't just abandon a product willy nilly you know, they did it because of the reasons i listed.
The sad part? All the basic parts are there, a modern kernel, DEs that with some serious polish could be great, plenty of drivers, but the zealots and itch scratching devs make sure Linux goes exactly nowhere. the ONLY reason it has gotten anywhere on servers is MSFT's frankly ass raping prices on CALs. If MSFT dropped the price of WinServer to $100 and the price of CALs to a buck a pop Linux would dry up and blow away, anybody that was honest would admit this. As a Linux admin i know put it "if you give a Windows and Linux admin the same job that the Linux guy has done repeatedly then the Linux admin WILL win, but if its a completely new task? the windows admin will be home making a sandwich before the Linux admin is done Googling".
But instead of admitting that CLIs are for servers and GUIs for desktops you'll get 300 page treaties on how "CLI is leet!" and how much better the world would be if "They would only embrace the POWER of CLI" like its the god damned force. So instead all you get is flag waving and fangirls. notice how many above me rushed to say "And I'm not a fanboi"? Every time you read that the translation should be "I'm such a fangirl I squee like a tweener at a Beiber concert when i see a Bash prompt!"
Ultimately though their denial can't change reality and the simple fact is their precious awesome OS lower than JavaME , a shitty third rate cellphone OS. Why? If it is sooo good why is it so low? Because it ISN'T good, its a buggy, fiddly, unfriendly, unintuitive, CLI heavy fiddly bitch that is about as far from the level of polish from OSX and Win 7 as it is from here to Europa. If they weren't so busy drooling over bash prompts maybe they'd ask the most important question, which is "What are our competitors doing right that we are doing wrong?' but that would mean admitting 70s terminals are as out as Disco, and they'd rather choke on RMS's sandals that admit that little truth.
Hi Oaktrail! Did you run your main account into the toilet again with your crazy conspiracy theories? Sorry to hear about that. Hey did you hear my business is doing so well i treated myself to a nice new AMD 6 core AND a new Asrock gamer board AND i'm building my GF a quad? yeah things are going great, let me leave you with my new song! We Wish You A Merry Thuban,We Wish You A Merry Thuban,We Wish You A Merry Thuban and a happy six coooorrres!
I'm sorry you're a bitter fanboi who backed a dead horse but look on the bright side, in 2014 I'm sure they be plenty of old XP junkers nobody wants you can dumpster dive! Merry Xmas!
Uhhh...I'm pretty sure that all of Ron Paul's beliefs come down to "Its up to the states' which was how the founding fathers meant it to be in the first place.
If one state wants to make pot legal or abortion illegal or support gay marriage then that is the will of the people of that state and if you don't like it? Well there is no law that says you have to stay in a state you don't agree with. this is one of the few places where i believe the invisible hand actually works as you can simply boycott doing business with a state, gay folks can refuse to vacation there, etc and you can affect change. Frankly I think its the ultra right wing fringe that keeps the issue in the media anyway, most of the rest of us frankly don't give a shit who you sleep with. I mean here I am living dead center in the deep south and our state capital has a large and very nice gay district. Everybody knows, nobody tries to hide it, nobody cares.
So frankly although i'm as left as left can be, hell my grandfather was a card carrying socialist, I have to say i do agree with Paul that the feds frankly have no business deciding such things that it should be up to the states. if you want to change things you gather petitions, get a measure put on the ballot, and try to get out the vote to change things. That is how it is supposed to work and at the state level it still can, its just that the federal level is got so much big money (as in TFA) that they simply ignore the will of the people. You throw out the bums and the next bunch is cashing their checks before they even get sworn in. I agree with Paul that if we are gonna change anything it needs to go back to having the power at the state level where the people can rally and vote, not at the federal level where you'll need sackfuls of money to even get heard.
Sadly though he wants to get rid of the fed which means the money men would NEVER let him be president. I mean look at what happened to the last one that tried to bring back the silver cert and get rid of the fed, he didn't get out of Dallas alive. Nowadays they don't even have to do that, they can just make sure their pets in the MSM just pretend the man doesn't exist. I mean look at how many polls the man has won or how much he has been able to raise and the media completely acts like he doesn't even exist while pushing ones like Newt or Mittens which they know have ZERO chance of winning jack shit. hell they might as well call it "The race to lose to Obama" and call it a day.
Well I can tell you that while it of course isn't gonna compete with my 6 core with an HD4850 it is a pretty damned nice mobile unit IMHO and frankly I'd say it beats Atom+ION as far as battery life + performance goes.
For $350 I got a EEE with an 8gb of RAM upgrade and 320gb of HDD space that has full VM capabilities, is powerful enough i use it as a mini music studio (thanks to Audacity, Acid, and hydrogen) and even under load it barely gets warm to the touch and I get around 6 hours of watching HD video or music creation out of it, what's not to like?
I'd say the reason the Dells bombed is they stuck with the lower end Atom chips and without ION frankly those things are just painful to use. while i'm sure they make Intel money simply because they are so damned cheap to make they really aren't nice to use either on Linux or Windows. The E-350 units on the other hand are quite pleasant, so much so that after trying a couple of them i had picked up for customers I sold my Athlon dual for the EEE and frankly haven't regretted it for a second.
So I think netbooks still have plenty of sales left, just not with shitty Intel Atom chips. Although it may simply be the fact that Dell just can't score the chips to compete and chose to bail instead. its pretty well known that Bobcat and bulldozer are proving to be so popular for AMD they haven't been able to keep up with demand and according to The Reg they quit making AM3 chips so they could use that capacity for Bobcat and Bulldozer. I wouldn't be surprised if Asus and HP already had contracts in place that got them first shot at the chips and Dell which has been typically an Intel only shop simply couldn't score any Bobcats.
But if you haven't tried one of the E-350 units i heartily recommend them. I mean where else you gonna get a sub $400 machine that only weighs 3 pounds, gets 6 hours on a battery, easily takes 8Gb of RAM, has full VT support, and even does 1080p over HDMI?
I haven't seen any laptop close to those specs without shelling out more money or dealing with a bigger clunkier unit. All the Dell units I looked at were Atom units which after trying several customer's netbooks (which they always brought me asking "Can you make it faster?") frankly I wouldn't take Atom on a bet. With the EEE I can surf, watch a video and have a chat window open and its still snappy, with the Atom units they always felt like they were struggling. So if all Dell could come with was the Atom goodbye Inspiron, I doubt you'll be missed.
Ask them to quickly rattle off some stupid age appropriate trivia? if its one thing we older folks have its too damned much stupid trivia, like "name three lame songs from early MTV" (my answer, Safety dance, Video killed the radio star, I always feel like somebody's watching me) or "What was the name of Captain Kangaroo's sidekick? "(Mr Greenjeans). See how easy that is? We have so damned much lame ass trivia to draw on it ain't even funny. Make it multiple choice with different stupid trivia each time and if they nail 90%+ in under 2 minutes you can be pretty damned sure there's an old fart on the other end of the line.
Personally i think Google in this case is full of shit simply because they are advertising to the kiddies and then saying they don't want them? make up your fucking mind Google, either you want them or you don't. Hotmail and Yahoo don't seem to have a problem with COPPA then why do you? Are you admitting you just don't have the ability? Surely with as much money as you have Google you can crank out a "Gmail for kids" yes?
Don't have the 125w friend, I have the 95w 1035t. I just did as you suggested, Prime 95 64bit let it run for about 15 minutes and it maxed out at 97. I could hear the fans kick up when it did but that was it Once i killed the test it dropped down to 73f in less than 2 minutes which is damned near room temp in my apt. The room is about 72f BTW in case you're curious. gotta say i'm impressed, that is pretty damned good for a $35 cooler IMHO. Hell I could take a pic if you want, my last chip was hitting 139f on stock cooling so fankly anything below that would have made me happy but the combo of coolermaster plus arctic silver seems to be kicking some serious booty.
And WHY do you think they said that EXACTLY? I'll tell you why: because Ballmer has such a raging hard on for Apple that if you show him an iPad he creams in his pants, that's why! They KNOW the desktop and laptop is gonna simply be a "replace it when it dies" market as PCs have become so insanely overpowered that nobody changes unless theirs goes tits up. They also know that Apple has found a hell of a cash cow in the mobile space because people toss every time their contract is up and in the case of the iShiny they toss every time there is a new model.
You bookmark this post and come back 6 months after Win 8 is released and watch it come true! Win 8 will make Vista look like Win95, the users won't want a cell phone GUI for a desktop so they'll stick with Win 7, the tablets will be returned en masse thanks to everyone bring their WinTabs home only to find Windows doesn't actually run Windows programs (WTF?) anymore, and Ballmer will "pursue other interests" to keep from being fired by the board when Win 8 goes down in flames. have YOU tried it? Its slow suck ass POS that is ONLY good for grandma. Anyone else will be annoyed as hell at all the resources all those damned constantly updating widgets suck and the attack vector that is having every win 8 desktop tied straight into IE will be a malware writers wet dream.
Mark my words the reason MSFT is saying this is because WinPhone has bombed and Ballmer thinks by sticking the Windows name on wintab he can get stupid developers to code for it, unlike WinPhone which is been ignored. but developers aren't retards, the public knows a cell phone when they look at it, and the ONLY reason to run Windows anything is WINDOWS PROGRAMS which naturally will run like shit with all those widgets on X86 and won't run at all on ARM. This is gonna be a clusterfuck they talk about for decades like bob only a hell of a lot more expensive, mark my words. Its a shame Jobs ain't here to see it because he'd be laughing his ass off at the uberfail.
Uhhh...I paid $300 for my EEE with the AMD E-350 dual core in Aug (well $350 after I threw in 8Gb of RAM and a nice briefcase style case for it) and it plays L4D, does full 1080P over HDMI, hell i'm even using it to edit audio multi-tracks with Audacity. What EXACTLY do you call a "real processor" anyway?
My guess is they are getting their ass kicked by Asus and don't want to admit they make a lousy product. The EEEs are damned nice little machines, especially the AMD Fusion models and talking to one of the guys I know at the local Walmart he said they are moving those things like there is no tomorrow. 6 hours on a battery charge under Windows 7, 8 hours under Expressgate, plenty of power, plays full 1080p over HDMI, sweet little units. If the Dell Inspiron mini is anything like their Inspiron laptops i can see why folks simply ain't buying, they're junk.
Maybe they just can't compete with the likes of HP and Asus, who knows. I know I was amazed I could get a fully loaded EEE while adding 8Gb of RAM and a nice little case for it for only $350 but of course that was before the flood, last i checked they are like $439. Maybe they can't score the drives and have given up? In any case i don't think Asus and HP will mind taking the business from dell, not one bit.
Not to mention Mr Coward the so called "Metro UI" that everybody hates can be turned COMPLETELY OFF with a simple registry switch, same as you can take Win 7 now and have it in Win 98 grey if that is what floats your boat. That's one thing MSFT has always been good about and that's making sure conservative businesses have a way of either using the old DE or even using the old OS with software assurance licenses. With the reg switch flipped all you get is Win 7 with a square start button instead of round. oh the horror! I must go out and buy thousands of dollars of Macbooks to escape the square button o' doom ZOMG!
I can see why so many post as AC now, hell maybe I ought to start posting as AC too. This site used to be the home of damned smart discussions, where arguments over file systems or GUI design could last 200 postings and even when you lost you damned well learned something, now its fanboi central and every argument ends in "nigger faggot cocksucker" aka "Shill troll astroturfer". Its all fanbois and bullshit and flag waving. I hate to say it but I have to agree with Mikey 400+ accounts "Slashdot = stagnated" No damned wonder taco ran away, he probably got sick of the BS too.
Not to mention the coward was talking about multi-billion dollar corps. Corps that size having to hire an army of coders to write custom apps, or paying a couple of hundred guys to convert files? Wouldn't even make line 23 of the budget proposal. When you are talking THAT level of business frankly short terms costs are rarely considered which is the exact opposite of most businesses or even small governments.
As we have seen several times on /. those that simply looked at Linux as "free as in beer" and didn't figure in migration costs ended up running back to Windows because the initial switch will cost you MORE than simply staying with what you have. This is simply common sense, a major arch or OS switch will always be more expensive than sticking with what you have, especially when MSFT sells site licenses. You have all those gotchas that nobody has figured in, like incompatible hardware, data conversion costs, having to have written a FOSS version of some proprietary app that simply won't run in Wine or paying the Wine guys to add support, etc.
Change is ALWAYS more expensive that staying where you are, which is why as you say you costs is only a small part and as I say you should change for the RIGHT reasons and not simply the bottom line.
I'll get hate for wading in with such obvious fanbois but WTF, truth is truth> You wanna know why Linux is dead last and going exactly nowhere? Its because you people really really REALLY suck at GUIs, you really do. While you may think some damned 70s terminal is the essence of nirvana the rest of the world has moved on dude, and nobody wants to play with your damned blinking cursor crap.
I mean holy fuck you are missing features that Windows had a fricking decade ago and while I don't have an OSX machine to confirm I wouldn't be surprised if Apple had them even longer. Where the fuck is the roll back drivers button? How about the find drivers button? You expect the user to magically know the make/model/rev of any and all pieces of hardware and go do the "find a fix" forum dance which ALWAYS ends with "open up bash and type" aka "We suck balls at GUIs so please take our shitty terminal again" with NO thought of ease of use or intuitiveness.
So you can make your little comments about how Windows and OSX is for "noobs" or how they "suck" but you know what? Apple and MSFT could raise their prices 300% and YOU WOULD NOT GAIN A SINGLE POINT because your designs are backwards, they are NOT intuitive, they are as unfriendly as can possibly be, and the GUIs frankly are extremely basic and often barely functional as I found out when network manager wouldn't take changes in the GUI, tossing them on each reboot. Guess what the solution was? We suck balls at GUIs so please take our terminal. Every. single. time you see "Open up bash and type" you have just written "We suck and are full of fail" because nobody else wants that lame shit but you.
The sad part is you have most of the pieces, a kernel that does everything a modern kernel should, several (partially) functional DEs that with some polish could be damned nice, and drivers for most hardware, but frankly you couldn't put all these pieces together into a solid intuitive OS if someone put a gun to the head of RMS and told you "do it or the hippie gets it". You know what Linux at this stage reminds me of? Windows 98. What was Win98? It was a CLI OS with a GUI shell bolted on top that kinda sorta worked but for anything more than basic tasks failed, was buggy as fuck, and to get anything complicated done you had to go CLI which you could even bypass the GUI shell completely and just go CLI. What is Linux now? It is a CLI OS with a GUI shell bolted on top that kinda sorta works but for anything more than basic tasks fails, is buggy as fuck, and to get anything complicated done you need to go CLI which you can even bypass the GUI shell completely and just go CLI.
Apple and MSFT are bringing their A games, which is why MSFT had one of its biggest quarters EVAR just recently and Apple is now one of the biggest corps ON THE PLANET and what do you bring? DE wars and CLI and Mickey Mouse amateur hour bugs. Sorry but there is a reason why you can't give your OS away, and it ain't no conspiracy, its the same reason every OEM from Asus who started Linux on netbooks to retailers like Walmart run away from your OS. Its not stable, its buggy, its too damned fiddly, it lacks polish, its too dependent on 70s terminals. In other words you are bringing your D game and everyone knows it. Now stick THAT in your terminal and compile it!
Funny you should mention that because what really turned me off of RMS was his fawning over communist leaders and talking about "software freedom' in places where strongmen like Chavez would happily crack your head in for actually asking for REAL freedom but to hear RMS tell it these places were paradises.
I have to wonder after reading some of his treaties about how his ultimate goal is to completely destroy all proprietary software that old RMS doesn't actually believe a communist utopia is possible. After all having true freedom means having the right to choose something that others may not like but RMS makes it clear you shouldn't have THAT freedom, only the freedom to use "free software" that fits HIS definition of free.
Like I said when the man is so damned militant he first tosses the Wifi in his OLPC because it has non free firmware before ditching the OLPC completely because its BIOS isn't free enough, only to replace it with some uber rare Loongson (who is sponsored by the Chinese government BTW) netbook because according to him that is the ONLY device on the planet that meets his definition of free? Well I have to think the man has gone so militant that including him in discussions about the future of FOSS would be like calling Fred Phelps to be a part of a conference on inter-faith cooperation. And of course there is this video which shows as the man gets older he is obviously getting a little...off. I mean seriously doesn't he realize that video is a MSFT salesman's wet dream? He makes the whole FOSS movement look batshit!
So let me get this straight: You switched because of an alpha build that nobody but programmers should even bother playing with and which most users will just skip like Vista? Okay that makes NO sense. you DO know that Win 7 is supported until 2020 yes? Or that it is quite easy to simply skip a Windows release, like going from XP to 7 yes?
If you'd have said you wanted more control over the code THAT I could understand but throwing out your entire infrastructure because of a developer's preview of an OS that most businesses will probably skip anyway just strikes me as a little nutty or just an excuse. Can't say as i blame you because I hear the new macbooks are quite nice.
Well anyone who has seen Steve Ballmer hooting like a madman while leaving sweat pools across the stage would know that Ballmer is waaaay more offensive than Goatse. Frankly i think he makes the Pepsi guy that ran Apple look like a fricking genius.You know its bad when Gates actually had to come out and say "I'm not coming back to MSFT, quit with the rumors already' because so many are unhappy with Ballmer they were hoping for a Jobs style saving of the company.
As for TFA its nice to see that some that try switching aren't doing it for the WRONG reasons, because they always seem to lead to failure. if you want to switch to Linux because its open? Because it lets YOU decide how long support will last? Because it allows you to look at and modify the code to suit YOUR needs? Congratulations you have switched for the RIGHT reasons and will most likely succeed. Where you see Linux fail time and time again is at these companies where they only care about "free as in beer" and they quickly find out that if all you want Linux for is to save money you are gonna lose and lose big.
Lets face it folks Linux isn't gonna save you a dime, not in the short or medium term anyway. You are gonna need more expensive Linux admins instead of dirt cheap MCSEs, you are gonna have to hire developers to code FOSS versions of any and all niche programs you have, you are gonna have to pay people to get your files out of proprietary formats and into FOSS ones, its not gonna be cheap friends. That is why the ones that ONLY care about price are doomed to fail, as when they don't see their budgets magically drop by half and in fact see costs initially rise they are gonna bail.
But if you do it for the right reasons listed above you will stick with it and end up probably better off than you were before since you won't be tied into any products by proprietary vendors like Adobe or MSFT and buy hiring internal coders and admins will be able to DIY instead of going out and buying solutions that will have to be re-bought when the support date ends.
So its nice to see someone looking like they are gonna have a happy outcome by doing it for the right reasons after all the stories we have seen of Linux being used for the wrong reasons and failing. I bet if you looked at their budget they probably haven't saved squat yet and possibly have even had the price go up as they have paid for all of the above that I listed, but they now have more control and can pay to have it customized any way they desire.
Well if all they care about is cheap, why aren't they using morphine? Morphine is old as dirt so I seriously doubt there are patents for plain old morphine anymore, they have a version called MS Contin which is just a timed release formula, and if you are in pain MS Contin doesn't get you high it just blocks the pain. I have a relative that's been on it something like 25 years after a horrific car wreck messed his back and knees all up and the guy has been on the same dose all this time, never more, never less. Hell he even lives on the second floor of an apt building now and I honestly thought he'd be lucky to dress himself after the wreck.
So if all they care about is cheap they should just use the natural stuff. Frankly the artificial drugs we cook up always seem to do more damage than the natural compounds and its obvious from TFA that this Methadone may be cheap but its also nasty.
I know they are using the form factor, doesn't change what I said. personally i'd love to have all kinds of cool little cards i could plug into a card reader the way we used to use PCMCIA. Nowadays unless you spend out the wazoo they simply don't include anything other than USB and while USB is great (hell my dad now has 23 USB ports on his PC, he believes EVERYTHING should be USB) it would still be nice to be able to just plug in say a little digital tuner card or other device through the card reader that every unit seems to have now.
And i'm glad you like Ninite, its a Godsend for those that need to load up a new box or laptop as you found out. i hope you don't mind another suggestion, but if you put together a machine more than once or twice a year WSUS Offline is your friend too. With WSUS Offline you can have ALL the Windows updates PLUS Service Packs PLUS .NET PLUS any version of MS Office updates ALL in one easy to use handy dandy tool. it'll make an offline updater out of a thumbstick or DVD, no "install reboot install" mess, you can tell it with a single checkbox to shut down or reboot when its done, just a nice little tool to have. I have everything from XP - Win 7 X64 in mine, just run it once a month to get the latest updates which since it has all previous updates it takes very little time to get it current.
Oh and one other final bit of advice, well two actually. 1.- if you need a cheap CPU upgrade for an older box? Go here as their service is top notch and the chips are some of the cheapest prices around. I can't count the number of machines I've upgraded thanks to Starmicro chips and you can't beat a place that has Pentium Ds for $18 and AMD quads starting at $55. 2.- If you or anybody else here runs into the "No device under sound" problem in windows, even though you KNOW you've installed the driver? Feel free to email me, i have a simple reg file that fixes that problem instantly. It simply resets the Windows sound server back to its default state. simply clicky clicky, reboot and voila! Instant sound. I've had this little reg file for years and I can confirm it works on ANY Windows from Win2K- Win 7 X64. Just put in the subject line "Sound reg file" so i know what its about.
Anyway i'm glad you enjoyed Ninite, its the little handy dandy tools that make life so much easier, and i hope your stepdaughter enjoys her new PC! I'll be using Ninite myself the middle of next week, i'll be building my GF a nice AMD quad for Xmas and she'll be getting the full Ninite treatment. man I can't wait until she sees it, all black and red and silver, it'll be the first new box my baby has had in something like 6 years.
Noooo...RMS has said repeatedly the ultimate goal of GPL is to kill proprietary software. You can look up his "GPL VS LGPL" for just one example, but there are several others out there.
We're all adults here right? so lets cut to brass tacks gentlemen, RMS is a militant and seems to get more militant as he gets older. compare GPL V1 - V3 to see how he tries his damnedest to make sure there is NO way you can use GPL unless YOUR PROGRAM is likewise GPL. He also says this in his GPL VS LGPL essay.
You have to remember folks that old RMS doesn't see this as a software thing, he sees it as some "good VS evil" battle where you are either FOR him or AGAINST him, there is no shades of grey, no compromises. Now while he is perfectly within his right to hold that view i think the numbers show that most developers don't see the world that way, otherwise the change to GPL V3 would have saw an uptick not a nosedive.
While the rational thing to do would be to sit down with developers from all walks of life, talk to them to find out what they don't like about the current GPL, and then fix it, sadly the problem with zealotry is there isn't any room for compromises like that and honestly from reading the man's writings I doubt it'd bother him in the least if he was the only one using GPL as long as it remained 'pure'. Remember we are talking about a guy who got rid of his OLPC because the BIOS wasn't GPL and is now using some rare loongson netbook simply because that was the ONLY device he could find that met his definition of GPL compliance.
So the fact that the GPL is going down the shitter as far as usage is concerned really doesn't surprise me and frankly i expect that trend to get worse not better. Life simply isn't black and white and when even Torvalds won't use GPL V3 because its too restrictive that should let you know RMS simply went too far. While i like the idea of FOSS and use it quite often i also know that companies have to make money and developers need to eat But it seems that RMS doesn't feel the same. Of course he is a self proclaimed "squatter at MIT" so he doesn't really have to worry about kids, a car, house payments, etc so its probably easier for him to live in a black and white world than it is for the rest of us.