Exactly, take the Win 7 UI. You have jumplists and breadcrumbs, libraries and being able to slam windows to one side or the other to make them half screen. There are a ton of little cool features in Win 7 and thanks to integrated search they are easier than ever to find, such as my dad learning that Win 7 had speech recognition and trying it out simply because he typed "microphone" into control panel looking for his mike settings.
One thing I will agree with the author on though is it should come down to the USER not the OS on which way to work. If they want to keep classic it should be easily accessible and if they want the new version that should be fine too. If they include the Win 7 GUI with a simple way to make it default i might use Win 8 but if the only GUI is that cell phone ripoff that is metro? I'll hang onto Win 7 until Win 9 comes around and hopefully gives us choice again.
That is because nobody will do squat about the squatters. Little known fact only 15% or so if the IP V4 addresses are actually being used by honest to God websites, the rest are either really old companies that got a shitload of numbers because they got there first and are now sitting on them, and of course the traditional squatters with an Adsense page hoping to make enough off of typos.
So if one were to do something about al the squatters we would have 85% free which we could in turn hand out and buy us some time to do the next IP version right, which means backwards compatibility along with offering free education and tax credits for those willing to go into networking to learn the new IP. Because as it is the flyover states are gonna severely fuck ALL of you friend, all of it goes right through those states sooner or later and the pay in right to work states suck so frankly nobody has bother to learn the new IP V6. When things go wrong which would have taken a couple of hours on IP V4 you'll be looking at days or even weeks simply because most of the old guard only know IP V4 and nobody is going into networking or IT anymore thanks to offshoring.
Any way you slice it thanks to no BC and no workers trained in the new protocol the switch is gonna be one giant clusterfuck. But hey this is what happens when you base a whole society on the race to the bottom and don't protect your workers from offshoring and H1-Bs, nobody wants a job where they don't know if they are gonna even have a job next week. I predict lots of breakage and middle America pretty much being a network dead zone where if anything breaks you are well and truly fucked. I personally haven't taken more than a glance at IP V6, I mean why should I? Nobody offers it here, pretty much every SMB and home router will have to be shitcanned and replaced with a router that may or may not work correctly unless you spend more money than its worth to buy an Airport, and in the end thanks to NAT it really doesn't offer my customers anything they don't already have, and of course no BC which means double the setup and double the hassles. No thanks.
Re:Government responsible says, 'Look, commies'.
on
Was Russia Behind Stuxnet?
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Besides didn't some Israeli general upon retirement say something to the effect of "LOL I helped kick some ass with Stux didn't I?". The whole thing smelt like Mossad to me. Frankly I honestly don't blame the Iranians for wanting the bomb as pretty much everyone in that region that hasn't kissed US bankster ass or have a bomb has been stomped on, they have the US Navy practically sitting off their coast and US drones buzzing overhead.
As has been said many times its not paranoia if they really are out to get you and the Neocons made it clear years ago that Iran was on their hit lists. If Iran says something like "We won't accept dollars for oil, only gold" like old MoMo did they'd probably be invaded before the year was out. pretty much the only way to not get stomped on by the US military anymore is to have the bomb. Kinda sad, but that's reality, the MSM is happy to dance to any tune their masters tell them to and its too easy to get the average citizen to believe anything the TV tells them to, just look at that poll where 40%+ thought we went into Iraq over 9/11.
Iran knows the clock is ticking and if they don't have the bomb some neocon is gonna come into power and squash them like a bug, if for no other reason than they don't get along with Israel and too many neocons are of the "Jesus won't come back if there aren't Jews in Zion! Come back Jesus come back!" variety. i don't know what is scarier, the Mullahs wanting a bomb or the fact that one of the most highly weaponized countries in the west have a large power base that believes the ME policy should be based on 1800 year old words written on a sheep's ass by goat herders about some 2000+ year old dead guy and how he needs a certain race in a certain place so he has a spot to park his fluffy white cloud.
So your answer is works for me along with imaginary problems kill windows is that correct? If you are gonna use the same memes every lintroll has used since the beginning of time could you PLEASE just use the linux TMs and save us all some time? kthanx. Now be sure to claim I'm a secret M$ ninja dirty poo poo head hiding in a hole in Redmond while you are at it.
BTW, how many machines have you sold at retail? How many systems have you built for sale? Could that answer be.....zero? I've been building and supporting systems and users since before there even WAS a Windows, back when Gem and DOS and a dozen others out there fought and bled and died. And i'm sorry friend but your problem and why Linux will never ever in a million damned years go anywhere on the desktop is twofold. One Linus Torvalds, who says such brilliant things as Linux isn't designed, it just grows like a virus Yeah linus its called an STD and thanks to you asshole Linux will NEVER have a stable ABI even though OSX, BSD, Solaris, Windows, hell even OS/2 has one, and two because the developers are all geeks scratching itches and don't give a flying piss about USERS. Since MSFT doesn't make any money if they ignore the users they have no choice, linux devs since they don't get paid simply tell the users "LOL Goatse'. For examples see GNOME Shell and unity.
So please, go back to patting yourself on the back for "sticking it to teh man" meanwhile when i'm finished this brand new Windows 7 quad WILL run pretty much non stop for the next 8 years, no bugs, no crashes, no CLI or forum dances or broken drivers. Can you HONESTLY say the same about YOUR OS? I think most definitely not. Good day sir.
So in other words you answer is "Linux is magical and never gets bugs so don't update it" correct? care to
explain thesemyfriend? protip: NO OS is secure without being patched NONE.I'd also point out the KDELook bug of year before last, oh and here is a nice little how to for writing Linux bugs.
But thank you for posting, yours is a PERFECT example of why linux on the desktop is as dead as disco. When pointed out the myriad of problems the community simply sticks their fingers in their ears and goes "La la la, CLI is leet! You don't know, you are noob, you are not leet! You must be a M$ Ninja dirty poo poo head!". would you like me to link to the OEMs that have abandoned Linux, including Asus which started the whole netbook craze? just ask and its yours, maybe you can explain how the ENTIRE PLANET is wrong and you're right.
Thanks Thundersnatch and you notice I got modded down for pointing out reality? Like I said i'm willing to put up with a sucky baseline simply because the WEB SHOULD BE FREE FOR ALL TO USE and I don't want Apple and MSFT with MPEG-LA locking it behind a paywall, but it don't make the codecs less shitty.
I've tried Dirac,WebM, and Theora and frankly even old Xvid gave me a better picture at a significantly lower file size than any of the above. And as you pointed out its not the license that bites you in the ass, its the bandwidth. while i don't run a video site I DO have to deal with a LOT of customers that have bandwidth limited connections and I have to keep abreast of such things as i have to find the best formats for them to use dropboxes and the like to share little Timmy's first words with the family in Chicago.
And while I still think the price of a free Internet is worth paying, as we can always have a video in the baseline format as the lowest common denominator along with MP4 or H.264 and then let the user decide which format to watch, I have to call a spade and spade and all the free ones seriously suck. To get the same level of quality I got in an 800Mb Xvid or DivX 5 video i had to end up with a file nearly twice the size and honestly? its still not quite as good, with more artifacts and pixelation. And compared to H.264 it wasn't even a contest, it was more like three times the size to equal a good H.264 encode.
I don't see how you can call this "super great security layer" when most of what both Chromium (as in Chromium, Chrome, Comodo Dragon, and others) and IE does is as old as Unix, since they are using low rights mode which is simply a level of permissions below that of even users which severely limits what the browser (and thus code inside it) can and can't do. combine that with sandboxing, ASLR, and DEP and you make a pretty damned hard nut to crack.
I think the problems with Firefox, the lousy memory usage, CPU spiking, bad security, it all comes down to Gecko. gecko simply wasn't built for today or for multithreading or isolation and trying to bolt more and more onto gecko is making it shittier. I just hope it'll turn out that Mozilla has been secretly having a rewrite of the underlying engine done and they'll spring it on us because while i really miss Firefox it is just too easy to pwn.
Hell if you have friends or clients that use yahoo Mail and FF I'm sure you've seen the spam from their accounts, that's an iFrame bug that will load a hidden iFrame and log into their Yahoo account while they are looking at free porn videos and then spam their address books. After seeing a couple of customers complaining about spamming even though all scans showed a clean machine I checked their history and tried it myself with a box I planned on wiping and with a Yahoo account I use as a spam dump and yep, Chromium and IE didn't get bit, FF did. sorry I didn't write down the exact address but since it seemed to be a hit and miss thing i think its malware hidden in some of the ads. But if you want to try it yourself just go to some of the sites like Redtube and youporn and start clicking on random links, but you'll have to have a fake Yahoo account with the pword saved in FF and a couple of addresses for it to send spam to.
But after that i moved all my customers away from FF, its just too risky. Not a single other browser i tried did that, not any of the chromiums or IE, not opera or Safari or QTWeb, ONLY FF got bit by that bug, again because gecko i think is too long in the tooth and needs to be replaced.
While I agree IE has gotten loads better thanks to MSFT fragmenting the living fuck out of IE trying to upsell Windows frankly i wouldn't take it on a bet. There is currently three and soon to be four Windows versions out there. Quick tell me this: which version of IE can XP run? How about Vista? 7? MSFT has made it a damned mess by not backporting shit which makes IE a nightmare to support. that is why i remove it, toss the links, as far as my systems i sell is concerned IE don't exist. I give them Comodo dragon and then if they manage to somehow bork that they can use the FF I have on there as a backup but NO IE. BTW you ought to see how few patches you need for Windows 7 if IE isn't on the machine, I'd say probably a good 70% of the win 7 patches are IE patches.
But I would take Dragon, QTWeb, Safari, Opera, Chrome, hell even FF over IE as long as I have ABP installed. trying to keep up with which version is for which OS and what features are for which version is too much of a PITA. My customers are certainly not gonna go out and buy new machines or a shitload of Windows CALs just because MSFT won't backport their own software. Funny how Google and all those browsers based on chromium like Dragon have NO problem supporting XP and Vista?
Yes but you CAN save a life. When my mom was on jury duty she came in after it was over white as a sheet and said 'Don't you EVER get a jury trial always ask for a judge!" and when I asked her what was wrong here was what I was told:
The case was arson of a restaurant, there was NO motive, as the guy didn't even have enough insurance to cover what he owed and had to file chap 11, there was NO evidence as even the fire investigator said he couldn't say with any certainty WHAT had started the fire and the place had already had two close calls thanks to wiring shorts, yet the jury wanted to convict and it was only my mom that hung them up, why? "Because he is Italian and Italians are in the mob and burn buildings, didn't you ever see goodfellas?"
That's right folks, your system at work. the man nearly lost 20 years of his life because of a ray liotta movie. the jury didn't care about a thing said in the court other than the fact he was Italian. If it hadn't been for my mom it really would have been "12 people too stupid to get out of jury duty". Now would you REALLY want to bet your life on the hope there is a single smart one in the pile of morons? I'm glad the guy is gonna do his jury duty but I bet when its over he too will have a nice horror story about how fucking DUMB the American public has become. it is truly "March of the morons" out there folks. Scary huh?
Do you even read what you posted? "As long as she doesn't need sound its good" well who the fuck wants an OS with no damned sound? Pulse is a damned nightmare from hell friend and frankly the whole community has gone right off the deep end with the 'CLI is teh leet!" bullshit. Here check out this exchange and see how batshit the community has become. especially check out WorBux who thinks grandma knows what CP and MV is along with saying you need CLI for "for" loops, like normal people are writing if/then/else programmer horseshit!
Frankly MSFT could raise their prices 300% it wouldn't matter, apple might gain some more share but Linux sure as hell won't, because the community is so out of touch the normal users might as well be Martians! For the last 3 years NONE of my users besides me has even HAD CLI access, because i remove it from my image to clean up the start menu, do you know how many complained? hell do you know how many even noticed? NONE, zip zero zilch nada squat nein. Year after year, patch after patch, Windows just WORKS, no broken drivers, no fucked up "settings won't stick" BS like what I went through with networkmanager in Linux, no forum dances, no CLI fixes, none of that. The machine i'm typing this on is a circa 2003 WinXP Home box i got several years back out of a pallet of refurbs and keep as a nettop because its ultra low power Sempron makes for a cheap nettop and it still has the SAME INSTALL from 2003, that's two service packs, around 1800 patches, know how many broken drivers I've had? Know how many times I've had to go CLI with it? i'm sure you know the answer and THAT is why Windows is WELL worth the price!
Sorry but that's bullshit friend. pulseaudio is a fucking nightmare from hell, the 6 month upgrades break more shit than they fix, and thanks to Torvalds and his itch scratching the kernel is constantly changing like the shifting sands.
I often have close to a dozen off lease machines coming through the door so I HAVE tried Linux friend, and its a fucking mess. hell the Linux of 2004 was more stable than this, the DEs have been gutted and replaced with frankly alpha quality code, the wireless is beyond broken, half the time I can't get jack shit to stick in network manager unless I go CLI (which when i complain again I get 40 treaties on how fucking wonderful CLI is, bite me CLI nutters!) so there is no other way to put it, its really programmer's toys at the moment, certainly not anything i'd trust to a non tech. and since her dad had a heart attack she is having to live 150 miles away and we see each other on the weekends, how the fuck am i supposed to fix her box if Linux takes a shit on Tuesday? with windows she simply calls me and gives me the code for remote assistance and BAM! I've got full control, just like i'm sitting at the box. since i haven't seen Windows Ethernet go down in ages (again unlike Linux where the last ubuntu update took a big shit on network manager for me) as long as she has a connection i'm right there if something goes wrong.
I'm sorry but until the nutters let go of the damned CLI and treating everything from the kernel up as tweaker central its simply unsuitable for purpose. in the retail biz rep is EVERYTHING, I get a bad rep i might as well close the doors and Linux shits itself worse than Windows 98 from what I've seen. here try my "is it safe?" test and see for yourself, this test simulates what my customer would go through if they only owned the box THREE years. Oh and before you say LTS allow me to say FUCK LTS, its a code word for "runs old shit" and most of the software is NEVER backported so you're looking at third party security risks, no thanks. ALL of my machines MUST have the latest patches, no unpatched software allowed.
Now download the version from 3 years ago, get all the drivers working (CLI is allowed here, after all you're the builder ATM not the buyer) and once it is done allow it to update to current, remember NO CLI from this point on because you are Suzy the checkout girl, not some geek! Now see what happened? see how much shit be broke? THAT is the problem. I'm typing this on an XP Home box that has had the same install since 2003, no bugs, no crashes, no broken drivers, and that is after TWO, count 'em two service packs and about 2000 patches.
So I'm sorry friend but from my perspective, and I know this'll piss you off but I call it as i see it, Linux IS Windows 98, no more, no less. What was Win98? It was a CLI OS with a DE shell that wasn't very stable and kinda sorta worked for the basics but if anything went wrong you'd need to go CLI, in fact you could just go straight to CLI and bypass the shell completely. what is Linux? Why It is a CLI OS with a DE shell that isn't very stable and kinda sorta worked for the basics but if anything goes wrong you'd need to go CLI, in fact you could just go straight to CLI and bypass the shell completely. BTW did you know Windows doesn't even HAVE easy access to CLI or even start>run anymore? In windows 7 it is buried waaaaaay in the back under accessories where nobody will EVER find them unless they go specifically hunting for it because IT IS NOT NEEDED. can YOU say the same? of course not because the answer to EVERY question in Linux ALWAYS comes down to "open up bash and type" period. Ask for anything else and you'll get shit thrown at you.
Enjoy your programmer's paradise friend, but since programmers are 0.04% of the population don't be surprised when you never gain any share. Hell I could go on all day pointing out the failures in Linux but why bother? you'll just call me filthy names because I won't drink the koolaid and pretend that inside every grandma there is a C programmer wa
Actually that is only fairly recently and I'd argue in large part because Apple refuses to support anything else. before that most of the flash video i came across was VP6 which is of course now completely free thanks to Google buying On2. As for the other poster...what's wrong with MP4? I LIKE MP4, its low resource, it plays nicely, especially the DivX and Xvid versions, and you can buy tons of sub $50 set top boxes that play the format. hell one of my biggest sellers to customers with kids is the Nbox settop which plays DivX and Xvid and is great for loading a HDD full of Dora vids on so little Becky doesn't cry when the disc gets scratched, so what is wrong with MP4?
Exactly. Before the flood i paid a grand total of $193 for 6Tb worth of storage, that 2 2Tb drives, a 1Tb OS drive and a 1Tb external for OS backups. You really can't complain when before the flood I was buying 2Tb Samsung for $59 and 1Tb for $35, even at 5400RPM the cache size makes them fast enough for OS drives. This of course isn't counting the 320Gb I have in my netbook nor the 320Gb laptop external drive i got to go with it. The netbook was $350 with that much space AND an upgrade to 8Gb of RAM, and the mini external was a whole $32 on sale, that's just nuts!
Once the mess is cleaned up we'll go back to sub $50 1Tb drives and sub $80 2Tbs and be up to our asses in more storage space than we can use again. I mean counting the internal and external drives i have something like 7.4Tb worth of space and that is just an insane amount of space for so cheap. Even loading ALL my games, music, and favorite movies i have something like 74% free on main machine which has 3Tb of storage in it. what am i gonna do with all that space? fuck if I know but it was cheap so who cares?
Actually i'd like her to have an OS that works, thanks ever so. I have WinXP boxes in the field going on a decade, that's three service packs and not a SINGLE driver failure, not one. Until Torvalds stops Goatse-ing the kernel and allows Linux to have a hardware ABI its simply unsuitable for purpose unless you are a CS grad, a nerd who thinks reading man pages and doing forum dances is a "fun" way to spend a weekend, or a programmer. Since my GF is none of those things I'd like her to have a functional OS and Linux doesn't cut the mustard friend.
Hell when i point out Linux is too dependent on CLI fixes and has too many drivers breaking on update instead of getting "well maybe we should do something about that" from the community I get 30 responses telling me how "powerful and leet" CLI is, with one going as far as to ask me "Well how do you expect to write a GUI for "for" loops" like IRL Suzy the checkout girl and other normal people are sitting around writing if/then/else statements? I'm sorry but the entire Linux community is off their nut. I'd be happy to post the link from LinuxInsider BTW, its almost comical how completely out of touch with reality the Linux community is with the wants and needs of consumers. They truly believe that grandmas write for loops and ordinary folks like my GF just can't wait to learn all about their 1970s terminal throwback.
As I finally threw up my hands and said "Its like mass insanity, how else can you explain otherwise rational people behaving so irrationally" and the fact you think an easy to use OS that can be updated for years without breaking and is supported until 2020 is ""S+M" shows that you too are peobably a little off your rocker friend.
More than 35% of my customers are under 25, surprise surprise. I often have to sit down with "customers" as young as tweeners whose parents bring them in to get either their first desktop or more often a netbook/laptop so i get their feedback just like I do the older folks. And your "improvements"? Its a BIGGER cell phone, that's not improving, that's screen clutter!
Look we'll see at RTM but Ballmer has made it VERY clear that he is pushing to try to get into the tablet market which frankly wouldn't take Windows 8 on a bet, I mean why should they when they can have Android for free? Windows ONLY real selling point anymore is WINDOWS PROGRAMS and of course an ARM tablet sure as fuck ain't playing windows programs so the returns are gonna be insane. As a retailer I can tell you that it doesn't take much when it comes to returns to eat right through any profits you have and make all your black ink turn to red.
But when even the kids are telling me "That is just an ugly cell phone" not a SINGLE person, not one, has anything nice to say about it? its a flop, its a turkey. hell look at MSFT under Ballmer its been more flops than hits across the board. Killing playsforsure for Zune market (which bombed HARD), rushing the X360 out when it had a fatal hardware flaw that to this day scares customers, Zune, WinMo, WinPhone, Kin, Vista, its been one PHB moment after another so the odds are in my favor friend.
Look I hope you're right friend, I really do as i make my living with MSFT products. I truly hope they pull back from the cliff they are headed towards because otherwise its gonna be a disaster. Windows 7 is frankly the best UI have they have ever designed bar none. Nice features, good memory management, easy for noobs while also giving power users plenty of features, and of course my customers love it, its a damned fine OS.
But its sadly been pretty damned clear than Ballmer sees iMoney and drools like a retard. Just look at how many times they have tried to get into apple's sandbox, Zune, Kin, WinPhone, Ballmer wants to be Apple so bad it hurts. But he doesn't seem to be capable of seeing that Apple products are basically toys for rich folks. Very damned few are trying to get any real work done in their iPad or iPhone, they are watching videos and playing angry birds. You watch my prediction come true, either MSFT offers a simple kill switch that tosses Metro for a standard Windows 7 desktop or Win 8 will go the way of Vista, an OS you can't even give away. I have 3 or 4 Vista CALs here at the shop, word of mouth has spread enough that even the noobs don't want it and i predict the same will be said of Win 8.
When the ONLY real question I get about Win 8 is "But YOU can get me a copy of windows 7 and stick it on, right?" you can just smell the fail.
Google has made it VERY clear that they HAVE NOT and WILL NOT offer indemnity for their users. Just look at how many have had to pay their $699 license fee to MSFT over Android. That is one thing MSFT should be given credit for as they make it clear they WILL indemnify their customers.
And nobody seems to be willing to talk about the big drunken elephant taking a big shit all over the rug which is the simple fact that the free codecs currently suck balls and are likely not only gonna need many millions of dollars worth of work but probably just as much spent on lawyers looking for submarine patents. Compare Dirac, Theora, and WebM to H.264 and Flash on resource usage and it isn't even funny, all the free ones use a hell of a lot more cycles to give you a shittier picture than either flash or H.26x, and that is before hardware acceleration which of course drops the power even lower.
As I said in an earlier post having a truly free web is worth putting up with a shitty free codec as a baseline for HTML V5 simply to keep the web free and open rather than locked behind an H.26x paywall, but that don't turn shit into caviar and honestly if you compare them side by side, both on encoding and decoding frankly old Xvid (which of course is based on the old MSFT MP4 codec) is better than what is being offered for free. The free codecs suck power and give you less picture quality in return and thanks to MPEG-LA having something like 2000+ patents on just about every step in the video chain i highly doubt any of the above free codecs would survive a court challenge,
I'd be more concerned about HTML V5, as both apple and MSFT are pushing like mad to lock it behind a paywall with H.264 which as we all know is patented so badly you can pretty much give up on FOSS ever having a free version, not for another 15-20 years at least.
This is why I never understood the FOSS flash hate or why they would run to embrace an obviously hostile to FOSS group like MPEG-LA over Adobe. Sure flash isn't the greatest but have you EVER seen them complain about a distro including flash? Hell they don't even complain about gnash and I wouldn't be surprised if they eventually open flash up. Compare this to MPEG-LA that basically went "Pay your $699 license fee you cock smoking teabagger!" to Firefox and made it QUITE clear you will NOT be shipping H.264 in a browser or OS without cutting a check. of course being proprietary both Apple and MSFT can and do just cut them a check and both want to "fucking kill Google" so they're just fine with H.264.
I just hope the developers here will put their money where their mouths are and refuse to touch HTML V5 until it has a free codec as the standard, be it Theora, be it WebM (which I think is quite nice actually) or be it the royalty free MPEG 1+2 in TFA. The web should be free to all, be you proprietary or FOSS, and ATM HTML V5 is anything but and that is before they add the MPAA DRM on top which i'm sure will never work in FOSS OSes as unlike Apple and MSFT they don't support kernel level DRM..
If you have a laptop those samsung drives run real nice and the 32Mb cache almost makes them as fast as 7200RPM thanks to its intelligent caching, at least in my own benchmarks. i'd be snatching but i already have 320gb in my netbook and 6tb in my desktops so i don't think I really need any more space for awhile. enjoy!
Oh man that's bad, and after WD got stuck with a 525 million dollar arbitration loss to Seagate last month. frankly i just hope WD survives getting a big one two punch like that, as I'd hate to see a world where all you had for HDDs was Seagate.
If you HONESTLY think they are gonna gut the ENTIRE UI before release day? here is a cookie to go with the koolaid you have been drinking. as for why show it to them? well to generate buzz dummy! With the win 7 Beta I had plenty of customers asking me all kinds of things, like "How fast is it? Does it have cool stuff? Is it worth it?" and when RTM hit I had 5 new builds, more than a dozen installs waiting,it helped generate more buzz!!
But I'm sorry if your a fanboy but win 8 is such a trainwreck its gonna make Vista look like win95. Hell even with Vista people were interested...until they actually played with the beta machine i had set up and saw what a buggy slow POS it was. With the Win 7 beta I was showing them the cool tricks like slamming windows on the sides to fit two apps (they love that one BTW, its great for having a chat and another app at the same time) or the breadcrumbs. with Win 8 it was unanimous, they all said "its a cell phone" and promptly hated it. folks PUT UP with their cell phone, most don't sit there caressing the thing and they sure as hell don't want to spend their day in front of it!
Uhhh...Tigerdirect was selling a Seagate 1.5Tb for $69 the other day, the 1Tb external for $99 so there are drives still out there, you just got to keep an eye out. I would suggest having an email account where you get the daily emails from ALL the major and minor tech stores, from Tiger and Newegg to Surpluscomputers and Geeks. That way since most of these things are first come you can jump in quick enough. BTW sellout.Woot! usually has all the sales listed so i'd add them to my daily checklist.
I'm just glad i got my 6Tb worth of space before the flood along with taking care of my long time customers and family. all i have left in SATA drives is a single 80Gb and that one is going in the new quad i'm building my GF for Xmas. All she does is FB and IM anyway so 80Gb with win 7 HP will be just perfect for her. I just hope the guy bringing me some off lease boxes this weekend has drives in them, because i'm down to a handful of IDE drives from 40Gb to 200Gb and then that's it. Lucky for me this time of year i already have the new boxes sold and all that is left is the off lease for those looking for a last minute affordable PC.
Man the moron that thought putting all the eggs in one basket ought to be FIRED. Does anybody know if the Maxtor factories were located there too? Because it seems like all I'm seeing now is Seagate drives and I'm wondering if they are not just using the Maxtor facility and slapping Seagate labels on them.
Oh bullshit! you ain't sticking the hogs with them damned longhorns, what are you nuts? Hell we don't want them shitkickers either, you give them to Mexico! We'll take TN and MS along with OK and LA thanks ever so!
As for the TSA what is killing their asses is the YouTube. Being giant douchebags really isn't easy when everyone and their dog and their dog's squeaky toy have a camera in their phone, and its kinda hard for a congress critter to stand up for the TSA when all of their constituents have been passing around links to the latest TSA goon attack, like the screaming 3 year old or the 96 year old they went after for having a soggy nappy.
That is why i've been plastering links and writing my congress critters having a royal shitfit over the blacklisting of websites. We finally have a way to watch the watchers thanks to 24 hour cell phone cameras so its less likely that a goon, be they police or TSA or anyone else for that matter can pull shit without everyone seeing it. if they can just pull the plug on any website it would be too easy to make those 'bad old videos" go away. does anybody here believe the MSM would have done squat about the TSA? nope YouTube and a thousand other video sites to the rescue!
But you are missing the big IF here friend and that is IF MSFT can get people to take Windows 8, and from the now 170 customers I've shown it to I have gotten NOTHING but hate. they don't like it, they don't want it, they wanted to know if they got stuck with a Windows 8 machine " can you put Windows 7 on it?". hell the closest i got to an endorsement of Windows 8 was this: "That's a nice looking cell phone screen, is that Android? i heard its quite nice...what do you mean Windows? Windows what? Well that is just stupid! Why would i want a cell phone on my computer?"
Frankly I think Ballmer is gonna get a pink slip when he finds out that like Vista you can't just ram crap down folk's throats anymore, MSFT just doesn't have the pull. The PCs being sold now that run Win 7 are frankly so insanely overpowered that most folks could keep them for a decade or more and not care. Does anybody think Suzy the checkout girl is gonna stress an AMD quad with 4gb of RAM? of course not. So when Ballmer's Folly comes out I predict we'll hear a giant "Yuck!" and folks will stick with win 7. if he tries to quit selling 7 to force people the pirates are gonna have a field day as Win 7 is beyond trivial to pirate.
As for TFA just one more tech Ballmer will most likely sacrifice on his altar to Steve Jobs and mobile. I swear for a CEO the man is retarded, trying to stick Windows on ARM? What a fucking disaster! they should stick with X86 on windows and just keep improving WinPhone for ARM. From what I've been told silverlight is pretty damned powerful, after all it'd have to be to make an entire OS in a browser. I'd love to see someone try to hack something that impressive together with just JavaScript!
But instead of helping Moonlight and making it a solid multi-OS framework Ballmer is probably gonna piss it all away trying to be Jobs. I can just imagine his "pep" talks "And with this we'll be as hip and cool as Apple! Yes we will! We really will! STOP LAUGHING AT ME!" followed by chairs flying.Oh and if there are any Apple guys here? I was one of those that made fun of you when the pepsi guy was running the company you depended on into the ground and I just want to say...I'm sorry alright? Its not funny anymore! I don't want to spend two damned years wiping Windows 8 like I did Vista!
Not to mention one could simply build a thorium plant right beside the light water reactor to run off its waste, cutting down the waste considerably. IIRC if you run the waste through enough times what you get left isn't any hotter than natural uranium.
As for TFA, has anybody really run the numbers on these things or is it just another rich toy so they can feel all "green" about themselves? What i mean is run the total numbers, from the cost of digging up the lithium and the cost of replacing and disposing of batteries to the cost of the electricity to charge them?, and then compared it to say one of the fuel efficient 4 bangers?
honestly i don't know as I've never seen a hard study that figured a "womb to the tomb" cost assessment on these electrics. i do know that their battery life is naturally dependent on where you live as extreme heat or extreme cold kills them a lot sooner so one would probably have to figure in the cost of building garages or car parks that are climate controlled into the equation as well. Frankly I wouldn't be surprised if some little 4 cylinder beep beep car ended up being better for the environment when all the costs are weighed than a purely electric vehicle.
Well at least they are just making it dumb and not torturing the poor little thing. Can you imagine if they hit it with nothing but wall to wall Snooki interviews? The poor things would be ramming themselves into power lines hoping to escape the horror!
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Exactly, take the Win 7 UI. You have jumplists and breadcrumbs, libraries and being able to slam windows to one side or the other to make them half screen. There are a ton of little cool features in Win 7 and thanks to integrated search they are easier than ever to find, such as my dad learning that Win 7 had speech recognition and trying it out simply because he typed "microphone" into control panel looking for his mike settings.
One thing I will agree with the author on though is it should come down to the USER not the OS on which way to work. If they want to keep classic it should be easily accessible and if they want the new version that should be fine too. If they include the Win 7 GUI with a simple way to make it default i might use Win 8 but if the only GUI is that cell phone ripoff that is metro? I'll hang onto Win 7 until Win 9 comes around and hopefully gives us choice again.
That is because nobody will do squat about the squatters. Little known fact only 15% or so if the IP V4 addresses are actually being used by honest to God websites, the rest are either really old companies that got a shitload of numbers because they got there first and are now sitting on them, and of course the traditional squatters with an Adsense page hoping to make enough off of typos.
So if one were to do something about al the squatters we would have 85% free which we could in turn hand out and buy us some time to do the next IP version right, which means backwards compatibility along with offering free education and tax credits for those willing to go into networking to learn the new IP. Because as it is the flyover states are gonna severely fuck ALL of you friend, all of it goes right through those states sooner or later and the pay in right to work states suck so frankly nobody has bother to learn the new IP V6. When things go wrong which would have taken a couple of hours on IP V4 you'll be looking at days or even weeks simply because most of the old guard only know IP V4 and nobody is going into networking or IT anymore thanks to offshoring.
Any way you slice it thanks to no BC and no workers trained in the new protocol the switch is gonna be one giant clusterfuck. But hey this is what happens when you base a whole society on the race to the bottom and don't protect your workers from offshoring and H1-Bs, nobody wants a job where they don't know if they are gonna even have a job next week. I predict lots of breakage and middle America pretty much being a network dead zone where if anything breaks you are well and truly fucked. I personally haven't taken more than a glance at IP V6, I mean why should I? Nobody offers it here, pretty much every SMB and home router will have to be shitcanned and replaced with a router that may or may not work correctly unless you spend more money than its worth to buy an Airport, and in the end thanks to NAT it really doesn't offer my customers anything they don't already have, and of course no BC which means double the setup and double the hassles. No thanks.
Besides didn't some Israeli general upon retirement say something to the effect of "LOL I helped kick some ass with Stux didn't I?". The whole thing smelt like Mossad to me. Frankly I honestly don't blame the Iranians for wanting the bomb as pretty much everyone in that region that hasn't kissed US bankster ass or have a bomb has been stomped on, they have the US Navy practically sitting off their coast and US drones buzzing overhead.
As has been said many times its not paranoia if they really are out to get you and the Neocons made it clear years ago that Iran was on their hit lists. If Iran says something like "We won't accept dollars for oil, only gold" like old MoMo did they'd probably be invaded before the year was out. pretty much the only way to not get stomped on by the US military anymore is to have the bomb. Kinda sad, but that's reality, the MSM is happy to dance to any tune their masters tell them to and its too easy to get the average citizen to believe anything the TV tells them to, just look at that poll where 40%+ thought we went into Iraq over 9/11.
Iran knows the clock is ticking and if they don't have the bomb some neocon is gonna come into power and squash them like a bug, if for no other reason than they don't get along with Israel and too many neocons are of the "Jesus won't come back if there aren't Jews in Zion! Come back Jesus come back!" variety. i don't know what is scarier, the Mullahs wanting a bomb or the fact that one of the most highly weaponized countries in the west have a large power base that believes the ME policy should be based on 1800 year old words written on a sheep's ass by goat herders about some 2000+ year old dead guy and how he needs a certain race in a certain place so he has a spot to park his fluffy white cloud.
So your answer is works for me along with imaginary problems kill windows is that correct? If you are gonna use the same memes every lintroll has used since the beginning of time could you PLEASE just use the linux TMs and save us all some time? kthanx. Now be sure to claim I'm a secret M$ ninja dirty poo poo head hiding in a hole in Redmond while you are at it.
BTW, how many machines have you sold at retail? How many systems have you built for sale? Could that answer be.....zero? I've been building and supporting systems and users since before there even WAS a Windows, back when Gem and DOS and a dozen others out there fought and bled and died. And i'm sorry friend but your problem and why Linux will never ever in a million damned years go anywhere on the desktop is twofold. One Linus Torvalds, who says such brilliant things as Linux isn't designed, it just grows like a virus Yeah linus its called an STD and thanks to you asshole Linux will NEVER have a stable ABI even though OSX, BSD, Solaris, Windows, hell even OS/2 has one, and two because the developers are all geeks scratching itches and don't give a flying piss about USERS. Since MSFT doesn't make any money if they ignore the users they have no choice, linux devs since they don't get paid simply tell the users "LOL Goatse'. For examples see GNOME Shell and unity.
So please, go back to patting yourself on the back for "sticking it to teh man" meanwhile when i'm finished this brand new Windows 7 quad WILL run pretty much non stop for the next 8 years, no bugs, no crashes, no CLI or forum dances or broken drivers. Can you HONESTLY say the same about YOUR OS? I think most definitely not. Good day sir.
So in other words you answer is "Linux is magical and never gets bugs so don't update it" correct? care to
explain these my friend? protip: NO OS is secure without being patched NONE.I'd also point out the KDELook bug of year before last, oh and here is a nice little how to for writing Linux bugs.
But thank you for posting, yours is a PERFECT example of why linux on the desktop is as dead as disco. When pointed out the myriad of problems the community simply sticks their fingers in their ears and goes "La la la, CLI is leet! You don't know, you are noob, you are not leet! You must be a M$ Ninja dirty poo poo head!". would you like me to link to the OEMs that have abandoned Linux, including Asus which started the whole netbook craze? just ask and its yours, maybe you can explain how the ENTIRE PLANET is wrong and you're right.
Thanks Thundersnatch and you notice I got modded down for pointing out reality? Like I said i'm willing to put up with a sucky baseline simply because the WEB SHOULD BE FREE FOR ALL TO USE and I don't want Apple and MSFT with MPEG-LA locking it behind a paywall, but it don't make the codecs less shitty.
I've tried Dirac,WebM, and Theora and frankly even old Xvid gave me a better picture at a significantly lower file size than any of the above. And as you pointed out its not the license that bites you in the ass, its the bandwidth. while i don't run a video site I DO have to deal with a LOT of customers that have bandwidth limited connections and I have to keep abreast of such things as i have to find the best formats for them to use dropboxes and the like to share little Timmy's first words with the family in Chicago.
And while I still think the price of a free Internet is worth paying, as we can always have a video in the baseline format as the lowest common denominator along with MP4 or H.264 and then let the user decide which format to watch, I have to call a spade and spade and all the free ones seriously suck. To get the same level of quality I got in an 800Mb Xvid or DivX 5 video i had to end up with a file nearly twice the size and honestly? its still not quite as good, with more artifacts and pixelation. And compared to H.264 it wasn't even a contest, it was more like three times the size to equal a good H.264 encode.
I don't see how you can call this "super great security layer" when most of what both Chromium (as in Chromium, Chrome, Comodo Dragon, and others) and IE does is as old as Unix, since they are using low rights mode which is simply a level of permissions below that of even users which severely limits what the browser (and thus code inside it) can and can't do. combine that with sandboxing, ASLR, and DEP and you make a pretty damned hard nut to crack.
I think the problems with Firefox, the lousy memory usage, CPU spiking, bad security, it all comes down to Gecko. gecko simply wasn't built for today or for multithreading or isolation and trying to bolt more and more onto gecko is making it shittier. I just hope it'll turn out that Mozilla has been secretly having a rewrite of the underlying engine done and they'll spring it on us because while i really miss Firefox it is just too easy to pwn.
Hell if you have friends or clients that use yahoo Mail and FF I'm sure you've seen the spam from their accounts, that's an iFrame bug that will load a hidden iFrame and log into their Yahoo account while they are looking at free porn videos and then spam their address books. After seeing a couple of customers complaining about spamming even though all scans showed a clean machine I checked their history and tried it myself with a box I planned on wiping and with a Yahoo account I use as a spam dump and yep, Chromium and IE didn't get bit, FF did. sorry I didn't write down the exact address but since it seemed to be a hit and miss thing i think its malware hidden in some of the ads. But if you want to try it yourself just go to some of the sites like Redtube and youporn and start clicking on random links, but you'll have to have a fake Yahoo account with the pword saved in FF and a couple of addresses for it to send spam to.
But after that i moved all my customers away from FF, its just too risky. Not a single other browser i tried did that, not any of the chromiums or IE, not opera or Safari or QTWeb, ONLY FF got bit by that bug, again because gecko i think is too long in the tooth and needs to be replaced.
While I agree IE has gotten loads better thanks to MSFT fragmenting the living fuck out of IE trying to upsell Windows frankly i wouldn't take it on a bet. There is currently three and soon to be four Windows versions out there. Quick tell me this: which version of IE can XP run? How about Vista? 7? MSFT has made it a damned mess by not backporting shit which makes IE a nightmare to support. that is why i remove it, toss the links, as far as my systems i sell is concerned IE don't exist. I give them Comodo dragon and then if they manage to somehow bork that they can use the FF I have on there as a backup but NO IE. BTW you ought to see how few patches you need for Windows 7 if IE isn't on the machine, I'd say probably a good 70% of the win 7 patches are IE patches.
But I would take Dragon, QTWeb, Safari, Opera, Chrome, hell even FF over IE as long as I have ABP installed. trying to keep up with which version is for which OS and what features are for which version is too much of a PITA. My customers are certainly not gonna go out and buy new machines or a shitload of Windows CALs just because MSFT won't backport their own software. Funny how Google and all those browsers based on chromium like Dragon have NO problem supporting XP and Vista?
Yes but you CAN save a life. When my mom was on jury duty she came in after it was over white as a sheet and said 'Don't you EVER get a jury trial always ask for a judge!" and when I asked her what was wrong here was what I was told:
The case was arson of a restaurant, there was NO motive, as the guy didn't even have enough insurance to cover what he owed and had to file chap 11, there was NO evidence as even the fire investigator said he couldn't say with any certainty WHAT had started the fire and the place had already had two close calls thanks to wiring shorts, yet the jury wanted to convict and it was only my mom that hung them up, why? "Because he is Italian and Italians are in the mob and burn buildings, didn't you ever see goodfellas?"
That's right folks, your system at work. the man nearly lost 20 years of his life because of a ray liotta movie. the jury didn't care about a thing said in the court other than the fact he was Italian. If it hadn't been for my mom it really would have been "12 people too stupid to get out of jury duty". Now would you REALLY want to bet your life on the hope there is a single smart one in the pile of morons? I'm glad the guy is gonna do his jury duty but I bet when its over he too will have a nice horror story about how fucking DUMB the American public has become. it is truly "March of the morons" out there folks. Scary huh?
Do you even read what you posted? "As long as she doesn't need sound its good" well who the fuck wants an OS with no damned sound? Pulse is a damned nightmare from hell friend and frankly the whole community has gone right off the deep end with the 'CLI is teh leet!" bullshit. Here check out this exchange and see how batshit the community has become. especially check out WorBux who thinks grandma knows what CP and MV is along with saying you need CLI for "for" loops, like normal people are writing if/then/else programmer horseshit!
Frankly MSFT could raise their prices 300% it wouldn't matter, apple might gain some more share but Linux sure as hell won't, because the community is so out of touch the normal users might as well be Martians! For the last 3 years NONE of my users besides me has even HAD CLI access, because i remove it from my image to clean up the start menu, do you know how many complained? hell do you know how many even noticed? NONE, zip zero zilch nada squat nein. Year after year, patch after patch, Windows just WORKS, no broken drivers, no fucked up "settings won't stick" BS like what I went through with networkmanager in Linux, no forum dances, no CLI fixes, none of that. The machine i'm typing this on is a circa 2003 WinXP Home box i got several years back out of a pallet of refurbs and keep as a nettop because its ultra low power Sempron makes for a cheap nettop and it still has the SAME INSTALL from 2003, that's two service packs, around 1800 patches, know how many broken drivers I've had? Know how many times I've had to go CLI with it? i'm sure you know the answer and THAT is why Windows is WELL worth the price!
Sorry but that's bullshit friend. pulseaudio is a fucking nightmare from hell, the 6 month upgrades break more shit than they fix, and thanks to Torvalds and his itch scratching the kernel is constantly changing like the shifting sands.
I often have close to a dozen off lease machines coming through the door so I HAVE tried Linux friend, and its a fucking mess. hell the Linux of 2004 was more stable than this, the DEs have been gutted and replaced with frankly alpha quality code, the wireless is beyond broken, half the time I can't get jack shit to stick in network manager unless I go CLI (which when i complain again I get 40 treaties on how fucking wonderful CLI is, bite me CLI nutters!) so there is no other way to put it, its really programmer's toys at the moment, certainly not anything i'd trust to a non tech. and since her dad had a heart attack she is having to live 150 miles away and we see each other on the weekends, how the fuck am i supposed to fix her box if Linux takes a shit on Tuesday? with windows she simply calls me and gives me the code for remote assistance and BAM! I've got full control, just like i'm sitting at the box. since i haven't seen Windows Ethernet go down in ages (again unlike Linux where the last ubuntu update took a big shit on network manager for me) as long as she has a connection i'm right there if something goes wrong.
I'm sorry but until the nutters let go of the damned CLI and treating everything from the kernel up as tweaker central its simply unsuitable for purpose. in the retail biz rep is EVERYTHING, I get a bad rep i might as well close the doors and Linux shits itself worse than Windows 98 from what I've seen. here try my "is it safe?" test and see for yourself, this test simulates what my customer would go through if they only owned the box THREE years. Oh and before you say LTS allow me to say FUCK LTS, its a code word for "runs old shit" and most of the software is NEVER backported so you're looking at third party security risks, no thanks. ALL of my machines MUST have the latest patches, no unpatched software allowed.
Now download the version from 3 years ago, get all the drivers working (CLI is allowed here, after all you're the builder ATM not the buyer) and once it is done allow it to update to current, remember NO CLI from this point on because you are Suzy the checkout girl, not some geek! Now see what happened? see how much shit be broke? THAT is the problem. I'm typing this on an XP Home box that has had the same install since 2003, no bugs, no crashes, no broken drivers, and that is after TWO, count 'em two service packs and about 2000 patches.
So I'm sorry friend but from my perspective, and I know this'll piss you off but I call it as i see it, Linux IS Windows 98, no more, no less. What was Win98? It was a CLI OS with a DE shell that wasn't very stable and kinda sorta worked for the basics but if anything went wrong you'd need to go CLI, in fact you could just go straight to CLI and bypass the shell completely. what is Linux? Why It is a CLI OS with a DE shell that isn't very stable and kinda sorta worked for the basics but if anything goes wrong you'd need to go CLI, in fact you could just go straight to CLI and bypass the shell completely. BTW did you know Windows doesn't even HAVE easy access to CLI or even start>run anymore? In windows 7 it is buried waaaaaay in the back under accessories where nobody will EVER find them unless they go specifically hunting for it because IT IS NOT NEEDED. can YOU say the same? of course not because the answer to EVERY question in Linux ALWAYS comes down to "open up bash and type" period. Ask for anything else and you'll get shit thrown at you.
Enjoy your programmer's paradise friend, but since programmers are 0.04% of the population don't be surprised when you never gain any share. Hell I could go on all day pointing out the failures in Linux but why bother? you'll just call me filthy names because I won't drink the koolaid and pretend that inside every grandma there is a C programmer wa
Actually that is only fairly recently and I'd argue in large part because Apple refuses to support anything else. before that most of the flash video i came across was VP6 which is of course now completely free thanks to Google buying On2. As for the other poster...what's wrong with MP4? I LIKE MP4, its low resource, it plays nicely, especially the DivX and Xvid versions, and you can buy tons of sub $50 set top boxes that play the format. hell one of my biggest sellers to customers with kids is the Nbox settop which plays DivX and Xvid and is great for loading a HDD full of Dora vids on so little Becky doesn't cry when the disc gets scratched, so what is wrong with MP4?
Exactly. Before the flood i paid a grand total of $193 for 6Tb worth of storage, that 2 2Tb drives, a 1Tb OS drive and a 1Tb external for OS backups. You really can't complain when before the flood I was buying 2Tb Samsung for $59 and 1Tb for $35, even at 5400RPM the cache size makes them fast enough for OS drives. This of course isn't counting the 320Gb I have in my netbook nor the 320Gb laptop external drive i got to go with it. The netbook was $350 with that much space AND an upgrade to 8Gb of RAM, and the mini external was a whole $32 on sale, that's just nuts!
Once the mess is cleaned up we'll go back to sub $50 1Tb drives and sub $80 2Tbs and be up to our asses in more storage space than we can use again. I mean counting the internal and external drives i have something like 7.4Tb worth of space and that is just an insane amount of space for so cheap. Even loading ALL my games, music, and favorite movies i have something like 74% free on main machine which has 3Tb of storage in it. what am i gonna do with all that space? fuck if I know but it was cheap so who cares?
Actually i'd like her to have an OS that works, thanks ever so. I have WinXP boxes in the field going on a decade, that's three service packs and not a SINGLE driver failure, not one. Until Torvalds stops Goatse-ing the kernel and allows Linux to have a hardware ABI its simply unsuitable for purpose unless you are a CS grad, a nerd who thinks reading man pages and doing forum dances is a "fun" way to spend a weekend, or a programmer. Since my GF is none of those things I'd like her to have a functional OS and Linux doesn't cut the mustard friend.
Hell when i point out Linux is too dependent on CLI fixes and has too many drivers breaking on update instead of getting "well maybe we should do something about that" from the community I get 30 responses telling me how "powerful and leet" CLI is, with one going as far as to ask me "Well how do you expect to write a GUI for "for" loops" like IRL Suzy the checkout girl and other normal people are sitting around writing if/then/else statements? I'm sorry but the entire Linux community is off their nut. I'd be happy to post the link from LinuxInsider BTW, its almost comical how completely out of touch with reality the Linux community is with the wants and needs of consumers. They truly believe that grandmas write for loops and ordinary folks like my GF just can't wait to learn all about their 1970s terminal throwback.
As I finally threw up my hands and said "Its like mass insanity, how else can you explain otherwise rational people behaving so irrationally" and the fact you think an easy to use OS that can be updated for years without breaking and is supported until 2020 is ""S+M" shows that you too are peobably a little off your rocker friend.
More than 35% of my customers are under 25, surprise surprise. I often have to sit down with "customers" as young as tweeners whose parents bring them in to get either their first desktop or more often a netbook/laptop so i get their feedback just like I do the older folks. And your "improvements"? Its a BIGGER cell phone, that's not improving, that's screen clutter!
Look we'll see at RTM but Ballmer has made it VERY clear that he is pushing to try to get into the tablet market which frankly wouldn't take Windows 8 on a bet, I mean why should they when they can have Android for free? Windows ONLY real selling point anymore is WINDOWS PROGRAMS and of course an ARM tablet sure as fuck ain't playing windows programs so the returns are gonna be insane. As a retailer I can tell you that it doesn't take much when it comes to returns to eat right through any profits you have and make all your black ink turn to red.
But when even the kids are telling me "That is just an ugly cell phone" not a SINGLE person, not one, has anything nice to say about it? its a flop, its a turkey. hell look at MSFT under Ballmer its been more flops than hits across the board. Killing playsforsure for Zune market (which bombed HARD), rushing the X360 out when it had a fatal hardware flaw that to this day scares customers, Zune, WinMo, WinPhone, Kin, Vista, its been one PHB moment after another so the odds are in my favor friend.
Look I hope you're right friend, I really do as i make my living with MSFT products. I truly hope they pull back from the cliff they are headed towards because otherwise its gonna be a disaster. Windows 7 is frankly the best UI have they have ever designed bar none. Nice features, good memory management, easy for noobs while also giving power users plenty of features, and of course my customers love it, its a damned fine OS.
But its sadly been pretty damned clear than Ballmer sees iMoney and drools like a retard. Just look at how many times they have tried to get into apple's sandbox, Zune, Kin, WinPhone, Ballmer wants to be Apple so bad it hurts. But he doesn't seem to be capable of seeing that Apple products are basically toys for rich folks. Very damned few are trying to get any real work done in their iPad or iPhone, they are watching videos and playing angry birds. You watch my prediction come true, either MSFT offers a simple kill switch that tosses Metro for a standard Windows 7 desktop or Win 8 will go the way of Vista, an OS you can't even give away. I have 3 or 4 Vista CALs here at the shop, word of mouth has spread enough that even the noobs don't want it and i predict the same will be said of Win 8.
When the ONLY real question I get about Win 8 is "But YOU can get me a copy of windows 7 and stick it on, right?" you can just smell the fail.
Google has made it VERY clear that they HAVE NOT and WILL NOT offer indemnity for their users. Just look at how many have had to pay their $699 license fee to MSFT over Android. That is one thing MSFT should be given credit for as they make it clear they WILL indemnify their customers.
And nobody seems to be willing to talk about the big drunken elephant taking a big shit all over the rug which is the simple fact that the free codecs currently suck balls and are likely not only gonna need many millions of dollars worth of work but probably just as much spent on lawyers looking for submarine patents. Compare Dirac, Theora, and WebM to H.264 and Flash on resource usage and it isn't even funny, all the free ones use a hell of a lot more cycles to give you a shittier picture than either flash or H.26x, and that is before hardware acceleration which of course drops the power even lower.
As I said in an earlier post having a truly free web is worth putting up with a shitty free codec as a baseline for HTML V5 simply to keep the web free and open rather than locked behind an H.26x paywall, but that don't turn shit into caviar and honestly if you compare them side by side, both on encoding and decoding frankly old Xvid (which of course is based on the old MSFT MP4 codec) is better than what is being offered for free. The free codecs suck power and give you less picture quality in return and thanks to MPEG-LA having something like 2000+ patents on just about every step in the video chain i highly doubt any of the above free codecs would survive a court challenge,
I'd be more concerned about HTML V5, as both apple and MSFT are pushing like mad to lock it behind a paywall with H.264 which as we all know is patented so badly you can pretty much give up on FOSS ever having a free version, not for another 15-20 years at least.
This is why I never understood the FOSS flash hate or why they would run to embrace an obviously hostile to FOSS group like MPEG-LA over Adobe. Sure flash isn't the greatest but have you EVER seen them complain about a distro including flash? Hell they don't even complain about gnash and I wouldn't be surprised if they eventually open flash up. Compare this to MPEG-LA that basically went "Pay your $699 license fee you cock smoking teabagger!" to Firefox and made it QUITE clear you will NOT be shipping H.264 in a browser or OS without cutting a check. of course being proprietary both Apple and MSFT can and do just cut them a check and both want to "fucking kill Google" so they're just fine with H.264.
I just hope the developers here will put their money where their mouths are and refuse to touch HTML V5 until it has a free codec as the standard, be it Theora, be it WebM (which I think is quite nice actually) or be it the royalty free MPEG 1+2 in TFA. The web should be free to all, be you proprietary or FOSS, and ATM HTML V5 is anything but and that is before they add the MPAA DRM on top which i'm sure will never work in FOSS OSes as unlike Apple and MSFT they don't support kernel level DRM..
Tiger has a Seagate 2Tb external for $120 with free shipping and a nice Samsung 1Tb 2.5in internal for $130 so it looks like they can find them. I wonder if they have better deals set up with the distributors than the OEMs that are bitching?
If you have a laptop those samsung drives run real nice and the 32Mb cache almost makes them as fast as 7200RPM thanks to its intelligent caching, at least in my own benchmarks. i'd be snatching but i already have 320gb in my netbook and 6tb in my desktops so i don't think I really need any more space for awhile. enjoy!
Oh man that's bad, and after WD got stuck with a 525 million dollar arbitration loss to Seagate last month. frankly i just hope WD survives getting a big one two punch like that, as I'd hate to see a world where all you had for HDDs was Seagate.
If you HONESTLY think they are gonna gut the ENTIRE UI before release day? here is a cookie to go with the koolaid you have been drinking. as for why show it to them? well to generate buzz dummy! With the win 7 Beta I had plenty of customers asking me all kinds of things, like "How fast is it? Does it have cool stuff? Is it worth it?" and when RTM hit I had 5 new builds, more than a dozen installs waiting,it helped generate more buzz!!
But I'm sorry if your a fanboy but win 8 is such a trainwreck its gonna make Vista look like win95. Hell even with Vista people were interested...until they actually played with the beta machine i had set up and saw what a buggy slow POS it was. With the Win 7 beta I was showing them the cool tricks like slamming windows on the sides to fit two apps (they love that one BTW, its great for having a chat and another app at the same time) or the breadcrumbs. with Win 8 it was unanimous, they all said "its a cell phone" and promptly hated it. folks PUT UP with their cell phone, most don't sit there caressing the thing and they sure as hell don't want to spend their day in front of it!
Uhhh...Tigerdirect was selling a Seagate 1.5Tb for $69 the other day, the 1Tb external for $99 so there are drives still out there, you just got to keep an eye out. I would suggest having an email account where you get the daily emails from ALL the major and minor tech stores, from Tiger and Newegg to Surpluscomputers and Geeks. That way since most of these things are first come you can jump in quick enough. BTW sellout.Woot! usually has all the sales listed so i'd add them to my daily checklist.
I'm just glad i got my 6Tb worth of space before the flood along with taking care of my long time customers and family. all i have left in SATA drives is a single 80Gb and that one is going in the new quad i'm building my GF for Xmas. All she does is FB and IM anyway so 80Gb with win 7 HP will be just perfect for her. I just hope the guy bringing me some off lease boxes this weekend has drives in them, because i'm down to a handful of IDE drives from 40Gb to 200Gb and then that's it. Lucky for me this time of year i already have the new boxes sold and all that is left is the off lease for those looking for a last minute affordable PC.
Man the moron that thought putting all the eggs in one basket ought to be FIRED. Does anybody know if the Maxtor factories were located there too? Because it seems like all I'm seeing now is Seagate drives and I'm wondering if they are not just using the Maxtor facility and slapping Seagate labels on them.
Oh bullshit! you ain't sticking the hogs with them damned longhorns, what are you nuts? Hell we don't want them shitkickers either, you give them to Mexico! We'll take TN and MS along with OK and LA thanks ever so!
As for the TSA what is killing their asses is the YouTube. Being giant douchebags really isn't easy when everyone and their dog and their dog's squeaky toy have a camera in their phone, and its kinda hard for a congress critter to stand up for the TSA when all of their constituents have been passing around links to the latest TSA goon attack, like the screaming 3 year old or the 96 year old they went after for having a soggy nappy.
That is why i've been plastering links and writing my congress critters having a royal shitfit over the blacklisting of websites. We finally have a way to watch the watchers thanks to 24 hour cell phone cameras so its less likely that a goon, be they police or TSA or anyone else for that matter can pull shit without everyone seeing it. if they can just pull the plug on any website it would be too easy to make those 'bad old videos" go away. does anybody here believe the MSM would have done squat about the TSA? nope YouTube and a thousand other video sites to the rescue!
But you are missing the big IF here friend and that is IF MSFT can get people to take Windows 8, and from the now 170 customers I've shown it to I have gotten NOTHING but hate. they don't like it, they don't want it, they wanted to know if they got stuck with a Windows 8 machine " can you put Windows 7 on it?". hell the closest i got to an endorsement of Windows 8 was this: "That's a nice looking cell phone screen, is that Android? i heard its quite nice...what do you mean Windows? Windows what? Well that is just stupid! Why would i want a cell phone on my computer?"
Frankly I think Ballmer is gonna get a pink slip when he finds out that like Vista you can't just ram crap down folk's throats anymore, MSFT just doesn't have the pull. The PCs being sold now that run Win 7 are frankly so insanely overpowered that most folks could keep them for a decade or more and not care. Does anybody think Suzy the checkout girl is gonna stress an AMD quad with 4gb of RAM? of course not. So when Ballmer's Folly comes out I predict we'll hear a giant "Yuck!" and folks will stick with win 7. if he tries to quit selling 7 to force people the pirates are gonna have a field day as Win 7 is beyond trivial to pirate.
As for TFA just one more tech Ballmer will most likely sacrifice on his altar to Steve Jobs and mobile. I swear for a CEO the man is retarded, trying to stick Windows on ARM? What a fucking disaster! they should stick with X86 on windows and just keep improving WinPhone for ARM. From what I've been told silverlight is pretty damned powerful, after all it'd have to be to make an entire OS in a browser. I'd love to see someone try to hack something that impressive together with just JavaScript!
But instead of helping Moonlight and making it a solid multi-OS framework Ballmer is probably gonna piss it all away trying to be Jobs. I can just imagine his "pep" talks "And with this we'll be as hip and cool as Apple! Yes we will! We really will! STOP LAUGHING AT ME!" followed by chairs flying.Oh and if there are any Apple guys here? I was one of those that made fun of you when the pepsi guy was running the company you depended on into the ground and I just want to say...I'm sorry alright? Its not funny anymore! I don't want to spend two damned years wiping Windows 8 like I did Vista!
Not to mention one could simply build a thorium plant right beside the light water reactor to run off its waste, cutting down the waste considerably. IIRC if you run the waste through enough times what you get left isn't any hotter than natural uranium.
As for TFA, has anybody really run the numbers on these things or is it just another rich toy so they can feel all "green" about themselves? What i mean is run the total numbers, from the cost of digging up the lithium and the cost of replacing and disposing of batteries to the cost of the electricity to charge them?, and then compared it to say one of the fuel efficient 4 bangers?
honestly i don't know as I've never seen a hard study that figured a "womb to the tomb" cost assessment on these electrics. i do know that their battery life is naturally dependent on where you live as extreme heat or extreme cold kills them a lot sooner so one would probably have to figure in the cost of building garages or car parks that are climate controlled into the equation as well. Frankly I wouldn't be surprised if some little 4 cylinder beep beep car ended up being better for the environment when all the costs are weighed than a purely electric vehicle.
Well at least they are just making it dumb and not torturing the poor little thing. Can you imagine if they hit it with nothing but wall to wall Snooki interviews? The poor things would be ramming themselves into power lines hoping to escape the horror!