Exactly, we aren't talking about the cheap shit photos you take of the wreck on i95 with your phone we are talking about the moments of your life to rip a line from an old commercial. The baby's first steps, the kid playing baseball, graduation, folks want these things to not only last but look nice and the warm tones that Kodachrome gave made even plain photos just look nice.
To use something more in my area its like music. Sure digital and solid state is everywhere yet 50 years after the rest of the world abandoned tubes some of the most popular amps and EQs and effects have tubes in them, why? Because digital can be TOO perfect, too sterile. the old tech had a warmth and a tone that just made it nicer on the ears and folks are willing to pay for that even though you can buy a SS amp for less than half the price.
Kodak could have cranked out digital camera that were designed to give the nice colors and warm of their classics, and the combination of warm natural colors and the Kodak name would have had people lining up to buy them even if they weren't the highest resolution camera or the cheapest because folks want nice pretty pictures and Kodak knew how to do that damned well. Its just another classic case of a company having the skills to compete but not the vision.
The problem dude is this everything apple is "claiming" is generic so to use a/. car analogy it would be like me saying 'I don't own the patents on the car or am trying to stifle production. you can still make cars as long as they don't have a roof AND wheels AND a motor AND seats, because that's MY design". Horseshit Apple, pure and complete horseshit.
There isn't a geek here that can't cram the living shit out of any posting with prior art for any of the individual points they have listed and simply putting generic prior art together doesn't suddenly give you the right to negate all that prior art. Just off the top of my head the old WinTablets had flat screens and black fronts as claimed by Apple, Palm had icon menus in a grid layout, hell its too easy as every single thing they are "claiming" is as old as dirt and just as common. This is the whole "look and feel" lawsuit all over again and we remember how well that turned out for the Pepsi guy.
Personally i think its a sign that what I've been thinking is true, that without Jobs Apple turns to caca. Just as before they'll be able to coast for a good while based on the work the man has already done, but without Jobs to steer the ship things start going south. Cook seems like a hell of a smart guy but seems more like a highly focused nuts and bolts kinda guy, not the "big vision" type like Jobs was. Like him or hate him Jobs pretty much had a single vision of how he wanted things built and done and although he refined it as tech got better he pretty much stuck to that vision his whole life.
Frankly while Apple might be hot now i could easily see them in 5 or 6 years being like they were in 93, running out of gas as new tech passes Steve's older ideas and without new ideas in the pipe Apple just stagnates. After all that is what happened last time without the big guy behind the helm, like it or not Apple will always be "the house that Steve built".
Sorry but this is old new and why most of us builders have been avoiding CNet like the clap for awhile. I'd loved to see their before and after website visits stats because i wouldn't be surprised if many are doing like me and the instant they see the article is on CNet closing the tab.
For those that need that "80%" software, the stuff you pretty much install on every system? Let old Hairy introduce to a really nice place with a weird name...Ninite. it has all the latest versions of the software everyone installs, your flash, codec packs, VLC, LibreOffice, several AV and antimal to choose from, and NO TOOLBARS are allowed, no crapware, just the program you want pre-packaged as an unattended installer that's as simple as "clicky clicky" and let her run. great for not only new builds but when you need to help someone who lives a good distance away who is having trouble or doesn't know where to find the above basics.
I used to swing by CNet all the time back in the day but since i don't support spammers and spyware pushers they can go pound sand. With ninite all the basics are covered and if you can think of others you'd like just drop their name in the suggestion box and they'll add the most popular choices to the list. I suggested Klite with MPC and voila! There it is, and more popular apps are being added all the time. Enjoy folks!
Ya want to know how they could have REALLY kicked some digital ass? they should have worked on a digital camera that outputs film style pictures. and they could have cleaned up! What I mean by that is the warm tones that something like Kodachrome put out. folks still like that warmth and would be happy to give up some resolution if they had a camera that could crank out digital pictures that looked like they were taken on Kodachrome. Sure you can tweak it afterwards in Photoshop, but how many people have the skills to do it?
A camera where little Suzy the checkout girl could have all the convenience of digital with the softer warmer look of film would have frankly been a hit. Tie it in with a photoprinter that could crank the pics out and they could have backed up the money truck. But just like the *.A.A and piracy instead of adapting to the times and offering a better product they sat on their collective butts and let the world pass them by. Stupid move Kodak, really stupid.
You wanna know what's weird? the girls are meeting up in these games like second life and WoW and not blasting or raiding but going on virtual shopping trips and the like. I know because when on the last tour of the college that my oldest is going to I asked if I could ask the kids some questions and that's what the girls are doing. who would have thought virtual shopping of all things but that and those click happy FB games like Farmville and the one where you build a little city are all the rage with the females.
As for the handhelds i honestly think a lot of it has to do with AMD cutting the bottom out of the netbook and laptop market. After the open house I've had several of the students, male and female, come to my little shop because "You're the one that got Jackson that cool little laptop right? Can you get me one at a decent price that'll play..." and then just insert the name of the game. I even had to help a little 14 year old sit with her grandma and pick her first netbook for Xmas, she got one of the little C-60s since the main gaming she wants to do is FB.
Before laptops were for the rich kids and the grownups, something that would play more than cards would cost you an arm and a leg. Now I have a $350 netbook that not only does 1080P and has 8Gb of RAM but plays L4D and GTA:VC just fine. the kids nowadays want something they can do their schoolwork on AND chat and use video chat with their friends AND play their MMOs AND surf the web AND listen to music AND watch video AND...you get the idea. My oldest boy's little $500 laptop has either a triple or quad CPU (can't remember off the top of my head) and does all of the above including playing his new Star Wars MMO (he actually got to be one of the first beta testers) and still lets him take notes in class and do the online portions of his studies.
So I'd say the handheld has its days numbered simply because of the incredible power you can get now in a portable device. hell you can pick up an Atom netbook for like $200 or an AMD with an APU that has killer graphics for $300. Parents are gonna look at those prices and compare them with the $250 list of a new handheld like the Vita and go 'My child will be better off with the laptop/netbook" and of course the kid will be happier as well since they are all online now.
I'm telling ya though it was weird seeing break rooms just full of kids clicking and tapping away on all these little netbooks and laptops. When they weren't doing classes it was MMO city, just one big online gathering even though the folks were right there!
Uhhh...Bill? you can just go to Ninite and just use the latest flash you know. i've found it runs better than the built in chromium one anyway. with the chromium flash SD video is skippy and sucks more CPU on the Sempron nettop and it uses more power on the Brazos netbook but with the latest flash its smooth as butter and lower power usage. Frankly it wouldn't surprise me if it uses the Intel compiler but i also heard it uses GCC which frankly isn't much better so i honestly don't know who to believe on that one. why they don't just use the Open64 compiler which works great on intel AND AMD I don't know.
But I can tell you that it is NOT just the compiler because there is also Pale Moon which is a custom compiled FF with the SSE flags properly set and the choice of 32 or 64 bit and i can tell you even the 64 bit version gets stomped by dragon and Chromium. And FF 7 and 8 is NOT lighter, it just trades memory for CPU time which IMHO is worse as the RAM uses that same power regardless while the CPU spikes suck batteries dead. And frankly IE could be offered to me with $1000 hookers and I won't take it, got burned enough from IE6 not to mention look at the number of patches for IE holes VS everything else. By removing and blocking IE from my win 7 installs I went from over 1.9Gb to get RTM to current to barely 730Mb!
BTW one of the reasons i learned of ninite was because i got tired of dealing with badly out of date Adobe crap on the machines the local worst buy sells. i often get called and paid $65 a pop simply to restore to factory settings and "get rid of the crap" because of my rep when it comes to cleaning and optimizing mobile devices. Now I just run decrapify, set Windows to the non granny settings, run Ninite followed by my tweaks and finally coretemp and AllCPUMeter. makes it easier to control power usage IMHO but honestly my Asus EEE wasn't that badly crapped. it had Adobe crap and 2 startup apps i didn't need, that's it.
Oh if you see ballmer tell that fat bastard i'm STILL waiting for my apology and free copy of Windows 7 for being burnt by ME and Vista. Where is my apology you fat fucker? WinME was against the Geneva Convention!
Thou art most welcome and sorry for the slow reply but guess what? The PC seller is swamped again. so much for "the desktop is dead" huh? I don't even have a single box to sell ATM because the guy that is dropping off my off lease boxes is running behind thanks to the holidays. The last desktop I have left is already sold to an old customer that before i could even get the specs out said "Sold, put it in the corner and I'll pick it up at the end of the week, just load my software on it" and that was that, and the off lease boxes i have at least 3, probably more, sold sight unseen.
This old geek has been around long enough to hear this song and dance before, first it was thin clients (remember those? Sun had the sun ray, HP had the ultranet or something like that, and they were gonna wipe out the desktop) and then it was the Palm Pilot, then the smartphone, then the netbook, now its the tablet. In each case they had a niche, some lived, most didn't, but they sure didn't "destroy the desktop".
And it isn't like i haven't looked into it, like i'm some 8 track salesman bitching about CDs, i've sold Android tablets and frankly talking to customers they ended up being used as expensive ebook Readers and glorified PMPs. There is only so much you can do by poking your greasy finger at a screen and other than Angry birds there frankly hasn't even been anything worth talking about. sure Apple will make a mint but look at the customer base. Can you see ANYONE else where a $1000 app that just gives you a red jewel and says "I am rich' would have sold even a single copy? Apple is like Prada, its all branding. everyone else will be fighting for scraps and lucky if they don't pull a touchpad.
Frankly I'd say the future has never been brighter for PCs. Thanks to the AMD mobile chips you can have $200 HTPCs that do 1080p and surf the web, sub $400 dual core netbooks that get 6 hours on a battery and even play games, and all in ones that make great kitchen and den PCs. The future is a wireless household with the PC doing all the grunt work and the iShiny working as a glorified touch screen remote.
I can tell you EXACTLY what went wrong, that damned Linus Torvalds is what went wrong! between his constant kernel fiddling breaking drivers (He needs to just change the logo for Linux from tux to Goatse because frankly it feels like he's trolling) and Canonical getting everyone on an INSANE 6 month release schedule (which means nothing gets fixed, just new versions that add new bugs on top of old bugs) the quality has backslid BAD and QA is right out. I mean when one of the top 4 OEMs has to run their own repos because even on a TEENY TINY subset of hardware they can't even get enough QA from Canonical to keep the drivers from taking a big old shit if you run the default repos? Something be stinking in Linux land.
Pulse Audio, Linus kernel Goatse, DEs getting tossed, frankly the guts in Linux is as stable as the shifting sands now. I've tried Linux on just about every off lease and refurb that has come through my shop and in ALL CASES the drivers shit themselves, the DEs gets screwy such as settings not "sticking" after reboot unless you input the data by CLI, its just one big fucking mess, that's what it is.
And they can complain about "Waaah they won't give us drivers waaah!" but you know what? a company would have to be certifiably INSANE to support Linux. With Windows just FOUR count 'em FOUR drivers gives you support for every version of Windows from 2000-2014 at the very least! 2K/XP XP X64/2K3 X64, Vista/7 32 bit, Vista/7 64 bit...tada! I'm done, stick a fork, my device will work now and keep working. and look what a company gets for bending over backwards to support linux? AMD not only opened the specs they hired developers to help the community write drivers, only for the drivers to constantly have to be rewritten (Linus Goatse) and the community to say in EVERY forum 'LOL Buy Nvidia". if i was AMD I'd tell the community to go fuck themselves.
Finally as for Android, lets break it down shall we? what IS Android? its the SAME DAMNED THING we retailers have been BEGGING the community to give us for X86/64. Its an ALL GUI no CLI OS where everything is "clicky clicky" and there are NO driver borkage because Google doesn't allow Linus "The Goatse" Torvalds to touch "their" kernel, that's why. Hell read his thoughts on the kernel and tell me if your ass wouldn't get a pink slip if you tried that! No roadmap, no plans, he scratches itches like its 1993 and he is still passing the kernel around over IRC.
Frankly I've given up. I've talked and written articles and begged until i'm blue in the face only to have the community throw shit and insults and say "Your a dirty poo poo head M$ Ninja!", I've tried every damned Linux there is and watched them shit themselves over tasks that frankly Windows could do a decade ago, hell they still don't even have a "Find drivers" or "roll back drivers" button and when i point this out I get a lecture on how my "duty" is to waste my time for free teaching my customers to do forum hunts and CLI tweaking copypasta that they have NO desire to learn or do, because they HAVE to "embrace the POWER of CLI" like its the God damned force!
Insanity friend, that's what it is, sheer mass insanity! To this very day they truly believe that the masses are all gonna abandon GUIs for terminals and go back to the 1970s! Frankly it shouldn't surprise me though, just look at their hero RMS. I swear to God the man still calls everyone "hackers" and acts like he is at a computer club meeting in 1978!
EEE 1000? Let me guess...Linux? We are talking WINDOWS here friend, Linux has a completely different arch and memory model, its like comparing Apples to grapefruits. From what I've seen FF on Linux runs nicely but considering Linux is stuck at 1% keeping every Linux user on the planet frankly isn't even gonna make the needle move, sorry.
I can tell you that on XP, XP X64, Vista 32, and Win 7 32 and 64 bit that FF runs like ass if you aren't on a VERY fast single or a multicore and it sucks the living hell out of the battery on mobile thanks to all the CPU slamming. On MY EEE, a Brazos E-350 running win 7 HP x64, I can tell you that using Coretemp I can tell you that FF causes my temp to jump over 10 degrees F because of its CPU hogging. The most Dragon will do is make the CPU usage jump to 50% and then for only a few seconds when i'm launching flash video whereas FF seems to slam the CPU to 100% for pretty much any action, launching a new tab, SD or HD video, Hell using CPU meter i can watch the CPU jump just by typing in a fricking text box.
So while i'm glad it runs well for you in Linux to use a/. car analogy its like you saying "My Cessna doesn't have traffic problems!" when the topic is which cars get the best mileage in a jam. I thought me and my other posters were pretty clear we were talking about windows, especially when i mentioned Windows in the first sentence.
Dude if you are on windows try Comodo Dragon first. it'll give you checkboxes on install that will move all your stuff over to dragon so there really isn't anything to move and after that simply use the Gmail sync to keep any machine you own synced together. But the built in Comodo Secure DNS is sweet, it uses a combo of WoT as well as Comodo's own web scans to keep nasty sites out and it has excellent domain checking and phishing blocking and at least in my tests seems to be a good 50% faster than the new FF.
But I've had nothing but good luck and happy customers since switching from FF to Dragon on all my builds and repairs. its fast, its free, has great security, and if you are on 7 it runs in low rights mode which after 5 years FF STILL doesn't support. Just the other day i got an email from halfway across the country from a gal on one of my laptops (A long time customer bought the laptop off me and shipped it to her) and she just had to email me and say "THANK YOU THANK YOU! Not only is this laptop just the bestest thing but i just LOVE that Dragon Eye thingie you gave me! Its soooo much faster on my email and FB!! Thank YOU!!". She was a longtime Firefox user and had me set up a chat session just so I could show her how to switch to "the Dragon eye thingie' on her desktop and copy everything over.
When they go to the trouble to write you from half the country away, set up a chat session, and then have you walk them through switching? you know Comodo is doing something right. That and FF is seriously screwing the pooch with their shitty performance.
That's funny, i have several customers as well as a couple of family members that bought PSPs and all bought them for their kids and i can't think of a single one that would be "hacked'. Honestly despite all the talk here on geek sites i bet hacked devices don't even add to up 3% of ANY device out there besides the iPhone, simply because normal folks are too scared they are gonna break the thing and don't have the tech skills required.
I doubt Sony fanboys will want to hear this but not a single customer has asked me squat about the new Sony and if they were thinking of buying i'd have heard of it, my former boss said i should have built a booth like Lucy on Peanuts and charged for it because i always end up answering everyone's tech questions, and those customers that I talk to often as well as the family have their PSPs sitting in the corner gathering dust. The high cost of memory sticks i have no doubt is partially to blame, but most ended up getting their kids a DS as well or a netbook/tablet/phone and now the PSP sits unloved.
Personally I won't be buying it for my family because of the memory and because i think it'd end up sitting in a closet. The days of single function portable devices is coming to an end i believe, just look at how Nintendo has had to drop the price on their 3D handheld. Smartphones, tablets, netbooks, that is where portable gaming is gonna be i think. my nephew is a perfect example, here was a kid that ALWAYS had a gaming handheld in his pocket and i haven't seen him touch one in a couple of years now, not since he got a little AMD laptop. Now he and his buddies will meet somewhere on campus and do some TF2 or some other MMO while all the girls across the campus are taking a break in Second Life or WoW. These kids today all seem to do the whole MMO thing which AFAIK the handhelds just don't do.
Man I didn't think of myself as old until my boys talked me into playing some TF2 and Bioshock II MP with them. I can kick ass in SP shooters, i really can, but in MMOs I spent all my time ragdolled on the floor, I couldn't get more than a shot or two off! i just don't get it, its like everyone else, even though they have the same weapons as me, just seem to be able to do much more damage. I just came to the conclusion i can't do the "chicken with its head cut off" gameplay style, too damned hectic for me.
Dude have you EVER worked corp? Because your post don't sound like it because it ain't the chip that slows corporate its CORPORATE BULLSHIT that slows corporate!
The last corp I had the misfortune to work hired gun for had no less than FOUR different startup scripts that ALL had to load before you could even log in, Norton "extra sucky" Edition making even a new tab feel like trying to run win98 on a 386SX, two different shares they had Windows autoloading and every single page had to go through all the corporate bullshit monitoring gear on the intranet which made even a page from a branch office load like it was coming from a C64 based in Siberia!
Dude you could give corporate desktops fricking 4 socket Magny Cours rigs and they'd have the thing running like a Pentium 3 running Vista LOL! for everyone else, SOHOs and SMBs and Home Users, which BTW is currently the biggest market by far, the AMD chips are way past good enough and into extreme overkill. Hell their prices are so damned cheap i put my dad on a quad core at his house! I doubt the man will ever get that chip above 40% load but WTF, it was a whole $30 difference. I don't even sell new dual core desktops anymore, AMD has the triples and quads so cheap there isn't really a point so even my granny customers are running Athlon X3 and X4. lets see FB slow down THAT shit!
Or if you are on windows Comodo Dragon which has some really nice features such as the option to have the browser and ONLY the browser use the Comodo Secure DNS. this I've found has an added side benefit as I've had customers call me and I had to walk them through setting the machine to Comodo DNS because their ISP DNS was running like caca or even suffering outages.
Of course if you'd like something off the beaten path that support Windows from 98-7 AND Linux AND OSX i'd suggest QTWeb which is completely portable and based on the QT framework and Webkit. Runs nice, plenty of nice features, sweet little browser and runs great from a thumbstick.
As for TFA? Couldn't happen to a more arrogant user unfriendly company. I used Firefox before it was even called Firefox and the Suite before that but after version 3.0.x things started slowing quickly and by version 4 I found it completely unsuitable for purpose. i have to support everything from Atom single core netbooks to older P4 office boxes to the latest multicore and frankly FF runs like ass on anything less than a P4 3GHz with HT and in my own exp anything less than a multicore it struggles. On the 1.8GHz Sempron i use as a nettop in the shop i can surf, download, watch SD video....in Dragon. In the latest Firefox SD video is a slideshow, launching a new tab will slam the CPU to 100% for up to a minute and if that tab contains SD video it'll hang the entire OS so long you might as well go make a sandwich because the machine won't be doing anything else. With Dragon I can have a half a dozen tabs open and launch an SD video in a new tab and she loads in under 10 seconds, never goes above 80% CPU, and the video plays just fine.
But Google won't kill funding unless they are VERY stupid, they'll just cut the hell out of it, but even that is iffy, why? Microsoft. MSFT wants in the search game B.A.D and by buying the default search engine from FF they could gain a nice boost, even with FF's lower numbers. Remember the thing they need the most is lots of searches so they can improve results and FF can give that to them. So i doubt Google will be dumb enough to walk away and give MSFT a free shot like that.
Actually i think you are wrong on your last sentence and here is why....AMD. The Brazos APU makes for an HTPC that is light, low power, low heat, lets you run a full Windows 7 HP without stuttering while playing 1080p video, hell you can even do light gaming on the thing. Between the Brazos HTPCs and the AMD Phenom IIs (also insanely cheap and insanely overpowered) I've been cranking out more HTPCs lately than i have desktops or laptops. All it takes is ONE, just one mind you, to get one in a neighborhood and the word leaks and the next thing you know? you're swamped.
The iShiny makes a good eReader and really expensive portable video player, that is all. Thanks to the one smart move MSFT has made in awhile and just building WMC into Win 7 it is beyond trivial to turn any recent desktop into an HTPC and folks are finding there is a wealth of killer add ons, from wireless game controllers to my most popular, the Lenovo remote that is just the right size for all those texting skilled housewives to crank out tweets and FB updates on. Add to that the new cheap all in ones by HP that make awesome kitchen and den PCs and the things are more popular than ever.
I think the "next big thing" for PCs will be the wireless house. folks will come in and plop in front of the widescreen to check their email before watching the news, the kids will all have Nboxes or WDs to watch their kid shows on, and the family will have all their movies stored on a big fat HDD on one of the PCs and just stream it anywhere they are. I have some customers i have already done this for and the word of mouth has been keeping me swamped. Folks frankly don't realize yet the incredible power they can have for dirt cheap but once they get a hint of what it can do they go nuts. he can simply grab a remote in any main area and have movies, music, web, anything he wants is just right there. I'd say the future of the PC has never been brighter, its just the media that is going gaga for the iShiny and helping keep it in the spotlight.
From the looks of it Bulldozer is another Phenom I, where they have to use a generation getting the bugs out. Phenom II was and is an excellent chip BTW, sure its not gonna slaughter the latest and greatest from Intel but the dirty little secret AMD and Intel don't want to talk about is that for 95%+ of the users out there PCs have been "good enough" for quite some time. hell I'm the kind of guy that was building himself a new PC practically every year in the past, now my AMD Deneb quad is going on 3 years old and if I get that Thuban upgrade i plan to for my BDay i could easily see it lasting another 5 years, maybe more.
The smart move which I applaud the new AMD CEO for doing is cutting down on the desktop product to crank the living hell out of mobile because that is where the money is at right now. you look at Brazos and they have been selling out of those chips as fast as they can crank them and as an owner of a EEE E-350 netbook I can see why, 6 hours of battery life running full Win 7 HP X64, takes 8Gb of RAM easily, does full HD video without a stutter, low heat, and its a great little multitasker chip, running head and shoulder better than Atom and often beating ION at a lower price. The OEMs have taken notice it seems as i have seen Brazos in netbooks, all in ones, and HTPCs all over the place. Walking into my local Walmart the other day, a place that just a few years ago was strictly Intel land, more than 3/4ths of the laptop/netbooks and virtually all the desktops were AMD Fusion. I asked one of the guys I knew there about them and he said 'These things are selling like crazy, great for video and FB' which is of course where most folks are nowadays.
Frankly I think the path AMD is on is the smart one right now but its gonna have teething problems. They are in the process of switching their GPUs from VLIW to vector and looking at the chip bulldozer arch is really made for the new vector GPUs that simply aren't finished. by switching to vector you'll have a super FP that the CPU can hand off heavy math to when not in use for gaming while having a smaller FP on the CPU thus allowing more cores per chip. Like the switch to Stars its gonna take some teething pains to get everything switched over to the new designs and having GloFlo drop the ball certainly didn't help.
Personally I can easily see a day where Intel owns the top end and that is pretty much it, as AMD cranks out the chips for the low and midrange. Frankly the dual core Brazos is more powerful than 90% of the jobs my customers could come up with and I can see a quad version pretty much owning the low and midrange sectors due to the combo of price/performance and lower power. Just give them time folks, they are still cranking out Denebs and Thubans so I'd stick with those for now and let the new BD arch get the bugs worked out and by the time the chip after Piledriver comes out the boards and laptops will be cheap and plentiful. Until then just stick with Thuban, Mobile Phenom II and Brazos.
Maybe someone can explain the whole U2 thing to me, because i just don't get it. I mean here is a tech invented in...what? 1958? Why hasn't anyone figured out how to swat those thing down like gnats already? i mean i could at least understand the SR71 blackbird as literally by the time you knew the thing was headed your way it was already gone. But the U2 ain't that fast and if the Ruskies were able to shoot down Powers why hasn't everyone else been knocking those things down?
As for TFA I'm sure i'll get labeled a racist for not kissing the booty but i have a feeling this is the USA wasting yet more money to dance to Israel's tune. they same jump and we just hop like good little frogs. The sad part is living next to a wealthy conservative college I've actually got to talk to a few of the guys that actually roam the corridors of power and make policies and scarily enough our entire ME policy pretty much boils down to "Jesus won't come back! Come back Jesus come back!"
Sometimes i don't know which is scarier, the whole backward assed ME Sharia countries or that a supposedly highly advanced western nation WITH multiple nuclear weapons is basing its policy for a major part of the planet, which has so far cost an incredible number of lives, on an 1800 year old sheep's ass parchment that says a 2000 year dead guy has to have a certain race in a certain spot or he won't have a place to park his fluffy white cloud.
I can't believe i have to spell this out and why so many bloggers think the sky is falling i have NO clue, except maybe just whoring for page views.The iShiny is a niche folks. sure it makes apple a metric fuckton of cash and makes too many developers drool at the thought of iMoney because Apple users will happily shell out real money for things Windows and Linux users wouldn't give a cent for, but its still a niche.
As someone in retail I can tell you there are TWO reasons why the iShiny is growing like crazy while the PC is so much lower and NEITHER have to do with the death or birth of anything. 1.- The iShiny simply hasn't existed very long so those that want one may not have gotten one yet. Look at how PC sales went nuts when they first became affordable, hell stores were going through units as fast as they could get them in the store.
And the most important reason 2.- The PC is mature technology and for the vast majority of the masses has been "good enough" for several years now. Even a 5 year old laptop or desktop is frankly INSANELY overpowered for what the vast majority do with a personal computer and everybody and their dog and their dog's squeaky toy has one if not several. In just my own family we have a single core laptop, dual core laptop, a dual core netbook, and no less than FIVE desktops ranging from a 3GHz Celeron for my mom all the way up to my quad. With all the units going through the shop I could frankly add another desktop or 3 without even blinking but what the fuck would i do with them? hell I'm typing this on a 1.8GHz Sempron I keep as a nettop and downloader box. This thing is circa 2003 but you know what? for the web and downloading it is quite peppy, even plays SD flash without a complaint.
So let these guys get their panties in a wad, it isn't like Windows PCs and Linux servers are going anywhere. Ballmer will put out his abomination called Windows 8 Dumbass Edition and finally get a big fat pink slip for Xmas next year, Apple could frankly put a brick in a box and still get lines around the street thanks to branding, but what is to be afraid of? The iPad? While I've met a few people that have actually forced themselves to use it constantly just to justify the money they spent the rest I've seen basically treat it as a really expensive portable video player, Mobile Phones? They are disposable razors. Folks get a new one with contract and shitcan the previous one, everyone i know has drawers full of the things. Sure they'll spend a dollar on a fart app or some shit but other than Angry Birds there hasn't been anything worth talking about.
But I hate to break the news to this guy but at the end of the day, when it comes to actually wanting to get something done? Everyone plops down in front of their desktop or laptop and breaks out an assload of software. Everybody and their cat has frankly mountains of the stuff, from some stupid app that came with their camera they really love to Quickbooks/Quicken to a bazillion other free and pay things they have collected over the years like so much belly button lint. What are they gonna do, give everyone a free copy of every app they own? try to force them all to go buy it all over again? yeah they tried that shit with the lousy backwards compatibility of Vista and I spent a year and a half wiping the damned thing off computers for XP.
TL:DR? Appstores are a niche market for a niche product, that is all. Sure they make good money but that is ONLY because they are a NEW market and once the shiny wears off and those that want one have one the bottom will crash and crash HARD. Don't forget there was a time not too long ago when much of the same things being said about the iShiny was said about the Palm Pilot, like how it would replace everything and rule the world. Where is it now?
Dude, you sound like a nice guy but you DO know that Linux has security holes like everyone else, yes? i could post a half a dozen links from Securina if you'd like, or even articles from here. Its not like I have users running update in the hope that there will be some new shiny, its because its stupid to run unpatched software because we ALL know that the script kiddies and malware guy use those patches to reverse engineer and make new malware!
I'm not asking for the moon here Kev, not asking for shiny bling bling or running Linux on a toaster. i just want to hand a box to some and know it WILL be patched AND stay running for the life of that machine. I mean I have XP boxes going on 12 years in the field and the community harps on about how inferior it is right? Well prove it and make a better product!
Frankly you know what? Don't give a shit, DO NOT GIVE A SHIT, you know why? Because we are supposed to be BETTER than the shills and the fanbois and astroturfers, we are SMARTER and have higher IQs and are therefor BETTER than them. you wanna kill a shill dead? drive a stake right into his still beating heart? Then DESTROY what he is shilling for with a well thought out counter argument!
Honestly this is why the Linux fanbois fucking HATE me, so badly in fact i had one follow me around for a month everywhere i posted just so he could post as AC "Die you fat fucker die" and HOW did i get him so pissed? I fucking CRUSHED his arguments with the truth, backed up by a solid list of citations! if you think they are blowing smoke then WALK THE WALK and tear him a new one with a solid argument and citations!
But this mindless endless bleating "shill astroturfer troll" is like "nigger faggot jew" and frankly a waste of everyone's time, i don't give a shit if it turns out the guys is a fucking drone or not! Because everyone sees that shit and they tune it out just as they do all the Goatse links or nigger posts.
We come here for the COMMENTS folks, this USED to be a place where the big brains would tear each other apart and even if you got fucking demolished by a guy that knew 50 times more than you thought you did you know what? you fucking LEARNED!!! I've been witness and part of arguments on file systems and CPU arches here that frankly taught me more than any class ever could, because by arguing their positions everyone brought their A games and dug out facts upon facts and frankly i'm not ashamed to admit I've been schooled here more than once and have been man enough to admit defeat when my position got ripped apart by someone with more knowledge on the subject.
C'mon guys, we're the fucking brains of the outfits aren't we? We the band of battered and abused IT guys and scientists and geeks and nerds and all of us little cogs that keep the train on the tracks? hell look at your post man, if you would have spent HALF the time tearing into that guy's position that you did backing up your shill point he would have left with his tail between his legs and we would have ALL probably learned a thing or two. We CAN do better guys, but this endless flamewar bullshit and screams of "shill astroturfer troll" make this feel more like a damned fansite instead of a place where the smart guys hang.
Personally i'm damned sick and tired of seeing everyone that doesn't go along with the herd and drink the koolaid like a good little drone being labeled a shill. Name a SINGLE thing that guy posted that wasn't true. if MSFT pulls out of search will there be anyone left to compete? nope as yahoo closed their search division nearly two years ago and are concentrating on their web portal and email which i can't say as i blame them as that is their two biggest products by far.
Lets look at his other statements shall we? does MSFT think long term? Well you can easily know to the DAY how long their products are gonna last, they put up handy little EOL roadmaps which makes it easy to plan a business around. For example XP is EOL in Apr 2014 and Windows 7 is 2020, no just killing products willy nilly here like Google.
Now lets look at yours and the others shall we? "The desktop is a has been" likely written from an iPad. Despite the coming of iJesus computers still sell REALLY well and frankly as a retailer I can tell you the ONLY reason PCs have slowed down is simply because they have reached maturity and are long past "good enough" for the masses. There is frankly nothing the average person does in home or office that doesn't run really well on even a 5 year old dual core, so why should they buy when they don't need to? Pads are a niche product, for Apple its a high dollar niche but its still a niche.
And then of course there is you labeling anyone who doesn't think like you a shill. honestly i have more respect for the trolls that call everyone nigger as they have less of a bad attitude than you do and are more honest. With your type of troll all must think like you or they are one of THEM, just insert the company you don't like into the THEM and lather rinse repeat. One week its Apple, the next MSFT, the one after that Oracle, all except whatever company is "your" company like its a God damned ball club.
So if you don't agree with his opinion while don't you actually do something constructive like make a well thought out argument for your position? Oh right that would mean actually having to think and compare instead of mindlessly following with the herd. I hate to say it but i'm gonna have to agree with old Mikey 400+ accounts that "Slashdot = stagnated'.
Now please waste your mod points for my blasphemy of pointing out mindless constant accusations instead of counter arguments is stupid and pointless, especially in a place that is SUPPOSED to be full of smart tech guys, not mindless fanbois.
Personally i'm damned sick of google shoving chrome down everyone's throats thanks to having it spammed in every piece of freeware on the planet. First it was the damned toolbar now its Chrome. seriously WTF Google? you have the biggest fricking search engine on the planet AND the most popular video site AND one of the biggest mobile OSes AND a very popular email client. that isn't enough damned ways to shill chrome for you? you gotta act like God damned Bonzi Buddy too? WTF?
Personally TFA wouldn't surprise me in the least, when they went from just trying to make good products to spamming their toolbars i knew that 'think no evil' was a crock of shit. When a company gets greedy enough they start trying to backdoor shill their products by shoving them down the clueless with tiny checkboxes in the middle of installers? yeah that is pretty sleazy in my book and while maybe not technically 'evil' it sure as hell is scummy in my book.
Ya know, i used to laugh at all the shit, now I'm not so sure. Whatever is coming out of those C130s that fly over sure as fuck ain't like anything they USED to fly and I've been watching them fly over from the local AFB since I was a kid so I'd have noticed, but whatever is in the C130s now leaves a film almost like crop dusting and whatever it is makes people hack like mad the next day.
So frankly who knows. I do know with all the lies they have been caught in from just the last 20 years i wouldn't trust my own government to tell me if its raining outside and that is kinda sad and more than a little scary.
I'll get modded worse but this is something I feel I HAVE to ask: Wasn't Linux supposed to be the "sensible" one? the one where you didn't have code just being chunked because of some new shiny? I mean here you had KDE 3 and GNOME 2, both had been battle tested, were rock solid, were certainly not ugly on the eyes, had tons of features and were getting pretty damned bug free, so what happened? Did MSFT going bling happy force everyone to be blinded by the shiny?
I swear the whole Linux situation reminds me of an old SNL skit about Bizarro world. its like "Quick users am happy and things am stable! This is no good, we must throw everything out and break lots of stuff! Now look, users am unhappy and things broken, all better now" WTF?
I don't know, maybe its all Canonical's fault as they seem to be the ones that really started doing Bizarro shit like 6 month releases and seeming to go out of their way to piss of their users. When I first tried Linux in 2004 I thought that by now me and every other retailer in America would have penguins on boxes and Linux PCs and laptops right beside the Windows and Mac machines. progress was slow but steady, every year things got better, drivers got a little more stable, things got less fiddly, it really looked to be coming along nicely.
Now it just seems more like politics and fanboyism, where every request or critique is treating like pissing on the bible, things seem a hell of a lot more unstable and all that progress seems to have been thrown right out the window into the path of a bus. I have tried damned near every "user friendly" distro I have ever heard of and can't get a single one to pass my "is it safe?" test which simulates my customer having the PC and just keeping it updated for 3 years, not a single one. Drivers break, DEs get swapped out, UIs get flaky, and when i point this out all I get is heaps of insults and accused of being one of THEM whoever the THEM is this week.
I just think its a damned shame, that's what it is. When XP goes EOL there will be literally tens of millions of machines with frankly overpowered hardware that COULD be running Linux and offering low cost computing to the masses and instead me and every other system builder and repair guy will be scrambling for cheap Win 7 Starter and Home CALs simply because nobody will listen to us and give us a simple, easy to use, fiddly free Linux that Suzy the checkout girl can run without picking up "Bash and scripting for dummies". Is that REALLY so much to ask?
Ya know, I want to hate the consoles but I have to say there is a nice side effect to the little bastards and that is how cheap I can offer folks an HTPC nowadays. Back in the olden days of the late 90s you were looking at a $150 GPU about every year to year and a half just to be able to play the games coming down the pipe and now I have several folks that are quite happy with HD4830s that i picked up for less than $50 a piece. And there is still more kick ass PC gaming for cheap than any other machine i know of, where else can you get games at the price of the big Steam Xmas sale while still having graphics that make my customers drool? you want to talk about an easy sale, all i have to do when they ask "But what can it do?" is fire up Just Cause II and set off some demo charges on the smokestacks. watching my guy walk into the sunset as these huge towers come crashing down and its "Sold!".
So I wouldn't bitch TOO much, the consoles keep game PCs quite cheap while still letting us have some pretty impressive visuals, and while its true that the specs on them suck at least there are still games coming out with enhanced graphics for PCs while allowing us that don't have "ePeen" money to still enjoy gaming. I just hope when the next consoles come out it won't take a couple of years for GPUs that match or beat them to become cheap enough for the masses as I REALLY don't want to go back to $150+ a year in GPUs just to game. Hell at the way things are going with any luck i may still get another couple of years out of this soon to be Thuban desktop;-)
I have to agree, some of the posters we have now aren't even enjoyable crazy like old twitter was but foaming at the mouth "He is different! Burn teh witch!" kind of nutso. i mean look at the post this guy is screaming "shill!" over. he doesn't even mention FB until the third paragraph and then mentions the games he enjoys there which considering the topic is about consoles and the future is right on topic.
While i personally think consoles suck but i love them because they let me game with a $50 HD4850 instead of having to blow $150 every year and a half like I did in the late 90s/early 00s I'd say the guy is entitled to his opinion.
I personally think that the future won't be pads, those things simply don't have a great interface I could see it getting to the point that a gaming PC is just as simple to use as a console, hell they are already close to that now. One of my biggest sellers is HTPCs simply because with wireless X360 controllers they can have all the use of a PC AND all the gaming fun with a frankly dirt cheap GPU so I could see something like that eventually replacing consoles as that is really all a modern console IS anymore, a computer with a dedicated OS and lots of DRM. I'm just shocked (probably afraid of hurting X360 sales) that MSFT hasn't come out with a "gamers edition" that is just a stripped down gaming OS.
But I agree completely that while I may think HTPCs are the way to go and British may think its the Pads we are both entitled to our opinion and the screams of 'You are not drinking teh koolaid you must be a (insert corporation) Ninja!" are getting seriously lame. hell I had one stalk me here for over a month just so he could accuse me of being of all people APK ( which is kinda funny since we fought for ages and I still think a recursive DNS is a better way to go over a HOSTS file) and constantly posted behind me 'Die you fat fucker die!".
I know this'll make me sound old but/. used to be a better place and I can see why Taco left. We used to have some heated arguments sure but they were SMART heated arguments. Where else could you have a 30 post back and forth over pros and cons of file systems or memory management? Now its all fanbois and trolls, hell it feels more like some anime site than a tech site anymore, and that is just a damned shame. Even the trolls are lame now!
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly, we aren't talking about the cheap shit photos you take of the wreck on i95 with your phone we are talking about the moments of your life to rip a line from an old commercial. The baby's first steps, the kid playing baseball, graduation, folks want these things to not only last but look nice and the warm tones that Kodachrome gave made even plain photos just look nice.
To use something more in my area its like music. Sure digital and solid state is everywhere yet 50 years after the rest of the world abandoned tubes some of the most popular amps and EQs and effects have tubes in them, why? Because digital can be TOO perfect, too sterile. the old tech had a warmth and a tone that just made it nicer on the ears and folks are willing to pay for that even though you can buy a SS amp for less than half the price.
Kodak could have cranked out digital camera that were designed to give the nice colors and warm of their classics, and the combination of warm natural colors and the Kodak name would have had people lining up to buy them even if they weren't the highest resolution camera or the cheapest because folks want nice pretty pictures and Kodak knew how to do that damned well. Its just another classic case of a company having the skills to compete but not the vision.
The problem dude is this everything apple is "claiming" is generic so to use a /. car analogy it would be like me saying 'I don't own the patents on the car or am trying to stifle production. you can still make cars as long as they don't have a roof AND wheels AND a motor AND seats, because that's MY design". Horseshit Apple, pure and complete horseshit.
There isn't a geek here that can't cram the living shit out of any posting with prior art for any of the individual points they have listed and simply putting generic prior art together doesn't suddenly give you the right to negate all that prior art. Just off the top of my head the old WinTablets had flat screens and black fronts as claimed by Apple, Palm had icon menus in a grid layout, hell its too easy as every single thing they are "claiming" is as old as dirt and just as common. This is the whole "look and feel" lawsuit all over again and we remember how well that turned out for the Pepsi guy.
Personally i think its a sign that what I've been thinking is true, that without Jobs Apple turns to caca. Just as before they'll be able to coast for a good while based on the work the man has already done, but without Jobs to steer the ship things start going south. Cook seems like a hell of a smart guy but seems more like a highly focused nuts and bolts kinda guy, not the "big vision" type like Jobs was. Like him or hate him Jobs pretty much had a single vision of how he wanted things built and done and although he refined it as tech got better he pretty much stuck to that vision his whole life.
Frankly while Apple might be hot now i could easily see them in 5 or 6 years being like they were in 93, running out of gas as new tech passes Steve's older ideas and without new ideas in the pipe Apple just stagnates. After all that is what happened last time without the big guy behind the helm, like it or not Apple will always be "the house that Steve built".
Sorry but this is old new and why most of us builders have been avoiding CNet like the clap for awhile. I'd loved to see their before and after website visits stats because i wouldn't be surprised if many are doing like me and the instant they see the article is on CNet closing the tab.
For those that need that "80%" software, the stuff you pretty much install on every system? Let old Hairy introduce to a really nice place with a weird name...Ninite. it has all the latest versions of the software everyone installs, your flash, codec packs, VLC, LibreOffice, several AV and antimal to choose from, and NO TOOLBARS are allowed, no crapware, just the program you want pre-packaged as an unattended installer that's as simple as "clicky clicky" and let her run. great for not only new builds but when you need to help someone who lives a good distance away who is having trouble or doesn't know where to find the above basics.
I used to swing by CNet all the time back in the day but since i don't support spammers and spyware pushers they can go pound sand. With ninite all the basics are covered and if you can think of others you'd like just drop their name in the suggestion box and they'll add the most popular choices to the list. I suggested Klite with MPC and voila! There it is, and more popular apps are being added all the time. Enjoy folks!
Ya want to know how they could have REALLY kicked some digital ass? they should have worked on a digital camera that outputs film style pictures. and they could have cleaned up! What I mean by that is the warm tones that something like Kodachrome put out. folks still like that warmth and would be happy to give up some resolution if they had a camera that could crank out digital pictures that looked like they were taken on Kodachrome. Sure you can tweak it afterwards in Photoshop, but how many people have the skills to do it?
A camera where little Suzy the checkout girl could have all the convenience of digital with the softer warmer look of film would have frankly been a hit. Tie it in with a photoprinter that could crank the pics out and they could have backed up the money truck. But just like the *.A.A and piracy instead of adapting to the times and offering a better product they sat on their collective butts and let the world pass them by. Stupid move Kodak, really stupid.
You wanna know what's weird? the girls are meeting up in these games like second life and WoW and not blasting or raiding but going on virtual shopping trips and the like. I know because when on the last tour of the college that my oldest is going to I asked if I could ask the kids some questions and that's what the girls are doing. who would have thought virtual shopping of all things but that and those click happy FB games like Farmville and the one where you build a little city are all the rage with the females.
As for the handhelds i honestly think a lot of it has to do with AMD cutting the bottom out of the netbook and laptop market. After the open house I've had several of the students, male and female, come to my little shop because "You're the one that got Jackson that cool little laptop right? Can you get me one at a decent price that'll play..." and then just insert the name of the game. I even had to help a little 14 year old sit with her grandma and pick her first netbook for Xmas, she got one of the little C-60s since the main gaming she wants to do is FB.
Before laptops were for the rich kids and the grownups, something that would play more than cards would cost you an arm and a leg. Now I have a $350 netbook that not only does 1080P and has 8Gb of RAM but plays L4D and GTA:VC just fine. the kids nowadays want something they can do their schoolwork on AND chat and use video chat with their friends AND play their MMOs AND surf the web AND listen to music AND watch video AND...you get the idea. My oldest boy's little $500 laptop has either a triple or quad CPU (can't remember off the top of my head) and does all of the above including playing his new Star Wars MMO (he actually got to be one of the first beta testers) and still lets him take notes in class and do the online portions of his studies.
So I'd say the handheld has its days numbered simply because of the incredible power you can get now in a portable device. hell you can pick up an Atom netbook for like $200 or an AMD with an APU that has killer graphics for $300. Parents are gonna look at those prices and compare them with the $250 list of a new handheld like the Vita and go 'My child will be better off with the laptop/netbook" and of course the kid will be happier as well since they are all online now.
I'm telling ya though it was weird seeing break rooms just full of kids clicking and tapping away on all these little netbooks and laptops. When they weren't doing classes it was MMO city, just one big online gathering even though the folks were right there!
Uhhh...Bill? you can just go to Ninite and just use the latest flash you know. i've found it runs better than the built in chromium one anyway. with the chromium flash SD video is skippy and sucks more CPU on the Sempron nettop and it uses more power on the Brazos netbook but with the latest flash its smooth as butter and lower power usage. Frankly it wouldn't surprise me if it uses the Intel compiler but i also heard it uses GCC which frankly isn't much better so i honestly don't know who to believe on that one. why they don't just use the Open64 compiler which works great on intel AND AMD I don't know.
But I can tell you that it is NOT just the compiler because there is also Pale Moon which is a custom compiled FF with the SSE flags properly set and the choice of 32 or 64 bit and i can tell you even the 64 bit version gets stomped by dragon and Chromium. And FF 7 and 8 is NOT lighter, it just trades memory for CPU time which IMHO is worse as the RAM uses that same power regardless while the CPU spikes suck batteries dead. And frankly IE could be offered to me with $1000 hookers and I won't take it, got burned enough from IE6 not to mention look at the number of patches for IE holes VS everything else. By removing and blocking IE from my win 7 installs I went from over 1.9Gb to get RTM to current to barely 730Mb!
BTW one of the reasons i learned of ninite was because i got tired of dealing with badly out of date Adobe crap on the machines the local worst buy sells. i often get called and paid $65 a pop simply to restore to factory settings and "get rid of the crap" because of my rep when it comes to cleaning and optimizing mobile devices. Now I just run decrapify, set Windows to the non granny settings, run Ninite followed by my tweaks and finally coretemp and AllCPUMeter. makes it easier to control power usage IMHO but honestly my Asus EEE wasn't that badly crapped. it had Adobe crap and 2 startup apps i didn't need, that's it.
Oh if you see ballmer tell that fat bastard i'm STILL waiting for my apology and free copy of Windows 7 for being burnt by ME and Vista. Where is my apology you fat fucker? WinME was against the Geneva Convention!
Thou art most welcome and sorry for the slow reply but guess what? The PC seller is swamped again. so much for "the desktop is dead" huh? I don't even have a single box to sell ATM because the guy that is dropping off my off lease boxes is running behind thanks to the holidays. The last desktop I have left is already sold to an old customer that before i could even get the specs out said "Sold, put it in the corner and I'll pick it up at the end of the week, just load my software on it" and that was that, and the off lease boxes i have at least 3, probably more, sold sight unseen.
This old geek has been around long enough to hear this song and dance before, first it was thin clients (remember those? Sun had the sun ray, HP had the ultranet or something like that, and they were gonna wipe out the desktop) and then it was the Palm Pilot, then the smartphone, then the netbook, now its the tablet. In each case they had a niche, some lived, most didn't, but they sure didn't "destroy the desktop".
And it isn't like i haven't looked into it, like i'm some 8 track salesman bitching about CDs, i've sold Android tablets and frankly talking to customers they ended up being used as expensive ebook Readers and glorified PMPs. There is only so much you can do by poking your greasy finger at a screen and other than Angry birds there frankly hasn't even been anything worth talking about. sure Apple will make a mint but look at the customer base. Can you see ANYONE else where a $1000 app that just gives you a red jewel and says "I am rich' would have sold even a single copy? Apple is like Prada, its all branding. everyone else will be fighting for scraps and lucky if they don't pull a touchpad.
Frankly I'd say the future has never been brighter for PCs. Thanks to the AMD mobile chips you can have $200 HTPCs that do 1080p and surf the web, sub $400 dual core netbooks that get 6 hours on a battery and even play games, and all in ones that make great kitchen and den PCs. The future is a wireless household with the PC doing all the grunt work and the iShiny working as a glorified touch screen remote.
I can tell you EXACTLY what went wrong, that damned Linus Torvalds is what went wrong! between his constant kernel fiddling breaking drivers (He needs to just change the logo for Linux from tux to Goatse because frankly it feels like he's trolling) and Canonical getting everyone on an INSANE 6 month release schedule (which means nothing gets fixed, just new versions that add new bugs on top of old bugs) the quality has backslid BAD and QA is right out. I mean when one of the top 4 OEMs has to run their own repos because even on a TEENY TINY subset of hardware they can't even get enough QA from Canonical to keep the drivers from taking a big old shit if you run the default repos? Something be stinking in Linux land.
Pulse Audio, Linus kernel Goatse, DEs getting tossed, frankly the guts in Linux is as stable as the shifting sands now. I've tried Linux on just about every off lease and refurb that has come through my shop and in ALL CASES the drivers shit themselves, the DEs gets screwy such as settings not "sticking" after reboot unless you input the data by CLI, its just one big fucking mess, that's what it is.
And they can complain about "Waaah they won't give us drivers waaah!" but you know what? a company would have to be certifiably INSANE to support Linux. With Windows just FOUR count 'em FOUR drivers gives you support for every version of Windows from 2000-2014 at the very least! 2K/XP XP X64/2K3 X64, Vista/7 32 bit, Vista /7 64 bit...tada! I'm done, stick a fork, my device will work now and keep working. and look what a company gets for bending over backwards to support linux? AMD not only opened the specs they hired developers to help the community write drivers, only for the drivers to constantly have to be rewritten (Linus Goatse) and the community to say in EVERY forum 'LOL Buy Nvidia". if i was AMD I'd tell the community to go fuck themselves.
Finally as for Android, lets break it down shall we? what IS Android? its the SAME DAMNED THING we retailers have been BEGGING the community to give us for X86/64. Its an ALL GUI no CLI OS where everything is "clicky clicky" and there are NO driver borkage because Google doesn't allow Linus "The Goatse" Torvalds to touch "their" kernel, that's why. Hell read his thoughts on the kernel and tell me if your ass wouldn't get a pink slip if you tried that! No roadmap, no plans, he scratches itches like its 1993 and he is still passing the kernel around over IRC.
Frankly I've given up. I've talked and written articles and begged until i'm blue in the face only to have the community throw shit and insults and say "Your a dirty poo poo head M$ Ninja!", I've tried every damned Linux there is and watched them shit themselves over tasks that frankly Windows could do a decade ago, hell they still don't even have a "Find drivers" or "roll back drivers" button and when i point this out I get a lecture on how my "duty" is to waste my time for free teaching my customers to do forum hunts and CLI tweaking copypasta that they have NO desire to learn or do, because they HAVE to "embrace the POWER of CLI" like its the God damned force!
Insanity friend, that's what it is, sheer mass insanity! To this very day they truly believe that the masses are all gonna abandon GUIs for terminals and go back to the 1970s! Frankly it shouldn't surprise me though, just look at their hero RMS. I swear to God the man still calls everyone "hackers" and acts like he is at a computer club meeting in 1978!
EEE 1000? Let me guess...Linux? We are talking WINDOWS here friend, Linux has a completely different arch and memory model, its like comparing Apples to grapefruits. From what I've seen FF on Linux runs nicely but considering Linux is stuck at 1% keeping every Linux user on the planet frankly isn't even gonna make the needle move, sorry.
I can tell you that on XP, XP X64, Vista 32, and Win 7 32 and 64 bit that FF runs like ass if you aren't on a VERY fast single or a multicore and it sucks the living hell out of the battery on mobile thanks to all the CPU slamming. On MY EEE, a Brazos E-350 running win 7 HP x64, I can tell you that using Coretemp I can tell you that FF causes my temp to jump over 10 degrees F because of its CPU hogging. The most Dragon will do is make the CPU usage jump to 50% and then for only a few seconds when i'm launching flash video whereas FF seems to slam the CPU to 100% for pretty much any action, launching a new tab, SD or HD video, Hell using CPU meter i can watch the CPU jump just by typing in a fricking text box.
So while i'm glad it runs well for you in Linux to use a /. car analogy its like you saying "My Cessna doesn't have traffic problems!" when the topic is which cars get the best mileage in a jam. I thought me and my other posters were pretty clear we were talking about windows, especially when i mentioned Windows in the first sentence.
Dude if you are on windows try Comodo Dragon first. it'll give you checkboxes on install that will move all your stuff over to dragon so there really isn't anything to move and after that simply use the Gmail sync to keep any machine you own synced together. But the built in Comodo Secure DNS is sweet, it uses a combo of WoT as well as Comodo's own web scans to keep nasty sites out and it has excellent domain checking and phishing blocking and at least in my tests seems to be a good 50% faster than the new FF.
But I've had nothing but good luck and happy customers since switching from FF to Dragon on all my builds and repairs. its fast, its free, has great security, and if you are on 7 it runs in low rights mode which after 5 years FF STILL doesn't support. Just the other day i got an email from halfway across the country from a gal on one of my laptops (A long time customer bought the laptop off me and shipped it to her) and she just had to email me and say "THANK YOU THANK YOU! Not only is this laptop just the bestest thing but i just LOVE that Dragon Eye thingie you gave me! Its soooo much faster on my email and FB!! Thank YOU!!". She was a longtime Firefox user and had me set up a chat session just so I could show her how to switch to "the Dragon eye thingie' on her desktop and copy everything over.
When they go to the trouble to write you from half the country away, set up a chat session, and then have you walk them through switching? you know Comodo is doing something right. That and FF is seriously screwing the pooch with their shitty performance.
That's funny, i have several customers as well as a couple of family members that bought PSPs and all bought them for their kids and i can't think of a single one that would be "hacked'. Honestly despite all the talk here on geek sites i bet hacked devices don't even add to up 3% of ANY device out there besides the iPhone, simply because normal folks are too scared they are gonna break the thing and don't have the tech skills required.
I doubt Sony fanboys will want to hear this but not a single customer has asked me squat about the new Sony and if they were thinking of buying i'd have heard of it, my former boss said i should have built a booth like Lucy on Peanuts and charged for it because i always end up answering everyone's tech questions, and those customers that I talk to often as well as the family have their PSPs sitting in the corner gathering dust. The high cost of memory sticks i have no doubt is partially to blame, but most ended up getting their kids a DS as well or a netbook/tablet/phone and now the PSP sits unloved.
Personally I won't be buying it for my family because of the memory and because i think it'd end up sitting in a closet. The days of single function portable devices is coming to an end i believe, just look at how Nintendo has had to drop the price on their 3D handheld. Smartphones, tablets, netbooks, that is where portable gaming is gonna be i think. my nephew is a perfect example, here was a kid that ALWAYS had a gaming handheld in his pocket and i haven't seen him touch one in a couple of years now, not since he got a little AMD laptop. Now he and his buddies will meet somewhere on campus and do some TF2 or some other MMO while all the girls across the campus are taking a break in Second Life or WoW. These kids today all seem to do the whole MMO thing which AFAIK the handhelds just don't do.
Man I didn't think of myself as old until my boys talked me into playing some TF2 and Bioshock II MP with them. I can kick ass in SP shooters, i really can, but in MMOs I spent all my time ragdolled on the floor, I couldn't get more than a shot or two off! i just don't get it, its like everyone else, even though they have the same weapons as me, just seem to be able to do much more damage. I just came to the conclusion i can't do the "chicken with its head cut off" gameplay style, too damned hectic for me.
Dude have you EVER worked corp? Because your post don't sound like it because it ain't the chip that slows corporate its CORPORATE BULLSHIT that slows corporate!
The last corp I had the misfortune to work hired gun for had no less than FOUR different startup scripts that ALL had to load before you could even log in, Norton "extra sucky" Edition making even a new tab feel like trying to run win98 on a 386SX, two different shares they had Windows autoloading and every single page had to go through all the corporate bullshit monitoring gear on the intranet which made even a page from a branch office load like it was coming from a C64 based in Siberia!
Dude you could give corporate desktops fricking 4 socket Magny Cours rigs and they'd have the thing running like a Pentium 3 running Vista LOL! for everyone else, SOHOs and SMBs and Home Users, which BTW is currently the biggest market by far, the AMD chips are way past good enough and into extreme overkill. Hell their prices are so damned cheap i put my dad on a quad core at his house! I doubt the man will ever get that chip above 40% load but WTF, it was a whole $30 difference. I don't even sell new dual core desktops anymore, AMD has the triples and quads so cheap there isn't really a point so even my granny customers are running Athlon X3 and X4. lets see FB slow down THAT shit!
Of course if you'd like something off the beaten path that support Windows from 98-7 AND Linux AND OSX i'd suggest QTWeb which is completely portable and based on the QT framework and Webkit. Runs nice, plenty of nice features, sweet little browser and runs great from a thumbstick.
As for TFA? Couldn't happen to a more arrogant user unfriendly company. I used Firefox before it was even called Firefox and the Suite before that but after version 3.0.x things started slowing quickly and by version 4 I found it completely unsuitable for purpose. i have to support everything from Atom single core netbooks to older P4 office boxes to the latest multicore and frankly FF runs like ass on anything less than a P4 3GHz with HT and in my own exp anything less than a multicore it struggles. On the 1.8GHz Sempron i use as a nettop in the shop i can surf, download, watch SD video....in Dragon. In the latest Firefox SD video is a slideshow, launching a new tab will slam the CPU to 100% for up to a minute and if that tab contains SD video it'll hang the entire OS so long you might as well go make a sandwich because the machine won't be doing anything else. With Dragon I can have a half a dozen tabs open and launch an SD video in a new tab and she loads in under 10 seconds, never goes above 80% CPU, and the video plays just fine.
But Google won't kill funding unless they are VERY stupid, they'll just cut the hell out of it, but even that is iffy, why? Microsoft. MSFT wants in the search game B.A.D and by buying the default search engine from FF they could gain a nice boost, even with FF's lower numbers. Remember the thing they need the most is lots of searches so they can improve results and FF can give that to them. So i doubt Google will be dumb enough to walk away and give MSFT a free shot like that.
Actually i think you are wrong on your last sentence and here is why....AMD. The Brazos APU makes for an HTPC that is light, low power, low heat, lets you run a full Windows 7 HP without stuttering while playing 1080p video, hell you can even do light gaming on the thing. Between the Brazos HTPCs and the AMD Phenom IIs (also insanely cheap and insanely overpowered) I've been cranking out more HTPCs lately than i have desktops or laptops. All it takes is ONE, just one mind you, to get one in a neighborhood and the word leaks and the next thing you know? you're swamped.
The iShiny makes a good eReader and really expensive portable video player, that is all. Thanks to the one smart move MSFT has made in awhile and just building WMC into Win 7 it is beyond trivial to turn any recent desktop into an HTPC and folks are finding there is a wealth of killer add ons, from wireless game controllers to my most popular, the Lenovo remote that is just the right size for all those texting skilled housewives to crank out tweets and FB updates on. Add to that the new cheap all in ones by HP that make awesome kitchen and den PCs and the things are more popular than ever.
I think the "next big thing" for PCs will be the wireless house. folks will come in and plop in front of the widescreen to check their email before watching the news, the kids will all have Nboxes or WDs to watch their kid shows on, and the family will have all their movies stored on a big fat HDD on one of the PCs and just stream it anywhere they are. I have some customers i have already done this for and the word of mouth has been keeping me swamped. Folks frankly don't realize yet the incredible power they can have for dirt cheap but once they get a hint of what it can do they go nuts. he can simply grab a remote in any main area and have movies, music, web, anything he wants is just right there. I'd say the future of the PC has never been brighter, its just the media that is going gaga for the iShiny and helping keep it in the spotlight.
From the looks of it Bulldozer is another Phenom I, where they have to use a generation getting the bugs out. Phenom II was and is an excellent chip BTW, sure its not gonna slaughter the latest and greatest from Intel but the dirty little secret AMD and Intel don't want to talk about is that for 95%+ of the users out there PCs have been "good enough" for quite some time. hell I'm the kind of guy that was building himself a new PC practically every year in the past, now my AMD Deneb quad is going on 3 years old and if I get that Thuban upgrade i plan to for my BDay i could easily see it lasting another 5 years, maybe more.
The smart move which I applaud the new AMD CEO for doing is cutting down on the desktop product to crank the living hell out of mobile because that is where the money is at right now. you look at Brazos and they have been selling out of those chips as fast as they can crank them and as an owner of a EEE E-350 netbook I can see why, 6 hours of battery life running full Win 7 HP X64, takes 8Gb of RAM easily, does full HD video without a stutter, low heat, and its a great little multitasker chip, running head and shoulder better than Atom and often beating ION at a lower price. The OEMs have taken notice it seems as i have seen Brazos in netbooks, all in ones, and HTPCs all over the place. Walking into my local Walmart the other day, a place that just a few years ago was strictly Intel land, more than 3/4ths of the laptop/netbooks and virtually all the desktops were AMD Fusion. I asked one of the guys I knew there about them and he said 'These things are selling like crazy, great for video and FB' which is of course where most folks are nowadays.
Frankly I think the path AMD is on is the smart one right now but its gonna have teething problems. They are in the process of switching their GPUs from VLIW to vector and looking at the chip bulldozer arch is really made for the new vector GPUs that simply aren't finished. by switching to vector you'll have a super FP that the CPU can hand off heavy math to when not in use for gaming while having a smaller FP on the CPU thus allowing more cores per chip. Like the switch to Stars its gonna take some teething pains to get everything switched over to the new designs and having GloFlo drop the ball certainly didn't help.
Personally I can easily see a day where Intel owns the top end and that is pretty much it, as AMD cranks out the chips for the low and midrange. Frankly the dual core Brazos is more powerful than 90% of the jobs my customers could come up with and I can see a quad version pretty much owning the low and midrange sectors due to the combo of price/performance and lower power. Just give them time folks, they are still cranking out Denebs and Thubans so I'd stick with those for now and let the new BD arch get the bugs worked out and by the time the chip after Piledriver comes out the boards and laptops will be cheap and plentiful. Until then just stick with Thuban, Mobile Phenom II and Brazos.
Maybe someone can explain the whole U2 thing to me, because i just don't get it. I mean here is a tech invented in...what? 1958? Why hasn't anyone figured out how to swat those thing down like gnats already? i mean i could at least understand the SR71 blackbird as literally by the time you knew the thing was headed your way it was already gone. But the U2 ain't that fast and if the Ruskies were able to shoot down Powers why hasn't everyone else been knocking those things down?
As for TFA I'm sure i'll get labeled a racist for not kissing the booty but i have a feeling this is the USA wasting yet more money to dance to Israel's tune. they same jump and we just hop like good little frogs. The sad part is living next to a wealthy conservative college I've actually got to talk to a few of the guys that actually roam the corridors of power and make policies and scarily enough our entire ME policy pretty much boils down to "Jesus won't come back! Come back Jesus come back!"
Sometimes i don't know which is scarier, the whole backward assed ME Sharia countries or that a supposedly highly advanced western nation WITH multiple nuclear weapons is basing its policy for a major part of the planet, which has so far cost an incredible number of lives, on an 1800 year old sheep's ass parchment that says a 2000 year dead guy has to have a certain race in a certain spot or he won't have a place to park his fluffy white cloud.
I can't believe i have to spell this out and why so many bloggers think the sky is falling i have NO clue, except maybe just whoring for page views.The iShiny is a niche folks. sure it makes apple a metric fuckton of cash and makes too many developers drool at the thought of iMoney because Apple users will happily shell out real money for things Windows and Linux users wouldn't give a cent for, but its still a niche.
As someone in retail I can tell you there are TWO reasons why the iShiny is growing like crazy while the PC is so much lower and NEITHER have to do with the death or birth of anything. 1.- The iShiny simply hasn't existed very long so those that want one may not have gotten one yet. Look at how PC sales went nuts when they first became affordable, hell stores were going through units as fast as they could get them in the store.
And the most important reason 2.- The PC is mature technology and for the vast majority of the masses has been "good enough" for several years now. Even a 5 year old laptop or desktop is frankly INSANELY overpowered for what the vast majority do with a personal computer and everybody and their dog and their dog's squeaky toy has one if not several. In just my own family we have a single core laptop, dual core laptop, a dual core netbook, and no less than FIVE desktops ranging from a 3GHz Celeron for my mom all the way up to my quad. With all the units going through the shop I could frankly add another desktop or 3 without even blinking but what the fuck would i do with them? hell I'm typing this on a 1.8GHz Sempron I keep as a nettop and downloader box. This thing is circa 2003 but you know what? for the web and downloading it is quite peppy, even plays SD flash without a complaint.
So let these guys get their panties in a wad, it isn't like Windows PCs and Linux servers are going anywhere. Ballmer will put out his abomination called Windows 8 Dumbass Edition and finally get a big fat pink slip for Xmas next year, Apple could frankly put a brick in a box and still get lines around the street thanks to branding, but what is to be afraid of? The iPad? While I've met a few people that have actually forced themselves to use it constantly just to justify the money they spent the rest I've seen basically treat it as a really expensive portable video player, Mobile Phones? They are disposable razors. Folks get a new one with contract and shitcan the previous one, everyone i know has drawers full of the things. Sure they'll spend a dollar on a fart app or some shit but other than Angry Birds there hasn't been anything worth talking about.
But I hate to break the news to this guy but at the end of the day, when it comes to actually wanting to get something done? Everyone plops down in front of their desktop or laptop and breaks out an assload of software. Everybody and their cat has frankly mountains of the stuff, from some stupid app that came with their camera they really love to Quickbooks/Quicken to a bazillion other free and pay things they have collected over the years like so much belly button lint. What are they gonna do, give everyone a free copy of every app they own? try to force them all to go buy it all over again? yeah they tried that shit with the lousy backwards compatibility of Vista and I spent a year and a half wiping the damned thing off computers for XP.
TL:DR? Appstores are a niche market for a niche product, that is all. Sure they make good money but that is ONLY because they are a NEW market and once the shiny wears off and those that want one have one the bottom will crash and crash HARD. Don't forget there was a time not too long ago when much of the same things being said about the iShiny was said about the Palm Pilot, like how it would replace everything and rule the world. Where is it now?
Dude, you sound like a nice guy but you DO know that Linux has security holes like everyone else, yes? i could post a half a dozen links from Securina if you'd like, or even articles from here. Its not like I have users running update in the hope that there will be some new shiny, its because its stupid to run unpatched software because we ALL know that the script kiddies and malware guy use those patches to reverse engineer and make new malware!
I'm not asking for the moon here Kev, not asking for shiny bling bling or running Linux on a toaster. i just want to hand a box to some and know it WILL be patched AND stay running for the life of that machine. I mean I have XP boxes going on 12 years in the field and the community harps on about how inferior it is right? Well prove it and make a better product!
Frankly you know what? Don't give a shit, DO NOT GIVE A SHIT, you know why? Because we are supposed to be BETTER than the shills and the fanbois and astroturfers, we are SMARTER and have higher IQs and are therefor BETTER than them. you wanna kill a shill dead? drive a stake right into his still beating heart? Then DESTROY what he is shilling for with a well thought out counter argument!
Honestly this is why the Linux fanbois fucking HATE me, so badly in fact i had one follow me around for a month everywhere i posted just so he could post as AC "Die you fat fucker die" and HOW did i get him so pissed? I fucking CRUSHED his arguments with the truth, backed up by a solid list of citations! if you think they are blowing smoke then WALK THE WALK and tear him a new one with a solid argument and citations!
But this mindless endless bleating "shill astroturfer troll" is like "nigger faggot jew" and frankly a waste of everyone's time, i don't give a shit if it turns out the guys is a fucking drone or not! Because everyone sees that shit and they tune it out just as they do all the Goatse links or nigger posts.
We come here for the COMMENTS folks, this USED to be a place where the big brains would tear each other apart and even if you got fucking demolished by a guy that knew 50 times more than you thought you did you know what? you fucking LEARNED!!! I've been witness and part of arguments on file systems and CPU arches here that frankly taught me more than any class ever could, because by arguing their positions everyone brought their A games and dug out facts upon facts and frankly i'm not ashamed to admit I've been schooled here more than once and have been man enough to admit defeat when my position got ripped apart by someone with more knowledge on the subject.
C'mon guys, we're the fucking brains of the outfits aren't we? We the band of battered and abused IT guys and scientists and geeks and nerds and all of us little cogs that keep the train on the tracks? hell look at your post man, if you would have spent HALF the time tearing into that guy's position that you did backing up your shill point he would have left with his tail between his legs and we would have ALL probably learned a thing or two. We CAN do better guys, but this endless flamewar bullshit and screams of "shill astroturfer troll" make this feel more like a damned fansite instead of a place where the smart guys hang.
Personally i'm damned sick and tired of seeing everyone that doesn't go along with the herd and drink the koolaid like a good little drone being labeled a shill. Name a SINGLE thing that guy posted that wasn't true. if MSFT pulls out of search will there be anyone left to compete? nope as yahoo closed their search division nearly two years ago and are concentrating on their web portal and email which i can't say as i blame them as that is their two biggest products by far.
Lets look at his other statements shall we? does MSFT think long term? Well you can easily know to the DAY how long their products are gonna last, they put up handy little EOL roadmaps which makes it easy to plan a business around. For example XP is EOL in Apr 2014 and Windows 7 is 2020, no just killing products willy nilly here like Google.
Now lets look at yours and the others shall we? "The desktop is a has been" likely written from an iPad. Despite the coming of iJesus computers still sell REALLY well and frankly as a retailer I can tell you the ONLY reason PCs have slowed down is simply because they have reached maturity and are long past "good enough" for the masses. There is frankly nothing the average person does in home or office that doesn't run really well on even a 5 year old dual core, so why should they buy when they don't need to? Pads are a niche product, for Apple its a high dollar niche but its still a niche.
And then of course there is you labeling anyone who doesn't think like you a shill. honestly i have more respect for the trolls that call everyone nigger as they have less of a bad attitude than you do and are more honest. With your type of troll all must think like you or they are one of THEM, just insert the company you don't like into the THEM and lather rinse repeat. One week its Apple, the next MSFT, the one after that Oracle, all except whatever company is "your" company like its a God damned ball club.
So if you don't agree with his opinion while don't you actually do something constructive like make a well thought out argument for your position? Oh right that would mean actually having to think and compare instead of mindlessly following with the herd. I hate to say it but i'm gonna have to agree with old Mikey 400+ accounts that "Slashdot = stagnated'.
Now please waste your mod points for my blasphemy of pointing out mindless constant accusations instead of counter arguments is stupid and pointless, especially in a place that is SUPPOSED to be full of smart tech guys, not mindless fanbois.
Personally i'm damned sick of google shoving chrome down everyone's throats thanks to having it spammed in every piece of freeware on the planet. First it was the damned toolbar now its Chrome. seriously WTF Google? you have the biggest fricking search engine on the planet AND the most popular video site AND one of the biggest mobile OSes AND a very popular email client. that isn't enough damned ways to shill chrome for you? you gotta act like God damned Bonzi Buddy too? WTF?
Personally TFA wouldn't surprise me in the least, when they went from just trying to make good products to spamming their toolbars i knew that 'think no evil' was a crock of shit. When a company gets greedy enough they start trying to backdoor shill their products by shoving them down the clueless with tiny checkboxes in the middle of installers? yeah that is pretty sleazy in my book and while maybe not technically 'evil' it sure as hell is scummy in my book.
Ya know, i used to laugh at all the shit, now I'm not so sure. Whatever is coming out of those C130s that fly over sure as fuck ain't like anything they USED to fly and I've been watching them fly over from the local AFB since I was a kid so I'd have noticed, but whatever is in the C130s now leaves a film almost like crop dusting and whatever it is makes people hack like mad the next day.
So frankly who knows. I do know with all the lies they have been caught in from just the last 20 years i wouldn't trust my own government to tell me if its raining outside and that is kinda sad and more than a little scary.
I'll get modded worse but this is something I feel I HAVE to ask: Wasn't Linux supposed to be the "sensible" one? the one where you didn't have code just being chunked because of some new shiny? I mean here you had KDE 3 and GNOME 2, both had been battle tested, were rock solid, were certainly not ugly on the eyes, had tons of features and were getting pretty damned bug free, so what happened? Did MSFT going bling happy force everyone to be blinded by the shiny?
I swear the whole Linux situation reminds me of an old SNL skit about Bizarro world. its like "Quick users am happy and things am stable! This is no good, we must throw everything out and break lots of stuff! Now look, users am unhappy and things broken, all better now" WTF?
I don't know, maybe its all Canonical's fault as they seem to be the ones that really started doing Bizarro shit like 6 month releases and seeming to go out of their way to piss of their users. When I first tried Linux in 2004 I thought that by now me and every other retailer in America would have penguins on boxes and Linux PCs and laptops right beside the Windows and Mac machines. progress was slow but steady, every year things got better, drivers got a little more stable, things got less fiddly, it really looked to be coming along nicely.
Now it just seems more like politics and fanboyism, where every request or critique is treating like pissing on the bible, things seem a hell of a lot more unstable and all that progress seems to have been thrown right out the window into the path of a bus. I have tried damned near every "user friendly" distro I have ever heard of and can't get a single one to pass my "is it safe?" test which simulates my customer having the PC and just keeping it updated for 3 years, not a single one. Drivers break, DEs get swapped out, UIs get flaky, and when i point this out all I get is heaps of insults and accused of being one of THEM whoever the THEM is this week.
I just think its a damned shame, that's what it is. When XP goes EOL there will be literally tens of millions of machines with frankly overpowered hardware that COULD be running Linux and offering low cost computing to the masses and instead me and every other system builder and repair guy will be scrambling for cheap Win 7 Starter and Home CALs simply because nobody will listen to us and give us a simple, easy to use, fiddly free Linux that Suzy the checkout girl can run without picking up "Bash and scripting for dummies". Is that REALLY so much to ask?
Ya know, I want to hate the consoles but I have to say there is a nice side effect to the little bastards and that is how cheap I can offer folks an HTPC nowadays. Back in the olden days of the late 90s you were looking at a $150 GPU about every year to year and a half just to be able to play the games coming down the pipe and now I have several folks that are quite happy with HD4830s that i picked up for less than $50 a piece. And there is still more kick ass PC gaming for cheap than any other machine i know of, where else can you get games at the price of the big Steam Xmas sale while still having graphics that make my customers drool? you want to talk about an easy sale, all i have to do when they ask "But what can it do?" is fire up Just Cause II and set off some demo charges on the smokestacks. watching my guy walk into the sunset as these huge towers come crashing down and its "Sold!".
So I wouldn't bitch TOO much, the consoles keep game PCs quite cheap while still letting us have some pretty impressive visuals, and while its true that the specs on them suck at least there are still games coming out with enhanced graphics for PCs while allowing us that don't have "ePeen" money to still enjoy gaming. I just hope when the next consoles come out it won't take a couple of years for GPUs that match or beat them to become cheap enough for the masses as I REALLY don't want to go back to $150+ a year in GPUs just to game. Hell at the way things are going with any luck i may still get another couple of years out of this soon to be Thuban desktop ;-)
I have to agree, some of the posters we have now aren't even enjoyable crazy like old twitter was but foaming at the mouth "He is different! Burn teh witch!" kind of nutso. i mean look at the post this guy is screaming "shill!" over. he doesn't even mention FB until the third paragraph and then mentions the games he enjoys there which considering the topic is about consoles and the future is right on topic.
While i personally think consoles suck but i love them because they let me game with a $50 HD4850 instead of having to blow $150 every year and a half like I did in the late 90s/early 00s I'd say the guy is entitled to his opinion.
I personally think that the future won't be pads, those things simply don't have a great interface I could see it getting to the point that a gaming PC is just as simple to use as a console, hell they are already close to that now. One of my biggest sellers is HTPCs simply because with wireless X360 controllers they can have all the use of a PC AND all the gaming fun with a frankly dirt cheap GPU so I could see something like that eventually replacing consoles as that is really all a modern console IS anymore, a computer with a dedicated OS and lots of DRM. I'm just shocked (probably afraid of hurting X360 sales) that MSFT hasn't come out with a "gamers edition" that is just a stripped down gaming OS.
But I agree completely that while I may think HTPCs are the way to go and British may think its the Pads we are both entitled to our opinion and the screams of 'You are not drinking teh koolaid you must be a (insert corporation) Ninja!" are getting seriously lame. hell I had one stalk me here for over a month just so he could accuse me of being of all people APK ( which is kinda funny since we fought for ages and I still think a recursive DNS is a better way to go over a HOSTS file) and constantly posted behind me 'Die you fat fucker die!".
I know this'll make me sound old but /. used to be a better place and I can see why Taco left. We used to have some heated arguments sure but they were SMART heated arguments. Where else could you have a 30 post back and forth over pros and cons of file systems or memory management? Now its all fanbois and trolls, hell it feels more like some anime site than a tech site anymore, and that is just a damned shame. Even the trolls are lame now!