You mean like this? Its been there for over 5 years, its just Windows doesn't need it as much as junctions because its a more directory based than file based OS. Again no big whoop, easy to use, its just that most simply have no need to link to only a file when the OS is more based on directories than file location.
Yes but again why hack and make a bastard offspring of GNOME 2 and 3, which obviously is gonna mean more work, when they can just join the GNOME 2 fork guys and have ALL the benefits you just outlined while having some say in the direction?
As it is it seems their direction is being held hostage by the GNOME 3 guys who are bound and determined to go a direction only the most ardent koolaid drinkers seems to want to go. the forums are littered with "I hate this!" and the GNOME 3 guys really don't seem to give a fuck what the users want. One of the advantages as you pointed out is the ability to fork and with so much hate for GNOME shell this seems like a good time to do so, before too much gets mired down in GNOME 3.
The problem with those types of scenarios is that as the Afghans have proven it really doesn't take much to mire down a superpower in a war of attrition, all it takes is will and some very basic chemicals. If they were to try that shit here every militia that has been setting on enough ammo to start WWIII will have more recruits than they can arm, the anarchist cookbook will be required reading, and shit will get nasty QUICK.
More likely what will happen will be another Libya, where the old heads thought their tech had it in the bag and found out the hard way that they didn't. Hell all NATO getting involved did was speed up the inevitable outcome, when it came out that pilots were stealing their planes and commanders stealing their tanks rather than fire on civilians i knew it was over. I've had the pleasure of knowing many a military man and they take their oaths DAMNED seriously and if the POTUS was to order them to fire on their own people? Well it would be welcome to the jungle, we got fun and games. it would be total free for all with just as many turning as would stay. Nobody is gonna put up with camps after Poland, nobody. I guess we can thank old Adolf for that one lesson in power.
Not to mention nobody has enough sense it seems to look at a well rounded approach. yes we need renewables but we ALSO need ways to deal with the carbon (and not carbon credit scams like in TFA) and we need new nuclear designs like thorium for off peak hours, we need all these different techs so we don't put our eggs in one basket.
Instead we get scams like the president's "green initiative" where SIXTEEN out of twenty billion went to major Obama donors. For an example the one that Al Gore and the youngest Kennedy is hooked up with have NEVER shown a profit and had a whole 13 million in operating revenue last year (and 16 million in costs for a loss of 3 million) and they were given 1.6 BILLION in practically free loans!
If we were actually investing, as in picking those companies that had the most promise and placing money with them, like R&D? i'd be all for it. Instead the whole "green" thing is turning into another pork barrel backroom payoff for friends of the POTUS. Now watch as those on the left mod me down even though I'd call bullshit if it was a rep pulling this shit. Bullshit is bullshit folks, whether it is done by a D or an R.
I just don't get why they don't pick something like Enlightenment where they could have some actual say in the direction of the FDE and make a clean break. Its pretty clear that the GNOME guys are in a serious "itch scratching" mode and really don't give a crap what the people actually using the software think, so why not simply make a clean break and be "their own man" so to speak?
I know they are working on switching to Debian so they aren't tied to whatever crazy idea Canonical comes up with this week, so trying to hack GNOME to be what they want it to be when the developers are going in a different direction seems kinda nutty to me. If they are gonna do that why not just support the GNOME 2 fork guys, again where they can have some say?
You mean like Windows, that has supported Symlinks since Win2K? They use a different name for them of course, they call them junction points, but they are there nonetheless. I use them all the time as I have the D: drive set up to hold the users docs so that if they ever bone the OS I can just do a quick wipe without giving a crap to their data, as nearly all programs just dump everything into my docs nowadays.
And I really don't see why so many in the "other OS" community have such a raging hard on for Windows hate, the Windows 7 works quite good. Its solid, has plenty of useful features for pros as well as noobs, has DEP, ASLR, and file and registry virtualization, pretty much every program on the planet (including FOSS) has a Windows port, it all "just works". Hell it even comes with disc imaging and the native ability to burn ISOs and do video conversion. I think its quite nice and it certainly less of a bug bear to set up and keep running than any modern Linux distro I've tried..
Oh please! Its at the very bottom of the page in little writing after naming what the specs are! Hell who even reads that shit? Since the consoles started making even 5 year old systems gamer PCs by holding the whole thing back i haven't even looked at the specs anymore because I know my $600 3 year old Deneb quad is like a God compared to the consoles. Hell my oldest got picked for the new Star wars beta and is running it on a fricking Pentium D and an HD4650 and damned if it ain't even skippy!
Now you show me where ANY of that shit is listed on the giant Steam sale lists. Before i could just spin the list and throw anything that sounded cool straight in the cart, no hassle or thought required, now you are telling me i have to go to every single game I want to throw in the cart, go to the very bottom of the page, and look for some little words past the system reqs? When hitting the back button throw the list often back to the first page? What a crock of shit!
Let me guess, Linux user? Because frankly if you are on Windows you are wasting your breath as the MPAA has already placed securepath in the OS, same thing with Macs.
And if you ARE on Linux? Well frankly nobody really cares about what you think, no offense. the graphics drivers are such a mess and so far behind nobody is gonna seriously look at your OS when it comes to gaming anyway. Sure with enough hoop jumping and Wine you can get some 5 year old game or MMO to run kinda sorta, but your sure as hell ain't running anything even slightly new. Oh and the hilarious part is nearly every Linux forum is filled with "Just use the PS3 for gaming!" which of course is just trading DRM on the PC for DRM on the console, hell the latest gen consoles are nothing BUT DRM.
TL:DR? Like it or not DRM is here to stay and if you truly try to live DRM free you might as well just unplug that PC and go get yourself a cabin in the woods. The rest of us will enjoy our completely hassle free gaming thanks to steam.
Not to mention their military became even worse of a clusterfuck than ours. there was a time when they had no less than FOUR main battle tanks ALL under production, nobody would cancel them even though they only needed one because 'he is a friend of the party" bullshit. So instead of a nice streamlined assembly line you had the T55, T62, T72 and the upgraded T72 (T80?) all being cranked out.
I'd say the bigger problem we are gonna have to face is we are rapidly approaching a time when the vast majority simply won't be able to trade their labor for capital simply because they are not needed. What do you do with the workers when the factories are all automated, the trees and fields are picked by robots, hell even the highways will be made by machine. What happens then? Most can't be educated up to a level high enough to be an engineer and frankly we don't need that many engineers anyway.
I think after several ugly years with more than a few civil wars we will come to the realization that capitalism as a system will have simply run its course. We'll end up with some sort of resource based economy where all get an equal share of the resources. Either that or we end up with a "make work" economy where you have masses of people doing jobs that are as pointless as the work you outlined above but are kept doing it just so you don't have tea party types screaming out "lazy bums".
Because look at how we are now in the USA. Several of the factories in my area that used to employ thousands are now run by a handful of guys, the machines do all the work. the machines don't get tired or sick, don't get workman's comp or need FICA, they work on holidays and don't care about hours. lets face it the machines are simply better workers. So you really have to do something with all those people that aren't needed and unless you think you can put them in camps or take away their reproductive rights there will simply be more of them in the coming decades. look at how it is now with those with years and degrees having to fight with 300 guys for a single opening, this system simply isn't sustainable in the face of technology.
Not to mention Steam gives the publisher a HELL of a lot of eyeballs to plug their game to. i know that thanks to Steam sales, which Steam nicely pops up in a little box to tell me about, i have bought more games in 6 months than I had in the 4 years before I started using Steam. didn't they say L4D had something like a 1740% increase in profits thanks to one of their crazy Steam sales? That is a LOT of money to leave on the table because Mr Publisher wants to be a douchenozzle.
Personally I can't really see myself shopping with anyone other than Steam and GOG anymore. once in a blue moon i'll pick one up at Amazon, just to round out the purchase for supersaver usually, but being able to just push a button and have the game is just too damned easy. Now that my boys are using steam too I won't even have to deal with any crazy Xmas running around as we'll just wait until the big Xmas sale and I'll just gift them the games they like.
So I agree the network effect means I just won't deal with crap like Origin. with Steam my friends are there, my family is there, its easy to chat and join a game, why would I want a bunch of different services? The only reason i still shop at GOG is that there is no stupid service and i get a DRM free.exe instead of dealing with the crap. They can keep origin, impulse, D2D, I'm just not interested. if it isn't on Steam? its not like there aren't a bazillion other game publishers with cool games I can spend my money on.
Sure you can, you just stick in the Win 7 DVD and set the partition size to less than 2.2Tb. why would you want a 3Tb C: drive anyway? What the hell are you installing that you need THAT kind of space for the OS? I personally put 300Gb for Windows 7, 90Gb for WinXP, 2Tb for my data drive and 540 for my video and audio editing drive.
As for TFA you know its bad when Tigerdirect is using SSDs on its $200 barebone kits now. I'm glad i got my drives when they were cheap, along with having a few 200Gb and 320gb for spares in case one of my family's drives goes tits up. This close to Xmas all my new builds are done and sold, now it'll be netbooks and refurbs so little Johnny can have a PC in his room so with any luck I should be good until spring. let us hope they learned from this stupidity and don't put all their eggs in one basket, yes?
Hopefully Google and all the other big drive customers like HP and Dell will put pressure on them to not clump up again like that. I know if I was Google I'd be seriously pushing for a second source that didn't use the same factories, like the way old big blue always insisted on having a second source for all their parts.
I don't see how they could NOT consider GFWL DRM when I had to jump through the hoops and make an account AND paste my "CD" key (first time I've EVER needed a key with a game i bought off Steam) just so i could play the MP!
And the problem with the way they tell you about starscrew and the rest is AFAIK you will ONLY see it if you actually go to the game page NOT if you just add it to the cart during one of their sales. before I'd just go down the list and throw anything that sounded nice in the cart, now i have to check every damned game for SecuCRAP and GFWL. This is of course making me buy less games because I'm not sitting there all day dealing with the BS.
So I still say there needs to be a page in your user setting that lets you check what DRM ou are willing to put up with and then simply not show you games that use what you refuse to have. That way i could go back to just throwing it in the cart because I know I'd only have Steam games checked. Just one more way game publishers keep me from handing them my money.
I'm just amazed that for the first time in my entire life I'm on the RIGHT side of a price shift! I've always been the unlucky bastard that bought the $200 drive that ended up $80 two weeks later. the bitch is if Samsung hadn't have sold their HDD business i'd probably be screwed right along with everybody else, but when i heard they were gonna be gone and saw 1Tb EcoDrives for $35 and 2Tb for $65 I went ahead and bought me 6Tb worth of drives just so my desktops would all be Samsung. I just looked online the other day and a refurb 1Tb Samsung was going for over $100 so all I have to say is....yay me! For once i didn't get shafted on the price, woo hoo!
Never thought I'd be able to sell those 200Gb drives I had sitting in the shop but when folks saw how quick the price was jumping poof! They were gone. As soon as I run out of these 80Gb drives it'll probably be SSDs until the hard drive mess is over. if the customer wants a big drive I hope they have a big wallet! Funny though that in some places like geeks you can still get external drives at an okay price....whoops! Spoke too soon, now the 1Tb refurbs are over a $100. Man TFA is right you can almost watch the price jumps just by refreshing your browser. Can't believe the 500Gb are going for $80 a pop, wow....yay me! i gots tons of space!
Actually 65w is the rating, the TDP is 41 watts for a quad. So you are only using 11w more than your $200 chip and for the same price you are paying just for the chip i could have a complete server as long as I use a smallish SSD instead of the crazy priced HDDs.
So if its anything its you sir that are comparing Apple & Oranges. you are comparing $200 chips to a $55 chip that can build you a whole system for less than the cost of just the chip and motherboard for your solution. Most of my customers would be happy to pay that extra 11w in return for having 4 machines for less than the price of two of yours.
Why is it garbage? Because it works? Because it lets you do what you want? of because it isn't "free as in freedom"? because frankly i haven't seen a damned thing wrong with either avi OR mp4, they play anywhere and "just work" which is more than I can say for MKV which is rarely hardware accelerated and frankly uses around 30-40% more resources, at least in my own tests.
So unless you can name another container that works with nearly every accelerator out there, doesn't put in a ton of overhead, isn't badly designed (ala Vorbis) and "just works" on everything I'm afraid we'll have to disagree. Frankly I don't care what runs good on your core i series, what matters to me is what runs great on netbooks, set top players, hell even those little $50 portable DVD players usually have support for DivX in an avi container. it "just works" which is why its still around.
While I agree to a point one thing I think they DO have a responsibility to do is either warn customers if there is extra DRM bullshit or offer them their money back if they don't want it because of the DRM. I bought Bioshock II on Steam during the last sale because i thought "Yay I can just use Steam, no GFWL!" well guess what? the damned thing makes you run Steam AND GFWL...&^%&^%*&^%*&%! it was only after I purchased I saw a teeny tiny thing in the corner mentioning GFWL.
If I'm buying from Steam there ought to be a way for me to say "I will ONLY accept Steam, period" no GWFL, No SecuROM or Safedisc or Starfuck, just Steam. If Valve would make it clear by either having a box you can check or even better have the store sectioned into "Games with extra DRM" and "Steam games" then they could bring subtle but very real pressure on the publishers not to fuck Steam when their sales go down the shitter.
Because if Gabe doesn't watch it those other publishers have such a hard on for DRM they will ruin Steam trying to make it the most DRMtastic service in the world. Then when they've boned Steam so nobody wants to use it (because the whole point of Steam was ONE service, no extra bullshit, no muss, no fuss) they'll just move over to D2D or Origin and keep right on with their shitty game screwing ways.
Gabe if you or your guys ever come here? I love your service but I should NEVER have to play "Guess what DRM this has" when I'm on Steam. I shouldn't have to deal with anything BUT Steam. that is why I use your service and give you my money. I know you want Steam to be "the" gamestore of the planet but you have to walk a fine line or you'll kill the golden goose. After all if I'm gonna have to deal with a bunch of extra bullshit I'll just buy from Amazon and GOG.
Or you could just go to TPB and download MKVs and be done with it. Its this endless bullshit that makes the MPAA companies an epic fail. All I want is an avi file, that's all. My dad has a little Nbox player that doesn't play copy protected bullshit so its of no use to me, also my netbook gets great battery life for playing avi files but i bet if i start playing DRM it'll go to shit.
So why the fuck won't they sell me an avi file? Are they somehow gonna magically make all those HD rips disappear off of TPB? Nope, they are just fucking folks like me that WANT to hand them the money but whome they won't give any content without making us do a little dance. it reminds me of that old Python bit in Time Bandits where Robin Hood would have one of his men punch a poor person before they would hand them anything "just to make them feel they earned it".
Well fuck you MPAA, if you won't accept my money for product thanks to piracy I can get the same product for free. you haven't stopped a damned thing, just pissed off people like me that would have happily handed you the money for a useful product.
Dude look at the fucking GUI of Windows 8...LOOK AT IT!!! I've haven't seen that big a clusterfuck of a GUI since Hot Dog stand, although Unity does try to keep up, even it isn't as big an epic fail as Win 8. As one of my customers put it so succinctly "That's just stupid! Why would I want a cell phone on my computer?"
DUDE ITS A CELL PHONE GUI!!! And the developers I've been reading all see EXACTLY what it is, its a way to try to force MSFT to get them to write for WinPhone, by saying "Hey its Windows, that'll mean you'll have all those millions of Windows customers!" which is of course total horseshit because the Windows ARM version (which I'm predicting MASSIVE RETURNS on, when folks get all these "Windows tablets" home and find out they don't actually run windows programs, WTF?) won't have the underlying Win32 so basically all you'll have that'll be "cross platform" are cheap appstore style crapola!
How sad that not only is the once mighty company being flushed down the shitter because Ballmer gets a stiffy every time he sees an Apple logo, but the Windows 7 GUI was about as close to perfect that I had ever seen a Windows desktop/laptop interface be. it had features that made it fast for power users while still being noob friendly. But they are gonna throw that all away because Ballmer can't get a hard on without thinking about the iPad. And I hate to break the news to him but if it doesn't run Windows programs his precious WinTablet is a giant DO NOT WANT because if it can't run Windows programs you are beter off running an iPad and having the better catalog or Android and having a cheaper device! hell it doesn't even have user familiarity to sell it because ITS A CELL PHONE GUI for God's sake!
I'd just add that as a repairman and retailer i've seen first hand how the horrible DRM that Ubisoft puts in its games can break the system which puts them in the "Not a fucking chance" column myself. of course the pirate game has NO DRM which means it won't screw your system, yet another case of the pirates offering a BETTER product, not because of price, but because the DRM screws legit customers.
You see one of the nasty things they don't tell you is NONE of the DRM schemas support each others tech, so if you have Starforce+SecuROM, or SecuROM+Safedisc? Conflict city here you come. Add to that that only recently has the DRM that Ubisoft and other use added support for X64 (and IMHO shoddily at that) and the fact their previous DRM doesn't go "Oh wait, this is a 64bit OS, I probably shouldn't try placing kernel hooks" and will instead happily try to jam 32bit kernel hooks into a 64bit kernel.....I'm sure you can see where the nasty is gonna come from. Oh and the uninstaller DOES NOT WORK ON X64! so the only way to remove it is to dual boot into another version of Windows and remove the crap, well its not fun. Oh and if you end up with Safedisc+SecuROM you can end up with a nasty conflict where both fight over the DVD drive and throw it into PIO mode, thus burning up the drive if you don't catch it.
So to quote Mr Garrison "You go to hell Ubisoft, you go to hell and you die!" because I will NEVER buy a single one of your products as long as you screw us over, nor will I pirate them. I ONLY pirate games where I have bought the game but don't wish to expose my system to the DRM, like Bioshock II and that POS GFWL, but that would mean giving you a dollar which I'll be damned first. i don't mind DRM that is up front, is fair and is easy to remove like Steam, but your limited installs and going out of your way to pick the nastiest DRM means I wouldn't take you entire catalog if a $1000 hooker brought it on a silver platter. I can live without ever playing Assassins Creed, it isn't like there aren't a bazillion other games I could buy instead.
AMD desktops all support ECC and have for ages. When you figure in the cost of the board and Intel's price for the chip one could easily get get one of the low power Phenom variations and still have money in your pocket. One of the places i like to get chips from (great bunch to shop with BTW) has the AMD Phenom X4 9150e which is a 65w quad at 1.8GHz for $55. Slap it in a nice cheap business class board, I prefer the ECS business class myself, and you have a nice cheap server that will be quiet as a churchmouse while being cheaper and more powerful than the Intel Pentium dual.
Been then, done that, completely worthless. My state is pretty much owned by a handful of megacorps, they decide who runs and who don't. Every year in every primary you see the same old money names, over and over AND over. They just take turns so that if the voters get in a "throw the bums out" mood you get the corporate stooge from the other side. When you have more than 80% of the people in an area employed in one way or another with one of the handful of megacorps? Makes it quite easy to control the population.
On the state level we have 6 families that pretty much run the show, they are the local equivalent of the Kennedy clan. Some of them are sixth generation politicians, the youngest I think is third generation. they control the dem and rep nomination process so they are ALWAYS the ones chosen on the ballot. our current RINO was the ONLY choice for the reps since I believe 1996, nobody else bothered to even run in the primary. On the dem side you'd have the same two or three families, so you could pick from "career politician family crony bullshit" A or B. When you have a handful of families that have more money than God anybody that tried running against them would be a fool. Two of the families are major media owners and old money don't cotton to no outsiders round here.
Must be nice to have the illusion of choice, but around here that just isn't the case. vote D, vote R, vote primary, vote general, you're just gonna get the same good old boys that pull the same shit.
Oh and on the police side they are all corrupt thanks to the massive money flowing in from the meth highway. Its so bad that I knew a guy that flew on the USAF drug interdiction flights and they'd make jokes like "Why does the sheriff in that county make so many meth busts? Because he don't like the competition!" rimshot. hell more than three fourths of the pine forests in the area are owned by cops. in case you don't know they like pines because the heat throws off the scanner so it makes it easier to hide pot and methlabs. Hell the only way we got rid of our coroner was when he got so blatant in taking bribes from the cops he put down a guy that was shot, stabbed, beaten AND thrown off a bridge was a "suicide'. Everyone laughed about how that was one determined suicidal individual right there!
Actually I'm shocked nobody has tried cooking up a low cost low power server based on brazos. With OpenCL you could harness the built in Radeon GPU and at 18w for a dual core 1.6GHz part its a power sipper. You could slap 4 of them into a blade and only be using 72 watts for an 8 core with 4 Radeon GPUs you could run GP/GPU code on. Now that even Nvidia is supporting OpenCL it seems like that would be a better deal over the Pentium in TFA.
Everyone makes jokes but they seem to miss the big picture. I can tell you from my position running my little shop that the VAST majority of the common folk that walk through my door have Yahoo.com set as their home page. Sure we geeks think its a cluttered mess, but they love it. Also Yahoo Mail last I checked had the highest numbers of in use accounts of ANY other Webmail including Gmail.
That is a HELL of a lot of eyeballs one can ads for and advertise your other products to. If the sweaty monkey can get it at a decent price instead of the scary billions he originally offered that Yang was frankly insane not to take? Well then it might actually be a win for the monkey.
Of course if it is like everything else that dumbass touches he will completely cock the whole thing up, either ruin it with some horrible "Windows Live 2.0 Web Cloud Powered By Bing" kinda bullshit, or he'll let his Apple fetish go nuts and it'll be some bad iTunes style skinning. Ballmer seems bound and determined to fuck the company right into the ground and I'm sure he'll figure out a way to bone this. if I didn't know better I'd think Google had sent him as a mole to destroy the company, but sadly he is just "Apple Pepsi CEO" levels of stupid. See his desperate trying to push a cell phone GUI onto Windows in the vain hope he can get developers to make apps for a Windows tablet nobody actually wants for an example.
BTW if anybody hasn't tried the Win 8 developer preview its out now for free and you really should give it a go. its got epic fail written on it so deep you're amazed it doesn't make your PC release a rancid shit smell when you run it.
If you don't want to use Emaule (my preferred choice) or BT you can find a copy of TinyXP on Mediafire or Rapidshare. The one you want is "TinyXP Rev 09" as that is SP3 and has the latest patches. If you have access to Emule they have a version called "Windows.Ultra.DVD.eXPerience" and that gives you 2K, XP, and 2K3 in 4 flavors, original, full, tiny, and micro and all four flavors you can choose to have driverpacks incorporated or not.. Micro runs damned good on as little as 48Mb of RAM but its pretty stripped down, tiny runs XP at around 63Mb and is closer to the "sweet spot" IMHO, and full has a ton of software preinstalled. For older machines and VMs Tiny and Micro frankly can't be beat, hellish for gamer rigs as well.
As far as QTWeb goes they have a small but pretty dedicated community so if you hit their forums somebody will either have a tutorial or can tell you where to tweak to get it the way you want. i keep QTWeb on my flash drive, makes a hell of a pocket browser, nice to know she fires even on old Win9x. sorry to hear about MPC, as that and VLC are my two go to media players. but that is why i said you'd have to spook up the old version, V245 is the last one that really runs on Win9X without serious hangs.
As for Linux its their lousy updates and killing support for older hardware like you ran into that gets it for me. I have a little test called "Is it safe?" where I take a distro from 3 years ago and update it to current, that simulates less than HALF what you get with a MSFT OS. I have yet to have a single one pass that test without serious breakage. my customers aren't gonna learn bash programming or read man pages and I sure as hell ain't giving out free lifetime support so Linux is right out for me.
For gaming I have a Deneb quad with an HD4850 and 8Gb of RAM so I don't really play much DOS games anymore (except what I buy from GOG) so what I mainly got those for was for older refurbs to give them a few games that run nice. i usually give them a nice mix of shooters, platforms, puzzle, the usual stuff, along with several of the games on the portable apps page. When I get a load of sub 2GHz boxes (I'm buddies with the super who is also the super at several office buildings so i get plenty during the upgrade cycle) and after using any good boards to build boxes for sale i take the rest and give them to poor folks like the battered women I mentioned. having a nice mix of games gives their kids something nice which when they are dirt poor its the little things. I usually give them a SNES or Genesis emulator with a ton of games as well, those run great on just about anything.
Anyway i hope you have a happy turkey day and enjoy QTWeb. for me as for as word processors go I still hang onto my old Office 2K I've had forever. Runs great even on win 7 X64, lightweight and with the converter pack even reads the new formats like DOCX. Now I'm gonna go into a nice turkey coma or try to stay awake long enough to hit the strawberry pie, I haven't made up my mind. peace.
But the big difference between then and now is you were MUCH more likely to be doing a much more manual labor intensive job than you are today. my great grandma ate everything cooked in lard and butter and made sweet tea that was so sweet it would choke you and was healthy as a hog right up to the last 2 years of her life and passed away at age 99. But she got up at 4AM and after a big country breakfast was out tending the fields until lunch and then back out in the fields until supper. I used to think "Bah I lug big heavy servers down 2 flights of stairs, how hard can it be?"...yeah. Working field hand with nothing but hand tools is some seriously back breaking works folks, no damned wonder they could eat anything they want. of course she never ate processed food product either, they slaughtered their own hogs and traded some of the meat to those that slaughtered their own cows.
as for TFA? That is why we need Thorium reactors AND wind AND solar and a half a dozen other technologies for generating power. Everything i've read on the new Thorium designs they can reprocess until you end up with waste that is no hotter than a DU round and more importantly it can provide power 24/7 rain or shine. while the ultimate goal should be a 100% renewable energy source we just haven't gotten there yet and rising power costs kills the economy. like it or not progress requires power and we will need ever more electricity if we are to move away from fossil fuels and start using electric cars and telecommuting.
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You mean like this? Its been there for over 5 years, its just Windows doesn't need it as much as junctions because its a more directory based than file based OS. Again no big whoop, easy to use, its just that most simply have no need to link to only a file when the OS is more based on directories than file location.
Yes but again why hack and make a bastard offspring of GNOME 2 and 3, which obviously is gonna mean more work, when they can just join the GNOME 2 fork guys and have ALL the benefits you just outlined while having some say in the direction?
As it is it seems their direction is being held hostage by the GNOME 3 guys who are bound and determined to go a direction only the most ardent koolaid drinkers seems to want to go. the forums are littered with "I hate this!" and the GNOME 3 guys really don't seem to give a fuck what the users want. One of the advantages as you pointed out is the ability to fork and with so much hate for GNOME shell this seems like a good time to do so, before too much gets mired down in GNOME 3.
The problem with those types of scenarios is that as the Afghans have proven it really doesn't take much to mire down a superpower in a war of attrition, all it takes is will and some very basic chemicals. If they were to try that shit here every militia that has been setting on enough ammo to start WWIII will have more recruits than they can arm, the anarchist cookbook will be required reading, and shit will get nasty QUICK.
More likely what will happen will be another Libya, where the old heads thought their tech had it in the bag and found out the hard way that they didn't. Hell all NATO getting involved did was speed up the inevitable outcome, when it came out that pilots were stealing their planes and commanders stealing their tanks rather than fire on civilians i knew it was over. I've had the pleasure of knowing many a military man and they take their oaths DAMNED seriously and if the POTUS was to order them to fire on their own people? Well it would be welcome to the jungle, we got fun and games. it would be total free for all with just as many turning as would stay. Nobody is gonna put up with camps after Poland, nobody. I guess we can thank old Adolf for that one lesson in power.
Not to mention nobody has enough sense it seems to look at a well rounded approach. yes we need renewables but we ALSO need ways to deal with the carbon (and not carbon credit scams like in TFA) and we need new nuclear designs like thorium for off peak hours, we need all these different techs so we don't put our eggs in one basket.
Instead we get scams like the president's "green initiative" where SIXTEEN out of twenty billion went to major Obama donors. For an example the one that Al Gore and the youngest Kennedy is hooked up with have NEVER shown a profit and had a whole 13 million in operating revenue last year (and 16 million in costs for a loss of 3 million) and they were given 1.6 BILLION in practically free loans!
If we were actually investing, as in picking those companies that had the most promise and placing money with them, like R&D? i'd be all for it. Instead the whole "green" thing is turning into another pork barrel backroom payoff for friends of the POTUS. Now watch as those on the left mod me down even though I'd call bullshit if it was a rep pulling this shit. Bullshit is bullshit folks, whether it is done by a D or an R.
I just don't get why they don't pick something like Enlightenment where they could have some actual say in the direction of the FDE and make a clean break. Its pretty clear that the GNOME guys are in a serious "itch scratching" mode and really don't give a crap what the people actually using the software think, so why not simply make a clean break and be "their own man" so to speak?
I know they are working on switching to Debian so they aren't tied to whatever crazy idea Canonical comes up with this week, so trying to hack GNOME to be what they want it to be when the developers are going in a different direction seems kinda nutty to me. If they are gonna do that why not just support the GNOME 2 fork guys, again where they can have some say?
You mean like Windows, that has supported Symlinks since Win2K? They use a different name for them of course, they call them junction points, but they are there nonetheless. I use them all the time as I have the D: drive set up to hold the users docs so that if they ever bone the OS I can just do a quick wipe without giving a crap to their data, as nearly all programs just dump everything into my docs nowadays.
And I really don't see why so many in the "other OS" community have such a raging hard on for Windows hate, the Windows 7 works quite good. Its solid, has plenty of useful features for pros as well as noobs, has DEP, ASLR, and file and registry virtualization, pretty much every program on the planet (including FOSS) has a Windows port, it all "just works". Hell it even comes with disc imaging and the native ability to burn ISOs and do video conversion. I think its quite nice and it certainly less of a bug bear to set up and keep running than any modern Linux distro I've tried..
Oh please! Its at the very bottom of the page in little writing after naming what the specs are! Hell who even reads that shit? Since the consoles started making even 5 year old systems gamer PCs by holding the whole thing back i haven't even looked at the specs anymore because I know my $600 3 year old Deneb quad is like a God compared to the consoles. Hell my oldest got picked for the new Star wars beta and is running it on a fricking Pentium D and an HD4650 and damned if it ain't even skippy!
Now you show me where ANY of that shit is listed on the giant Steam sale lists. Before i could just spin the list and throw anything that sounded cool straight in the cart, no hassle or thought required, now you are telling me i have to go to every single game I want to throw in the cart, go to the very bottom of the page, and look for some little words past the system reqs? When hitting the back button throw the list often back to the first page? What a crock of shit!
Let me guess, Linux user? Because frankly if you are on Windows you are wasting your breath as the MPAA has already placed securepath in the OS, same thing with Macs.
And if you ARE on Linux? Well frankly nobody really cares about what you think, no offense. the graphics drivers are such a mess and so far behind nobody is gonna seriously look at your OS when it comes to gaming anyway. Sure with enough hoop jumping and Wine you can get some 5 year old game or MMO to run kinda sorta, but your sure as hell ain't running anything even slightly new. Oh and the hilarious part is nearly every Linux forum is filled with "Just use the PS3 for gaming!" which of course is just trading DRM on the PC for DRM on the console, hell the latest gen consoles are nothing BUT DRM.
TL:DR? Like it or not DRM is here to stay and if you truly try to live DRM free you might as well just unplug that PC and go get yourself a cabin in the woods. The rest of us will enjoy our completely hassle free gaming thanks to steam.
Not to mention their military became even worse of a clusterfuck than ours. there was a time when they had no less than FOUR main battle tanks ALL under production, nobody would cancel them even though they only needed one because 'he is a friend of the party" bullshit. So instead of a nice streamlined assembly line you had the T55, T62, T72 and the upgraded T72 (T80?) all being cranked out.
I'd say the bigger problem we are gonna have to face is we are rapidly approaching a time when the vast majority simply won't be able to trade their labor for capital simply because they are not needed. What do you do with the workers when the factories are all automated, the trees and fields are picked by robots, hell even the highways will be made by machine. What happens then? Most can't be educated up to a level high enough to be an engineer and frankly we don't need that many engineers anyway.
I think after several ugly years with more than a few civil wars we will come to the realization that capitalism as a system will have simply run its course. We'll end up with some sort of resource based economy where all get an equal share of the resources. Either that or we end up with a "make work" economy where you have masses of people doing jobs that are as pointless as the work you outlined above but are kept doing it just so you don't have tea party types screaming out "lazy bums".
Because look at how we are now in the USA. Several of the factories in my area that used to employ thousands are now run by a handful of guys, the machines do all the work. the machines don't get tired or sick, don't get workman's comp or need FICA, they work on holidays and don't care about hours. lets face it the machines are simply better workers. So you really have to do something with all those people that aren't needed and unless you think you can put them in camps or take away their reproductive rights there will simply be more of them in the coming decades. look at how it is now with those with years and degrees having to fight with 300 guys for a single opening, this system simply isn't sustainable in the face of technology.
Not to mention Steam gives the publisher a HELL of a lot of eyeballs to plug their game to. i know that thanks to Steam sales, which Steam nicely pops up in a little box to tell me about, i have bought more games in 6 months than I had in the 4 years before I started using Steam. didn't they say L4D had something like a 1740% increase in profits thanks to one of their crazy Steam sales? That is a LOT of money to leave on the table because Mr Publisher wants to be a douchenozzle.
Personally I can't really see myself shopping with anyone other than Steam and GOG anymore. once in a blue moon i'll pick one up at Amazon, just to round out the purchase for supersaver usually, but being able to just push a button and have the game is just too damned easy. Now that my boys are using steam too I won't even have to deal with any crazy Xmas running around as we'll just wait until the big Xmas sale and I'll just gift them the games they like.
So I agree the network effect means I just won't deal with crap like Origin. with Steam my friends are there, my family is there, its easy to chat and join a game, why would I want a bunch of different services? The only reason i still shop at GOG is that there is no stupid service and i get a DRM free .exe instead of dealing with the crap. They can keep origin, impulse, D2D, I'm just not interested. if it isn't on Steam? its not like there aren't a bazillion other game publishers with cool games I can spend my money on.
Sure you can, you just stick in the Win 7 DVD and set the partition size to less than 2.2Tb. why would you want a 3Tb C: drive anyway? What the hell are you installing that you need THAT kind of space for the OS? I personally put 300Gb for Windows 7, 90Gb for WinXP, 2Tb for my data drive and 540 for my video and audio editing drive.
As for TFA you know its bad when Tigerdirect is using SSDs on its $200 barebone kits now. I'm glad i got my drives when they were cheap, along with having a few 200Gb and 320gb for spares in case one of my family's drives goes tits up. This close to Xmas all my new builds are done and sold, now it'll be netbooks and refurbs so little Johnny can have a PC in his room so with any luck I should be good until spring. let us hope they learned from this stupidity and don't put all their eggs in one basket, yes?
Hopefully Google and all the other big drive customers like HP and Dell will put pressure on them to not clump up again like that. I know if I was Google I'd be seriously pushing for a second source that didn't use the same factories, like the way old big blue always insisted on having a second source for all their parts.
I don't see how they could NOT consider GFWL DRM when I had to jump through the hoops and make an account AND paste my "CD" key (first time I've EVER needed a key with a game i bought off Steam) just so i could play the MP!
And the problem with the way they tell you about starscrew and the rest is AFAIK you will ONLY see it if you actually go to the game page NOT if you just add it to the cart during one of their sales. before I'd just go down the list and throw anything that sounded nice in the cart, now i have to check every damned game for SecuCRAP and GFWL. This is of course making me buy less games because I'm not sitting there all day dealing with the BS.
So I still say there needs to be a page in your user setting that lets you check what DRM ou are willing to put up with and then simply not show you games that use what you refuse to have. That way i could go back to just throwing it in the cart because I know I'd only have Steam games checked. Just one more way game publishers keep me from handing them my money.
I'm just amazed that for the first time in my entire life I'm on the RIGHT side of a price shift! I've always been the unlucky bastard that bought the $200 drive that ended up $80 two weeks later. the bitch is if Samsung hadn't have sold their HDD business i'd probably be screwed right along with everybody else, but when i heard they were gonna be gone and saw 1Tb EcoDrives for $35 and 2Tb for $65 I went ahead and bought me 6Tb worth of drives just so my desktops would all be Samsung. I just looked online the other day and a refurb 1Tb Samsung was going for over $100 so all I have to say is....yay me! For once i didn't get shafted on the price, woo hoo!
Never thought I'd be able to sell those 200Gb drives I had sitting in the shop but when folks saw how quick the price was jumping poof! They were gone. As soon as I run out of these 80Gb drives it'll probably be SSDs until the hard drive mess is over. if the customer wants a big drive I hope they have a big wallet! Funny though that in some places like geeks you can still get external drives at an okay price....whoops! Spoke too soon, now the 1Tb refurbs are over a $100. Man TFA is right you can almost watch the price jumps just by refreshing your browser. Can't believe the 500Gb are going for $80 a pop, wow....yay me! i gots tons of space!
Actually 65w is the rating, the TDP is 41 watts for a quad. So you are only using 11w more than your $200 chip and for the same price you are paying just for the chip i could have a complete server as long as I use a smallish SSD instead of the crazy priced HDDs.
So if its anything its you sir that are comparing Apple & Oranges. you are comparing $200 chips to a $55 chip that can build you a whole system for less than the cost of just the chip and motherboard for your solution. Most of my customers would be happy to pay that extra 11w in return for having 4 machines for less than the price of two of yours.
Why is it garbage? Because it works? Because it lets you do what you want? of because it isn't "free as in freedom"? because frankly i haven't seen a damned thing wrong with either avi OR mp4, they play anywhere and "just work" which is more than I can say for MKV which is rarely hardware accelerated and frankly uses around 30-40% more resources, at least in my own tests.
So unless you can name another container that works with nearly every accelerator out there, doesn't put in a ton of overhead, isn't badly designed (ala Vorbis) and "just works" on everything I'm afraid we'll have to disagree. Frankly I don't care what runs good on your core i series, what matters to me is what runs great on netbooks, set top players, hell even those little $50 portable DVD players usually have support for DivX in an avi container. it "just works" which is why its still around.
While I agree to a point one thing I think they DO have a responsibility to do is either warn customers if there is extra DRM bullshit or offer them their money back if they don't want it because of the DRM. I bought Bioshock II on Steam during the last sale because i thought "Yay I can just use Steam, no GFWL!" well guess what? the damned thing makes you run Steam AND GFWL...&^%&^%*&^%*&%! it was only after I purchased I saw a teeny tiny thing in the corner mentioning GFWL.
If I'm buying from Steam there ought to be a way for me to say "I will ONLY accept Steam, period" no GWFL, No SecuROM or Safedisc or Starfuck, just Steam. If Valve would make it clear by either having a box you can check or even better have the store sectioned into "Games with extra DRM" and "Steam games" then they could bring subtle but very real pressure on the publishers not to fuck Steam when their sales go down the shitter.
Because if Gabe doesn't watch it those other publishers have such a hard on for DRM they will ruin Steam trying to make it the most DRMtastic service in the world. Then when they've boned Steam so nobody wants to use it (because the whole point of Steam was ONE service, no extra bullshit, no muss, no fuss) they'll just move over to D2D or Origin and keep right on with their shitty game screwing ways.
Gabe if you or your guys ever come here? I love your service but I should NEVER have to play "Guess what DRM this has" when I'm on Steam. I shouldn't have to deal with anything BUT Steam. that is why I use your service and give you my money. I know you want Steam to be "the" gamestore of the planet but you have to walk a fine line or you'll kill the golden goose. After all if I'm gonna have to deal with a bunch of extra bullshit I'll just buy from Amazon and GOG.
Or you could just go to TPB and download MKVs and be done with it. Its this endless bullshit that makes the MPAA companies an epic fail. All I want is an avi file, that's all. My dad has a little Nbox player that doesn't play copy protected bullshit so its of no use to me, also my netbook gets great battery life for playing avi files but i bet if i start playing DRM it'll go to shit.
So why the fuck won't they sell me an avi file? Are they somehow gonna magically make all those HD rips disappear off of TPB? Nope, they are just fucking folks like me that WANT to hand them the money but whome they won't give any content without making us do a little dance. it reminds me of that old Python bit in Time Bandits where Robin Hood would have one of his men punch a poor person before they would hand them anything "just to make them feel they earned it".
Well fuck you MPAA, if you won't accept my money for product thanks to piracy I can get the same product for free. you haven't stopped a damned thing, just pissed off people like me that would have happily handed you the money for a useful product.
Dude look at the fucking GUI of Windows 8...LOOK AT IT!!! I've haven't seen that big a clusterfuck of a GUI since Hot Dog stand, although Unity does try to keep up, even it isn't as big an epic fail as Win 8. As one of my customers put it so succinctly "That's just stupid! Why would I want a cell phone on my computer?"
DUDE ITS A CELL PHONE GUI!!! And the developers I've been reading all see EXACTLY what it is, its a way to try to force MSFT to get them to write for WinPhone, by saying "Hey its Windows, that'll mean you'll have all those millions of Windows customers!" which is of course total horseshit because the Windows ARM version (which I'm predicting MASSIVE RETURNS on, when folks get all these "Windows tablets" home and find out they don't actually run windows programs, WTF?) won't have the underlying Win32 so basically all you'll have that'll be "cross platform" are cheap appstore style crapola!
How sad that not only is the once mighty company being flushed down the shitter because Ballmer gets a stiffy every time he sees an Apple logo, but the Windows 7 GUI was about as close to perfect that I had ever seen a Windows desktop/laptop interface be. it had features that made it fast for power users while still being noob friendly. But they are gonna throw that all away because Ballmer can't get a hard on without thinking about the iPad. And I hate to break the news to him but if it doesn't run Windows programs his precious WinTablet is a giant DO NOT WANT because if it can't run Windows programs you are beter off running an iPad and having the better catalog or Android and having a cheaper device! hell it doesn't even have user familiarity to sell it because ITS A CELL PHONE GUI for God's sake!
I'd just add that as a repairman and retailer i've seen first hand how the horrible DRM that Ubisoft puts in its games can break the system which puts them in the "Not a fucking chance" column myself. of course the pirate game has NO DRM which means it won't screw your system, yet another case of the pirates offering a BETTER product, not because of price, but because the DRM screws legit customers.
You see one of the nasty things they don't tell you is NONE of the DRM schemas support each others tech, so if you have Starforce+SecuROM, or SecuROM+Safedisc? Conflict city here you come. Add to that that only recently has the DRM that Ubisoft and other use added support for X64 (and IMHO shoddily at that) and the fact their previous DRM doesn't go "Oh wait, this is a 64bit OS, I probably shouldn't try placing kernel hooks" and will instead happily try to jam 32bit kernel hooks into a 64bit kernel.....I'm sure you can see where the nasty is gonna come from. Oh and the uninstaller DOES NOT WORK ON X64! so the only way to remove it is to dual boot into another version of Windows and remove the crap, well its not fun. Oh and if you end up with Safedisc+SecuROM you can end up with a nasty conflict where both fight over the DVD drive and throw it into PIO mode, thus burning up the drive if you don't catch it.
So to quote Mr Garrison "You go to hell Ubisoft, you go to hell and you die!" because I will NEVER buy a single one of your products as long as you screw us over, nor will I pirate them. I ONLY pirate games where I have bought the game but don't wish to expose my system to the DRM, like Bioshock II and that POS GFWL, but that would mean giving you a dollar which I'll be damned first. i don't mind DRM that is up front, is fair and is easy to remove like Steam, but your limited installs and going out of your way to pick the nastiest DRM means I wouldn't take you entire catalog if a $1000 hooker brought it on a silver platter. I can live without ever playing Assassins Creed, it isn't like there aren't a bazillion other games I could buy instead.
"Intel Desktops don't have ECC" FTFY
AMD desktops all support ECC and have for ages. When you figure in the cost of the board and Intel's price for the chip one could easily get get one of the low power Phenom variations and still have money in your pocket. One of the places i like to get chips from (great bunch to shop with BTW) has the AMD Phenom X4 9150e which is a 65w quad at 1.8GHz for $55. Slap it in a nice cheap business class board, I prefer the ECS business class myself, and you have a nice cheap server that will be quiet as a churchmouse while being cheaper and more powerful than the Intel Pentium dual.
Been then, done that, completely worthless. My state is pretty much owned by a handful of megacorps, they decide who runs and who don't. Every year in every primary you see the same old money names, over and over AND over. They just take turns so that if the voters get in a "throw the bums out" mood you get the corporate stooge from the other side. When you have more than 80% of the people in an area employed in one way or another with one of the handful of megacorps? Makes it quite easy to control the population.
On the state level we have 6 families that pretty much run the show, they are the local equivalent of the Kennedy clan. Some of them are sixth generation politicians, the youngest I think is third generation. they control the dem and rep nomination process so they are ALWAYS the ones chosen on the ballot. our current RINO was the ONLY choice for the reps since I believe 1996, nobody else bothered to even run in the primary. On the dem side you'd have the same two or three families, so you could pick from "career politician family crony bullshit" A or B. When you have a handful of families that have more money than God anybody that tried running against them would be a fool. Two of the families are major media owners and old money don't cotton to no outsiders round here. Must be nice to have the illusion of choice, but around here that just isn't the case. vote D, vote R, vote primary, vote general, you're just gonna get the same good old boys that pull the same shit.
Oh and on the police side they are all corrupt thanks to the massive money flowing in from the meth highway. Its so bad that I knew a guy that flew on the USAF drug interdiction flights and they'd make jokes like "Why does the sheriff in that county make so many meth busts? Because he don't like the competition!" rimshot. hell more than three fourths of the pine forests in the area are owned by cops. in case you don't know they like pines because the heat throws off the scanner so it makes it easier to hide pot and methlabs. Hell the only way we got rid of our coroner was when he got so blatant in taking bribes from the cops he put down a guy that was shot, stabbed, beaten AND thrown off a bridge was a "suicide'. Everyone laughed about how that was one determined suicidal individual right there!
Actually I'm shocked nobody has tried cooking up a low cost low power server based on brazos. With OpenCL you could harness the built in Radeon GPU and at 18w for a dual core 1.6GHz part its a power sipper. You could slap 4 of them into a blade and only be using 72 watts for an 8 core with 4 Radeon GPUs you could run GP/GPU code on. Now that even Nvidia is supporting OpenCL it seems like that would be a better deal over the Pentium in TFA.
Everyone makes jokes but they seem to miss the big picture. I can tell you from my position running my little shop that the VAST majority of the common folk that walk through my door have Yahoo.com set as their home page. Sure we geeks think its a cluttered mess, but they love it. Also Yahoo Mail last I checked had the highest numbers of in use accounts of ANY other Webmail including Gmail.
That is a HELL of a lot of eyeballs one can ads for and advertise your other products to. If the sweaty monkey can get it at a decent price instead of the scary billions he originally offered that Yang was frankly insane not to take? Well then it might actually be a win for the monkey.
Of course if it is like everything else that dumbass touches he will completely cock the whole thing up, either ruin it with some horrible "Windows Live 2.0 Web Cloud Powered By Bing" kinda bullshit, or he'll let his Apple fetish go nuts and it'll be some bad iTunes style skinning. Ballmer seems bound and determined to fuck the company right into the ground and I'm sure he'll figure out a way to bone this. if I didn't know better I'd think Google had sent him as a mole to destroy the company, but sadly he is just "Apple Pepsi CEO" levels of stupid. See his desperate trying to push a cell phone GUI onto Windows in the vain hope he can get developers to make apps for a Windows tablet nobody actually wants for an example.
BTW if anybody hasn't tried the Win 8 developer preview its out now for free and you really should give it a go. its got epic fail written on it so deep you're amazed it doesn't make your PC release a rancid shit smell when you run it.
If you don't want to use Emaule (my preferred choice) or BT you can find a copy of TinyXP on Mediafire or Rapidshare. The one you want is "TinyXP Rev 09" as that is SP3 and has the latest patches. If you have access to Emule they have a version called "Windows.Ultra.DVD.eXPerience" and that gives you 2K, XP, and 2K3 in 4 flavors, original, full, tiny, and micro and all four flavors you can choose to have driverpacks incorporated or not.. Micro runs damned good on as little as 48Mb of RAM but its pretty stripped down, tiny runs XP at around 63Mb and is closer to the "sweet spot" IMHO, and full has a ton of software preinstalled. For older machines and VMs Tiny and Micro frankly can't be beat, hellish for gamer rigs as well.
As far as QTWeb goes they have a small but pretty dedicated community so if you hit their forums somebody will either have a tutorial or can tell you where to tweak to get it the way you want. i keep QTWeb on my flash drive, makes a hell of a pocket browser, nice to know she fires even on old Win9x. sorry to hear about MPC, as that and VLC are my two go to media players. but that is why i said you'd have to spook up the old version, V245 is the last one that really runs on Win9X without serious hangs.
As for Linux its their lousy updates and killing support for older hardware like you ran into that gets it for me. I have a little test called "Is it safe?" where I take a distro from 3 years ago and update it to current, that simulates less than HALF what you get with a MSFT OS. I have yet to have a single one pass that test without serious breakage. my customers aren't gonna learn bash programming or read man pages and I sure as hell ain't giving out free lifetime support so Linux is right out for me.
For gaming I have a Deneb quad with an HD4850 and 8Gb of RAM so I don't really play much DOS games anymore (except what I buy from GOG) so what I mainly got those for was for older refurbs to give them a few games that run nice. i usually give them a nice mix of shooters, platforms, puzzle, the usual stuff, along with several of the games on the portable apps page. When I get a load of sub 2GHz boxes (I'm buddies with the super who is also the super at several office buildings so i get plenty during the upgrade cycle) and after using any good boards to build boxes for sale i take the rest and give them to poor folks like the battered women I mentioned. having a nice mix of games gives their kids something nice which when they are dirt poor its the little things. I usually give them a SNES or Genesis emulator with a ton of games as well, those run great on just about anything.
Anyway i hope you have a happy turkey day and enjoy QTWeb. for me as for as word processors go I still hang onto my old Office 2K I've had forever. Runs great even on win 7 X64, lightweight and with the converter pack even reads the new formats like DOCX. Now I'm gonna go into a nice turkey coma or try to stay awake long enough to hit the strawberry pie, I haven't made up my mind. peace.
But the big difference between then and now is you were MUCH more likely to be doing a much more manual labor intensive job than you are today. my great grandma ate everything cooked in lard and butter and made sweet tea that was so sweet it would choke you and was healthy as a hog right up to the last 2 years of her life and passed away at age 99. But she got up at 4AM and after a big country breakfast was out tending the fields until lunch and then back out in the fields until supper. I used to think "Bah I lug big heavy servers down 2 flights of stairs, how hard can it be?"...yeah. Working field hand with nothing but hand tools is some seriously back breaking works folks, no damned wonder they could eat anything they want. of course she never ate processed food product either, they slaughtered their own hogs and traded some of the meat to those that slaughtered their own cows.
as for TFA? That is why we need Thorium reactors AND wind AND solar and a half a dozen other technologies for generating power. Everything i've read on the new Thorium designs they can reprocess until you end up with waste that is no hotter than a DU round and more importantly it can provide power 24/7 rain or shine. while the ultimate goal should be a 100% renewable energy source we just haven't gotten there yet and rising power costs kills the economy. like it or not progress requires power and we will need ever more electricity if we are to move away from fossil fuels and start using electric cars and telecommuting.