You don't have to worry about that, and you can thank your friends at AMD for it! AMD has announced they are going with Coreboot instead of UEFI which i'm sure many here will know is a completely free and open source BIOS replacement that is getting a lot of funding through AMD. This of course means MSFT won't be able to force Windows 8 to be secure boot only as that would keep every AMD CPU from running Win 8 and probably get them another round of antitrust for their trouble.
Personally it has just made me happier that I switched to become an AMD only shop. One of the things that REALLY pisses me off with OEM PCs is getting in there and finding the BIOS is so crippled and short on features it actually hampers the system, like with a customer I had recently that had to toss a stick of RAM simply because the BIOS had no feature to switch between dual and single mode and the board wouldn't read unmatched sticks. But for those of us that stick with AMD it'll mean if you get an OEM and Coreboot doesn't have what you need so what? You can roll your own and just flash the Coreboot with a different version, kinda like CyanogenMod.
Oh and MSFT really can't lock it down to where you can't switch OSes simply because all those fat software assurance and MSDN contracts wouldn't be worth shit. i know quite a few that have those contracts so they can run older versions for critical programs and if MSFT killed it there would go a LOT of SMBs and business is their bread and butter.
No most likely on first boot you'll get a "Did you know you don't have secureboot? Check yes if you wish to disable and absolve MSFT of any responsibility if you get a boot virus" and we'll all go "yes we know now STFU and get out of my face, stupid Windows" and go on about our daily lives, just as we do now.
Actually it doesn't have a damned thing to do with linux and everything to do with pirates. if you look on any BT site you'll find "Windows 7 all versions pre activated" which passes WGA and has for nearly two years. it does this by running a bootloader that fakes an OEM signature so MSFT would have to kill the keys for the major OEMs thus causing more than a little shitstorm from all those that bought win 7 PCs and suddenly were told they are pirates.
So despite all the bullshit from MSFT that it was about security, and despite all the FOSSies screaming "Its a plot to kill Linux!" in actuality it was just MSFT playing whack a mole with the pirates and yet again losing.
.
The sad part was they HAD the cure for piracy in the west, I saw with my own two eyes as many pirates which had NEVER paid for Windows suddenly were running legit. i'm of course talking about the Win 7 HP $50 upgrade. When they killed that suddenly the local CL was filled with $100 PCs with $300 Windows installs. Just more proof Ballmer is as shitty a CEO as the Pepsi guy was for Apple.
Uhhh the same Ron Paul that said we should "go back to 1901" when it came to disasters while pointing out his home city while forgetting to mention it took them TWENTY FIVE YEARS to get back to where they were and the biggest gains from the disaster were by the uber rich, who could afford to buy out those that had lost everything at fire sale prices?
The answer to that would be YES! Paul has some good ideas when it comes to dealing with foreign lands (like not being the world's police) but frankly his domestic policies like most of the right wing are more than a little batshit. He believes waaaay too much in the almighty invisible hand when we have seen time and time again all the invisible hand does is allow those at the top to consolidate power. See the gilded age or what we have now for examples.
Plus he is missing the point that it is no different than our political system, with two groups at the top that are Coke and Pepsi and take any competition VERY nastily. In my own area neither the cable nor DSL has moved a single inch in a decade and when a friend tried to route around them by getting his boss to shell out for a T-1 and renting connections off the line the duopoly made a few calls and has his connection price raised 400%!
They told him "Just try and sue us" and his lawyer told him flat footed "Oh yeah you'll win no doubt, but it'll cost you about a mil five in fees and a decade out of your life" so they just closed up shop and moved away. those folks are STILL stuck with nothing but cellular or dialup BTW, and guess who is the only ones that offer that in that area? Why one of the duopoly of course!
The only way things are ever gonna change is if the lines are opened up to competition. We even have precedent as we gave them 200 billion to run us nationwide broadband more than a decade ago and all they gave us was a low res Goatse while their CxOs used the cash for big boobed hookers and blow. If they want a monopoly? We'll give them 15 years for any area they run FTTH, we'll give them 25 if that area had never been served. oh and it doesn't count unless EVERY house can receive it, otherwise they'll run it to a single house and count the whole area, like they do on that lame.gov broadband list that shows my mom has SIX different ones to choose from when all she has is a single badly run WISP that is frankly not much better than cellular.
Personally I think with so many out of work it is time to bring back the WPA and have those that are hurting for work run us nationwide fiber that We, The People will own. any carrier can then compete and give us plenty to choose from. Otherwise all we are gonna get thanks to our corporate overlords is the short bus to the information superhighway while even Romania kicks our ass on speed!
See it is THAT, that right there that is pissing me off! If it had been Theora or WebM, even though they currently take more resources I could understand that. it would be about having a "universal codec" that ANY device could run without fear of trolls and THAT is a goal I can understand.
But everyone acts like that is still the case when its not! Both MSFT and Apple have made it clear it SHALL BE H.264 and with everyone falling all over themselves drooling at the profit margins Apple is getting nobody, not this occupy dufus nor anybody on this site, seems to be capable of asking the MOST IMPORTANT of all questions, which is "Why is this being pushed? who will gain from this?"
And i think it is pretty damned clear who will benefit from a locked all to hell DRMed patented up the ass "standard' becoming the only source of video on the web, and that is Apple and MSFT! you look at apple after Steve came back, he didn't give a shit about MSFT, hell he had gates on the stage with him, why? because he knew MSFT had a market they didn't want which was the low rent commodity market. What worried Steve was NOT MSFT but Google and the rise of the web. kinda hard to lock anyone down if everything is in the cloud and uses formats all can use isn't it?
So while I can understand the hatred of flash, really i can, on anything other than windows it has never been great, but lets not replace something that "kinda sorta' works for DRM in a box, okay? We should all tell these numbnuts that we will NOT accept HTML V5 unless it uses a 100% free codec that EVERYONE can use! I know that with so many thinking I'm a "dirty M$ ninja poo poo head" that those words might seem like a shock but I don't want MSFT to be able to force upgrades simply because you want to watch the latest videos any more than I want Apple to control the direction of the web with iShiny!
so PLEASE web developers, tell them you won't have HTML V5 unless it is usable by all! Otherwise the dreams of iMoney is gonna take us back to the bad old days where the web was fractured and you had to have a bazillion codecs just to function! You'll have some on Theora (the FOSSies) you'll have some on WebM (The google fanbois) and you'll have MSFT and Apple pushing H.264. Can your device accelerate all three? will you have to base your battery life based on which sites you see? Is this REALLY progress over flash? I don't think so, and i hope I'm not alone in this.
Re:I propose we Occupy "Occupy"
on
Occupy Flash?
·
· Score: 0
I hate to reply to myself but as usual the iFanbois are modding down anything which doesn't follow the laws written by the great iSteve and handed down on a stone skinned iPad.
Name me ONE THING that HTML V5 does better? And don't give me "free as in freedom!" because H.264 is about as "free" as iOS is. Does it use less CPU? NO. Does it use less bandwidth? NO. does it use less RAM? Or need less powerful hardware to run it? that would be a giant NO.
I can fire up a 1.8Ghz Celeron or a first generation Intel Atom and watch SD video in flash all day long. it will be smooth and pleasant to watch. I tried firing up the latest HTML V5 videos in SD no less, on a 3.2Ghz P4 with HT and all it was was a slideshow. it was jerky, it was slow, it sucked bandwidth like mad.
So I want someone to have the balls to come on here and explain EXACTLY what makes a spec that is worse in every. single. way. compared to what we have now "better". hell Realvideo is "better" when it comes to resources than this crapola!
And is there nobody here that can think for themselves anymore? Why has NOBODY here asked themselves "Who is pushing this? who will gain from it?" and the answer is....drumroll....Apple and MSFT! By pushing a heavily patented spec like H.264 as the video "standard" they will be able to further lock down the web. Remember folks that Apple don't care about MSFT, they know MSFT will take the low end and hasn't had an original thought since Ballmer became CEO. It wasn't Windows that Steve wanted to nuke, remember?
What you will see is the MPAA come up with a truly horrible DRM for H.264 to protect their content, Apple and MSFT will embrace it, FOSS will be fucked. Remember that Apple and MSFT support kernel level DRM and I wouldn't be surprised if Apple joins MSFT in adding secureboot as well. At least now you can play flash on FOSS OSes, how much you wanna bet that will go bye bye when Apple and MSFT are done?
Re:I propose we Occupy "Occupy"
on
Occupy Flash?
·
· Score: 1
You should send an email to Charlie Sheen then, as whatever he is taking seems to make him think he is 'winning" so it should be just the ticket for a Seahawks fan. Oh and my condolences.
If you were to go back and read my posts on Win 7 I was unhappy that they were taking CHOICE away from the user, as I have said about a bazillion times the user is king and THEY should decide, not supermegacorp. If I wanted zero choice I'd have Apple, thanks. And you'll notice once I started running the beta I had nothing but good things to say as I found third party hacks that gave choice back to the users. If a customer wants the classic start menu and quicklaunch? I can give it to them, not a problem. Again it should be up to the USER not the corp.
As for Windows 8 when I showed Win 7, first in screencaps and then the beta, to my customers what I got was curiosity. They wanted to know my opinion, was it better than Vista? What new features did it have? Did I think it was worth the upgrade? Now I'm up to nearly 150 people I've shown the screencaps of Win 8 and ALL I have gotten is HATE. they don't like it, don't want to know anything about it, in fact the ONLY question I got was "But you'll be able to get me Windows 7 if I need another one, right?"
You know they are in trouble when the closest I could get to an endorsement was this exchange by a little old lady of all people: "That is a nice cell phone picture, is that Android? I have heard that's quite nice...what do you mean Windows? Windows what? Well that is just stupid! Why would I want a cell phone on my computer?" and from the mouths of ordinary folks comes wisdom.
Windows 8 I'm sure will make a great TABLET OS, but that is ALL it is or should have been sold as. they should have labeled it "Win 8 Tablet edition" and stuck to the Win 7 UI for Win 8 desktop and laptop. Because despite the iShiny sales (which I would argue is as much a status thing as anything else, I have several customers that bought tablets and they all ended up using them as really expensive eBook readers) home users and businesses aren't rushing to replace their PCs with tablets. The ONLY reason PC sales have slowed down is simply the fact there hasn't been any "killer app" that requires more power than they already have and even a bottom of the line dual core plays YouTube and goes to FB just fine.
Finally don't bet on R&D because I was a beta tester for Vista and we were all screaming at MSFT that it wasn't ready. I myself reported one show stopper after another, bugs in networking and shares were especially bad, but they refused to listen. Ballmer's Folly will get shoved out the door hopefully after it tanks Ballmer will be shoved out the door with it. I have to wonder if some of the higher ups at MSFT aren't doing this to let Ballmer fall on his own stupidity and get him out the door, as we all know Bill backs his little buddy. I'm seriously thinking they are letting any crazy dumbass "Me too!" idea Ballmer has go into Windows 8 because they know a megaflop is the only way to get Ballmer out from the CEO chair and bring in new blood.
After all the stockholders don't like him, so many of the engineers have bailed it ain't even funny, even Ozzie whom i thought would die working for MSFT bailed. It smells to me like Win 8 is letting Ballmer's "ideas" run rampant just to let the world see what a piss poor CEO he is and how his "vision" is to ape what Apple did 4 years ago. I'm just glad Win 7 is supported until 2020, I'm telling my customers to avoid Win 8 like the clap and just make sure you have a machine nice enough to weather the storm, because Win 8 is gonna be a stinker.
Re:I propose we Occupy "Occupy"
on
Occupy Flash?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Not to mention, and I'm sure I'm gonna get hate from all the web developers that are drooling in their coffee over new tech (I swear you guys are as bad as gamers when it comes to new toys) but everyone seems to ignore the elephant in the room that is taking a big shit on the rug and stinking up the joint! What is that elephant?
HTML V5 IS A BIG PILE OF SUCK! that's what! It sucks MORE resources than flash, requires MORE CPU and RAM, I've found it pretty much won't run at all on anything less than a dual core, whereas flash will run fine without hardware acceleration on a 1.8GHz Celeron or Sempron as long as you stick to SD video and will even play HD1080p if you put a decent GPU to share the load, sucks up MORE bandwidth than flash...
Are you people sure this idea of "progress" wasn't cooked up by Dilbert's PHB? Now I can understand the iFanbois rushing to embrace it because anything the God Steve said was law to those nutters, but web developers are usually a LITTLE more sane than that, so what gives? Did you lose your collective minds?
And before someone pipes in with "It'll get better" well that may be true, but I could say that in the future that I could play HD video simply by farting the theme from "The Dukes Of Hazzard" but that don't help us none NOW does it partner? We are talking NOW and guys like the nutball occupy flash want to replace flash NOW with a system that simply doesn't work!
It is worse in EVERY SINGLE MEASURE than flash and we haven't even gotten to the DRM that MSFT and Apple is gonna put into it yet! Hell is there even a way for the FOSS guys to legally play H.264 on Linux, or is it still like Blu Ray? If it sucks THIS bad now, imagine when the MPAA gets done. Oh MSFT and Apple will be happy, they both sign NDAs and support kernel level DRM so the next netflix will play beautifully on Win 8 and the next iShiny, sucks for FOSS though.
So why? It makes no sense! It is worse in every way, will most likely be a *.A.A wet dream as both MSFT and Apple want to "fucking kill Google" and what better way than trying to lock up the next format between themselves, and most importantly HTML V5 is a damned pig, sucking CPU cycles and RAM like a drunk at a free minibar! So WTF developers, have you lost your damned minds? Or is that iPad just too damned shiny for you to see anything but iMoney?
No I think evil can come from good and good can come from evil. I mean the founding fathers were slave holders that didn't think any that didn't own land should vote, didn't make any of the feats they accomplished any less great did it? Manning may have had selfish reasons but what he did accomplished good as it got many to wake up and see what was happening to this country.
When you have acts like the above condoned by the government, when you have that video of the pilots laughing and joking as they blow the family away, that was a BIG slap in the face for those "the government wouldn't lie" types.
I have to wonder if movements like OWS and the masses no longer believing in their congressmen (more than 68% last poll I saw) can't be traced right back to Wikileaks first opening their eyes to the blatant lies. there have been pieces on frontline, worldwide media reports, most of the USA got a nice taste of the dirty dealing we have been doing in these foreign lands and I think one day Manning will get credit for that.
Finally follow the money trail, notice that while they say "this was being investigated" that the PMC involved is STILL getting big fat government contracts and that this first came to light when they pulled the same stunt with little girls in Kosovo. what was that? 96? Their "investigations" appear to be "Would you try to keep it on the down low? Thanks, oh and here's a check". it just goes to show what the OWS people have finally figured out, if you have money or position you can get away with ANYTHING.
Oh one final piece to turn your stomach, look up "
child porn pentagon" to see what happens when they tried to follow the money trail of a major CP supplier, guess where many of their customers were surfing their filth? You guessed it, you know they fear nothing when they are surfing CP on government property, oh and they didn't get arrested so i guess their lack of fear was justified. i'm just glad my family that fought in WWII aren't here to see the scum that have taken over, truly sick and evil.
Sorry friend but i'm betting Win 8 is Vista the second coming. people were curious about win 7 but when i showed them win 8 all i got was HATRED that made ME look like XP.
As for Phenom II the dirty little secret the chip manufacturers don't want you to know is except for a few niche roles chips have been beyond "good enough" for quite some time. i love to game and frankly the ONLY reason I'm going to Thuban is because it is cheap and I like to transcode and the software i use scales with CPUs. but for gaming its always GPU not CPU bound and for just about every other job the CPU sits there twiddling its thumbs waiting on work. I'm a serious multitasker and frankly the ONLY time I slam my Deneb is transcoding, everything else I have power to spare.
So unless your board is shot or your board simply can't take a decent amount of RAM, say 4Gb to 8Gb, honestly there really isn't any reason ATM to go A series on the desktop. In every bench I've seen Thuban and often Deneb are neck and neck or even beating A series, and when you figure in the 20-30% premium for the chips and boards? not worth it. The mobile side is another story, with Brazos costing atom money but besting ION while using less power and having less heat. Oh and the chips hold 8Gb of RAM which is damned sweet for a 3 pound netbook.
I'd say get you a Deneb or even better Thuban, load your board with RAM, and enjoy. I've got mine loaded with 8Gb of RAM and honestly the games I'm playing hasn't even required the replacement of my HD4850 yet, so why switch and pay the early adopter penalty? you are still supporting AMD by buying Phenom II or Brazos.
Sure we can! while it was cute and good at stringing together pop culture references frankly that is pretty much ALL it was, a long string of pop culture references. notice how something like Bambi or Fantasia didn't NEED constant pop culture references? that is because when you have a really quality movie you don't NEED a constant stream of pop culture references!
In 30 years or less Shrek will seem as hack and dated as those 60s TV shows that threw in "daddy-O" and every other piece of cool at that second pop culture they could find.
Wasn't it Jobs with Pixar that gave an interview about Disney, something about them only being able to mine past IP and come up with "crap like squirrels" or some such? All this will mean is Disney can crank out "(insert name of past character) story (insert number)" even faster. Wow, I'm soooo grateful Intel, really.
Thanks for making dreck able to be produced at the speed of light, now they'll be able to crank out 5 sequels before the first line of toys is done being made out of PCBs in China! Thanks Intel! All I can say is thank (insert Deity) my kids are grown!
That is because they bribed the living shit out of the OEMs, so badly one likened it to "cocaine" and dell during the price wars had several quarters where their ONLY profits were Intel kickbacks.
As for the other poster than having the GPU means a "wasted" GPU when you add a discrete? Not so as the new units will function similar to hybrid crossfire now and when they switch over to vector graphics from VLIW they will be able to just about replace the FP unit in the chip with a much simpler one and have the GPU do FP. this will mean that currently when you have a discrete the GPU on chip can be used for physics, and when it switches to vector advanced AI and other routines will be able to be run by the on chip GPU while the discrete does the drawing.
as for TFA? Couldn't happened to a shittier company, yay!
Yep it "listens" to the pauses and auto splits the tacks so you don't have to. the one I saw you could either let it name the album "track 1, track 2" or you could go to FreeDB or another DB service before it started and choose which album you had put in. it wasn't perfect, as if you screwed up and say picked the English version and you had the American it could screw up track listings, but it was a hell of a lot better than actually having to sit through every track of every LP you own.
I know about it because I had a customer with a pretty massive LP collection and he called me to come over and show him how to edit the tracks after recording. Some of his stuff was really old and while the software that came with it could cut down on the pops it did so by also cutting down on the treble which he didn't like. So I showed him how to just let the software do the ripping and then load it into Audacity for final mixing. It has some great plugins that really help with LP conversion and it didn't take him long to get the swing of things. he later told me it took him about a month and a half to convert by doing it 4 hours a day while he was on FB. Once he had the steps down in Audacity he could whip off a song in it about every 90 seconds, so no worries there.
I know you're probably trying to be funny but lets be honest, artists back then had plenty of filler just like today and trying to skip around on an LP can be a PITA. This way he got his entire collection ripped as high quality FLAC and could transcode a copy to any MP3 bitrate he wanted without losing the original. pretty sweet setup and if you know someone with albums I highly recommend conversion.
Did you even READ the post I was responding to? The guy was so desperate for Linux to gain ANY share he cooked up this scenario where a $25 cell phone GPU caused a "revolution" with people buying this en masse and tossing Windows! Nobody and I repeat NOBODY that uses a modern or even older Windows desktop/netbook/laptop is gonna shitcan their current setup for a $25 cell phone GPU that doesn't even come in a case!
You wanna know why Linux numbers are flatline? Its actually really simple, its because the developers and community won't listen and violate rule 1 of business, give the people what they want or at least what they think they want! Instead to paraphrase a line from Vietnam the whole thing has been taken over by deluded zealots that truly believe 'inside every user is a C programmer waiting to get out' like Suzy the checkout girl is reading Bash programming manuals in the bathtub and grandma is working on her CS degree in between knitting classes, its fucking nuts!
Look, if you want to be a hobbyist OS for programmers? I have NOTHING against that, in fact I ran OS/2 for years after everyone else had bailed. But coming up with one delusional scenario after another just makes your OS look like the property of the "Elvis is alive, NASA faked the moon landing" tinfoil hat wearing nutters. When I am having a conversation with a 15+ year Linux server admin who runs a giant server farm for a living and they tell me when i ask what distro to try as a final gasp before giving up and they say "As soon as I'm backed up i'm going to FreeBSD and if that doesn't cut the mustard I'm giving up on FOSS desktops and going Mac or Windows" you KNOW the shit is fucked up.
Fix the driver borkage (Protip: everyone else from BSD to Solaris has had a hardware ABI for nearly a decade, you think you are smarter than every OS designer on the planet?) and make an OS that will pass my "Is it safe?" test, where I simulate a user having the machine for 3 years by downloading the distro from 3 years ago and updating to current (which of course causes it to fall down like a house of cards) and then we'll talk. Keep predicting that some niche device will magically make people see bash prompts and programming as "the next big thing" and we'll all laugh at you and you'll stay flatline, kinda like...well right now actually. Kinda sad when MSFT puts out Vista, one of the most hated of their OSes EVAR, and you can't even gain a single percentage point. that is just sad man, totally sad and pathetic.
Oh AMD still have some sweet chips in the game, there is a reason why they had to slow down their desktop A series production to crank up the mobile and that was because they were selling their brazos chips faster than they were able to crank them out. They simply didn't see the uses other than netbooks and weren't prepared for all these all in one and HTPC units using brazos as well. if you haven't tried one they are really nice, great battery life, low power, built in Radeon GPU that accelerates pretty much any video format, great little chips. I was impressed enough I sold my Athlon II wind to pick up a EEE brazos and just love the thing, were else can you get a dual core netbook that does 1080p and gets 6 hours on a battery with 8Gb of RAM and a carrying case for $350?
On the desktop side I'm advising my customers to do as I'm doing, which is stick with Deneb and Thuban and wait out the A series. it looks like the A series bulldozer is gonna be another Phenom I, where they need a generation to work out the kinks. Also since the BD arch is really designed for the upcoming hybrid core with the new Radeon vector units, as opposed to the VLIW based Radeons of today, it makes sense to let them switch to the new design and work out the kinks. By the time software catches up enough that the Deneb and thuban are not cutting it the chips after Piledriver will be out and the boards for the new socket will be cheap and plentiful. I personally am gonna wait until after the holidays and then buy myself a Thuban 95w as a BDay prezzie for myself. Do I REALLY need 6 cores? No but I wants it precious, I wants it!
As for TFA RDRAM was a dead end design and Rambus used their spot in the SDRAM standards committee to submarine as many patents as they could before becoming uber patent trolls. It was expensive, it had to have matching chips or a dummy terminator, it was hard to scale, if Rambus hadn't submarined those patents they would have gone the way of EDO memory. Notice how the only ones that use Rambus tech anymore are the consoles who use tiny amounts of it as fast buffers, simply because the crap is too costly to load up the machine with.
Just another example of why we need patent reform IMHO. When companies can make their living simply by trolling instead of actually making products to me that is a sign the system is broken.
Actually what I got from reading Atlas Shrugged (more like skimming because her ass liked the hell out of REALLLLY long speeches) was that the goal would be more like Somalia or even Bioshock in that "he who has the gold makes the rules" and there really wouldn't BE any government to speak of. Basically in a perfect Randian world the only "laws" would be at the barrel of a gun and that gun would be wielded by thugs hired by the rich guy. The roads, the schools, everything would be for profit and private property.
Kinda sad though that the ultra right wing are doing their damnedest to make the crazy woman's batshit world come to be. it reminds me of a story i read, the director of Blue Thunder said in an interview "so I make this movie about how dangerous the power of super tech can be, how you would have this gunship that can see through walls and cut cars in half, so what happens? the movie is barely started running in theaters and my secretary is swamped by calls from SWAT units and militaries all asking the same thing...how much you want for Blue Thunder? they saw it as a damned tech demo!"
Sad that there are people in this world that look at 1984 or Atlas Shrugged or Blue Thunder not as warnings but how to manuals. kinda scary huh?
Well you see friend, we have this thing called "multitasking" that most folks have gotten quite good at, even when they don't actually know they are doing it! The software runs in the background converting the LP, LP gets done a little flash of the icon tells the user 'hey flip the record over or put on another one" and then they do so and go back to their FB game.
So its really no more complicated than "And the monkey pushes the button' from what I've seen. Sorry I can't give you the name of the software but since I don't actually own any LPs I really wasn't that interested. My mom has her old disco era records out in the shed somewhere but I seriously doubt I could even be bothered to spend the $50 for a USB turntable to get "fly robin fly" converted...eww!
Oh please! How damned delusional and desparate for users do you have to be that you HONESTLY think people in the west are gonna rush out and by a cellphone GPU based hackers toy? Maybe, juuuust maybe, if you would actually give the people what they wanted instead of singing the hacker song while putting out updates that bork your drivers, and just FYI but EVERYONE ELSE has a hardware ABI and have had one for over a decade, might want to wake up and join the current century, then you might not have to pray for a device cheap enough people will take your shit?
I mean how fucking sad when your ONLY hope at this point is that China can crank out something so damned cheap that Windows won't fit. Oh BTW, just to REALLY ruin your day, but you know Windows 7 HP? Yeah its actually below free. you see they put this stuff called 'trialware" on the PC and the money they make from it actually is more than the cost of the OS. So unless you are gonna pay $20 to everyone to take your OS? you're only shot if you refuse to listen to your potential customers is to find shit with specs so damned crappy nothing else will run. Such lofty goals you got there Sparky, lofty goals!
As for the R-Pi? The only truly amazing thing IMHO is they are using a GPU as the main processor. look up the specs on that BCM and they make it clear its an HD decoder chip, no different from those HD mini PCIe cards you can put in a shitty low end Atom netbook to take a load off the craptastic CPU. I do find it amazing that someone would take a GPU and use it for a CPU, i've always wondered if one could do that. I bet the code is gonna have to be optimized up the butt to run worth a shit on such a highly specialized chip though.
But done right it could be a VIC20 or C64 for the third world, the only question is...will they care? they seem to be skipping a large part of our history, bypassing dialup and BBS and heading straight to low end smartphones and cellular networks. I have to question if this will even find a market in the third world when both India and China are racing each other to make the cheapest smartphone. I mean why bother with a blinking cursor when they can have Android loaded onto a nice pretty screen?
But I have to agree with the guy that couldn't find it that the new design is seriously dumbshit. Usability 101: if your average grandma can't even figure the shit out without a manual? You got a problem. its a fricking browser, not the backend of a DB, it should be simple and intuitive, like FF WAS for years. I will give them credit for one thing though, they did help me move my users over to Comodo Dragon. When all the buttons and the classic file/edit/view disappeared my users went "WTF?" and when i told them they better get used to pretty constant changes and updates from FF they were like "Surely YOU know something better right?" So thanks FF devs, you're the Vista of browsers!
As for TFA? Frankly I don't blame them for not making it default as it makes them money, all that data lets them better target ads which actually work on the little old lady crowd I was surprised to find out. Me personally the closest I've ever come to buying something because of an ad is Amazon with their little 'people that looked at X also bought Y" bit or steam with their "Hey just FYI but we got a sale on", but the LOLs actually respond to those targeted ads and shop their little butts off. So as long as their is some way for us geeks and our families to turn it off its okay by me, more options in this case better than none.
Which just shows how completely worthless judging a company by stock price is, as its a popularity contest, nothing more. look at the chart during the release of XP it goes DOWN even though MSFT was selling copies hand over fist! I bet if you look at the same period for Apple even though they weren't moving even 1/500th of the product that MSFT was during the same period (remember we are talking pre iPhone and iTouch here) you'll see it climb like crazy!
All the stock prices prove anymore is that day traders are sheep and care more about "buzz" than common sense. Look at the IPOs before the dotbomb collapse for proof of that, you had stocks going nuts for companies that had never made a cent!
As for TFA Ballmer is an idiot with a serious Apple fetish, nuff said. Since he has taken over with the exception of Win 7 (which was saved by bringing in the office guys while Ballmer was busy playing mobile suckage) his "strategy" has been staring in the windows at Cupertino and going "Me too! Ohhh me too!" and putting out one dumbass idea after another. Zune, Kin, killing playsforsure for Zune market, rushing the X360 out with a fatal flaw trying to beat Sony, rushing out Vista with every beta tester screaming about the horrible bugs, it was just one fuckup after another. Now you have Windows 8, or as one of my customers put it "That's just stupid, why would I want a cell phone on my desktop?".
So frankly I don't blame current stockholders for being pissed, Ballmer is a PHB that frankly wouldn't have gotten that job if he wasn't bill's sidekick.
Sure in the olden days, when 8-tracks were plentiful and dinosaurs roamed the earth as my boys say, but have you tried in the past 20 years or so? its bloody easy! that have these things called "USB turntables" that automatically cut the tracks up and everything, and before that i remember seeing a few serial units (they were high though). But if anybody still has LPs they REALLY ought to convert to FLAC as frankly the LP versions kick the shit out of those horribly mixed CDs. You listen to an LP of Hendrix or Joplin then listen to the CD its like night and day.
As for TFA frankly the RIAA needs to DIAF. Thanks to their treasonous bribery we ALREADY have the most insane fucked up copyright system in history, a system where artists have been dead longer than many have been alive yet their works are STILL copyright protected! If we would have stuck to the original terms that were laid down you could have Hendrix and the Beatles, hear artist making cool chop ups of the Stones and Buddy Holly, we would have a MUCH richer music catalog than we do now. But as long as bribery is allowed and encouraged in our corrupted ruined system things simply won't get better and our history will be locked behind paywalls.
Sadly even boycotts and protests are no longer usable as we have seen with the record corps making record profits while trotting out PPTs that say they should have made doubleplus uber profits they shall simply use ANY dip in profits or even failure to meet the projections some quant has cooked up as "proof" they "deserve' more laws and worse draconian measure. hell cause them to dip two quarters in a row i'm sure they'll just get themselves declared "too big to fail' and take the money directly from your pockets!
yeah no shit. I knew they had passed sanity about 3 exits back when I heard about their "sea kittens" campaign. I swear these crazies want everyone in the world to call fish "sea kittens" because they think 10,000 years of people eating fish can be changed by calling them kittens! I swear to God I'm not making this stuff up, look it up for yourself, the website they made for it is hilarious!
Slashdot Mirror
You don't have to worry about that, and you can thank your friends at AMD for it! AMD has announced they are going with Coreboot instead of UEFI which i'm sure many here will know is a completely free and open source BIOS replacement that is getting a lot of funding through AMD. This of course means MSFT won't be able to force Windows 8 to be secure boot only as that would keep every AMD CPU from running Win 8 and probably get them another round of antitrust for their trouble.
Personally it has just made me happier that I switched to become an AMD only shop. One of the things that REALLY pisses me off with OEM PCs is getting in there and finding the BIOS is so crippled and short on features it actually hampers the system, like with a customer I had recently that had to toss a stick of RAM simply because the BIOS had no feature to switch between dual and single mode and the board wouldn't read unmatched sticks. But for those of us that stick with AMD it'll mean if you get an OEM and Coreboot doesn't have what you need so what? You can roll your own and just flash the Coreboot with a different version, kinda like CyanogenMod.
Oh and MSFT really can't lock it down to where you can't switch OSes simply because all those fat software assurance and MSDN contracts wouldn't be worth shit. i know quite a few that have those contracts so they can run older versions for critical programs and if MSFT killed it there would go a LOT of SMBs and business is their bread and butter.
No most likely on first boot you'll get a "Did you know you don't have secureboot? Check yes if you wish to disable and absolve MSFT of any responsibility if you get a boot virus" and we'll all go "yes we know now STFU and get out of my face, stupid Windows" and go on about our daily lives, just as we do now.
That you should buy a Mac?
Sorry, but you know he walked right into that one, i just couldn't help it!
Actually it doesn't have a damned thing to do with linux and everything to do with pirates. if you look on any BT site you'll find "Windows 7 all versions pre activated" which passes WGA and has for nearly two years. it does this by running a bootloader that fakes an OEM signature so MSFT would have to kill the keys for the major OEMs thus causing more than a little shitstorm from all those that bought win 7 PCs and suddenly were told they are pirates.
So despite all the bullshit from MSFT that it was about security, and despite all the FOSSies screaming "Its a plot to kill Linux!" in actuality it was just MSFT playing whack a mole with the pirates and yet again losing.
. The sad part was they HAD the cure for piracy in the west, I saw with my own two eyes as many pirates which had NEVER paid for Windows suddenly were running legit. i'm of course talking about the Win 7 HP $50 upgrade. When they killed that suddenly the local CL was filled with $100 PCs with $300 Windows installs. Just more proof Ballmer is as shitty a CEO as the Pepsi guy was for Apple.
Uhhh the same Ron Paul that said we should "go back to 1901" when it came to disasters while pointing out his home city while forgetting to mention it took them TWENTY FIVE YEARS to get back to where they were and the biggest gains from the disaster were by the uber rich, who could afford to buy out those that had lost everything at fire sale prices?
The answer to that would be YES! Paul has some good ideas when it comes to dealing with foreign lands (like not being the world's police) but frankly his domestic policies like most of the right wing are more than a little batshit. He believes waaaay too much in the almighty invisible hand when we have seen time and time again all the invisible hand does is allow those at the top to consolidate power. See the gilded age or what we have now for examples.
Plus he is missing the point that it is no different than our political system, with two groups at the top that are Coke and Pepsi and take any competition VERY nastily. In my own area neither the cable nor DSL has moved a single inch in a decade and when a friend tried to route around them by getting his boss to shell out for a T-1 and renting connections off the line the duopoly made a few calls and has his connection price raised 400%!
They told him "Just try and sue us" and his lawyer told him flat footed "Oh yeah you'll win no doubt, but it'll cost you about a mil five in fees and a decade out of your life" so they just closed up shop and moved away. those folks are STILL stuck with nothing but cellular or dialup BTW, and guess who is the only ones that offer that in that area? Why one of the duopoly of course!
The only way things are ever gonna change is if the lines are opened up to competition. We even have precedent as we gave them 200 billion to run us nationwide broadband more than a decade ago and all they gave us was a low res Goatse while their CxOs used the cash for big boobed hookers and blow. If they want a monopoly? We'll give them 15 years for any area they run FTTH, we'll give them 25 if that area had never been served. oh and it doesn't count unless EVERY house can receive it, otherwise they'll run it to a single house and count the whole area, like they do on that lame .gov broadband list that shows my mom has SIX different ones to choose from when all she has is a single badly run WISP that is frankly not much better than cellular.
Personally I think with so many out of work it is time to bring back the WPA and have those that are hurting for work run us nationwide fiber that We, The People will own. any carrier can then compete and give us plenty to choose from. Otherwise all we are gonna get thanks to our corporate overlords is the short bus to the information superhighway while even Romania kicks our ass on speed!
See it is THAT, that right there that is pissing me off! If it had been Theora or WebM, even though they currently take more resources I could understand that. it would be about having a "universal codec" that ANY device could run without fear of trolls and THAT is a goal I can understand.
But everyone acts like that is still the case when its not! Both MSFT and Apple have made it clear it SHALL BE H.264 and with everyone falling all over themselves drooling at the profit margins Apple is getting nobody, not this occupy dufus nor anybody on this site, seems to be capable of asking the MOST IMPORTANT of all questions, which is "Why is this being pushed? who will gain from this?"
And i think it is pretty damned clear who will benefit from a locked all to hell DRMed patented up the ass "standard' becoming the only source of video on the web, and that is Apple and MSFT! you look at apple after Steve came back, he didn't give a shit about MSFT, hell he had gates on the stage with him, why? because he knew MSFT had a market they didn't want which was the low rent commodity market. What worried Steve was NOT MSFT but Google and the rise of the web. kinda hard to lock anyone down if everything is in the cloud and uses formats all can use isn't it?
So while I can understand the hatred of flash, really i can, on anything other than windows it has never been great, but lets not replace something that "kinda sorta' works for DRM in a box, okay? We should all tell these numbnuts that we will NOT accept HTML V5 unless it uses a 100% free codec that EVERYONE can use! I know that with so many thinking I'm a "dirty M$ ninja poo poo head" that those words might seem like a shock but I don't want MSFT to be able to force upgrades simply because you want to watch the latest videos any more than I want Apple to control the direction of the web with iShiny!
so PLEASE web developers, tell them you won't have HTML V5 unless it is usable by all! Otherwise the dreams of iMoney is gonna take us back to the bad old days where the web was fractured and you had to have a bazillion codecs just to function! You'll have some on Theora (the FOSSies) you'll have some on WebM (The google fanbois) and you'll have MSFT and Apple pushing H.264. Can your device accelerate all three? will you have to base your battery life based on which sites you see? Is this REALLY progress over flash? I don't think so, and i hope I'm not alone in this.
I hate to reply to myself but as usual the iFanbois are modding down anything which doesn't follow the laws written by the great iSteve and handed down on a stone skinned iPad.
Name me ONE THING that HTML V5 does better? And don't give me "free as in freedom!" because H.264 is about as "free" as iOS is. Does it use less CPU? NO. Does it use less bandwidth? NO. does it use less RAM? Or need less powerful hardware to run it? that would be a giant NO.
I can fire up a 1.8Ghz Celeron or a first generation Intel Atom and watch SD video in flash all day long. it will be smooth and pleasant to watch. I tried firing up the latest HTML V5 videos in SD no less, on a 3.2Ghz P4 with HT and all it was was a slideshow. it was jerky, it was slow, it sucked bandwidth like mad.
So I want someone to have the balls to come on here and explain EXACTLY what makes a spec that is worse in every. single. way. compared to what we have now "better". hell Realvideo is "better" when it comes to resources than this crapola!
And is there nobody here that can think for themselves anymore? Why has NOBODY here asked themselves "Who is pushing this? who will gain from it?" and the answer is....drumroll....Apple and MSFT! By pushing a heavily patented spec like H.264 as the video "standard" they will be able to further lock down the web. Remember folks that Apple don't care about MSFT, they know MSFT will take the low end and hasn't had an original thought since Ballmer became CEO. It wasn't Windows that Steve wanted to nuke, remember?
What you will see is the MPAA come up with a truly horrible DRM for H.264 to protect their content, Apple and MSFT will embrace it, FOSS will be fucked. Remember that Apple and MSFT support kernel level DRM and I wouldn't be surprised if Apple joins MSFT in adding secureboot as well. At least now you can play flash on FOSS OSes, how much you wanna bet that will go bye bye when Apple and MSFT are done?
You should send an email to Charlie Sheen then, as whatever he is taking seems to make him think he is 'winning" so it should be just the ticket for a Seahawks fan. Oh and my condolences.
If you were to go back and read my posts on Win 7 I was unhappy that they were taking CHOICE away from the user, as I have said about a bazillion times the user is king and THEY should decide, not supermegacorp. If I wanted zero choice I'd have Apple, thanks. And you'll notice once I started running the beta I had nothing but good things to say as I found third party hacks that gave choice back to the users. If a customer wants the classic start menu and quicklaunch? I can give it to them, not a problem. Again it should be up to the USER not the corp.
As for Windows 8 when I showed Win 7, first in screencaps and then the beta, to my customers what I got was curiosity. They wanted to know my opinion, was it better than Vista? What new features did it have? Did I think it was worth the upgrade? Now I'm up to nearly 150 people I've shown the screencaps of Win 8 and ALL I have gotten is HATE. they don't like it, don't want to know anything about it, in fact the ONLY question I got was "But you'll be able to get me Windows 7 if I need another one, right?"
You know they are in trouble when the closest I could get to an endorsement was this exchange by a little old lady of all people: "That is a nice cell phone picture, is that Android? I have heard that's quite nice...what do you mean Windows? Windows what? Well that is just stupid! Why would I want a cell phone on my computer?" and from the mouths of ordinary folks comes wisdom.
Windows 8 I'm sure will make a great TABLET OS, but that is ALL it is or should have been sold as. they should have labeled it "Win 8 Tablet edition" and stuck to the Win 7 UI for Win 8 desktop and laptop. Because despite the iShiny sales (which I would argue is as much a status thing as anything else, I have several customers that bought tablets and they all ended up using them as really expensive eBook readers) home users and businesses aren't rushing to replace their PCs with tablets. The ONLY reason PC sales have slowed down is simply the fact there hasn't been any "killer app" that requires more power than they already have and even a bottom of the line dual core plays YouTube and goes to FB just fine.
Finally don't bet on R&D because I was a beta tester for Vista and we were all screaming at MSFT that it wasn't ready. I myself reported one show stopper after another, bugs in networking and shares were especially bad, but they refused to listen. Ballmer's Folly will get shoved out the door hopefully after it tanks Ballmer will be shoved out the door with it. I have to wonder if some of the higher ups at MSFT aren't doing this to let Ballmer fall on his own stupidity and get him out the door, as we all know Bill backs his little buddy. I'm seriously thinking they are letting any crazy dumbass "Me too!" idea Ballmer has go into Windows 8 because they know a megaflop is the only way to get Ballmer out from the CEO chair and bring in new blood.
After all the stockholders don't like him, so many of the engineers have bailed it ain't even funny, even Ozzie whom i thought would die working for MSFT bailed. It smells to me like Win 8 is letting Ballmer's "ideas" run rampant just to let the world see what a piss poor CEO he is and how his "vision" is to ape what Apple did 4 years ago. I'm just glad Win 7 is supported until 2020, I'm telling my customers to avoid Win 8 like the clap and just make sure you have a machine nice enough to weather the storm, because Win 8 is gonna be a stinker.
Not to mention, and I'm sure I'm gonna get hate from all the web developers that are drooling in their coffee over new tech (I swear you guys are as bad as gamers when it comes to new toys) but everyone seems to ignore the elephant in the room that is taking a big shit on the rug and stinking up the joint! What is that elephant?
HTML V5 IS A BIG PILE OF SUCK! that's what! It sucks MORE resources than flash, requires MORE CPU and RAM, I've found it pretty much won't run at all on anything less than a dual core, whereas flash will run fine without hardware acceleration on a 1.8GHz Celeron or Sempron as long as you stick to SD video and will even play HD1080p if you put a decent GPU to share the load, sucks up MORE bandwidth than flash...
Are you people sure this idea of "progress" wasn't cooked up by Dilbert's PHB? Now I can understand the iFanbois rushing to embrace it because anything the God Steve said was law to those nutters, but web developers are usually a LITTLE more sane than that, so what gives? Did you lose your collective minds?
And before someone pipes in with "It'll get better" well that may be true, but I could say that in the future that I could play HD video simply by farting the theme from "The Dukes Of Hazzard" but that don't help us none NOW does it partner? We are talking NOW and guys like the nutball occupy flash want to replace flash NOW with a system that simply doesn't work!
It is worse in EVERY SINGLE MEASURE than flash and we haven't even gotten to the DRM that MSFT and Apple is gonna put into it yet! Hell is there even a way for the FOSS guys to legally play H.264 on Linux, or is it still like Blu Ray? If it sucks THIS bad now, imagine when the MPAA gets done. Oh MSFT and Apple will be happy, they both sign NDAs and support kernel level DRM so the next netflix will play beautifully on Win 8 and the next iShiny, sucks for FOSS though.
So why? It makes no sense! It is worse in every way, will most likely be a *.A.A wet dream as both MSFT and Apple want to "fucking kill Google" and what better way than trying to lock up the next format between themselves, and most importantly HTML V5 is a damned pig, sucking CPU cycles and RAM like a drunk at a free minibar! So WTF developers, have you lost your damned minds? Or is that iPad just too damned shiny for you to see anything but iMoney?
No I think evil can come from good and good can come from evil. I mean the founding fathers were slave holders that didn't think any that didn't own land should vote, didn't make any of the feats they accomplished any less great did it? Manning may have had selfish reasons but what he did accomplished good as it got many to wake up and see what was happening to this country.
When you have acts like the above condoned by the government, when you have that video of the pilots laughing and joking as they blow the family away, that was a BIG slap in the face for those "the government wouldn't lie" types.
I have to wonder if movements like OWS and the masses no longer believing in their congressmen (more than 68% last poll I saw) can't be traced right back to Wikileaks first opening their eyes to the blatant lies. there have been pieces on frontline, worldwide media reports, most of the USA got a nice taste of the dirty dealing we have been doing in these foreign lands and I think one day Manning will get credit for that.
Finally follow the money trail, notice that while they say "this was being investigated" that the PMC involved is STILL getting big fat government contracts and that this first came to light when they pulled the same stunt with little girls in Kosovo. what was that? 96? Their "investigations" appear to be "Would you try to keep it on the down low? Thanks, oh and here's a check". it just goes to show what the OWS people have finally figured out, if you have money or position you can get away with ANYTHING.
Oh one final piece to turn your stomach, look up " child porn pentagon" to see what happens when they tried to follow the money trail of a major CP supplier, guess where many of their customers were surfing their filth? You guessed it, you know they fear nothing when they are surfing CP on government property, oh and they didn't get arrested so i guess their lack of fear was justified. i'm just glad my family that fought in WWII aren't here to see the scum that have taken over, truly sick and evil.
Sorry friend but i'm betting Win 8 is Vista the second coming. people were curious about win 7 but when i showed them win 8 all i got was HATRED that made ME look like XP.
As for Phenom II the dirty little secret the chip manufacturers don't want you to know is except for a few niche roles chips have been beyond "good enough" for quite some time. i love to game and frankly the ONLY reason I'm going to Thuban is because it is cheap and I like to transcode and the software i use scales with CPUs. but for gaming its always GPU not CPU bound and for just about every other job the CPU sits there twiddling its thumbs waiting on work. I'm a serious multitasker and frankly the ONLY time I slam my Deneb is transcoding, everything else I have power to spare.
So unless your board is shot or your board simply can't take a decent amount of RAM, say 4Gb to 8Gb, honestly there really isn't any reason ATM to go A series on the desktop. In every bench I've seen Thuban and often Deneb are neck and neck or even beating A series, and when you figure in the 20-30% premium for the chips and boards? not worth it. The mobile side is another story, with Brazos costing atom money but besting ION while using less power and having less heat. Oh and the chips hold 8Gb of RAM which is damned sweet for a 3 pound netbook.
I'd say get you a Deneb or even better Thuban, load your board with RAM, and enjoy. I've got mine loaded with 8Gb of RAM and honestly the games I'm playing hasn't even required the replacement of my HD4850 yet, so why switch and pay the early adopter penalty? you are still supporting AMD by buying Phenom II or Brazos.
Sure we can! while it was cute and good at stringing together pop culture references frankly that is pretty much ALL it was, a long string of pop culture references. notice how something like Bambi or Fantasia didn't NEED constant pop culture references? that is because when you have a really quality movie you don't NEED a constant stream of pop culture references!
In 30 years or less Shrek will seem as hack and dated as those 60s TV shows that threw in "daddy-O" and every other piece of cool at that second pop culture they could find.
Wasn't it Jobs with Pixar that gave an interview about Disney, something about them only being able to mine past IP and come up with "crap like squirrels" or some such? All this will mean is Disney can crank out "(insert name of past character) story (insert number)" even faster. Wow, I'm soooo grateful Intel, really.
Thanks for making dreck able to be produced at the speed of light, now they'll be able to crank out 5 sequels before the first line of toys is done being made out of PCBs in China! Thanks Intel! All I can say is thank (insert Deity) my kids are grown!
That is because they bribed the living shit out of the OEMs, so badly one likened it to "cocaine" and dell during the price wars had several quarters where their ONLY profits were Intel kickbacks.
As for the other poster than having the GPU means a "wasted" GPU when you add a discrete? Not so as the new units will function similar to hybrid crossfire now and when they switch over to vector graphics from VLIW they will be able to just about replace the FP unit in the chip with a much simpler one and have the GPU do FP. this will mean that currently when you have a discrete the GPU on chip can be used for physics, and when it switches to vector advanced AI and other routines will be able to be run by the on chip GPU while the discrete does the drawing.
as for TFA? Couldn't happened to a shittier company, yay!
Yep it "listens" to the pauses and auto splits the tacks so you don't have to. the one I saw you could either let it name the album "track 1, track 2" or you could go to FreeDB or another DB service before it started and choose which album you had put in. it wasn't perfect, as if you screwed up and say picked the English version and you had the American it could screw up track listings, but it was a hell of a lot better than actually having to sit through every track of every LP you own.
I know about it because I had a customer with a pretty massive LP collection and he called me to come over and show him how to edit the tracks after recording. Some of his stuff was really old and while the software that came with it could cut down on the pops it did so by also cutting down on the treble which he didn't like. So I showed him how to just let the software do the ripping and then load it into Audacity for final mixing. It has some great plugins that really help with LP conversion and it didn't take him long to get the swing of things. he later told me it took him about a month and a half to convert by doing it 4 hours a day while he was on FB. Once he had the steps down in Audacity he could whip off a song in it about every 90 seconds, so no worries there.
I know you're probably trying to be funny but lets be honest, artists back then had plenty of filler just like today and trying to skip around on an LP can be a PITA. This way he got his entire collection ripped as high quality FLAC and could transcode a copy to any MP3 bitrate he wanted without losing the original. pretty sweet setup and if you know someone with albums I highly recommend conversion.
Did you even READ the post I was responding to? The guy was so desperate for Linux to gain ANY share he cooked up this scenario where a $25 cell phone GPU caused a "revolution" with people buying this en masse and tossing Windows! Nobody and I repeat NOBODY that uses a modern or even older Windows desktop/netbook/laptop is gonna shitcan their current setup for a $25 cell phone GPU that doesn't even come in a case!
You wanna know why Linux numbers are flatline? Its actually really simple, its because the developers and community won't listen and violate rule 1 of business, give the people what they want or at least what they think they want! Instead to paraphrase a line from Vietnam the whole thing has been taken over by deluded zealots that truly believe 'inside every user is a C programmer waiting to get out' like Suzy the checkout girl is reading Bash programming manuals in the bathtub and grandma is working on her CS degree in between knitting classes, its fucking nuts!
Look, if you want to be a hobbyist OS for programmers? I have NOTHING against that, in fact I ran OS/2 for years after everyone else had bailed. But coming up with one delusional scenario after another just makes your OS look like the property of the "Elvis is alive, NASA faked the moon landing" tinfoil hat wearing nutters. When I am having a conversation with a 15+ year Linux server admin who runs a giant server farm for a living and they tell me when i ask what distro to try as a final gasp before giving up and they say "As soon as I'm backed up i'm going to FreeBSD and if that doesn't cut the mustard I'm giving up on FOSS desktops and going Mac or Windows" you KNOW the shit is fucked up.
Fix the driver borkage (Protip: everyone else from BSD to Solaris has had a hardware ABI for nearly a decade, you think you are smarter than every OS designer on the planet?) and make an OS that will pass my "Is it safe?" test, where I simulate a user having the machine for 3 years by downloading the distro from 3 years ago and updating to current (which of course causes it to fall down like a house of cards) and then we'll talk. Keep predicting that some niche device will magically make people see bash prompts and programming as "the next big thing" and we'll all laugh at you and you'll stay flatline, kinda like...well right now actually. Kinda sad when MSFT puts out Vista, one of the most hated of their OSes EVAR, and you can't even gain a single percentage point. that is just sad man, totally sad and pathetic.
Oh AMD still have some sweet chips in the game, there is a reason why they had to slow down their desktop A series production to crank up the mobile and that was because they were selling their brazos chips faster than they were able to crank them out. They simply didn't see the uses other than netbooks and weren't prepared for all these all in one and HTPC units using brazos as well. if you haven't tried one they are really nice, great battery life, low power, built in Radeon GPU that accelerates pretty much any video format, great little chips. I was impressed enough I sold my Athlon II wind to pick up a EEE brazos and just love the thing, were else can you get a dual core netbook that does 1080p and gets 6 hours on a battery with 8Gb of RAM and a carrying case for $350?
On the desktop side I'm advising my customers to do as I'm doing, which is stick with Deneb and Thuban and wait out the A series. it looks like the A series bulldozer is gonna be another Phenom I, where they need a generation to work out the kinks. Also since the BD arch is really designed for the upcoming hybrid core with the new Radeon vector units, as opposed to the VLIW based Radeons of today, it makes sense to let them switch to the new design and work out the kinks. By the time software catches up enough that the Deneb and thuban are not cutting it the chips after Piledriver will be out and the boards for the new socket will be cheap and plentiful. I personally am gonna wait until after the holidays and then buy myself a Thuban 95w as a BDay prezzie for myself. Do I REALLY need 6 cores? No but I wants it precious, I wants it!
As for TFA RDRAM was a dead end design and Rambus used their spot in the SDRAM standards committee to submarine as many patents as they could before becoming uber patent trolls. It was expensive, it had to have matching chips or a dummy terminator, it was hard to scale, if Rambus hadn't submarined those patents they would have gone the way of EDO memory. Notice how the only ones that use Rambus tech anymore are the consoles who use tiny amounts of it as fast buffers, simply because the crap is too costly to load up the machine with.
Just another example of why we need patent reform IMHO. When companies can make their living simply by trolling instead of actually making products to me that is a sign the system is broken.
Actually what I got from reading Atlas Shrugged (more like skimming because her ass liked the hell out of REALLLLY long speeches) was that the goal would be more like Somalia or even Bioshock in that "he who has the gold makes the rules" and there really wouldn't BE any government to speak of. Basically in a perfect Randian world the only "laws" would be at the barrel of a gun and that gun would be wielded by thugs hired by the rich guy. The roads, the schools, everything would be for profit and private property.
Kinda sad though that the ultra right wing are doing their damnedest to make the crazy woman's batshit world come to be. it reminds me of a story i read, the director of Blue Thunder said in an interview "so I make this movie about how dangerous the power of super tech can be, how you would have this gunship that can see through walls and cut cars in half, so what happens? the movie is barely started running in theaters and my secretary is swamped by calls from SWAT units and militaries all asking the same thing...how much you want for Blue Thunder? they saw it as a damned tech demo!"
Sad that there are people in this world that look at 1984 or Atlas Shrugged or Blue Thunder not as warnings but how to manuals. kinda scary huh?
Well you see friend, we have this thing called "multitasking" that most folks have gotten quite good at, even when they don't actually know they are doing it! The software runs in the background converting the LP, LP gets done a little flash of the icon tells the user 'hey flip the record over or put on another one" and then they do so and go back to their FB game.
So its really no more complicated than "And the monkey pushes the button' from what I've seen. Sorry I can't give you the name of the software but since I don't actually own any LPs I really wasn't that interested. My mom has her old disco era records out in the shed somewhere but I seriously doubt I could even be bothered to spend the $50 for a USB turntable to get "fly robin fly" converted...eww!
Oh please! How damned delusional and desparate for users do you have to be that you HONESTLY think people in the west are gonna rush out and by a cellphone GPU based hackers toy? Maybe, juuuust maybe, if you would actually give the people what they wanted instead of singing the hacker song while putting out updates that bork your drivers, and just FYI but EVERYONE ELSE has a hardware ABI and have had one for over a decade, might want to wake up and join the current century, then you might not have to pray for a device cheap enough people will take your shit?
I mean how fucking sad when your ONLY hope at this point is that China can crank out something so damned cheap that Windows won't fit. Oh BTW, just to REALLY ruin your day, but you know Windows 7 HP? Yeah its actually below free. you see they put this stuff called 'trialware" on the PC and the money they make from it actually is more than the cost of the OS. So unless you are gonna pay $20 to everyone to take your OS? you're only shot if you refuse to listen to your potential customers is to find shit with specs so damned crappy nothing else will run. Such lofty goals you got there Sparky, lofty goals!
As for the R-Pi? The only truly amazing thing IMHO is they are using a GPU as the main processor. look up the specs on that BCM and they make it clear its an HD decoder chip, no different from those HD mini PCIe cards you can put in a shitty low end Atom netbook to take a load off the craptastic CPU. I do find it amazing that someone would take a GPU and use it for a CPU, i've always wondered if one could do that. I bet the code is gonna have to be optimized up the butt to run worth a shit on such a highly specialized chip though.
But done right it could be a VIC20 or C64 for the third world, the only question is...will they care? they seem to be skipping a large part of our history, bypassing dialup and BBS and heading straight to low end smartphones and cellular networks. I have to question if this will even find a market in the third world when both India and China are racing each other to make the cheapest smartphone. I mean why bother with a blinking cursor when they can have Android loaded onto a nice pretty screen?
But I have to agree with the guy that couldn't find it that the new design is seriously dumbshit. Usability 101: if your average grandma can't even figure the shit out without a manual? You got a problem. its a fricking browser, not the backend of a DB, it should be simple and intuitive, like FF WAS for years. I will give them credit for one thing though, they did help me move my users over to Comodo Dragon. When all the buttons and the classic file/edit/view disappeared my users went "WTF?" and when i told them they better get used to pretty constant changes and updates from FF they were like "Surely YOU know something better right?" So thanks FF devs, you're the Vista of browsers!
As for TFA? Frankly I don't blame them for not making it default as it makes them money, all that data lets them better target ads which actually work on the little old lady crowd I was surprised to find out. Me personally the closest I've ever come to buying something because of an ad is Amazon with their little 'people that looked at X also bought Y" bit or steam with their "Hey just FYI but we got a sale on", but the LOLs actually respond to those targeted ads and shop their little butts off. So as long as their is some way for us geeks and our families to turn it off its okay by me, more options in this case better than none.
Which just shows how completely worthless judging a company by stock price is, as its a popularity contest, nothing more. look at the chart during the release of XP it goes DOWN even though MSFT was selling copies hand over fist! I bet if you look at the same period for Apple even though they weren't moving even 1/500th of the product that MSFT was during the same period (remember we are talking pre iPhone and iTouch here) you'll see it climb like crazy!
All the stock prices prove anymore is that day traders are sheep and care more about "buzz" than common sense. Look at the IPOs before the dotbomb collapse for proof of that, you had stocks going nuts for companies that had never made a cent!
As for TFA Ballmer is an idiot with a serious Apple fetish, nuff said. Since he has taken over with the exception of Win 7 (which was saved by bringing in the office guys while Ballmer was busy playing mobile suckage) his "strategy" has been staring in the windows at Cupertino and going "Me too! Ohhh me too!" and putting out one dumbass idea after another. Zune, Kin, killing playsforsure for Zune market, rushing the X360 out with a fatal flaw trying to beat Sony, rushing out Vista with every beta tester screaming about the horrible bugs, it was just one fuckup after another. Now you have Windows 8, or as one of my customers put it "That's just stupid, why would I want a cell phone on my desktop?".
So frankly I don't blame current stockholders for being pissed, Ballmer is a PHB that frankly wouldn't have gotten that job if he wasn't bill's sidekick.
Sure in the olden days, when 8-tracks were plentiful and dinosaurs roamed the earth as my boys say, but have you tried in the past 20 years or so? its bloody easy! that have these things called "USB turntables" that automatically cut the tracks up and everything, and before that i remember seeing a few serial units (they were high though). But if anybody still has LPs they REALLY ought to convert to FLAC as frankly the LP versions kick the shit out of those horribly mixed CDs. You listen to an LP of Hendrix or Joplin then listen to the CD its like night and day.
As for TFA frankly the RIAA needs to DIAF. Thanks to their treasonous bribery we ALREADY have the most insane fucked up copyright system in history, a system where artists have been dead longer than many have been alive yet their works are STILL copyright protected! If we would have stuck to the original terms that were laid down you could have Hendrix and the Beatles, hear artist making cool chop ups of the Stones and Buddy Holly, we would have a MUCH richer music catalog than we do now. But as long as bribery is allowed and encouraged in our corrupted ruined system things simply won't get better and our history will be locked behind paywalls.
Sadly even boycotts and protests are no longer usable as we have seen with the record corps making record profits while trotting out PPTs that say they should have made doubleplus uber profits they shall simply use ANY dip in profits or even failure to meet the projections some quant has cooked up as "proof" they "deserve' more laws and worse draconian measure. hell cause them to dip two quarters in a row i'm sure they'll just get themselves declared "too big to fail' and take the money directly from your pockets!
yeah no shit. I knew they had passed sanity about 3 exits back when I heard about their "sea kittens" campaign. I swear these crazies want everyone in the world to call fish "sea kittens" because they think 10,000 years of people eating fish can be changed by calling them kittens! I swear to God I'm not making this stuff up, look it up for yourself, the website they made for it is hilarious!