Because unlike you who thinks the user should just go get that CS degree or reading "bash made easy" in the bathtub I actually care about if the machines works OUTSIDE the shop? You may think handing a machine that is gonna shit itself when the next 6 month deathmarch rolls around is just peachy keen but that doesn't cut it for me.
As for Ubuntu it seems to me you wish to use a combo of use distro X and works for me is that correct? Please in the future when spouting off excuses use TM repo so that it will be easier to see which of the stock phrases are being used. you'll find there are roughly a dozen used constantly, such as the two above along with "Ur a shill!" and "use esoteric workarounds" which is ALWAYS popular.
To answer your first meme, use distro X, I've tried the "is it safe?' test, which btw is less than HALF the time you get for Windows when it comes to support so Linux is already being given a handicap and fails anyway, i've tried Ubuntu, PCLOS, Mepis, Fedora, and one or two others I can't think of off the top of my head. Pretty much anything that has been labeled as user friendly I've tried, so which magical version did you have in mind for use distro X? As for "works for me"? Again try the is it safe test if you dare. That is giving Linux less than half the average MSFT support cycle and it STILL falls down and goes BOOM!
I've said it before and I'll say it again, and hate it ALL you want but its true, in its current form Linux IS Win98 no more and no less. Which would be fine in 1999, but this is about to be 2012. think about it, what was Win98? It was a CLI OS with a GUI shell, while the GUI worked for basic tasks if anything went wrong you had to go CLI and you could bypass the GUI completely as it was a second class citizen while the OS couldn't function without CLI as it was a vital subsystem. What is Linux? It is a CLI OS with a GUI shell, while the GUI works for basic tasks if anything goes wrong you have to go CLI and you can bypass the GUI completely as it is a second class citizen while the OS can't function without CLI as it is a vital subsystem. Does that sound familiar?
Don't blame me because your OS can't even provide three years of support without crapping itself, I didn't invent the thing. And where is your response to Dell? You got the balls to say one of the largest OEMs on the planet is "doin it wrong" too? Or is the koolaid THAT powerful that you can't even address it?
You'll probably laugh for me saying this as its not a brand people think of, but you want good solid boards you really ought to look at the ECS business class. Nothing crazy, no triple crossfire or factory OCing or anything, just really good built boards with solid caps that are stable as hell and take frankly insane levels of punishment.
I was so impressed by the ones I built for construction trailers (where the funk is beyond belief) I based my own machine around a socket AM3 ECS board instead of my usual Gigabyte and couldn't be happier. 4 RAM slots let me have up to 16Gb of DDR 2 (I think my 8Gb is plenty enough though) and even though it had been out for nearly a year when the thubans came out they updated the BIOS to support the 95w 6 cores. Just a damned good business board at really cheap prices.
as for so much of the list being Intel that doesn't surprise me, frankly they haven't been the most FOSS friendly since they put out that GPU based on PowerVR which had craptastic Linux support. Between that and their crippling of CPUs like killing features on lower end chips or artificially limiting the amount of RAM you can have with an Atom chip they just aren't very user friendly right now. At least with the AMD chips I don't have to play "guess what works?" as all the features are on ALL the CPUs, even the lowest Sempron chips, and they even support ECC RAM if that is what floats your boat.
Oh its more than just a a corrupt culture and I'm sure i'll get hate for repeating it but Charles explained it this way and i think he was right after seeing it with my own eyes. He said "You got the black folks and you got the niggers and sadly we just got too damned many niggers". He said you can tell the difference because black folks value education and hard work, want their kids to succeed in things other than playing ball or music, and they try to avoid being around the niggers just as the blacks from Kenya you described.
Then you have what he called the niggers that revel in stupidity, treat getting out of jail like its a cause for celebration like they graduated from college (we were actually hired to play more than one party that turned out was a "coming home" party) while treating anybody that tried to better themselves as an oreo or "house nigger", while singing songs like "Its' free, swipe your EBT!" (Its on Youtube, look it up, you won't believe that shit) and doing everything they can to get out of any kind of legitimate work. Oh and they play the race card at the drop of a hat, which REALLY pisses off the black folks.
I'd say it really has split the community, with the black folks doing everything they can to disassociate themselves from the "Thug life!" ers as I call them, while the thug lifers blame everything on whitey and expect a position not a job. I'd say it certainly isn't be helped by the Rev Als of this world who play on the victim mentality instead of telling the community to work hard and support education. As my friend Dru put it "I didn't get to where I am, running over a dozen locations as regional manager by sitting on my ass and blaming white folks for my troubles, i got here by busting my ass and working my way up. Now most of the discrimination I see is because some nigger came along and rented from the landlord I want to rent from and tore shit up and acted like a damned fool and now the landlord is afraid to rent to me, afraid i'm like them."
Yeah and more than 10% of their farmland if poisoned with heavy metals! Yay free market! That invisible hand really works huh?
I just love how many crazies out there say "We should be competing with China, get rid of the regs!" while kinda glossing over the fact that a Chinese person living in the city will ingest more toxins in a week than we do in a year.
Actually I can explain those. For the first you have to remember all of the current programs are written for what we shall call for the sake of discussion "CC" for classic CPU, which is a large FP and integer unit and no real GPU to speak of. AMD simply hasn't had the time to write drivers that can "fool' previous CC programs into shuttling the FP work to the GPU yet. I can tell you that on netbooks where you are more likely to be running code that can benefit from the GPU Brazos is pretty damned sweet.
For the second remember they only have HALF the chip completed, the CPU half. the GPU half is still VLIW when the BD chip is really designed for vector. Personally I agree completely about thuban, i'm hoping after the holiday to get the thuban for myself as a BDay prezzie. But AMD had to push something out the door for TWO reasons, one they needed the OEMs to get up to speed on the new socket, two because of Intel and the tick tock of sandy/Ivy bridge putting pressure. personally i'd have went for thuban and tried for 95w 8 cores and 125w 12 cores and pushed those instead of BD while killing athlon mobile for Brazos duals and quads on the low end and Phenom II quads on the midrange.
but I agree on thuban, even though I have a deneb quad those two extra cores makes me drool. do I need it? Fuck no but I WANTS IT precious, I wants it!
But to answer you final remark on why they haven't stuffed more BD cores? its the age old AMD problem of heat. without the GPU taking the load from the smaller FP the FP module is having to pump like hell and that cranks up the heat. look at the heat rating on the 8 core BD, it says 125w but frankly I wouldn't be surprised if its as high as 140w like the Phenom I. It always seems to take a generation for AMD to get the bugs out, just as with Phenom I VS Phenom II (although I'm still selling Phenom I chips and folks are happy with cheap triples and quads) so they really are gonna have to tighten the software side, work on the heat issue, and finally get the vector units out the door.
My advice? skip BD and probably piledriver as well. Stick with thuban and by the time your 6 core is long in the tooth they'll have it licked and you'll be able to get a 24 module chip that acts like a 48 CPU unit. On the mobile side Athlon II is okay but if you care about battery life I'd go with Brazos, having a netbook that holds 8Gb of RAM compared to 2Gb artificial limitation of atom paired with a good GPU makes for a sweet netbook with killer battery life. That said my oldest went for the Phenom II Mobile triple laptop and loves the hell out of it, it makes a damned good desktop replacement.
Oh please! Its a shock word, how about you look at how many times the word faggot or cock smoker is used while you're at it? The ONLY thing it proves is Gabe is right and his theory is sound, that's it.
Sadly no and here is why: Its the culture, not the lack of tech. I know this because for more than half a decade i played in an all black band (The singer Charles used to diffuse the situation at the clubs by saying "This is our token white boy, gotta support affirmative action ya know") so I got to go to many a place where white folks simply weren't welcome and it didn't take long until i was just treated like another guy.
What I saw frankly broke my heart, families that would cheer if they played sports or music while seriously treating like shit anybody that tried to get an education or really did anything "geeky". you'd hear shit like Oreo and Uncle Tom and a hell of a lot of 'you think you are better than me?' bullshit. many in the community from what I saw looked upon someone more educated as someone looking down upon them and got downright hostile over it.
While I also saw that to some degree with the poor whites nothing like the scale i saw it in the black communities and we played all over the south and often were invited into their homes and to their parties afterwards so I got to see it up close all over the place. Being a band we got invited to everybody's parties, reunions, you name it, and it really didn't take long at all before everyone just forgot I was there.
Why someone would do such a thing i'll never understand. my oldest is going to premed now and if brains were a gun he'd BFG my ass while if I was lucky I'd be packing an AK. hell I'm glad he is smarter than me and has the skills to go to medical school, as I WANT him to go farther than I did. But from what I saw many black folks look upon it as a direct insult to their intelligence and will come down hard on those not going into music or athletics.
Uhhh...then how do you explain the stretching of the commerce clause beyond all realms of logic or sanity? When they said interstate commerce was affected by a guy growing his own feed for his own animals (can't remember the case offhand, someone here does i'm sure) how could you call that anything BUT creating law out of thin air? The commerce clause says interstate commerce, not inter field.
Actually I read somewhere that by having only one FP between two modules they actually cut down the count by nearly 40% and the design makes sense if the ultimate goal is to have the GPU do most of the more complex FP and just have a very simple FP in the CPU proper. it'll just take time for them to get switched from VLIW to vector on their GPUs and incorporate them into the CPUs.
That is why i thought the CEO was smart to cut down bulldozer production to crank up mobile chips like Brazos, as they've been selling completely out of the Brazos APUs and where heat and battery life is more important than raw horse Brazos is a good value.
I know i love my EEE brazos netbook to death, get 6 hours watching HD videos and closer to 7 surfing, and if I use Expressgate instead of Windows (which I do when i'm only surfing) it seems to add another hour and a half, so closer to 9 hours. Gotta love that kind of battery life in a dual core netbook that can play L4D and other games.
Uhhh...dude? When my PC is way above system reqs (which BTW if one would support your argument then they would have to accept that THERE ARE NO GAMES FOR 64BIT OS since I have yet to see 64 bit on a single box) there is NO damned reason why it shouldn't 'just work" except for their code being unsuitable for purpose. I have also found their demos to be absolutely worthless as they will bust their ass to make sure the demo code works well while the rest of the game runs like absolute ass. for examples Max Payne, Vamp:Bloodlines (which was such shit that I couldn't play the game until a fan made patch came out a year and a half later, by which time the game was in the $10 bin instead of the $50 i paid) Titan Quest (where I actually had a developer tell me i must have pirated the demo, WTF?) hell I could go on all day.
It does not change the fact that software is the ONLY item that I'm aware of where you can sell a completely broken product and get to keep the money. All they have to do is getting working on ONE config and then shove it out the door. can you imagine if they sold cars that would only run on a particular brand of gas that wasn't sold in your area and once you found this out got told "tough shit we gots your money now bitch!".
I TOLD that fucker I needed ketchup for my fries! Dammit did he listen? Oh HELL NO, he goes out and gets mustard. he thinks he can just punk me like that? he thinks I'm a fucking joke? Yeah who is laughing now mustard boy, huh?I hope you like that French's shit IN HELL!!
The sad part is Joe and Sally average hasn't got a fricking clue about version numbers and have been bailing on FF because they don't like the lousy performance and crappy UI. I mean its bad when my nephew pops onto steam the other night and says "Help my PC is running REALLY slow!" and I say "Close Firefox, you''ve probably had it running more than a few hours' and sure enough he pops back on "Wow! Thanks!"
I have yet to have one of my customers say they like the new UI, in fact most want me to tell them how to get the old UI back, and if they use it constantly it seems to drag the whole OS down as the day wears on. I've seen this in XP, in Vista, and in win 7, I've seen this in customers that have plenty of extensions and some that have no extensions at all, its just a mess.
And before anybody starts trotting out benches i'd point out that the Geforce FX series originally showed up nicely on benches too, it just meant they were coding for the bench which isn't real life. I don't know if it is Gecko, something got screwy when they changed the UI, the flash container or what but when my customers go to the sites they always go to, FB to play their games, yahoo mail, Amazon, Google News, as the day wears on FF seems to drag the system down. they close it and suddenly the machine jumps back to life. again I've seen this on a wide variety of systems, on AMD and Intel, dual and quad, mobile and desktop.
So I wish they'd just get off the crazy number jumping and go back to trying to make the best damned browser instead of trying to ape chrome. its gotten bad enough I've just about switched all my customers over to Comodo dragon just so they'll quit griping about how slow everything is. When they switch it is like "Wow! that made a BIG difference, thanks!".
and this isn't some chome yay FF boo thing. I still have FF installed on my quad and my nettop and fire it up with each release hoping it'll get better, hoping it'll go back to being fast and nimble, but it just ain't been happening. While I've grown used to the chrome style interface of Dragon that doesn't keep me from missing the old FF UI nor even trying alternate builds like Pale Moon hoping to get my old FF back. sadly it reminds me of how OS/2 bragged "a better Windows than Windows" and instead everybody just went with windows. if i wanted Chrome I'd just use Chrome FF devs, I want FF back!
Actually there are sometimes very good reasons for downloading copyrighted material. For example I have downloaded cracked versions of several games that i have bought and paid for, why? because when I switched to a 64 bit OS the fucked up DRM would no longer function and in fact IME can seriously damage the OS because some of the installers will try to jam 32bit hooks into a 64bit kernel and really make a mess. oh and their uninstaller DOES NOT WORK so once its jammed in there you are SOL. I have also found company supplied system requirements and demos are often completely full of shit, as i've bought games where I was WAY below system reqs and the demo played fine but the game simply wouldn't run at all on my system. of course there is no taking it back once opened, so there goes my money right down the shitter.
So until the game companies start removing their DRM after a year or whenever they stop supporting the game, whichever comes first, and I'm allowed to take back products that are defective frankly they can kiss my ass. If they were smart they'd embrace sites like Steam and GOG where my games "just work" but even that they are trying to fuck up by adding DRM on top of Steam, such as the shitastic GFWL bullshit I got stuck with when i bought Bioshock II. The pirate version? No jumping through GFWL constant bullshit just to play the game.
So I have to agree with Gabe from Valve when he said something along the lines of "piracy means you are offering an inferior product". Either your price is too high, the DRM too shitty, or too many hoops just to play (I'm looking at YOU Bioshock II) and you are simply not making your product as useful for the customer as the pirated version.
Well I read it as 'MSFT realizes the standards don't mean shit to ODMs and worked around it" while the Linux guys try to stick to the standards and it bit them in the ass. Building and repairing PCs 6 days a week frankly this does NOT surprise me because if you've looked at the BIOS some of these ODMs put out frankly shoddy shit is the ONLY word to describe it!
I had to tell a customer just last week he was either gonna have to have me order an EXACTLY identical stick for his desktop or simply do without a stick because the POS BIOS on the eMachines would not allow you to run dual sticks unless they were a perfect match! all because some ODM decided that having a simple switch in BIOS for single or dual mode was just too much bother. I've also run into OEMs that put dual core HSFs on quads, fans so shitty I'm surprised they run at all, PSUs that are so close to the absolute max limit on the machine that literally a single fan or DVD burner would have overloaded the thing, it seems like if it can save them 2c and it'll pass POST that is all they give a shit about.
I'm all for having low prices but when the design decisions actually shorten the life of the machine and risk all kinds of errors and hassles for the user that's where i draw the line. Some of the low end Dells and eMachines are so badly built frankly i'm amazed they make it to the end of warranty, talk about junk!
Bulldozer looks to be like Phenom I, where they try something new and then need to work the bugs out before getting the decent chip. The smart thing is they are focused more on the mobile ATM and have slowed production on the desktop because the Phenom II still has some life left in the low to mid range along with Athlon II on the desktop but those Brazos APUs give a better bang per watt than the mobile Athlons.
But if you look at their roadmap Bulldozer is basically a testbed for their next big jump which if they can crank it out like they do the Brazos chips ought to be pretty sweet. With bulldozer you have two integers but only one FP between them and by doing it this way you seriously cut power while supposedly being able to get around 80% of what you'd get in a dual core. it works pretty good on Brazos but they haven't gotten it down well enough to ramp the clocks which they need for Bulldozer.
But the sweet thing which ought to give them a hell of a nice boost and why the two integer but one FP design makes sense and fits in with TFA on different designs is the new GPU design coming down the pipe from ATI which will be in the future APUs. These new GPU/APU units will switch from VLIW to vector which should give roughly half of native FP speed (currently GPUs are less than 1/4th as fast as CPUs when it comes to double precision FP last I checked) and close to native on second gen with native being the ultimate goal.
What makes this sweet is with the amount of stream processors they'll be able to squeeze in there you'll have basically a super FP so that when you aren't doing graphics work the GPU will stay busy as a GP/GPU. They'll be able to accelerate more and more programs using this super FP than they have with current tech which should again give it a pretty nice kick in the pants.
All I know is if they can keep it close to Brazos in terms of price and power usage i'm all for it. my EEE gives me 40% more battery life than my Athlon II based Wind did while staying cool and playing HD videos smooth as butter. If they can keep the heat down like they have with Brazos it ought to be a pretty damned sweet chip, they just need to work out the kinks with Bulldozer so they'll be able to kick up the clocks on the desktop version.
Uhh you SEEM to know what you are talking about but unless i'm mistaken there is a flaw in your logic. you just said that the patch add the heuristics that Windows uses to detect ASPM which if they are having to use heuristics to detect the thing how EXACTLY is the OEM "helping" Windows? By making their crap crappy so heuristics works?
It sounds more like the race to the bottom has caused some low end ODMs to cut corners where they shouldn't have been cut. I've found that contrary to popular belief this DOES bite Windows in the ass too, as I found when upgrading some machines from XP to Vista during the whole "We install XP and give you the Vista disc" phase that some OEMs had the BIOS set to an insanely fast boot sequence that wouldn't completely initialize before beginning the handoff to the OS. With XP it seemed to tolerate it just fine, but Vista would just "forget" hardware like BT was there. I had to go in and tweak the BIOS to give a few more seconds time before handoff to make Vista function on those machines.
Actually while I never supported objectivism Rand accepting services which she was forced to pay for earlier in her career by the government really doesn't go against her philosophy any.
if you want to nail Rand for something i think her "Yay rape!" scenes in her books would be a better place to start friend. But her taking the service she wasn't given a choice to opt out of just shows how it fits in her philosophy as forced dependence upon the government.
But it IS Blanche it is because they are robbing YOU by printing it by making the money in YOUR pocket worth less every second!
And again the shell game fucks the American taxpayer, who works for money that is worth less every single day so Goldman and their friends can have the perfect scam, a classic "heads i win, tails you lose" where all profits are private, all risks PUBLIC.
Would you like some links to back it up friend? i just LOOOVE how the FOSSies mod down anyone who isn't sucking the Koolaid, tell me friend, is it cherry? Does it smell like the bullshit you've been spewing?
Riddle me this smart guy, do you HONESTLY think I can get BETTER results than one of the biggest OEMs on the entire planet, who has to run their own repos even though we are talking a teeny tiny subset of hardware? Oh right because if they don't Linux shits itself and dies if you use the default repos!
If you would like some more just ask, i can wallpaper it with retailers, OEMs, users, all who have found out that my "is it safe?" test, which BTW I bet my last dollar you do NOT have the balls to try yourself, is 100% accurate. You upgrade Linux and shits breaks like its 1995, which funny you should bring up that date because that is about where Linux seems to be at now, with a GUI shell over a CLI OS just like...Windows 95!
So please don 't be afraid to ask, I'll be happy to give you so many links of Linux fails it'll take you a week to sort them all. But instead you'll hide your head under your tux blankie and say 'Leave poor Tux alone, you must be a M$ Ninja you dirty poo poo head!".
But don't blame me because your shit be stankin', try it yourself if you dare, try the "is it safe" test with the distro of your choice and watch, Linux fall down and go BOOM!
Personally I'd say the bigger problem is HTML V5 isn't up to snuff. In every test I've run it sucks up more resources than flash, hits the CPU harder than flash, and from the looks of things Apple if gonna make H.264 be the "standard" so it'll be more proprietary than flash. Finally there is the question of protected content and since MSFT and Apple both are part of MPEG-LA and both allow kernel level DRM I frankly wouldn't be surprised if to please the MPAA overlords they add some seriously nasty DRM.
Sucks more resources, hits the CPU harder, more proprietary, and possibly (more like probably, I can't see the MPAA allowing their content unencrypted, which is why we had protected flash) nastier DRM. Are we sure that this isn't "progress" as specified by Dilbert's PHB?
Not to mention with just a teeny tiny bit of planning one can extend that 3+ years quite a bit. My main machine started out as an Athlon X2 with 400Gb HDD, 2gb of RAM and 3200 IGP, now it is a Phenom X4 with 3Tb of HDD, 8Gb of RAM, and an HD4850. Oh and after the holidays I may just go ahead and go up to X6 while i can get one cheap.
In its original config I would have gotten 2, maybe 3 years, now I'm over 4 and can easily see this machine lasting me until Win 7 gets EOL in 2020 barring some incredible killer app that requires all new hardware to run. If I would have bought prebuilt I'd be on my second PC and frankly wouldn't have as nice a specs without getting gouged, but because i simply waited until each component was on sale (for example the HD4850 cost me $45 and the 3Tb cost me just $85, the RAM was $45 for 4 2Gb sticks) I got a much nicer machine for a much cheaper price AND I made more than I paid for the original parts when I sold them.
So by just a little planning and looking ahead one can get quite a lot of bang for very little buck and have better quality parts throughout as well. I've seen many an OEM die because of shitty PSUs, crap fans, bad caps, lousy boards that killed the CPU when they croaked, etc. Compare that to the ones I've built where they just get passed down from person to person. Hell my first "gamer" box, a Pentium 100Mhz, is currently running as a DOS 3 C&C controller for this funky old computerized lathe at a lumber mill. The thing works 5 days a week, happily purring along. while I can't say every box i built lived THAT long, as i got bit by the bad caps in 03 like everybody else, most have far outlived the standard OEM.
I'm sorry but if you can't have a PC go from a pile of parts to POST in under an hour? Uhhh...you suck. Its not like you are being asked to stamp the sheet metal here folks, parts go in box, cables go in box, plug in power, stick in Windows disc, done. If you use WSUS Offline for the updates and Ninite for the third party software you are talking zippola on the OS install too.
As for what is keeping me on windows? i'll get hate for saying this but until a truly user friendly distro comes out that I can give to my customers i simply have no use for Linux. And before anyone trots out the usual suspects I've already tried them and not a single one passed my "is it safe?' test, go ahead, try it yourself. since Windows gets on average 7 years i cut Linux a break off the bat and only use a 3 year old distro CD, simulating what my customer would go through if they bought a Linux PC from me and tried to keep it current, standard best practices, nothing fancy. I install the OS, make sure ALL the hardware is working, then let it update/upgrade to current, what happens? things break, a LOT of things break. Sound or video gets flaky, maybe the network gets borked, settings in programs don't seem to stick or don't stick past reboot, its always a flaky mess.
I mean when i'm talking to a long time Linux server admin and desktop user about my problem and they confide in me "As soon as I'm done backing up I'm switching to BSD and if that isn't stable on the desktop I'm quitting" and most likely going to Mac? There is trouble in paradise folks. Funny how it used to be "Oh you have to wipe Windows and start over, while Linux is safe!" has turned into the complete opposite. I did a ton of in place upgrades from Vista to 7 for folks that didn't want to lose their settings, that is 5 years with another 8 years to go for 7, and it just worked. I've tried Ubuntu, PCLOS, Mepis, just about every supposedly "user friendly" distro I can find and not one has passed my "is it safe?" test.
I sell to and support normal folks, so telling them to play find the fix or spend a couple of days reading man pages and dealing with CLI gobbledygook is right out. I also can't plan my entire business around the LTS releases so if the bog standard release won't cut it then its no good. I'm gonna try Linux Mint and FreeBSD over the turkey week holiday and give them my "is it safe?" test if I can find the releases from 3 years ago. If they pass? yippee skippy i can have FOSS machines next to the Windows ones. if not? I'm just gonna have to give up for a couple of years and scour the earth for someone that will give me a good deal on Starter, which is actually a nice OS, especially for older machines.
Someone cue up the Ayn Rand criminal quote, because it seems like a perfect use for it. After all since they have been privatizing the penal system those at the top can make good money on all those "criminals".
Kinda a shame though, once upon a time this was a decent country, now it is just some rich pigs at the top figuring out every scam they can to fuck everyone else.
Personally I predict when Europe collapses which will be the final nail in our coffin thanks to Goldman Sachs and friends quietly shifting all their Greek and other toxic debt onto the Fed so that when it goes they'll have already cashed out and left us with another 10 trillion or so in debt, then we'll get to have our very own Arab spring.
But as the wise Thomas Jefferson said "But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security."
I'd say the constant march towards a police state by our officials and bumraping by those at the top makes the current situation fit that description pretty well, don't you?
Because Gabe strikes me as the type of guy you could go get a beer with while the CxOs at EA strike me as the kind that would skip out while you were taking a piss just to stick you with the tab.
Call me weird but attitude and how you treat those around you counts for something with me and old Gabe has always seemed like a pretty straight shooter. Plus when Steam actually has a sale its a SALE, with EA it has always been "hey we're giving you a dollar off, its a whole dollar!". Last Steam sale I picked up the FEAR 1&2 series, 5 games for $6.79. Now be honest can you EVER picture EA allowing even ONE game much less FIVE to be sold for less than $7?
I'm just glad I got my boys on Steam as I fricking HATED dealing with Xmas shopping for them,as everything they wanted always seemed to be back ordered. Now they are counting down to the Steam sale to see how many games they can score. Go Steam!
Riiight, because after Lego gave up control some douchebag wouldn't be making giant Lego Goatse statues and 40 foot Lego dicks to go into it.
This isn't just some original IP friend, lego has built that brand up for decades as this ultra kid friendly imagination toy. And if it is one thing the Internet should have taught everyone by now its that there is NEVER a shortage of douchebags.
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Because unlike you who thinks the user should just go get that CS degree or reading "bash made easy" in the bathtub I actually care about if the machines works OUTSIDE the shop? You may think handing a machine that is gonna shit itself when the next 6 month deathmarch rolls around is just peachy keen but that doesn't cut it for me.
As for Ubuntu it seems to me you wish to use a combo of use distro X and works for me is that correct? Please in the future when spouting off excuses use TM repo so that it will be easier to see which of the stock phrases are being used. you'll find there are roughly a dozen used constantly, such as the two above along with "Ur a shill!" and "use esoteric workarounds" which is ALWAYS popular.
To answer your first meme, use distro X, I've tried the "is it safe?' test, which btw is less than HALF the time you get for Windows when it comes to support so Linux is already being given a handicap and fails anyway, i've tried Ubuntu, PCLOS, Mepis, Fedora, and one or two others I can't think of off the top of my head. Pretty much anything that has been labeled as user friendly I've tried, so which magical version did you have in mind for use distro X? As for "works for me"? Again try the is it safe test if you dare. That is giving Linux less than half the average MSFT support cycle and it STILL falls down and goes BOOM!
I've said it before and I'll say it again, and hate it ALL you want but its true, in its current form Linux IS Win98 no more and no less. Which would be fine in 1999, but this is about to be 2012. think about it, what was Win98? It was a CLI OS with a GUI shell, while the GUI worked for basic tasks if anything went wrong you had to go CLI and you could bypass the GUI completely as it was a second class citizen while the OS couldn't function without CLI as it was a vital subsystem. What is Linux? It is a CLI OS with a GUI shell, while the GUI works for basic tasks if anything goes wrong you have to go CLI and you can bypass the GUI completely as it is a second class citizen while the OS can't function without CLI as it is a vital subsystem. Does that sound familiar?
Don't blame me because your OS can't even provide three years of support without crapping itself, I didn't invent the thing. And where is your response to Dell? You got the balls to say one of the largest OEMs on the planet is "doin it wrong" too? Or is the koolaid THAT powerful that you can't even address it?
You'll probably laugh for me saying this as its not a brand people think of, but you want good solid boards you really ought to look at the ECS business class. Nothing crazy, no triple crossfire or factory OCing or anything, just really good built boards with solid caps that are stable as hell and take frankly insane levels of punishment.
I was so impressed by the ones I built for construction trailers (where the funk is beyond belief) I based my own machine around a socket AM3 ECS board instead of my usual Gigabyte and couldn't be happier. 4 RAM slots let me have up to 16Gb of DDR 2 (I think my 8Gb is plenty enough though) and even though it had been out for nearly a year when the thubans came out they updated the BIOS to support the 95w 6 cores. Just a damned good business board at really cheap prices.
as for so much of the list being Intel that doesn't surprise me, frankly they haven't been the most FOSS friendly since they put out that GPU based on PowerVR which had craptastic Linux support. Between that and their crippling of CPUs like killing features on lower end chips or artificially limiting the amount of RAM you can have with an Atom chip they just aren't very user friendly right now. At least with the AMD chips I don't have to play "guess what works?" as all the features are on ALL the CPUs, even the lowest Sempron chips, and they even support ECC RAM if that is what floats your boat.
Oh its more than just a a corrupt culture and I'm sure i'll get hate for repeating it but Charles explained it this way and i think he was right after seeing it with my own eyes. He said "You got the black folks and you got the niggers and sadly we just got too damned many niggers". He said you can tell the difference because black folks value education and hard work, want their kids to succeed in things other than playing ball or music, and they try to avoid being around the niggers just as the blacks from Kenya you described.
Then you have what he called the niggers that revel in stupidity, treat getting out of jail like its a cause for celebration like they graduated from college (we were actually hired to play more than one party that turned out was a "coming home" party) while treating anybody that tried to better themselves as an oreo or "house nigger", while singing songs like "Its' free, swipe your EBT!" (Its on Youtube, look it up, you won't believe that shit) and doing everything they can to get out of any kind of legitimate work. Oh and they play the race card at the drop of a hat, which REALLY pisses off the black folks.
I'd say it really has split the community, with the black folks doing everything they can to disassociate themselves from the "Thug life!" ers as I call them, while the thug lifers blame everything on whitey and expect a position not a job. I'd say it certainly isn't be helped by the Rev Als of this world who play on the victim mentality instead of telling the community to work hard and support education. As my friend Dru put it "I didn't get to where I am, running over a dozen locations as regional manager by sitting on my ass and blaming white folks for my troubles, i got here by busting my ass and working my way up. Now most of the discrimination I see is because some nigger came along and rented from the landlord I want to rent from and tore shit up and acted like a damned fool and now the landlord is afraid to rent to me, afraid i'm like them."
Yeah and more than 10% of their farmland if poisoned with heavy metals! Yay free market! That invisible hand really works huh?
I just love how many crazies out there say "We should be competing with China, get rid of the regs!" while kinda glossing over the fact that a Chinese person living in the city will ingest more toxins in a week than we do in a year.
Actually I can explain those. For the first you have to remember all of the current programs are written for what we shall call for the sake of discussion "CC" for classic CPU, which is a large FP and integer unit and no real GPU to speak of. AMD simply hasn't had the time to write drivers that can "fool' previous CC programs into shuttling the FP work to the GPU yet. I can tell you that on netbooks where you are more likely to be running code that can benefit from the GPU Brazos is pretty damned sweet.
For the second remember they only have HALF the chip completed, the CPU half. the GPU half is still VLIW when the BD chip is really designed for vector. Personally I agree completely about thuban, i'm hoping after the holiday to get the thuban for myself as a BDay prezzie. But AMD had to push something out the door for TWO reasons, one they needed the OEMs to get up to speed on the new socket, two because of Intel and the tick tock of sandy/Ivy bridge putting pressure. personally i'd have went for thuban and tried for 95w 8 cores and 125w 12 cores and pushed those instead of BD while killing athlon mobile for Brazos duals and quads on the low end and Phenom II quads on the midrange. but I agree on thuban, even though I have a deneb quad those two extra cores makes me drool. do I need it? Fuck no but I WANTS IT precious, I wants it!
But to answer you final remark on why they haven't stuffed more BD cores? its the age old AMD problem of heat. without the GPU taking the load from the smaller FP the FP module is having to pump like hell and that cranks up the heat. look at the heat rating on the 8 core BD, it says 125w but frankly I wouldn't be surprised if its as high as 140w like the Phenom I. It always seems to take a generation for AMD to get the bugs out, just as with Phenom I VS Phenom II (although I'm still selling Phenom I chips and folks are happy with cheap triples and quads) so they really are gonna have to tighten the software side, work on the heat issue, and finally get the vector units out the door.
My advice? skip BD and probably piledriver as well. Stick with thuban and by the time your 6 core is long in the tooth they'll have it licked and you'll be able to get a 24 module chip that acts like a 48 CPU unit. On the mobile side Athlon II is okay but if you care about battery life I'd go with Brazos, having a netbook that holds 8Gb of RAM compared to 2Gb artificial limitation of atom paired with a good GPU makes for a sweet netbook with killer battery life. That said my oldest went for the Phenom II Mobile triple laptop and loves the hell out of it, it makes a damned good desktop replacement.
Oh please! Its a shock word, how about you look at how many times the word faggot or cock smoker is used while you're at it? The ONLY thing it proves is Gabe is right and his theory is sound, that's it.
Sadly no and here is why: Its the culture, not the lack of tech. I know this because for more than half a decade i played in an all black band (The singer Charles used to diffuse the situation at the clubs by saying "This is our token white boy, gotta support affirmative action ya know") so I got to go to many a place where white folks simply weren't welcome and it didn't take long until i was just treated like another guy.
What I saw frankly broke my heart, families that would cheer if they played sports or music while seriously treating like shit anybody that tried to get an education or really did anything "geeky". you'd hear shit like Oreo and Uncle Tom and a hell of a lot of 'you think you are better than me?' bullshit. many in the community from what I saw looked upon someone more educated as someone looking down upon them and got downright hostile over it.
While I also saw that to some degree with the poor whites nothing like the scale i saw it in the black communities and we played all over the south and often were invited into their homes and to their parties afterwards so I got to see it up close all over the place. Being a band we got invited to everybody's parties, reunions, you name it, and it really didn't take long at all before everyone just forgot I was there.
Why someone would do such a thing i'll never understand. my oldest is going to premed now and if brains were a gun he'd BFG my ass while if I was lucky I'd be packing an AK. hell I'm glad he is smarter than me and has the skills to go to medical school, as I WANT him to go farther than I did. But from what I saw many black folks look upon it as a direct insult to their intelligence and will come down hard on those not going into music or athletics.
Uhhh...then how do you explain the stretching of the commerce clause beyond all realms of logic or sanity? When they said interstate commerce was affected by a guy growing his own feed for his own animals (can't remember the case offhand, someone here does i'm sure) how could you call that anything BUT creating law out of thin air? The commerce clause says interstate commerce, not inter field.
Actually I read somewhere that by having only one FP between two modules they actually cut down the count by nearly 40% and the design makes sense if the ultimate goal is to have the GPU do most of the more complex FP and just have a very simple FP in the CPU proper. it'll just take time for them to get switched from VLIW to vector on their GPUs and incorporate them into the CPUs.
That is why i thought the CEO was smart to cut down bulldozer production to crank up mobile chips like Brazos, as they've been selling completely out of the Brazos APUs and where heat and battery life is more important than raw horse Brazos is a good value.
I know i love my EEE brazos netbook to death, get 6 hours watching HD videos and closer to 7 surfing, and if I use Expressgate instead of Windows (which I do when i'm only surfing) it seems to add another hour and a half, so closer to 9 hours. Gotta love that kind of battery life in a dual core netbook that can play L4D and other games.
Uhhh...dude? When my PC is way above system reqs (which BTW if one would support your argument then they would have to accept that THERE ARE NO GAMES FOR 64BIT OS since I have yet to see 64 bit on a single box) there is NO damned reason why it shouldn't 'just work" except for their code being unsuitable for purpose. I have also found their demos to be absolutely worthless as they will bust their ass to make sure the demo code works well while the rest of the game runs like absolute ass. for examples Max Payne, Vamp:Bloodlines (which was such shit that I couldn't play the game until a fan made patch came out a year and a half later, by which time the game was in the $10 bin instead of the $50 i paid) Titan Quest (where I actually had a developer tell me i must have pirated the demo, WTF?) hell I could go on all day.
It does not change the fact that software is the ONLY item that I'm aware of where you can sell a completely broken product and get to keep the money. All they have to do is getting working on ONE config and then shove it out the door. can you imagine if they sold cars that would only run on a particular brand of gas that wasn't sold in your area and once you found this out got told "tough shit we gots your money now bitch!".
I TOLD that fucker I needed ketchup for my fries! Dammit did he listen? Oh HELL NO, he goes out and gets mustard. he thinks he can just punk me like that? he thinks I'm a fucking joke? Yeah who is laughing now mustard boy, huh?I hope you like that French's shit IN HELL!!
The sad part is Joe and Sally average hasn't got a fricking clue about version numbers and have been bailing on FF because they don't like the lousy performance and crappy UI. I mean its bad when my nephew pops onto steam the other night and says "Help my PC is running REALLY slow!" and I say "Close Firefox, you''ve probably had it running more than a few hours' and sure enough he pops back on "Wow! Thanks!"
I have yet to have one of my customers say they like the new UI, in fact most want me to tell them how to get the old UI back, and if they use it constantly it seems to drag the whole OS down as the day wears on. I've seen this in XP, in Vista, and in win 7, I've seen this in customers that have plenty of extensions and some that have no extensions at all, its just a mess.
And before anybody starts trotting out benches i'd point out that the Geforce FX series originally showed up nicely on benches too, it just meant they were coding for the bench which isn't real life. I don't know if it is Gecko, something got screwy when they changed the UI, the flash container or what but when my customers go to the sites they always go to, FB to play their games, yahoo mail, Amazon, Google News, as the day wears on FF seems to drag the system down. they close it and suddenly the machine jumps back to life. again I've seen this on a wide variety of systems, on AMD and Intel, dual and quad, mobile and desktop.
So I wish they'd just get off the crazy number jumping and go back to trying to make the best damned browser instead of trying to ape chrome. its gotten bad enough I've just about switched all my customers over to Comodo dragon just so they'll quit griping about how slow everything is. When they switch it is like "Wow! that made a BIG difference, thanks!".
and this isn't some chome yay FF boo thing. I still have FF installed on my quad and my nettop and fire it up with each release hoping it'll get better, hoping it'll go back to being fast and nimble, but it just ain't been happening. While I've grown used to the chrome style interface of Dragon that doesn't keep me from missing the old FF UI nor even trying alternate builds like Pale Moon hoping to get my old FF back. sadly it reminds me of how OS/2 bragged "a better Windows than Windows" and instead everybody just went with windows. if i wanted Chrome I'd just use Chrome FF devs, I want FF back!
Actually there are sometimes very good reasons for downloading copyrighted material. For example I have downloaded cracked versions of several games that i have bought and paid for, why? because when I switched to a 64 bit OS the fucked up DRM would no longer function and in fact IME can seriously damage the OS because some of the installers will try to jam 32bit hooks into a 64bit kernel and really make a mess. oh and their uninstaller DOES NOT WORK so once its jammed in there you are SOL. I have also found company supplied system requirements and demos are often completely full of shit, as i've bought games where I was WAY below system reqs and the demo played fine but the game simply wouldn't run at all on my system. of course there is no taking it back once opened, so there goes my money right down the shitter.
So until the game companies start removing their DRM after a year or whenever they stop supporting the game, whichever comes first, and I'm allowed to take back products that are defective frankly they can kiss my ass. If they were smart they'd embrace sites like Steam and GOG where my games "just work" but even that they are trying to fuck up by adding DRM on top of Steam, such as the shitastic GFWL bullshit I got stuck with when i bought Bioshock II. The pirate version? No jumping through GFWL constant bullshit just to play the game.
So I have to agree with Gabe from Valve when he said something along the lines of "piracy means you are offering an inferior product". Either your price is too high, the DRM too shitty, or too many hoops just to play (I'm looking at YOU Bioshock II) and you are simply not making your product as useful for the customer as the pirated version.
Well I read it as 'MSFT realizes the standards don't mean shit to ODMs and worked around it" while the Linux guys try to stick to the standards and it bit them in the ass. Building and repairing PCs 6 days a week frankly this does NOT surprise me because if you've looked at the BIOS some of these ODMs put out frankly shoddy shit is the ONLY word to describe it!
I had to tell a customer just last week he was either gonna have to have me order an EXACTLY identical stick for his desktop or simply do without a stick because the POS BIOS on the eMachines would not allow you to run dual sticks unless they were a perfect match! all because some ODM decided that having a simple switch in BIOS for single or dual mode was just too much bother. I've also run into OEMs that put dual core HSFs on quads, fans so shitty I'm surprised they run at all, PSUs that are so close to the absolute max limit on the machine that literally a single fan or DVD burner would have overloaded the thing, it seems like if it can save them 2c and it'll pass POST that is all they give a shit about.
I'm all for having low prices but when the design decisions actually shorten the life of the machine and risk all kinds of errors and hassles for the user that's where i draw the line. Some of the low end Dells and eMachines are so badly built frankly i'm amazed they make it to the end of warranty, talk about junk!
Bulldozer looks to be like Phenom I, where they try something new and then need to work the bugs out before getting the decent chip. The smart thing is they are focused more on the mobile ATM and have slowed production on the desktop because the Phenom II still has some life left in the low to mid range along with Athlon II on the desktop but those Brazos APUs give a better bang per watt than the mobile Athlons.
But if you look at their roadmap Bulldozer is basically a testbed for their next big jump which if they can crank it out like they do the Brazos chips ought to be pretty sweet. With bulldozer you have two integers but only one FP between them and by doing it this way you seriously cut power while supposedly being able to get around 80% of what you'd get in a dual core. it works pretty good on Brazos but they haven't gotten it down well enough to ramp the clocks which they need for Bulldozer.
But the sweet thing which ought to give them a hell of a nice boost and why the two integer but one FP design makes sense and fits in with TFA on different designs is the new GPU design coming down the pipe from ATI which will be in the future APUs. These new GPU/APU units will switch from VLIW to vector which should give roughly half of native FP speed (currently GPUs are less than 1/4th as fast as CPUs when it comes to double precision FP last I checked) and close to native on second gen with native being the ultimate goal.
What makes this sweet is with the amount of stream processors they'll be able to squeeze in there you'll have basically a super FP so that when you aren't doing graphics work the GPU will stay busy as a GP/GPU. They'll be able to accelerate more and more programs using this super FP than they have with current tech which should again give it a pretty nice kick in the pants.
All I know is if they can keep it close to Brazos in terms of price and power usage i'm all for it. my EEE gives me 40% more battery life than my Athlon II based Wind did while staying cool and playing HD videos smooth as butter. If they can keep the heat down like they have with Brazos it ought to be a pretty damned sweet chip, they just need to work out the kinks with Bulldozer so they'll be able to kick up the clocks on the desktop version.
Uhh you SEEM to know what you are talking about but unless i'm mistaken there is a flaw in your logic. you just said that the patch add the heuristics that Windows uses to detect ASPM which if they are having to use heuristics to detect the thing how EXACTLY is the OEM "helping" Windows? By making their crap crappy so heuristics works?
It sounds more like the race to the bottom has caused some low end ODMs to cut corners where they shouldn't have been cut. I've found that contrary to popular belief this DOES bite Windows in the ass too, as I found when upgrading some machines from XP to Vista during the whole "We install XP and give you the Vista disc" phase that some OEMs had the BIOS set to an insanely fast boot sequence that wouldn't completely initialize before beginning the handoff to the OS. With XP it seemed to tolerate it just fine, but Vista would just "forget" hardware like BT was there. I had to go in and tweak the BIOS to give a few more seconds time before handoff to make Vista function on those machines.
Actually while I never supported objectivism Rand accepting services which she was forced to pay for earlier in her career by the government really doesn't go against her philosophy any.
if you want to nail Rand for something i think her "Yay rape!" scenes in her books would be a better place to start friend. But her taking the service she wasn't given a choice to opt out of just shows how it fits in her philosophy as forced dependence upon the government.
But it IS Blanche it is because they are robbing YOU by printing it by making the money in YOUR pocket worth less every second!
And again the shell game fucks the American taxpayer, who works for money that is worth less every single day so Goldman and their friends can have the perfect scam, a classic "heads i win, tails you lose" where all profits are private, all risks PUBLIC.
Would you like some links to back it up friend? i just LOOOVE how the FOSSies mod down anyone who isn't sucking the Koolaid, tell me friend, is it cherry? Does it smell like the bullshit you've been spewing?
Riddle me this smart guy, do you HONESTLY think I can get BETTER results than one of the biggest OEMs on the entire planet, who has to run their own repos even though we are talking a teeny tiny subset of hardware? Oh right because if they don't Linux shits itself and dies if you use the default repos!
If you would like some more just ask, i can wallpaper it with retailers, OEMs, users, all who have found out that my "is it safe?" test, which BTW I bet my last dollar you do NOT have the balls to try yourself, is 100% accurate. You upgrade Linux and shits breaks like its 1995, which funny you should bring up that date because that is about where Linux seems to be at now, with a GUI shell over a CLI OS just like...Windows 95!
So please don 't be afraid to ask, I'll be happy to give you so many links of Linux fails it'll take you a week to sort them all. But instead you'll hide your head under your tux blankie and say 'Leave poor Tux alone, you must be a M$ Ninja you dirty poo poo head!".
But don't blame me because your shit be stankin', try it yourself if you dare, try the "is it safe" test with the distro of your choice and watch, Linux fall down and go BOOM!
Personally I'd say the bigger problem is HTML V5 isn't up to snuff. In every test I've run it sucks up more resources than flash, hits the CPU harder than flash, and from the looks of things Apple if gonna make H.264 be the "standard" so it'll be more proprietary than flash. Finally there is the question of protected content and since MSFT and Apple both are part of MPEG-LA and both allow kernel level DRM I frankly wouldn't be surprised if to please the MPAA overlords they add some seriously nasty DRM.
Sucks more resources, hits the CPU harder, more proprietary, and possibly (more like probably, I can't see the MPAA allowing their content unencrypted, which is why we had protected flash) nastier DRM. Are we sure that this isn't "progress" as specified by Dilbert's PHB?
Not to mention with just a teeny tiny bit of planning one can extend that 3+ years quite a bit. My main machine started out as an Athlon X2 with 400Gb HDD, 2gb of RAM and 3200 IGP, now it is a Phenom X4 with 3Tb of HDD, 8Gb of RAM, and an HD4850. Oh and after the holidays I may just go ahead and go up to X6 while i can get one cheap.
In its original config I would have gotten 2, maybe 3 years, now I'm over 4 and can easily see this machine lasting me until Win 7 gets EOL in 2020 barring some incredible killer app that requires all new hardware to run. If I would have bought prebuilt I'd be on my second PC and frankly wouldn't have as nice a specs without getting gouged, but because i simply waited until each component was on sale (for example the HD4850 cost me $45 and the 3Tb cost me just $85, the RAM was $45 for 4 2Gb sticks) I got a much nicer machine for a much cheaper price AND I made more than I paid for the original parts when I sold them.
So by just a little planning and looking ahead one can get quite a lot of bang for very little buck and have better quality parts throughout as well. I've seen many an OEM die because of shitty PSUs, crap fans, bad caps, lousy boards that killed the CPU when they croaked, etc. Compare that to the ones I've built where they just get passed down from person to person. Hell my first "gamer" box, a Pentium 100Mhz, is currently running as a DOS 3 C&C controller for this funky old computerized lathe at a lumber mill. The thing works 5 days a week, happily purring along. while I can't say every box i built lived THAT long, as i got bit by the bad caps in 03 like everybody else, most have far outlived the standard OEM.
I'm sorry but if you can't have a PC go from a pile of parts to POST in under an hour? Uhhh...you suck. Its not like you are being asked to stamp the sheet metal here folks, parts go in box, cables go in box, plug in power, stick in Windows disc, done. If you use WSUS Offline for the updates and Ninite for the third party software you are talking zippola on the OS install too.
As for what is keeping me on windows? i'll get hate for saying this but until a truly user friendly distro comes out that I can give to my customers i simply have no use for Linux. And before anyone trots out the usual suspects I've already tried them and not a single one passed my "is it safe?' test, go ahead, try it yourself. since Windows gets on average 7 years i cut Linux a break off the bat and only use a 3 year old distro CD, simulating what my customer would go through if they bought a Linux PC from me and tried to keep it current, standard best practices, nothing fancy. I install the OS, make sure ALL the hardware is working, then let it update/upgrade to current, what happens? things break, a LOT of things break. Sound or video gets flaky, maybe the network gets borked, settings in programs don't seem to stick or don't stick past reboot, its always a flaky mess.
I mean when i'm talking to a long time Linux server admin and desktop user about my problem and they confide in me "As soon as I'm done backing up I'm switching to BSD and if that isn't stable on the desktop I'm quitting" and most likely going to Mac? There is trouble in paradise folks. Funny how it used to be "Oh you have to wipe Windows and start over, while Linux is safe!" has turned into the complete opposite. I did a ton of in place upgrades from Vista to 7 for folks that didn't want to lose their settings, that is 5 years with another 8 years to go for 7, and it just worked. I've tried Ubuntu, PCLOS, Mepis, just about every supposedly "user friendly" distro I can find and not one has passed my "is it safe?" test.
I sell to and support normal folks, so telling them to play find the fix or spend a couple of days reading man pages and dealing with CLI gobbledygook is right out. I also can't plan my entire business around the LTS releases so if the bog standard release won't cut it then its no good. I'm gonna try Linux Mint and FreeBSD over the turkey week holiday and give them my "is it safe?" test if I can find the releases from 3 years ago. If they pass? yippee skippy i can have FOSS machines next to the Windows ones. if not? I'm just gonna have to give up for a couple of years and scour the earth for someone that will give me a good deal on Starter, which is actually a nice OS, especially for older machines.
Someone cue up the Ayn Rand criminal quote, because it seems like a perfect use for it. After all since they have been privatizing the penal system those at the top can make good money on all those "criminals".
Kinda a shame though, once upon a time this was a decent country, now it is just some rich pigs at the top figuring out every scam they can to fuck everyone else.
Personally I predict when Europe collapses which will be the final nail in our coffin thanks to Goldman Sachs and friends quietly shifting all their Greek and other toxic debt onto the Fed so that when it goes they'll have already cashed out and left us with another 10 trillion or so in debt, then we'll get to have our very own Arab spring.
But as the wise Thomas Jefferson said "But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security."
I'd say the constant march towards a police state by our officials and bumraping by those at the top makes the current situation fit that description pretty well, don't you?
Because Gabe strikes me as the type of guy you could go get a beer with while the CxOs at EA strike me as the kind that would skip out while you were taking a piss just to stick you with the tab.
Call me weird but attitude and how you treat those around you counts for something with me and old Gabe has always seemed like a pretty straight shooter. Plus when Steam actually has a sale its a SALE, with EA it has always been "hey we're giving you a dollar off, its a whole dollar!". Last Steam sale I picked up the FEAR 1&2 series, 5 games for $6.79. Now be honest can you EVER picture EA allowing even ONE game much less FIVE to be sold for less than $7?
I'm just glad I got my boys on Steam as I fricking HATED dealing with Xmas shopping for them,as everything they wanted always seemed to be back ordered. Now they are counting down to the Steam sale to see how many games they can score. Go Steam!
Riiight, because after Lego gave up control some douchebag wouldn't be making giant Lego Goatse statues and 40 foot Lego dicks to go into it.
This isn't just some original IP friend, lego has built that brand up for decades as this ultra kid friendly imagination toy. And if it is one thing the Internet should have taught everyone by now its that there is NEVER a shortage of douchebags.