Bah! Amateur, let an old guy show you how its done..
In Soviet Russia Money Launders YOU!
These kids today I swear, no respect for tradition, no respect at all. Next thing you know they'll be just linking to a page that says "Goatse goes here" and using fill in the blank for shit eater trolls...damned lazy kids, get off my lawn!
Won't work because you'll never get the females to agree and that is their bread and butter. I have literally had females come in and have their machine built around how well it would run that Zynga crap. Farmville, Mafia Wars, Frontierville, they eat that crap up. It used to drive me nuts when my now ex GF would stay the weekend with me that at 7:AM on the dot she'd play her hour of Farmville. That was as much a part of her morning routine as my morning caffeine and she wasn't happy unless she got it so I kept a spare desktop in the corner just for her so I wouldn't hear the clicking when I was trying to sleep.
As for TFA "Scummy company treats employees like shit and tries to fuck them over" news at 11 and here is Cathy with the weather "Water is wet Bill, back to you".
I've thought about that, but as silly as this may sound in our capitalist society I really hate not giving poor folks an option.
Take Suzy the checkout girl for example, here is a 32 year old woman with a 13 year old and 11 year old and a husband that just walked off one day and never came back, trying to take care of a family without even a GED and working a shit job. Hell she wouldn't have even HAD a computer if someone wouldn't have given her one of my PCs that had already been passed through one family and half of another. I ended up letting her pay $15 a paycheck for the rebuild and just let her have one of the bazillion 200watt PSUs I had sitting in the closet. Did I make any real money off her? Nope, but at least her kids now have a way to work on reports and are learning how to use computers which will help them later in life.
So while I still get plenty of business customers those types prefer all new gear, can't blame them there. Each new gen gets a little better on power usage and when their work depends on it old gear isn't something they are real keen on. my home users with cash are going HTPC since I built a few of those and showed them how easy it was to make them into giant media tanks and play Steam. one customer with batman:AA has sold more HTPCs for me by word of mouth than any ad I've ever put out!
But it just gives me a warm fuzzy to help folks, ya know? that is why i always try to keep at least a handful of $100 or less desktops and sub $150 laptops, that way there is something for everybody. On the refurb desktops I usually make $35-$40 and the lappys $50 or so so I'll never get rich at this but sometimes there are things worth more than money. And by building goodwill i often have businesses that will give me their old machines for free when they upgrade just because they know I make sure their data is wiped and the PC gets a good home.
I had a former teacher call me saying he needed my help with a student's PC, he was volunteering to teach basic office skills to women who had been abused. I get there and the poor thing is nearly in tears because her PC won't run the software needed for class but Shawn is trying to calm her down by saying "Don't you worry, old Kevin is a wiz at these things and has rooms filled with parts, if anybody can get it running he can". I get there and the poor thing is trying to learn office on a 50Mhz! with 4Mb of the old EDO junk and WFW 3.11.
So she tells me she really needs this class and she hopes to make a little money to go to rent a center (ripoff!) and give the PC to her kid. I tell her to just back her car up to my PC and I can fix it right then. She does as I ask and I pop open the trunk and start loading a couple of 2GHz P4s a client that I was upgrading gave me, i had wiped them on site and used one of my automatic install discs so it was clean and ready. When she starts saying she can't afford it and I tell her they're free (I told her I didn't have anymore room at the shop, didn't want her to feel like she was being given pity ya know) the poor little thing broke down right there in the parking lot. I told her Shawn could show her how to set them up easy, even threw in a couple of 15 inch CRTs and some $4 laser mice i had picked up at the big lots.
Old Shawn contacted me a year later and told me she had found her a nice little office job thanks to learning office skills, bought her and her kid new PCs and donated those back to Shawn which he then handed out to another 2 gals that didn't have decent gear. So yeah, more money is nice, but there are more important things. I have two wonderful boys that were given to me by the fates when my sis got terminal cancer that have grown into two wonderful young men, the worst problems I have is my dad bouncing like a 5 year old when he gets some new tech toy and i'm not there to set it up, life is good. If I can find a nice FOSS OS to make prices even cheaper for the poor folks I'm all for it, but what matters is i give them something that will last and make their life better. With the holiday coming up its time to spread the cheer, don't ya think?
Bring them back? they never left here (north central AR) as they are useful for tornado warnings. They set them off on noon every Wed just like clockwork, in fact i know a couple of older folks that actually check their clocks by listening for the horn. Frankly I don't see why everyplace don't have them for warnings because they really do cut through any noise and you'd can't mistake the klaxon for ANY other sound.
Frankly I don't care if the exec said it was protected by Shaka Zulu, what I DO care about is how many reports of people immediately after that said 'Hey somebody used my CC number!"
Remember ROT13 is still considered encryption, its just useless encryption. Considering how many pissed off customers were popping up saying their CC got used i'd say Sony got the heat they deserved because whatever they used was obviously piss poor.
Exactly, as long as they used good solid encryption (after all technically encryption could include ROT13 so we can't judge by simply saying its encrypted) along with salting one shouldn't have anything to worry about, although it does make me feel a little better about never having them save my CC numbers for future purchases.
But frankly they'll have to do a lot worse to run me off, because between Steam, GOG, and Amazon I don't have to deal with irritating retail anymore which makes me VERY happy. Steam also makes it easy to just gift games to my nephews without any hassle, and frankly where else is there to go? Origin? I wouldn't trust EA any farther than I can throw their fattest CxO, looking at their EULA it pretty much reads as "We can do what we want, when we want, tough shit". The second i start seeing 'third party" in the EULAs I start backing away as IMHO the usually ends up being a code phrase for "We sell your info to anybody with a dollar". No thanks, Steam "just works".
Yes because it all comes down to something that goes right to the heart of our system and that is the right to do what you like with what you have created. if those that have actually written the code says they can change it, hell make it into t-shirts that is THEIR business. Nobody has the right to tell those guys what they can and can't do with code they wrote period.
Question: Were they supposed to set off the Klaxon horns? Because with everyone online the only time I know if anything is going on is either ForecastFox pops up a warning or the klaxons go off. If they were supposed to go off it was an epic fail here, nothing. My mom has the TV on pretty much 24/7 and didn't report squat, so fail there too.
Thanks for the advice, i'll keep that in mind. The main thing I'm worried about is updates, i can't just "time" my deliveries so they always land on the start of one of the 5 year support cycles so I REALLY need updates to "just work" without borkage. I always kill compiz though, these older Intel chipsets just don't have the horses for it.
But FreeBSD over turkey week i think will be my last attempt for a couple of year barring some breakthrough. I already use the XP CALs when I have them and grab serials wherever I can, dying boxes, hardware upgrades, you name it if its a legit CAL I grab it. I know some of my fellow builders have said screw it and are using the family packs as they pass WGA but I think that road is dicey. I think if the BSDs just don't pass muster I'm gonna scour the earth until I find someone willing to sell me starter at a decent price. For all the jokes its actually a nice OS, Asus even released a hack to get around that "You can't change wallpapers" BS and I've found on older system starter runs just fine on 512Mb and like a charm on 1Gb.
Finally while your giving the user choice is good in THEORY in practice it really doesn't work so well. That is because given a choice they will ALWAYS choose the lower priced machine, no matter what, then here comes the complaints when it won't do X which you clearly told them up front it would NOT do in the first place! So you either have to burn them, thus screwing your rep, or you have to take it back, refurb it back to original state and resell it. And there goes your profits. Last time I simply set up a "Linux section" and had a clear sign that said 'THIS DOES NOT RUN WINDOWS PROGRAMS" which worked...right up until the updates bit them in the ass then it was right back to me, sigh.
But I'll follow your advice and give it a shot during my turkey week break, maybe a rolling release OS is the way to go. I'm just getting really tired of dumb shit like updates breaking bog standard common hardware or programs that don't behave like they should. You would think having open drivers this kind of BS wouldn't even be happening wouldn't you? Hell Windows 7 now has its own driver repo in WU and Linux you have to go to the forums and hunt, how fucked up is that?
Sadly I have to agree with you Billy. Once I showed my users that you in fact have TWO menubars on Office 2K7 they fell in love with it as did I. If you don't know you can customize the "mini bar" to have the things you are using most when you are just reading or proofing a document, for me the biggest are the copy and replace dialogs, and then when they are creating the full ribbon with its previews makes coming up with nicer docs and using more features a HELL of a lot easier.
But Metro simply brings nothing to the table, it in fact reminds me of that scourge of noob land known as weatherbug. Its a bunch or irritating cell phone style desktop apps that will suck up resources only to be ignored because the vast majority will simply fire up their browser thus covering that shit up! Not to mention the giant ass security hole as the whole thing is tied to IE and ActiveX.
And sadly i have to agree on Linux as well. For all the comments labeling me some sort of "M$ Shill dirty poo poo head" I've wasted a good month or more of my life trying every user friendly distro i can find hoping to get one that was user friendly, didn't break when you update, and worked consistently. Instead all I found was unless you treat Linux like a browser in a box things quickly turned to shit. Its kinda sad when a long term user i talk to here has decided to give up Linux for BSD after 15 years simply because they are tired of spending so much time working on the thing.
Although one thing I think you are wrong about is IE, hell even the grannies coming to my shop have ditched it. That is why they are pushing it into Metro, hoping to stop the free fall. but it won't work, the stench of IE6 soured folks on the brand. the ONLY place I see still entrenched with IE is corporate, and that is because Firefox pulled a Goatse on the IT admins with their little 'Fuck testing, we're spinning the numbers boys!" stunt thus ensuring IT stays with IE so they can at least have a support roadmap. Somebody really needs to offer a "corporate Chromium based" that gives IT 1 year of support from release or even better 2 so they can test and plan.
But to quote a late southern rock band when it comes to Win 8 'The smell of death surrounds you" and the stench of uberfail hangs in the air. You KNOW why they are doing this, as do I. Ballmer has such a stiffie for Apple he wants to be in the cell phone and tablet markets and thinks by sticking the Windows name on his ARM offerings he can jump on, but ALL that will do is burn customers and cause massive returns when they buy their "Windows" tablet only to bring it home and find their Windows apps won't run. fucking stupid.
Apparently you don't even know what a Riva TNT2 is do you? You might want to read here and be sure to note that NOWHERE do you see the word shader, that is because this card is so old it didn't use shaders in the modern sense, it was a buffer design ala the Voodoo 2. BTW it isn't even the top of the line one with decent buffers and a 64bit pipe, but the Vanta OEM which had been made for OEMs because Nvidia found they had many chips that wouldn't even reach the 100MHz clockrate or take the 64 bit bus so Nvidia was one of the first to sell its chips that didn't pass muster as a slower model, in this case an 80MHz clock and only 16bit bus with 12Mb of RAM. You will also note that it is a Dx6 card and the absolute lowest Adobe says they support is Dx9, more than 3 generations newer.
So just admit your wrongness and accept it. There is no way in hell a Dx6 card with only 16bits and 12Mb of RAM can accelerate shit when it comes to FMV of ANY sort, much less flash. hell this card didn't even accelerate DVD, this was the days when you would buy an MPG2 card if you wanted to watch DVDs.
Sure we will at least on the PCs although it won't cost a lot and it'll be from AMD and Intel, like with Brazos and Ivy Bridge CULV. I mean when I can pick up a netbook for $350 with 8Gb of RAM that will play L4D and TF2, get 6 hours on a battery while watching HD movies, outputs 1080p over HDMI, and all in a machine that only weighs 3 pounds and costs less than my craptastic Celeron laptop did 5 years ago? Now THAT is nice!
I think the next advance will be just how far what was once considered "gamer only" levels of graphic performance will spread. i mean it wasn't that long ago that if you wanted to play anything more than DVDs or better than SD you needed a discrete card in your laptop that jumped the price like crazy and made the battery life shit, or how in desktops IGP was a dirty word and how cell phones had to be dropped to almost comically bad resolutions just to get more than a slideshow. Now you have all these machines either in the market or coming down the pipe that get frankly insane levels of graphics for prices so cheap anybody can have one.
Personally i'm ALL for it. I don't know about the ARM side but on the X86 it looks like OpenCL (which is now supported by Nvidia as well as AMD) is gonna make more and more programs accelerated by the GPU, the power seems to be dropping both on the desktop side and on the mobile side its getting crazy how much performance per watt some of these things are getting, and its all gonna be smooth video and nice if not truly Crysis insane levels on the gaming front. If ARM can keep current power usage levels and get PS3 graphics? I say great, more avenues to sell them means more games!
Well that scratches opensuse and LXDE off my list, as a good 70% of my tower sales are sans monitor so I have no idea what size they'll be running it on and having it lose cursor settings in this day and age is inexcusable. That just leaves FreeBSD with Enlightenment or XFCE and then i'll officially have gone through everything even remotely user friendly...sigh. That makes Ubuntu, PCLOS, Puppy,Fedora and two more I can't think of without my morning caffeine kicked in.
Have you tried Enlightenment or XFCE? any good or user friendly? But now you see why I get hate from the community, I simply ask for a stable easy to use distro, get told all these different ones, and when i try them? same thing you are getting only worse in some respects because i always seem to run into driver issues, especially with the laptops. I mean you'd think that with more than 80% of the hardware out there being the boring bog standard stuff like Realtek and ATI and SiS and Intel i just wouldn't have this problem would you?
I've had problems with settings in GUIs not sticking so you have to input what you want changed in CLI (which kinda kills the point of even HAVING a GUI in the first place), drivers borked beyond belief after an upgrade so that a once running machine when rebooted after upgrade just gives you a black screen with NO sound and NO clue as to what to do next, like you I've run into simple programs that slam the CPU and make the entire machine feel like its running underwater, not to mention changes acting like they took fine only to have them tossed on reboot like they never happened...sigh.
For all the insults and accusations on me being some "M$ Ninja shill dirty man!" I've probably blown close to a month and a half of my life just putting distros through VERY basic tasks hoping to find a friendly one that worked only to sadly find like you that if I didn't use it like a web kiosk things start to unravel. And I've actually been told I was an idiot for applying security upgrades! That once I was up and running I should DISABLE updates and just "leave everything alone" like just having the name Linux would magically make all the unpatched software and OS safe. I'm starting to wonder if the community is suffering from group insanity when they tell me 'Oh this is user friendly and ready to go!" only to find crap that wouldn't have been allowed on Win3.x, just shoddy.
I think that if I can't get FreeBSD or PCBSD up and running stable and user friendly i'm just gonna give up for a few years, see if they ever come to their senses. i'll just have to start looking for a loophole so I can use the Win 7 family packs or find someone who'll sell me Win 7 Starter for all these refurbs. Because in PC retail rep is everything, without a good rep i don't eat. i've had customers put off purchases just so i could get in stock because they'd rather pay me over someone like Dell, even though I cost more, because they know i make sure my machines "just work" and are reliable and solid. I can't be handing out machines with obviously messed up software and glitchy OS bugs everywhere, it just won't do.
sigh, while I think Linux and FOSS in general is a nice idea, and I think Linux is great for web servers and for embedded use like Ardunio, I'm starting to wonder if the desktop will EVER be fully functional and stable enough for the common Joe and Suzy the checkout girl. Simple, easy, solid, able to be patched without breaking...why is that so damned hard to find?
Bimbo Newton Crosby. There is one store that carries 100 packs of blank DVDs here, their cost? $49.99 before tax! If you added local taxes to Amazon my cost? $22. My mother loves horror writers like Patricia Briggs, what do they carry here? Romance novels only.
Does anyone think this tax will help the retailers around me? Nope, yet i'm doing fine, why? Because I don't gouge, I offer good service after the sale, I know my gear, and I'm happy to help.
Gee, good service, fair prices, and willing to help the customer winning out over charging assrape prices while hiring 18 year olds that couldn't find their ass with a map and GPS, who would have thought?
Not to mention the "PC" political pandering bullshit has gotten WAY the fuck out of hand! My mom is friends with a state worker whose job it is to check on older folks and those in need and get them help. She is frankly so sick of her job she is looking for ANY excuse to get transferred, why? Because she says every damned day is spent helping illegals who literally only know how to say "How do I get check?" but when she complained she was told "its political" and to STFU. The reps want the 'free' labor, the Dems want the votes, the USA taxpayer gets the fucking bill.
Well I say fuck both of them. I say when you step into that booth you get everyone of your friends and you yourself vote straight green ticket as they are the ONLY ones who have made dealing with the border part of their platform. look at the Dem and Rep platforms, neither gives a fuck and why should they? Its not THEIR money its YOURS they are handing out. Look at what happened when that state vowed to check on schools and whether they were citizens, suddenly their schools pupils dropped by TWO THIRDS in some areas! That's YOUR money they are spending folks, imagine what the money spent on those schools would have done if only spent on legal citizens?
Riiight, because we aren't paying out the ass for yet another aircraft carrier (we have 11 BTW, the next biggest country has 2 IIRC) stupid money sinks like the F35, or if you want to talk states in my state they have been raising taxes to 'give us better roads" for 30+ years now, we have better potholes than anybody else now! Oh and the local jail, cost 7.6 million a decade ago, its falling down now so they want 20 mil for a new one. i guess kickbacks cost more now huh?
If we quit shipping truckloads of money overseas, quit acting like its the cold war, and on the state and local level quit making the most expensive part of each and every purchase kickbacks to their friends....umm guess what? you could probably LOWER taxes while having everything you mentioned, probably more of everything you mentioned.
but the ONE thing dems and reps can agree on is fucking the poor sure does feel good. I wonder if they'll manage to slip in an exception for luxury goods, just so their rich friends won't have to pay? wouldn't surprise me. the whole damned thing is rotten to the core.
I bet you don't have a lot of stuff in your docks though. I just counted and not counting the settings icon I currently have 14 items in my dock on one PC and 16 on my nettop. I have apps I use often, folders i use often, things I need everyday i put in the dock so when i need it I can just slam my mouse up and there it is. I have used my Rocketdocks so long I don't even need to look anymore, i know by muscle memory exactly which part of the top screen to hit to get what I want.
To me the thing stinks of "Fuck you desktops and laptops, all we care about is tablets and cell phones!" which is stupid as hell. not only do you have 400 million PCs about to be EOLed but frankly the vast majority of folks I've talked to really don't give a shit about their cell phones. they take the one that looks nice or comes free with the contract and then they "learn to deal with it" while they are on contract, only to shitcan it and get something else. With the exception of iFanbois there just isn't any loyalty there, it all comes down to the offers the carriers have.
Last year around this time I saw tons of folks with iPhones, now I see tons of folks with the little cheapo Atom netbooks and Android, why? Because one of the local carriers is offering the low end Android phone "for free" if you take their ass rape data plan, and they sell you the netbook for $12 a month. Carrier offers a "deal' they jump, its that simple. I think Canonical is burning a hell of a lot of bridges to try to force their way into a market where if some carrier doesn't offer them as the cheap/free device they are royally fucked. And I think Ballmer's Folly is likewise a big case of dumbshit and may finally (Pleasw Lord! He is worse than the Pepsi guy!) get Ballmer fired.
Its stupid, its catering to a market where they don't matter, it pisses off users more than it impresses, where is the upside here?
That is why while everyone else is moaning at the XP EOL I'm like "happy day, oh happy day!" because I'm starting to see newer and newer XP machines that rather than see if they could just, you know, actually install 7 on the thing? They go out and buy a new box.
My last load brought in by one of my suppliers had nearly a dozen late P4 as well as 4 dual cores, and a half a dozen Pentium Mobile and Athlon Mobile laptops, all in pretty damned good shape, know what I paid? $100 for all 15 boxes and because I'd need to replace the batteries $10 each for the laptops! Once he left I was practically giggling like a schoolgirl!
Hell all I had to do was wipe and reinstall which since I have automated discs was nothing, I had to replace two power adapters on the lappies and one turned out to be toast, bad screen. Big fricking whoop I got $75 a pop for the desktops as fast as I could load them in the window and I didn't have to pay shit for batteries because at $100 each for the laptops folks didn't care! I called one old time customer and when he heard what i had he bought two of the laptops sight unseen, so he'd have one for his GF and a spare!
So while I personally put a good AV and build my machines to last the idiots out there really do make me happy sometimes. I don't know why but folks just go insane for cheap laptops. Hell I have a 900Mhz P3 laptop with 256Mb of RAM and a 20Gb HDD and a guy handed me his number and has called 4 times wanting to make sure i take his $90 for it when the new power adapter gets here! Man I can't wait until the next load!
Sure thing friend, but remember, be careful what you wish for!
Get ready, heretheycome! Kinda makes that koolaid just a little bitter now, don't it? I believe in using the best tool for the job, but to say Linux is secure or better than any other complex OS is frankly bullshit. Hell I was talking to a 15 year Linux admin on one of the other sites that had gotten so sick of Linux fuckups they were going to BSD and if THAT didn't "just work" they were gonna wash their hands of FLOSS on the desktop and just go Mac.
BTW if you'd like a little more food for thought, what OS was 3 of the 4 CAs running that were compromised? takea lookand see. Maybe they just had configs? Surely someone with knowledge would be safe right? Guess again and its not a flukeby any means.
BTW if you wish to run Linux because its cheap/free, or to make a political statement? Not a problem with me, I'm personally gonna try out FreeBSD on turkey week to see if I can lower my costs on refurbs. But to pretend that Linux is a magical woobie that makes you hack proof like the one I was responding to (Notice how I was labeled troll for pointing out his "Herp derp, Linux is safe herp derp" was bullshit? Enjoy that groupthink koolaid) then you deserve a good smacking. News Flash: ALL OSES ARE COMPLEX,COMPLEXITY LEADS TO BUGS BUGS LEAD TO HACKS. There USED to be smart people here on Slashdot that knew basics like this, but now its a fanboi jerkoff. As soon as I find a decent OS site i'll be moving on, and if you look at how far/. numbers have dropped i'm far from being the only one sick of being handed Koolaid.
The same way they do it now I suspect, by splitting the job amongst their zombie hoard. After all we are talking about 4 BILLION address with the current Internet so you'd think it wouldn't be worth the effort NOW wouldn't you? But they do it, all damned day. my guess is when they don't have anything better for the zombies to do they just have them take a section and get to knocking just to see what is there.
Must be nice on the router, now try Newegg and Tiger, look at everything under $60, what do you see? IPV4 as far as the eye can see. Why do they even allow them to bring new ones in? Talk about designed for the dump!
Okay genius you explain to me how flash is doing GPU acceleration on a Riva TNT2 because THAT is what is in the Sempron. It draws the screen at native 1600x900 so I never bothered to put anything bigger, still plays SD video just fine too in dragon.
How's that FLOSSie koolaid? Is it cherry? if you had bothered to use anything besides "XP Corporate Razr1911 Edition" you'd know that both Chrome and IE have low rights mode by default so that the browser actually has LOWER permissions than even the user does. Does Linux? Nope, same privileges. Nice try but its a swing and a miss. Hell Linux sever has more open vulnerabilities right now according to Securina, be happy to post the links if you like.
As for TFA all those cheering HTML V5 is gonna get bit right in the ass and i'm gonna laugh, oh how I'm gonna laugh. in my own tests even SD video on HTML V5 sucks up a hell of a lot more CPU and memory than flash, from the looks of it Apple will ram through H.264 as the format for HTML V5 as everyone wants to get into the fat money the iShiny is making, so there goes any freedom you thought you'd get, and if you think the movie companies are gonna give up their DRM I have a nice bridge you'd be interested in so I wouldn't be surprised if you end up with a version of HTML V5 that won't even play on Linux thanks to lack of kernel level DRM like Windows and Apple has.
So give it five years, hell give it three, I bet all those that are cheering HTML V5 thinking it'll "free the web!" is gonna be looking back and thinking they never had it so good. The default answer on every forum will be "Go buy a copy of Windows, install into VM, then watch video" thus ensuring even less people will deal with the hoops jumping than before. hell MSFT couldn't have asked for a better prezzie!
Oh and before anyone says "Google will save us!" I predict Google will just take their nice GPL V2 kernel and lock the fuck out of it, thus letting them sign the NDA and getting their own DRM kernel module so they can play HTML V5 protected content. this helps Google as it gives them one more selling point to OEMs, and when even grandma knows about the little green robot frankly they don't need the hackers anymore. Final score for HTML V5? Bloated DRM that lets the big three, Apple, Google, and MSFT split the market and fucks the smaller OSes like Linux right out the market. Hell at least with Adobe they did give you flash, even if it was usually behind. Is there even a legal H.264 codec for Linux yet?
And what do you do about the scanners looking for holes to punch? looking at the firewall logs its pretty much constant hits from China looking for past OS vulnerabilities which like it or not NAT does keep them from doing more than just slamming up against the firewall.
And IP V6 is fine and dandy if your corporate, but what about home users? the ONLY IPV6 router i've seen is the Apple one and at $100 is not only overpriced for the average home frankly its way overkill, with tons of features they'll never use. meanwhile the $25-$50 home routers are ALL IPV4, even on Newegg there is nothing but IPV4 as far as the eye can see.
I've said it before and I've said it again, IP V6 is gonna be a royal clusterfuck. Not having backwards compatibility, no way to set up an easy NAT for home users, sure we have to switch but its gonna be ugly and I wouldn't be surprised if networks are flaky as hell for awhile, especially stuff in the flyover states. finally this'll also be a gold mine for the *.A.A who have wanted one IP address per person for awhile for their John Doe lawsuits.
My guess? Google and Netflix, both of whom looked to be hurt if the ISPs could gouge. What pissed me off is it was classic double dipping. they wanted ME to pay their ever jacked up fees while they charged big corps like Google and Netflix to! Fuck you ISPs, I paid for my pipe, just because your media content sucks doesn't mean you get to force me to watch your crap.
Its already bad enough I HAVE to take the triple pack because they have priced it in such a way that having it without the cable TV costs MORE than not having it, we're talking 50% plus price jump here, but to then try to stear me to their commerical-tastic garbage? To steal a line from Mr Garrison "You got to hell ISPs, you go to hell and you die!"
I work with a lot of home users so I hear of such things and I agree and I'd add the Wii to the "We bought it now what?" list. Folks play with the tablets for a few months, the Wii got around 5 or 6 months, then it sits on a shelf. I had a cousin whose kid practically begged for a Wii and when i ran into him I asked how he liked it and he said 'You're right, its collecting dust and John is on steam playing the crazy looking shooter thing (TF2) all the time". My customers that bought tablets? Same thing. some had me get them the fancy and expensive, some went with the small and cheap, they all ended up sitting on the stand in the corner as a more expensive digital picture frame or just turned off.
So I'm having to wonder if its a fad. Sure there are some people that use the far out of them, just as there are some that use the heck out of the Wii, but I'm finding those to be in the minority, at least around here. Meanwhile even my landlady has jumped on the netbook after seeing me enjoying the Indian summer with mine in the picnic area. She even had me come down while all her friends were here the other day since hers wasn't in yet and she wanted me to give them a little demo to show what she was talking about. The atom netbooks were just too slow unless they had ION but the AMD ones are snappy and light.
So while I wish them luck, simply because Nvidia got screwed by Intel (who i think still should have gotten busted for what they did to Nvidia and AMD) I don't see anybody able to take Apple's "I'm hip!" slot and folks don't seem to be really using the things much anyway. Hell even the local college which was formerly Apple land and you would think would be the place you'd see iPads everywhere, what with the free high speed Wifi all over campus, has instead went to the netbooks and smaller laptops. When I asked my oldest who was going there he said 'Yeah well all the guys go to the lounge to unwind with a little TF2 while the girls are all in Second Life". Maybe they'll take off if they can get Valve to port Steam but I can't imagine TF2 on a touchscreen, talk about being pwned.
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Bah! Amateur, let an old guy show you how its done..
In Soviet Russia Money Launders YOU!
These kids today I swear, no respect for tradition, no respect at all. Next thing you know they'll be just linking to a page that says "Goatse goes here" and using fill in the blank for shit eater trolls...damned lazy kids, get off my lawn!
Won't work because you'll never get the females to agree and that is their bread and butter. I have literally had females come in and have their machine built around how well it would run that Zynga crap. Farmville, Mafia Wars, Frontierville, they eat that crap up. It used to drive me nuts when my now ex GF would stay the weekend with me that at 7:AM on the dot she'd play her hour of Farmville. That was as much a part of her morning routine as my morning caffeine and she wasn't happy unless she got it so I kept a spare desktop in the corner just for her so I wouldn't hear the clicking when I was trying to sleep.
As for TFA "Scummy company treats employees like shit and tries to fuck them over" news at 11 and here is Cathy with the weather "Water is wet Bill, back to you".
I've thought about that, but as silly as this may sound in our capitalist society I really hate not giving poor folks an option.
Take Suzy the checkout girl for example, here is a 32 year old woman with a 13 year old and 11 year old and a husband that just walked off one day and never came back, trying to take care of a family without even a GED and working a shit job. Hell she wouldn't have even HAD a computer if someone wouldn't have given her one of my PCs that had already been passed through one family and half of another. I ended up letting her pay $15 a paycheck for the rebuild and just let her have one of the bazillion 200watt PSUs I had sitting in the closet. Did I make any real money off her? Nope, but at least her kids now have a way to work on reports and are learning how to use computers which will help them later in life.
So while I still get plenty of business customers those types prefer all new gear, can't blame them there. Each new gen gets a little better on power usage and when their work depends on it old gear isn't something they are real keen on. my home users with cash are going HTPC since I built a few of those and showed them how easy it was to make them into giant media tanks and play Steam. one customer with batman:AA has sold more HTPCs for me by word of mouth than any ad I've ever put out!
But it just gives me a warm fuzzy to help folks, ya know? that is why i always try to keep at least a handful of $100 or less desktops and sub $150 laptops, that way there is something for everybody. On the refurb desktops I usually make $35-$40 and the lappys $50 or so so I'll never get rich at this but sometimes there are things worth more than money. And by building goodwill i often have businesses that will give me their old machines for free when they upgrade just because they know I make sure their data is wiped and the PC gets a good home.
I had a former teacher call me saying he needed my help with a student's PC, he was volunteering to teach basic office skills to women who had been abused. I get there and the poor thing is nearly in tears because her PC won't run the software needed for class but Shawn is trying to calm her down by saying "Don't you worry, old Kevin is a wiz at these things and has rooms filled with parts, if anybody can get it running he can". I get there and the poor thing is trying to learn office on a 50Mhz! with 4Mb of the old EDO junk and WFW 3.11.
So she tells me she really needs this class and she hopes to make a little money to go to rent a center (ripoff!) and give the PC to her kid. I tell her to just back her car up to my PC and I can fix it right then. She does as I ask and I pop open the trunk and start loading a couple of 2GHz P4s a client that I was upgrading gave me, i had wiped them on site and used one of my automatic install discs so it was clean and ready. When she starts saying she can't afford it and I tell her they're free (I told her I didn't have anymore room at the shop, didn't want her to feel like she was being given pity ya know) the poor little thing broke down right there in the parking lot. I told her Shawn could show her how to set them up easy, even threw in a couple of 15 inch CRTs and some $4 laser mice i had picked up at the big lots.
Old Shawn contacted me a year later and told me she had found her a nice little office job thanks to learning office skills, bought her and her kid new PCs and donated those back to Shawn which he then handed out to another 2 gals that didn't have decent gear. So yeah, more money is nice, but there are more important things. I have two wonderful boys that were given to me by the fates when my sis got terminal cancer that have grown into two wonderful young men, the worst problems I have is my dad bouncing like a 5 year old when he gets some new tech toy and i'm not there to set it up, life is good. If I can find a nice FOSS OS to make prices even cheaper for the poor folks I'm all for it, but what matters is i give them something that will last and make their life better. With the holiday coming up its time to spread the cheer, don't ya think?
Bring them back? they never left here (north central AR) as they are useful for tornado warnings. They set them off on noon every Wed just like clockwork, in fact i know a couple of older folks that actually check their clocks by listening for the horn. Frankly I don't see why everyplace don't have them for warnings because they really do cut through any noise and you'd can't mistake the klaxon for ANY other sound.
Frankly I don't care if the exec said it was protected by Shaka Zulu, what I DO care about is how many reports of people immediately after that said 'Hey somebody used my CC number!"
Remember ROT13 is still considered encryption, its just useless encryption. Considering how many pissed off customers were popping up saying their CC got used i'd say Sony got the heat they deserved because whatever they used was obviously piss poor.
Exactly, as long as they used good solid encryption (after all technically encryption could include ROT13 so we can't judge by simply saying its encrypted) along with salting one shouldn't have anything to worry about, although it does make me feel a little better about never having them save my CC numbers for future purchases.
But frankly they'll have to do a lot worse to run me off, because between Steam, GOG, and Amazon I don't have to deal with irritating retail anymore which makes me VERY happy. Steam also makes it easy to just gift games to my nephews without any hassle, and frankly where else is there to go? Origin? I wouldn't trust EA any farther than I can throw their fattest CxO, looking at their EULA it pretty much reads as "We can do what we want, when we want, tough shit". The second i start seeing 'third party" in the EULAs I start backing away as IMHO the usually ends up being a code phrase for "We sell your info to anybody with a dollar". No thanks, Steam "just works".
Yes because it all comes down to something that goes right to the heart of our system and that is the right to do what you like with what you have created. if those that have actually written the code says they can change it, hell make it into t-shirts that is THEIR business. Nobody has the right to tell those guys what they can and can't do with code they wrote period.
Question: Were they supposed to set off the Klaxon horns? Because with everyone online the only time I know if anything is going on is either ForecastFox pops up a warning or the klaxons go off. If they were supposed to go off it was an epic fail here, nothing. My mom has the TV on pretty much 24/7 and didn't report squat, so fail there too.
Thanks for the advice, i'll keep that in mind. The main thing I'm worried about is updates, i can't just "time" my deliveries so they always land on the start of one of the 5 year support cycles so I REALLY need updates to "just work" without borkage. I always kill compiz though, these older Intel chipsets just don't have the horses for it.
But FreeBSD over turkey week i think will be my last attempt for a couple of year barring some breakthrough. I already use the XP CALs when I have them and grab serials wherever I can, dying boxes, hardware upgrades, you name it if its a legit CAL I grab it. I know some of my fellow builders have said screw it and are using the family packs as they pass WGA but I think that road is dicey. I think if the BSDs just don't pass muster I'm gonna scour the earth until I find someone willing to sell me starter at a decent price. For all the jokes its actually a nice OS, Asus even released a hack to get around that "You can't change wallpapers" BS and I've found on older system starter runs just fine on 512Mb and like a charm on 1Gb.
Finally while your giving the user choice is good in THEORY in practice it really doesn't work so well. That is because given a choice they will ALWAYS choose the lower priced machine, no matter what, then here comes the complaints when it won't do X which you clearly told them up front it would NOT do in the first place! So you either have to burn them, thus screwing your rep, or you have to take it back, refurb it back to original state and resell it. And there goes your profits. Last time I simply set up a "Linux section" and had a clear sign that said 'THIS DOES NOT RUN WINDOWS PROGRAMS" which worked...right up until the updates bit them in the ass then it was right back to me, sigh.
But I'll follow your advice and give it a shot during my turkey week break, maybe a rolling release OS is the way to go. I'm just getting really tired of dumb shit like updates breaking bog standard common hardware or programs that don't behave like they should. You would think having open drivers this kind of BS wouldn't even be happening wouldn't you? Hell Windows 7 now has its own driver repo in WU and Linux you have to go to the forums and hunt, how fucked up is that?
Sadly I have to agree with you Billy. Once I showed my users that you in fact have TWO menubars on Office 2K7 they fell in love with it as did I. If you don't know you can customize the "mini bar" to have the things you are using most when you are just reading or proofing a document, for me the biggest are the copy and replace dialogs, and then when they are creating the full ribbon with its previews makes coming up with nicer docs and using more features a HELL of a lot easier.
But Metro simply brings nothing to the table, it in fact reminds me of that scourge of noob land known as weatherbug. Its a bunch or irritating cell phone style desktop apps that will suck up resources only to be ignored because the vast majority will simply fire up their browser thus covering that shit up! Not to mention the giant ass security hole as the whole thing is tied to IE and ActiveX.
And sadly i have to agree on Linux as well. For all the comments labeling me some sort of "M$ Shill dirty poo poo head" I've wasted a good month or more of my life trying every user friendly distro i can find hoping to get one that was user friendly, didn't break when you update, and worked consistently. Instead all I found was unless you treat Linux like a browser in a box things quickly turned to shit. Its kinda sad when a long term user i talk to here has decided to give up Linux for BSD after 15 years simply because they are tired of spending so much time working on the thing.
Although one thing I think you are wrong about is IE, hell even the grannies coming to my shop have ditched it. That is why they are pushing it into Metro, hoping to stop the free fall. but it won't work, the stench of IE6 soured folks on the brand. the ONLY place I see still entrenched with IE is corporate, and that is because Firefox pulled a Goatse on the IT admins with their little 'Fuck testing, we're spinning the numbers boys!" stunt thus ensuring IT stays with IE so they can at least have a support roadmap. Somebody really needs to offer a "corporate Chromium based" that gives IT 1 year of support from release or even better 2 so they can test and plan.
But to quote a late southern rock band when it comes to Win 8 'The smell of death surrounds you" and the stench of uberfail hangs in the air. You KNOW why they are doing this, as do I. Ballmer has such a stiffie for Apple he wants to be in the cell phone and tablet markets and thinks by sticking the Windows name on his ARM offerings he can jump on, but ALL that will do is burn customers and cause massive returns when they buy their "Windows" tablet only to bring it home and find their Windows apps won't run. fucking stupid.
Apparently you don't even know what a Riva TNT2 is do you? You might want to read here and be sure to note that NOWHERE do you see the word shader, that is because this card is so old it didn't use shaders in the modern sense, it was a buffer design ala the Voodoo 2. BTW it isn't even the top of the line one with decent buffers and a 64bit pipe, but the Vanta OEM which had been made for OEMs because Nvidia found they had many chips that wouldn't even reach the 100MHz clockrate or take the 64 bit bus so Nvidia was one of the first to sell its chips that didn't pass muster as a slower model, in this case an 80MHz clock and only 16bit bus with 12Mb of RAM. You will also note that it is a Dx6 card and the absolute lowest Adobe says they support is Dx9, more than 3 generations newer.
So just admit your wrongness and accept it. There is no way in hell a Dx6 card with only 16bits and 12Mb of RAM can accelerate shit when it comes to FMV of ANY sort, much less flash. hell this card didn't even accelerate DVD, this was the days when you would buy an MPG2 card if you wanted to watch DVDs.
Sure we will at least on the PCs although it won't cost a lot and it'll be from AMD and Intel, like with Brazos and Ivy Bridge CULV. I mean when I can pick up a netbook for $350 with 8Gb of RAM that will play L4D and TF2, get 6 hours on a battery while watching HD movies, outputs 1080p over HDMI, and all in a machine that only weighs 3 pounds and costs less than my craptastic Celeron laptop did 5 years ago? Now THAT is nice!
I think the next advance will be just how far what was once considered "gamer only" levels of graphic performance will spread. i mean it wasn't that long ago that if you wanted to play anything more than DVDs or better than SD you needed a discrete card in your laptop that jumped the price like crazy and made the battery life shit, or how in desktops IGP was a dirty word and how cell phones had to be dropped to almost comically bad resolutions just to get more than a slideshow. Now you have all these machines either in the market or coming down the pipe that get frankly insane levels of graphics for prices so cheap anybody can have one.
Personally i'm ALL for it. I don't know about the ARM side but on the X86 it looks like OpenCL (which is now supported by Nvidia as well as AMD) is gonna make more and more programs accelerated by the GPU, the power seems to be dropping both on the desktop side and on the mobile side its getting crazy how much performance per watt some of these things are getting, and its all gonna be smooth video and nice if not truly Crysis insane levels on the gaming front. If ARM can keep current power usage levels and get PS3 graphics? I say great, more avenues to sell them means more games!
Well that scratches opensuse and LXDE off my list, as a good 70% of my tower sales are sans monitor so I have no idea what size they'll be running it on and having it lose cursor settings in this day and age is inexcusable. That just leaves FreeBSD with Enlightenment or XFCE and then i'll officially have gone through everything even remotely user friendly...sigh. That makes Ubuntu, PCLOS, Puppy,Fedora and two more I can't think of without my morning caffeine kicked in.
Have you tried Enlightenment or XFCE? any good or user friendly? But now you see why I get hate from the community, I simply ask for a stable easy to use distro, get told all these different ones, and when i try them? same thing you are getting only worse in some respects because i always seem to run into driver issues, especially with the laptops. I mean you'd think that with more than 80% of the hardware out there being the boring bog standard stuff like Realtek and ATI and SiS and Intel i just wouldn't have this problem would you?
I've had problems with settings in GUIs not sticking so you have to input what you want changed in CLI (which kinda kills the point of even HAVING a GUI in the first place), drivers borked beyond belief after an upgrade so that a once running machine when rebooted after upgrade just gives you a black screen with NO sound and NO clue as to what to do next, like you I've run into simple programs that slam the CPU and make the entire machine feel like its running underwater, not to mention changes acting like they took fine only to have them tossed on reboot like they never happened...sigh.
For all the insults and accusations on me being some "M$ Ninja shill dirty man!" I've probably blown close to a month and a half of my life just putting distros through VERY basic tasks hoping to find a friendly one that worked only to sadly find like you that if I didn't use it like a web kiosk things start to unravel. And I've actually been told I was an idiot for applying security upgrades! That once I was up and running I should DISABLE updates and just "leave everything alone" like just having the name Linux would magically make all the unpatched software and OS safe. I'm starting to wonder if the community is suffering from group insanity when they tell me 'Oh this is user friendly and ready to go!" only to find crap that wouldn't have been allowed on Win3.x, just shoddy.
I think that if I can't get FreeBSD or PCBSD up and running stable and user friendly i'm just gonna give up for a few years, see if they ever come to their senses. i'll just have to start looking for a loophole so I can use the Win 7 family packs or find someone who'll sell me Win 7 Starter for all these refurbs. Because in PC retail rep is everything, without a good rep i don't eat. i've had customers put off purchases just so i could get in stock because they'd rather pay me over someone like Dell, even though I cost more, because they know i make sure my machines "just work" and are reliable and solid. I can't be handing out machines with obviously messed up software and glitchy OS bugs everywhere, it just won't do.
sigh, while I think Linux and FOSS in general is a nice idea, and I think Linux is great for web servers and for embedded use like Ardunio, I'm starting to wonder if the desktop will EVER be fully functional and stable enough for the common Joe and Suzy the checkout girl. Simple, easy, solid, able to be patched without breaking...why is that so damned hard to find?
Bimbo Newton Crosby. There is one store that carries 100 packs of blank DVDs here, their cost? $49.99 before tax! If you added local taxes to Amazon my cost? $22. My mother loves horror writers like Patricia Briggs, what do they carry here? Romance novels only.
Does anyone think this tax will help the retailers around me? Nope, yet i'm doing fine, why? Because I don't gouge, I offer good service after the sale, I know my gear, and I'm happy to help.
Gee, good service, fair prices, and willing to help the customer winning out over charging assrape prices while hiring 18 year olds that couldn't find their ass with a map and GPS, who would have thought?
Not to mention the "PC" political pandering bullshit has gotten WAY the fuck out of hand! My mom is friends with a state worker whose job it is to check on older folks and those in need and get them help. She is frankly so sick of her job she is looking for ANY excuse to get transferred, why? Because she says every damned day is spent helping illegals who literally only know how to say "How do I get check?" but when she complained she was told "its political" and to STFU. The reps want the 'free' labor, the Dems want the votes, the USA taxpayer gets the fucking bill.
Well I say fuck both of them. I say when you step into that booth you get everyone of your friends and you yourself vote straight green ticket as they are the ONLY ones who have made dealing with the border part of their platform. look at the Dem and Rep platforms, neither gives a fuck and why should they? Its not THEIR money its YOURS they are handing out. Look at what happened when that state vowed to check on schools and whether they were citizens, suddenly their schools pupils dropped by TWO THIRDS in some areas! That's YOUR money they are spending folks, imagine what the money spent on those schools would have done if only spent on legal citizens?
Riiight, because we aren't paying out the ass for yet another aircraft carrier (we have 11 BTW, the next biggest country has 2 IIRC) stupid money sinks like the F35, or if you want to talk states in my state they have been raising taxes to 'give us better roads" for 30+ years now, we have better potholes than anybody else now! Oh and the local jail, cost 7.6 million a decade ago, its falling down now so they want 20 mil for a new one. i guess kickbacks cost more now huh?
If we quit shipping truckloads of money overseas, quit acting like its the cold war, and on the state and local level quit making the most expensive part of each and every purchase kickbacks to their friends....umm guess what? you could probably LOWER taxes while having everything you mentioned, probably more of everything you mentioned.
but the ONE thing dems and reps can agree on is fucking the poor sure does feel good. I wonder if they'll manage to slip in an exception for luxury goods, just so their rich friends won't have to pay? wouldn't surprise me. the whole damned thing is rotten to the core.
I bet you don't have a lot of stuff in your docks though. I just counted and not counting the settings icon I currently have 14 items in my dock on one PC and 16 on my nettop. I have apps I use often, folders i use often, things I need everyday i put in the dock so when i need it I can just slam my mouse up and there it is. I have used my Rocketdocks so long I don't even need to look anymore, i know by muscle memory exactly which part of the top screen to hit to get what I want.
To me the thing stinks of "Fuck you desktops and laptops, all we care about is tablets and cell phones!" which is stupid as hell. not only do you have 400 million PCs about to be EOLed but frankly the vast majority of folks I've talked to really don't give a shit about their cell phones. they take the one that looks nice or comes free with the contract and then they "learn to deal with it" while they are on contract, only to shitcan it and get something else. With the exception of iFanbois there just isn't any loyalty there, it all comes down to the offers the carriers have.
Last year around this time I saw tons of folks with iPhones, now I see tons of folks with the little cheapo Atom netbooks and Android, why? Because one of the local carriers is offering the low end Android phone "for free" if you take their ass rape data plan, and they sell you the netbook for $12 a month. Carrier offers a "deal' they jump, its that simple. I think Canonical is burning a hell of a lot of bridges to try to force their way into a market where if some carrier doesn't offer them as the cheap/free device they are royally fucked. And I think Ballmer's Folly is likewise a big case of dumbshit and may finally (Pleasw Lord! He is worse than the Pepsi guy!) get Ballmer fired.
Its stupid, its catering to a market where they don't matter, it pisses off users more than it impresses, where is the upside here?
That is why while everyone else is moaning at the XP EOL I'm like "happy day, oh happy day!" because I'm starting to see newer and newer XP machines that rather than see if they could just, you know, actually install 7 on the thing? They go out and buy a new box.
My last load brought in by one of my suppliers had nearly a dozen late P4 as well as 4 dual cores, and a half a dozen Pentium Mobile and Athlon Mobile laptops, all in pretty damned good shape, know what I paid? $100 for all 15 boxes and because I'd need to replace the batteries $10 each for the laptops! Once he left I was practically giggling like a schoolgirl!
Hell all I had to do was wipe and reinstall which since I have automated discs was nothing, I had to replace two power adapters on the lappies and one turned out to be toast, bad screen. Big fricking whoop I got $75 a pop for the desktops as fast as I could load them in the window and I didn't have to pay shit for batteries because at $100 each for the laptops folks didn't care! I called one old time customer and when he heard what i had he bought two of the laptops sight unseen, so he'd have one for his GF and a spare!
So while I personally put a good AV and build my machines to last the idiots out there really do make me happy sometimes. I don't know why but folks just go insane for cheap laptops. Hell I have a 900Mhz P3 laptop with 256Mb of RAM and a 20Gb HDD and a guy handed me his number and has called 4 times wanting to make sure i take his $90 for it when the new power adapter gets here! Man I can't wait until the next load!
Sure thing friend, but remember, be careful what you wish for!
Get ready, here they come! Kinda makes that koolaid just a little bitter now, don't it? I believe in using the best tool for the job, but to say Linux is secure or better than any other complex OS is frankly bullshit. Hell I was talking to a 15 year Linux admin on one of the other sites that had gotten so sick of Linux fuckups they were going to BSD and if THAT didn't "just work" they were gonna wash their hands of FLOSS on the desktop and just go Mac.
BTW if you'd like a little more food for thought, what OS was 3 of the 4 CAs running that were compromised? take a look and see. Maybe they just had configs? Surely someone with knowledge would be safe right? Guess again and its not a fluke by any means.
BTW if you wish to run Linux because its cheap/free, or to make a political statement? Not a problem with me, I'm personally gonna try out FreeBSD on turkey week to see if I can lower my costs on refurbs. But to pretend that Linux is a magical woobie that makes you hack proof like the one I was responding to (Notice how I was labeled troll for pointing out his "Herp derp, Linux is safe herp derp" was bullshit? Enjoy that groupthink koolaid) then you deserve a good smacking. News Flash: ALL OSES ARE COMPLEX,COMPLEXITY LEADS TO BUGS BUGS LEAD TO HACKS. There USED to be smart people here on Slashdot that knew basics like this, but now its a fanboi jerkoff. As soon as I find a decent OS site i'll be moving on, and if you look at how far /. numbers have dropped i'm far from being the only one sick of being handed Koolaid.
The same way they do it now I suspect, by splitting the job amongst their zombie hoard. After all we are talking about 4 BILLION address with the current Internet so you'd think it wouldn't be worth the effort NOW wouldn't you? But they do it, all damned day. my guess is when they don't have anything better for the zombies to do they just have them take a section and get to knocking just to see what is there.
Must be nice on the router, now try Newegg and Tiger, look at everything under $60, what do you see? IPV4 as far as the eye can see. Why do they even allow them to bring new ones in? Talk about designed for the dump!
Okay genius you explain to me how flash is doing GPU acceleration on a Riva TNT2 because THAT is what is in the Sempron. It draws the screen at native 1600x900 so I never bothered to put anything bigger, still plays SD video just fine too in dragon.
How's that FLOSSie koolaid? Is it cherry? if you had bothered to use anything besides "XP Corporate Razr1911 Edition" you'd know that both Chrome and IE have low rights mode by default so that the browser actually has LOWER permissions than even the user does. Does Linux? Nope, same privileges. Nice try but its a swing and a miss. Hell Linux sever has more open vulnerabilities right now according to Securina, be happy to post the links if you like.
As for TFA all those cheering HTML V5 is gonna get bit right in the ass and i'm gonna laugh, oh how I'm gonna laugh. in my own tests even SD video on HTML V5 sucks up a hell of a lot more CPU and memory than flash, from the looks of it Apple will ram through H.264 as the format for HTML V5 as everyone wants to get into the fat money the iShiny is making, so there goes any freedom you thought you'd get, and if you think the movie companies are gonna give up their DRM I have a nice bridge you'd be interested in so I wouldn't be surprised if you end up with a version of HTML V5 that won't even play on Linux thanks to lack of kernel level DRM like Windows and Apple has.
So give it five years, hell give it three, I bet all those that are cheering HTML V5 thinking it'll "free the web!" is gonna be looking back and thinking they never had it so good. The default answer on every forum will be "Go buy a copy of Windows, install into VM, then watch video" thus ensuring even less people will deal with the hoops jumping than before. hell MSFT couldn't have asked for a better prezzie!
Oh and before anyone says "Google will save us!" I predict Google will just take their nice GPL V2 kernel and lock the fuck out of it, thus letting them sign the NDA and getting their own DRM kernel module so they can play HTML V5 protected content. this helps Google as it gives them one more selling point to OEMs, and when even grandma knows about the little green robot frankly they don't need the hackers anymore. Final score for HTML V5? Bloated DRM that lets the big three, Apple, Google, and MSFT split the market and fucks the smaller OSes like Linux right out the market. Hell at least with Adobe they did give you flash, even if it was usually behind. Is there even a legal H.264 codec for Linux yet?
And what do you do about the scanners looking for holes to punch? looking at the firewall logs its pretty much constant hits from China looking for past OS vulnerabilities which like it or not NAT does keep them from doing more than just slamming up against the firewall.
And IP V6 is fine and dandy if your corporate, but what about home users? the ONLY IPV6 router i've seen is the Apple one and at $100 is not only overpriced for the average home frankly its way overkill, with tons of features they'll never use. meanwhile the $25-$50 home routers are ALL IPV4, even on Newegg there is nothing but IPV4 as far as the eye can see.
I've said it before and I've said it again, IP V6 is gonna be a royal clusterfuck. Not having backwards compatibility, no way to set up an easy NAT for home users, sure we have to switch but its gonna be ugly and I wouldn't be surprised if networks are flaky as hell for awhile, especially stuff in the flyover states. finally this'll also be a gold mine for the *.A.A who have wanted one IP address per person for awhile for their John Doe lawsuits.
My guess? Google and Netflix, both of whom looked to be hurt if the ISPs could gouge. What pissed me off is it was classic double dipping. they wanted ME to pay their ever jacked up fees while they charged big corps like Google and Netflix to! Fuck you ISPs, I paid for my pipe, just because your media content sucks doesn't mean you get to force me to watch your crap.
Its already bad enough I HAVE to take the triple pack because they have priced it in such a way that having it without the cable TV costs MORE than not having it, we're talking 50% plus price jump here, but to then try to stear me to their commerical-tastic garbage? To steal a line from Mr Garrison "You got to hell ISPs, you go to hell and you die!"
I work with a lot of home users so I hear of such things and I agree and I'd add the Wii to the "We bought it now what?" list. Folks play with the tablets for a few months, the Wii got around 5 or 6 months, then it sits on a shelf. I had a cousin whose kid practically begged for a Wii and when i ran into him I asked how he liked it and he said 'You're right, its collecting dust and John is on steam playing the crazy looking shooter thing (TF2) all the time". My customers that bought tablets? Same thing. some had me get them the fancy and expensive, some went with the small and cheap, they all ended up sitting on the stand in the corner as a more expensive digital picture frame or just turned off.
So I'm having to wonder if its a fad. Sure there are some people that use the far out of them, just as there are some that use the heck out of the Wii, but I'm finding those to be in the minority, at least around here. Meanwhile even my landlady has jumped on the netbook after seeing me enjoying the Indian summer with mine in the picnic area. She even had me come down while all her friends were here the other day since hers wasn't in yet and she wanted me to give them a little demo to show what she was talking about. The atom netbooks were just too slow unless they had ION but the AMD ones are snappy and light.
So while I wish them luck, simply because Nvidia got screwed by Intel (who i think still should have gotten busted for what they did to Nvidia and AMD) I don't see anybody able to take Apple's "I'm hip!" slot and folks don't seem to be really using the things much anyway. Hell even the local college which was formerly Apple land and you would think would be the place you'd see iPads everywhere, what with the free high speed Wifi all over campus, has instead went to the netbooks and smaller laptops. When I asked my oldest who was going there he said 'Yeah well all the guys go to the lounge to unwind with a little TF2 while the girls are all in Second Life". Maybe they'll take off if they can get Valve to port Steam but I can't imagine TF2 on a touchscreen, talk about being pwned.