Y'all wanna know why desktops and laptops are in decline? I hate to break the news to ya but it ain't because everyone is using an iPad, it is because as we system builders that are still doing well in this economy can tell you for several years the PC has been "good enough" and there simply is no killer app that makes users need to switch!
I have several customers who do their daily computing on what guys here would laugh at, late model P4s with a Gb of RAM and a couple hundred Gb HDD, but why should they switch? Webmail, FB, farmville, these things just don't slam even a 3.2Ghz P4 with HT, much less all those dual cores that have been sold since 06. hell my boys are both on hand me down Pentium Ds and when I offered to build them something bigger they were both "Uhhh...why? Our stuff works fine." all they do is surf and play MMOs and with both boxes having Radeon HD4850s everything just works fine.
The problem is too many in the industry as well as my fellow system builders got used to the "MHz Wars" where everyone tossed every 3 years and which gave them constant churn and that just isn't the case anymore. Hell i always built myself a new PC every year and a half but my AMD quad is going on 3 years now and will probably last me another 5 or more, why should I switch? My games play just fine, I have 8Gb of RAM and 3Tb of space, and I can always slap in a replacement for my HD4850 or upgrade my CPU to a 6 core later on down the road if I need more power. But as it is all my games play at my screens native 1600x900 smooth, video transcoding is nice, everything "just works" and now that I finally replaced my old laptop for a dual core netbook I honestly can't see myself needing another PC for several years.
So PCs aren't going anywhere, it is simply everybody has one. With cell phones folks chunk when the 2 year contract is up so that is creating churn and the tablets simply haven't be around long enough for everybody who wants one to have already bought one. I'm actually seeing quite good sales on the new AMD Brazos netbooks, I think the problem in that market is in the race to the bottom too many OEMs chose Atom without ION and that equals painful, but the Brazos has a nice Radeon built in and does full 1080P and plays WoW so everyone likes those. hell in my own family we have something like 7 desktop and 4 laptops, what would we do with more?
The ones that survive are gonna be smart and doing value add like me. I show folks how they can organize and stream everything with an HTPC, how to make that late model P4 or early dual into a great PC media center for the kids, how to set up sharing networks so you can drag and drop between every machine in the house, how to have it all "just work" wirelessly. PCs aren't going anywhere, if anything everyone has so many of them now nobody knows what to do with them. the smart guys will be showing them how to get the most out of what they have.
Damn I'm sorry to hear that Barbara, what bit you in the butt this time? I'll be giving the FreeBSD a spin on turkey week just heard from one of my suppliers he has a load for me that he just hasn't had time to deliver so i figure i'll have plenty to play with.
Well if FreeBSD doesn't cut the mustard I can honestly say with the exception of the price Windows 7 is extremely nice. they got rid of the Vista irritants, low rights mode with Chromium based and IE means you don't have to worry about drive bys anymore, live Mesh and Easy Connect makes it beyond butt simple to remote in to boxes and control them just like you were sitting there, libraries and jumplists make managing huge amounts of data and getting to most used places quick and painless, the explorer jumplist especially is a Godsend as it remembers the last 10 folders you used and will pop up a list of them on right click so I don't even need to fire up explorer hardly anymore, and memory management with superfetch is awesome, the more memory you have the more of your programs are loaded into memory based on usage patterns. Oh and if you are into CLI administration I hear Powershell is quite good and is just as easy to admin a whole server farm as it is to control the local box and of course you can install and run Bash tools on Windows.
Meh if the BSDs just don't cut the mustard I'm gonna have to start looking for some sort of loophole in the family pack license so I can use that because $100 a pop for system builders HP just don't cut it in a down economy. I like to stay legit but I'm noticing more and more of the machines crossing my desk having the "Win 7 Razr1911 edition" simply because MSFT gouges system builders. Hell if I could get starter at $35 a pop or HP for $50 I probably wouldn't use anything else and with it being supported until 2020 there is no worries there.
I really hope the BSD works out as I like the IDEA of FLOSS and it would sure help my bottom line but if you, someone who has years of Linux admin experience, gets frustrated and has trouble keeping it running, what chance would Suzy the checkout girl have?
You really should try Win 7, its actually quite nice. I fully expected to hate it like I did Vista but it was the complete opposite, I found they finally got the perfect mix of power user features and making it easy for grandma that it all just fit.
You have the integrated search everywhere which makes finding features you didn't even know existed, like how my dad is learning voice control by simply typing mic into control panel, the jumplist for Explorer keeps up with the last ten folders you were using which makes it a Godsend, I love that damned thing so much I feel like my hands are tied behind my back with I have to work in XP, memory usage is much better with smart prefetch making sure your favorite programs are already waiting in RAM, Readyboost is quite nice for netbooks although I've found it also is a nice addition to full desktops, libraries are fricking awesome, you can have folders all over a dozen drives and Windows will give you a central folder that will let you organize and control them all no matter where they are, real sweet, oh and finally yes they have a TweakUI for 7 only its called Windows Ultimate Tweaker. The first thing I do on a new 7 build is fire it off of my thumbstick and use it to kill those stupid fade in/out effects. Why MSFT loves that crap I don't know, it just irritates IMHO.
I have to agree though that the new UIs suck, as I said nobody wants Win 8, and I tried Unity and I could not stand it, and this is from someone who has used a dock on his Windows PCs for more than half a decade so I have NO problem with docks. But what idiot thought putting the stupid thing on the left side of the screen when we all have widescreens was a good idea? Vertical is NOT where widescreens have the most space! I guess is it for people that will never use more than one or two apps at a time which leaves me out. I have nearly 20 items I use a lot on my Rocketdock and being able to just slam my mouse straight up and hit the dock makes it a hell of a lot easier to use IMHO.
But hopefully the world will speak and they will listen. the Linux guys seems to be migrating to XFCE and LXDE, good for them, and as you said it looks like Win 7 will be the new XP and Win 8 the new Vista. Oh and for the guy below that said the users must have been running as admin? Nope its just that Vista would scream about ANY change. Need to change something in control panel? Cancel/allow. you want to uninstall a program? Cancel/allow. hell i had one machine where Vista would throw up about three cancel/allow dialogs when emptying temp crap into the trash! With Win 7 ONLY changes that will affect the system, such as new program installs, throw up the box. I personally went from a dozen 'ZOMG cancel allow?" boxes a day to maybe twice a week and those twice a week were where I would EXPECT Win 7 to ask me, not for dumb shit.
What innovation? I have YET to see an HTML V5 site that didn't suck! I can watch full screen SD video even on this 1.8GHz Sempron I use as a nettop with NO GPU acceleration and it plays just fine, no skips no stutters. I try to play any site bragging about HTML V5 and even on my brand new dual core netbook its beats the CPU like a pimp dealing with a bitch late with his money. Of course it also looks like the video tag (which is all it is you know, its up to the browsers to decide what it means and Apple and MSFT have already said won't be Theora or WebM, seeing as how they both want to "fucking kill Google") will end up being H.264 so it will be just as damned proprietary as flash, so no gains there either.
So what do we gain? we get a "solution" that uses more resources than the one we had, is just as proprietary if not more so that the one we had, and which will mean many more machines that can play the original solution won't be able to play the new and will have to be shitcanned. You guys SERIOUSLY call this progress? Are you sure you don't work for Oracle or MSFT?
Huh? Paranoid much? where was I "proud" of anything? I stated a need based on my customer's usage patterns, they all go to YouTube and other video sites and they all play FB games, that means no flash and as far as they are concerned the machine is "broken" and unsuitable for purpose.
As far as HTML V5 dear lord i hope not, its sucks! As another poster pointed out its just a tag and from the looks of thing H.264 is gonna win, so its just as proprietary as flash and I've found even SD video to be a slideshow on anything short of a P4 3.2GHz with HT! Compare this to flash where with a Chromium based browser such as Comodo Dragon I can play SD flash video smooth as butter on a circa 2003 1.8GHz Sempron with 1.5GHz RAM I keep at the shop as a nettop. With many companies dumping their XP machines as part of the great XP EOL migration I'm getting tons of late model XP PCs and laptops cheap and in a down economy I'd found refurbing these quickly and cheaply lets me make a decent profit on them while having them priced to move, the sub $150 laptops I've found literally get bought before I can even finish with them!
So I don't care if it emulation, native, or magic, as long as it works and is rock solid long term. I have plenty of machines I sold 5, 6, 7 years ago out in the field being used or handed down to family so it has to just work and KEEP just working, no driver borkage or having the user be forced to do a clean install every new release or do the upgrade "crap my drivers broke!" find the fix game.
So since you know the subject, some questions, how long does the latest version get security updates? software backported? Does it have anything similar to WINE so if they have some program they love I can install it for them and make it work? How is its support for printers, especially the all in ones? What about PMPs like iPod, how well does it support them? Is there an easy to use media player that will let them get songs on and off, hopefully with ripping support? How about DVDs, is it hard to get them to play?
Just remember we aren't talking geeks or programmers, we are talking Suzy the checkout girl and Marty the meter reader types, so simple and solid is a must as my initial setup will most likely be the LAST time a geek touches it. i'm leaning towards Enlightenment or LXDE as those are both light, any experience with them? But I wouldn't be wasting my time coming up with and typing all these questions if all I cared about was proprietary, I'd just stick with Windows or strip the machines. I already give my users a lot of FOSS like VLC and LO and like and have no trouble walking them through chromium, so if I can find a solid free OS that will let me lower my price further I'm all for it.
But how long does it get security updates if you don't upgrade? i know with most Linux distros that isn't very long and often newer software just doesn't get backported. The problem here is most folks in my area are big on "If it works it stays" and as I've said having a PC I sold in the field 6 or 7 years isn't unheard of and most end up at 5 years plus. I even had a checkout girl recently (which is why I always talk about Suzy the checkout girl) who asked me if I could "Look and see if I could make this PC given to her go faster" only to get out there and its a box I built back in 99! When it looked like the poor thing was gonna cry because i laughed i told what was funny and it turned out that box had gone through one entire family before being passed to another where it was on its third owner. I sold her a nice late model P4 board with CPU+RAM for $60 and its still going!
So that is why I make such a big deal about the OS not breaking because with a little tweaking and a good AV my machines are known for just working for ages. If I were to switch to an OS that even caused them to have to bring it in once a year that would hurt my rep and in this business rep is everything. One of the other posters says freeBSD comes in LXDE and Enlightenment so I'll probably go with one of those on my test, I just hope i can get them solid and stable.
And allow me to chime in from the other side of the aisle since he also mentions Windows 8. my customers are just your ordinary folks, the kind MSFT expects to sell Win 8 to. Suzy the checkout girl, Brian who runs a backhoe, everyday Joes. Now to put what I am about to say in perspective I showed screencaps of Win 7 as well as ran the beta when it became available and the reaction across the board was one of curiosity, they wanted to know what it did and how it stacked up to XP since nobody really liked Vista. oh and if everyone wants to know what killed Visa for ordinary folks, Canel/allow? constantly drove them nuts!
But I'm now up to about 130 of these normal folks that I've shown the Win 8 screengrabs to and about 20 that actually watched a little of the video and they all to a man absolutely fucking HATE it and have made it quite clear they don't give a shit WHAT it does its a giant DO NOT WANT. In fact the closest I got to an "endorsement" was this exchange by a sweet little middle aged female customer "Oh that is a nice looking cell phone picture, is it that Android? I heard that is supposed to be quite nice....what do you mean Windows? Windows what? Well that is just stupid! Why would I want a cell phone on my computer?"
And from the mouth of an ordinary person comes truth. Instead of the curiosity I saw with Win 7 the biggest question they had for me was "But if I need another Windows 7 you'll be able to get me one, right?" which I would say is a sign that Ballmer's Folly does not look to be in a good position right from the start. I didn't even see this kind of hate for Vista this early, most like myself hoped they'd fix it. Hell the only nice thing I can say about Win 8 is maybe Ballmer will be forced to "pursue other interests" and someone decent can be brought in to right the ship.
So I feel for ya Linux guys, I really do. Its like all the DE designers drank the same poorly mixed Kool Aid and became Bizarro developers "Quick things am stable and users am happy! Must make big mess, throw out years of work, and make things am confusing! Users am unhappy now? We do good!"
Aww crap, just my luck. How is FreeBSD with flash support? Resource usage? Does it have a nice clean GUI similar to LXDE that would allow users to easily switch from Windows? And how does the rolling release bit fare with regards to sound, video, and wifi? Those are the big three i have seen borked the most. the machines will most likely be Intel or nvidia GPUs with Realtek sound and possibly Broadcom or one of the generic wireless, the laptops standard Intel and AMD late models, 1.5-1.8Ghz with Intel or ATI everything.
Funny you should mention the classic "never upgrade windows" meme because for shits and giggles I upgraded from Vista to 7 on a machine i planned to wipe anyway, damned if it didn't just drop the old windows into a folder called "Windows.old" and work like a charm. I was actually shocked, kinda ironic though that Linux and Windows would switch places on that huh?
As long as its low resource and doesn't break I'll give it a whirl though, I really hate having to shitcan working hardware if I don't have to and the last batch that came through only about half had XP CALs. I ended up stripping for parts as I couldn't get either PCLOS or Mepis to keep from borking and the Ubuntu one borked right off the bat, I got bit by that "black desktop" bug, like my users would have had a prayer with THAT! But there is no way in hell my users can wipe and reinstall every 6 months and I sure as hell can't afford to do that for free.
Re:Only "troubled" if you're not Lockheed Martin
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The F-35 Story
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Actually you'd be surprised at the Soviet stuff some of them goat herders have. i can't remember the name of the battle off hand but during the invasion of Iraq we actually had ourselves a good old fashioned WWII style tank battle between the M1 and the "Lion of Babylon" tank I believed they called it? it was a heavily modified soviet T-series (A T55 IIRC) that they had been tweaking and modifying to make it more in line with current tanks, similar to what the Chinese have done with many Soviet era tech.
Have you seen what the Pakistanis and Chinese have done with the MiG 21 and 23 designs? They are actually not bad modern aircraft. And of course if Israel stirs up shit and ends up trying to drag us into Iran (which frankly wouldn't surprise me, I've actually gotten to talk to some of the ring wing high muckety mucks thanks to living next to a conservative college and they think "We gotta make sure Jesus comes back!" is a valid strategy for the ME) much of their tech is actually based on OUR stuff, such as they have their own highly modified fighter based on the design of the F5 Freedom Fighter (talk about irony) that we sold the shah in the 70s. Go to some of the aircraft and defense sites and they think with the current blend of American and French designs it'll actually be a pretty decent fighter with a hell of a turning ratio and power to spare since the frame is so small and light, kinda a ME answer to the F16.
So I worry about the attitude we have now. remember the japs were pretty damned arrogant at the start of the war and thought WE were the goat herders. Their plane was the fastest in the sky and was nimble whereas we were flying the aptly named Buffalo. Just because those goat herders are working with Soviet era shit doesn't mean they can't make it kick ass. For a perfect example look at the "dear little cobra" as the soviets called the Airacobra. We couldn't do shit with it, they stripped out the wing mounted guns and just stuck with the cannons and chopped Nazis all to hell with it.
Has anyone tried the LXDE Mint edition here? How stable is it? How about the Debian based version? I'm having a load of refurbs dropped off in the next few days and really want to give something user friendly a shot. Ms Hudson says OpenSUSE so that is on my list although I haven't been able to find a copy from 3 years ago for my "is it safe?" test yet. any OS I put on these machines needs to be able to update for at LEAST 5 years without drivers breaking so I download a version from 3 years ago, update to current and see if it passes. So far no dice, and I've tried Ubuntu, PCLOS, Mepis, some other one I can't remember off the top of my head and Fedora (because I had one guy insist Fedora could do it) so I'm starting to run out of user friendly distros here folks.
I don't need lots of bling, just one that will update to current without breaking ANY drivers, easy for the average person (think Suzy the checkout girl) and will run comfortably on a standard P4 office box, that is a 2.2- 3.6GHz with 512Mb of RAM and a 40Gb HDD. I don't mind having to jump through a few hoops on initial setup but once handed to the user there should be ZERO need for tweaking or playing find the fix.
Surely there has got to be at least one that fits the bill and since I'll be off for turkey week i'll have plenty of time to fiddle with them, any suggestions? The ones I have lined up are openSUSE and Linux Mint LXDE and if a distro works well with laptops that's a bonus as I may be getting in a load of off lease laptops soon.
As for TFA I gotta agree Ubuntu has been all over the place of late. Wanting to jump into the crowded ARM tablet arena with the 8000 pound gorilla that is Google? What are they nuts? Why not just concentrate on making the best damned Linux desktop ever so that when the 2014 EOL comes we retailers will have something nice to stick on all those trade ins? Android has too much brand recognition and Apple has the top in sewed shut, hell I even had a 68 year old lady asking me today "What do you think of that cute little green robot thingy tablet, are they good?". When even the grannies know the Android bot you can bet getting into that market? suicide. no wonder HP is looking to sell WebOS.
I'd just be happy if they'd figure out what they broke after the 3.0x branch and please please PLEASE undo it? because through 3.0x I could play SD video fine, even on a nettop. after 4.0 it started getting stuttery, after 5 it was simply unwatchable. You launch a video in new tab and the CPU is slammed to 100% and pretty much stays there until i close the link or use downloadhelper to download the video (thus allowing me to close the link).
In the latest Dragon, chrome, and opera i can still watch SD video just fine, I also NEVER have the CPU slam to 100% and stay there, even on launch or while having multiple tabs open. With FF it really seems to like to bitchslap the CPU and on anything lower than a P4 3.06Ghz at least from what I've seen, its so hard on the CPU it'll actually make the machine itself jerky, like the screen isn't updating. I just downloaded and launched the new FF and WHAM, slam the CPU for about 5 seconds, then launched a video WHAM BAM the CPU stayed slammed until I closed it. Again with the others I just don't see that, I even disabled all my add ons just to see, no dice. It doesn't seem to like having tons of bookmarks in folders either, it gets real jerky when I try to go down the tree. same bookmarks in the others? No problem.
I'm really starting to wonder if its Gecko. If the engine simply can't take all the stuff that's been done to it and its time for a rewrite. The chromium based like Dragon may use more RAM because they have a separate process per tab but it doesn't feel slow or jerky or bloated. A single SD video doesn't make the entire browser slam the CPU, or even make the whole OS jerk, but with FF it does, at least for me.
This isn't some "yay everyone else, FF boo!" as I really miss FF and want it to get better. I even downloaded and tried the Pale moon fork hoping that stripped of the cruft and having it optimized for SSE it would be better. it was a little but not enough to matter. so I really do hope that things get better, that they have some new guts they are working on that will blow webkit and presto away, but so far i'm just not seeing it, which is why I've been switching my users to Dragon when they complain.
Hell its even worse than that. Everybody here knows the niche for something like that would be parties, where you could just snap off a pic of friends and hand it to them. well this thing only lets you print 25 pics and then the printer part, the ONLY real selling point this thing has because as your link explains it isn't even as good a picture as the newer smartphones, is kaput. dead, toast.
WTF good is that? 25 pics? sure it says it can also save another 75 in memory before it goes completely dead, but if all you wanted to do was save you'd have just point a $70 Olympus or just used your smartphone.
Sorry Polaroid, and this is from someone that loved your old "zebra cam" 70s model and still has his grandma's fold up unit in a closet but $300 for a cam that can only do 25 shots on a charge just don't cut it, especially not with $25 film. I agree at $99 it might have found a niche but I bet at $300 this thing will be on Woot! in a year for less than a hundred bucks, but good luck finding the film by then.
Re:Only "troubled" if you're not Lockheed Martin
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The F-35 Story
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· Score: 1
Oh please! Energy weapons? you trying to sell us that it has laser beams mounted to its head? they have been trying to get that crap to work for damned near 30 years and it STILL sucks!
And if you are wanting a test platform that can land on a carrier and be stealth then the better solution is UCAV which is what the Russians are working on. with a drone you don't have the man rating so its faster to market, it can do turns that would pop a human like a zit, uses less fuel, and won't cost more than paying off half the mortgages in Oklahoma if you lose the damned thing.
The F35 is the same damned story we have seen ever since we started the whole stealth kick, yet another multibillion dollar turkey that will have MAYBE 100 of them built and will cost frankly insane amounts of money to fly and operate. meanwhile the enemy will be able to spam with MiG29s and SU35s (Since they are cheap and Russia will sell to anybody with cash) and I don't care if the thing does a square dance in the sky to "Danger Zone" if the enemy has 50 or even 75 to 1 when it comes to numbers you be screwed friend.
Just ask the Germans whose FW190s and BF109s were frankly nicer than what we had in their later models, not to mention their ME262. the B17 may have been a slow ass flying target but once we were able to spam them with P47s and P51s it was all over but the crying, or look at their Panther and King Tiger compared to the Sherman. it would take TEN Shermans to defeat a KT but we were cranking out 500+ to every 1 they could produce.
In the end it frankly doesn't matter how damned slick the stealth is if we can only afford 1 for every 30+ the future enemies have, they'll just spam us out of the sky.
Actually YOU sir don't know what you are talking about, as the registry grows it can become fragmented just like the file system and if those dead entries are called upon, like say the right click menu which is often had crap dumped by third parties, then windows will waste time trying to load it before giving up. may not be much but over time that adds up.
But hey don't believe me, there is a butt simple way to test this yourself. take ANY windows machine that has been running more than a year and has had a decent amount of activity, lets say daily usage. use a solid benchmark tool like PCWizard made by the nice folks at CPUID. Then instal and run tuneup, make the profile and let it do its thing, run the one click maintenance and THEN benchmark. I bet your benchmark scores WILL be better. How much or little better will depend on the system but they WILL be better.
It also does a lot more than just the registry, but you'd know that if you'd have actually tried it instead of just spouting off. the link I gave you is 100% free, what do you have to lose?
I'll play, before they actually had to follow you, which meant they had to put in hours, file expense reports, they had to WORK for it. Now they can just spam GPS units which will naturally make their threshold for what is "worth watching" drop significantly.
any tool can and WILL be abused if proper safeguards aren't in place and I'd say there simply aren't enough safeguards in place to make up for the natural barriers that traditional surveillance placed upon the police.
I don't know, as someone who was the victim of nearly two years of police harassment i know what kind of effect it can have. For nearly two years I had a police escort EVERYWHERE, when i pulled out of school, the grocery store, you name it he was there. any excuse to pull me over (not to give me a ticket, as that would give me proof to fight with, just to fuck with me and intimidate me) sometimes as many as three times a day. what was my crime? My GF at the time was the babysitter for his ex and his son (whom he lost all custody of by being a right bastard) and while his son hated his father he thought the world of me, even got his mom to get him a leather jacket like mine. hell I wasn't trying to be his dad, i just felt sorry for the kid, everyone ignored him or treated him like shit.
The only way I got the bullshit to end was my dad got tired of sending me to the store or the parts supply and it taking me half a day thanks to the constant bullshit so he went to go see a county judge he was buddies with and when the judge said one of HIS cops would do that he told the judge to get in the car, since he took my Mustang, and see for himself. Sure enough once they got to one of the places I usually hung out here come the blue lights. when that bastard cop walked up to the door boy did he get a fucking shock. Last I heard he ended up on a police force more than 150 miles away after that judge made it clear the only duty he'd be getting in this county was shit detail!
So I can tell you it don't take much to start getting on your nerves and lets not forget the guy ALREADY had a tracker mounted on his SUV and possibly his GFs as well so he is already on somebody's shit list. I'd love to know who he pissed off and why..
Well he may be a spammer but I can tell you how to actually help your aunt without her needing any degrees or even doing anything difficult. (disclaimer, not affiliated with nor do I even get a discount, in fact i'm gonna say how to get a version for free and how to use it to get the newer version for cheaper than list)
I've found what slows a PC down more than anything is shitty third party programs that spam the registry and leave dead keys, eventually causing what is known as winrot. to get rid of it and have the PC remain fresh and snappy even years after install the easy peasy way just use Tuneup Utilities which after install will automatically keep the PC clean and if your auntie will just answer a couple of questions by simply double clicking on the taskbar icon and following its recommendations it'll customize itself to her PC and give her even better performance.
That link is not warez, its the 08 version they give away in the hopes you'll like it and spring for the new version. I've found with each version it gets better and has even more excellent tools so I think its worth it, and you can install the 2008 and then buy the upgrade version for $29 instead of $49 if you want the latest and greatest. if not the 08 version works on XP/Vista/7 32 bit and IIRC 64 bit as well. The best thing is once you've installed it even if you don't touch a thing it will do the work for your auntie every 3 days like clockwork, registry, temp junk, defrag if she needs it, broken shortcuts, all the clutter that badly written programs can crap all over the PC is a thing of the past. Answer those few questions in the taskbar it gets better and more customized for your particular PC.
as for TFA here's a silly question....WTF are the prison systems doing being accessible from the fricking net? Seriously WTF? Does the warden want to be able to let the rapist in cell 356 out of his unit from his iPhone? WTF people? Some systems should NEVER EVER be able to be connected to the net, electric grids, nuclear powerplants, vital defense systems and oh yeah PRISONS! what bozo decided that having them net connected was a good idea? And I apologize if TFA explains why the braintrust wanted them hooked as it doesn't want to load for me ATM.
I know I shouldn't feed a racist troll but he brings up something that maybe someone here can answer because it has been puzzling me...How in the fuck do those "Thug Life!"ers walk down the damned street with their pants THAT low and they don't fall off? hell how do they even stand? Do they use glue? Tape? Because I have seen thug lifers stand on a corner for hours like that and NEVER have to adjust or pull those things up and gravity dictates that they should be around their ankles. Hooks attached to the outer thigh?
As for TFA why wouldn't there be spotted horses? mother nature is pretty well known for having offshoots and variants and as we have seen with many animals spots can make for a good camouflage, so it would just seem natural that at sometime in the past horses would have offshoots that had mixed colors. Now pink polka dot or something like that I could see doubting, but mixed coloring on animals is probably as old as time. After all if we can have hobbit sized people and elephants the size of horses i doubt horses having spots would be THAT big a leap.
I also doubt there would be much fibbing on the part of the painters, as from the cave paintings I've seen anyway they appear to be telling the tribal stories, the men dropping game, migrating herds, the things that would actually affect their lives. I wouldn't be surprised if the horse migrations were watched and followed like any other large game.
Are you still butthurt that your OS can't function without CLI and is more like Win98 than a modern OS? Poor baby, I can understand then why you would be afraid to use the entire quote then since it make your magical woobie OS look even more like shit on a shingle.
As for what the other guy was trying to point out, which apparently like your inability to even copypasta is just beyond your tiny mind, is that Bill Gates is part of an exclusive club, the.01% percent. They are so high above even the 1%ers that they could buy their own third world and even second world countries and have themselves set as "King god of the mountain" if that is what tickled their fancy. And while the Koch bros use theirs to try to buttfuck as many people in the USA as they possibly can bill uses his to try to help people and even to advocate raising his own taxes. If you weren't completely clueless then you'd know the man even went so far as to go against the current CEO of MSFT in trying to get Washington state to raise taxes on the rich.
But hey, what can anyone expect from a moran that can't even copypasta a single sentence because the truth of that sentence makes him shit himself with fear. So thanks for this opportunity to show yet again what a fail both you AND the product you shill for is.. the correct sentence is as far as the user is concerned THERE IS NO COMMAND LINE IN WINDOWS and that statement is as true as the sky is blue. ask the next 20 people you meet on the street how to call up CLI in Windows and see what you get, but you know this don't you? This is why that little sentence makes you afraid. It is also why you bring up server even in talks about desktops, hoping to move the goalposts, but server ain't doing so well either it turns out. Here enjoy some fail pudding..
Not only does Linux have 4x++ the amount of unpatched security vulnerabilities its competitor Windows Server 2008 does, but it bears 3 remotely exploitable unpatched security vulnerabilities strike one, strike twostrike three and you're out of there! Let me end with a little food for thought, did you know that THREE out of the FOUR recently breached CAs are running Linux? Be happy to show you the Netcraft report if you like, but i think I'd rather showsome otherrecent uber fails.
In light of this evidence I can see why that sentence scares you so much you would corrupt it to make your sig, like a talisman to ward off the stench of fail and death that surrounds you. But numbers can't be warded off and after twenty years of slaving, after all that money wasted by Shuttleworth you are STILL lower than JavaME and there is a whole website dedicated To your bullshit and excuses that you use to cover your wasted effort. I'd laugh but its kinda sad more than anything else. And you wonder why retailers like me won't touch your product?
I'll give it a shot, my supplier is supposed to swing by some more refurbs for me to turn and the building super also works at the local college so I end up with their turnovers. I'll probably go with the LXDE as most of the refurbs I get are what I call "standard office boxes", that is a 2.4-3.6Ghz P4 with 512mb of RAM and a 40gb HDD which should be plenty for LXDE.
I'll just never understand why they threw away years of hard work and bug fixes on GNOME and KDE just to chase the bling, it still blows my mind. What was wrong with what they had? It wasn't ugly, far from it. It had nice looks, smooth functionality, mature software, I ran KDE 3.x from 05 to 07 on my personal laptop and found it quite lovely and fast. Its a shame that with all the work going to the new bling fests the old ones will just slowly die out,IMHO forks that don't take over the slot held by the original just don't last long as they lose momentum.
I just wish someone would make a "one repo to rule them all" with drivers. Just imagine, your disc could have basic network and graphics driver and then just hook up to the driver repo to take care of ALL the drivers, no matter what the hardware. After an upgrade it could just do a scan and hit the driver repo for any drivers it had messed up, all without the user doing squat.
Even better they could make a disc version with X86 and X64 flavors so a guy like me could just pop in the disc and it would have enough drivers that you could get ANY machine up and running quickly. If they can do it with the tons and tons of third party drivers in windows with driverpacks surely it could be done with Linux. as a bonus one could have a "local driver store' on disc that contained the what I call 80% drivers, the big name hardware like ATI and Nvidia, Broadcom and Atheros,Realek and Sigmatel, all the major all in one and printer drivers, compressed and stored so that if you plugged ANY new hardware in there would at least be a generic driver already waiting that would at least get them functional. I'd personally be happy to give up 5Gb on each drive just to not have to worry about hardware.
But like I said i'll download the version from 3 years ago and give it the "is it safe" test, I just hope that it works. There is gonna be a ton of really nice dual cores that are gonna be EOLed with XP that would make great Linux boxes and laptops but I have to know when I hand it to a customer they aren't gonna have to bring it back in 6 months or less because 'update foo broke my stuff!' as my users just don't have the skills to be doing the "find the fix" tango.
I'll give you one better, put the "80%" as I call them, AMD, Intel and Nvidia chipsets and GPUs, Broadcom and Atheros wireless, Realtek and SiS networking, Realtek and Simatel sound, and put them on a disc similar to what we have with Windows. I have a pair of discs, one 32bit and one 64bit, that I can put into ANY box or laptop and it WILL have the driver. There REALLY needs to be something similar for Linux. like you said they don't have to be optimized, hell don't have to be the most current, just something that will "just work" and allow someone to get ANY machine up and functional. After that as you said a central driver repo could take care of the rest.
The sad part is despite all the experience Linux has with repos MSFT is actually gotten ahead of them on this. When I left my dad's new PC at his home and told him I'd be back on the weekend to install Win 7 he got impatient and decided to do it himself, thanks to the new Windows Update which runs during install and downloads any and all drivers you need (it comes with just about every generic networking driver, along with a basic driver for most others, the rest is hosted at WU) when I got there the machine was running beautifully, didn't even need the driver disc. it all "just worked".
I truly want Linux to succeed and carve out a decent niche, I really do. I'm old enough to remember when the market was plumb full of choices, we had Atari and Commodore, Tandy and Apple and IBM clones up the butt, plenty to choose from. Hell I even think it would be better for Apple and MSFT as they'd have to stay on their toes. But until the driver problem is fixed or there is a hell of a lot longer support schedule I just can't carry it, the updates/upgrades just break too much stuff. I need an OS that once i hand it to the customer they don't need me anymore except for hardware upgrades or replacement, with a good AV I can get that with windows. With Linux I just end up spending all my time dealing with forums and looking for fixes. Surely there has to be a better way!
Molten salt solar I think would be the better path, also has the advantage of just needing mirrors and a salt tower instead of solar cells that have to be replaced. At night there is enough heat in the salt to use it as a battery.
Of course they'll have to be built in the deserts but it isn't like we don't have plenty of desert land right? I bet with some work one could use salt as a battery for the solar cells as well, but I don't know how much would be lost in the conversion.
Re:Only "troubled" if you're not Lockheed Martin
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Which is why I mentioned the B-2 for taking out the radar, after that we can bring out the B-52 for any 'pile on the pounding" and use the A-10 for more precision strike.
That sad part is the ONLY thing the F35 does really well is suck money, you can't load on the pounds without blowing its stealth, without the stealth its an easy target, it can't fight like a fighter, it can't bomb like a bomber. Frankly the whole stealth idea is pretty damned lame anyway. with modern HARM missiles anybody that points a radar at us is gonna be blown into the afterlife and the HARM is a hell of a lot cheaper than even the cheapest stealth, and for those rolls where it absolutely positively HAS to be stealth, whatever those rolls are, we have the B-2 and F22 just sitting there.
Re:Only "troubled" if you're not Lockheed Martin
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That is why we need to use the bounty system. We say "Here is what we want, here is how much we will pay, GO!" and let them fight it out. It has become too much a good old boys club, with senator kickbackus and congressman porkus getting their palms greased and "bringing home the bacon" no matter how worthless the final project is.
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Y'all wanna know why desktops and laptops are in decline? I hate to break the news to ya but it ain't because everyone is using an iPad, it is because as we system builders that are still doing well in this economy can tell you for several years the PC has been "good enough" and there simply is no killer app that makes users need to switch!
I have several customers who do their daily computing on what guys here would laugh at, late model P4s with a Gb of RAM and a couple hundred Gb HDD, but why should they switch? Webmail, FB, farmville, these things just don't slam even a 3.2Ghz P4 with HT, much less all those dual cores that have been sold since 06. hell my boys are both on hand me down Pentium Ds and when I offered to build them something bigger they were both "Uhhh...why? Our stuff works fine." all they do is surf and play MMOs and with both boxes having Radeon HD4850s everything just works fine.
The problem is too many in the industry as well as my fellow system builders got used to the "MHz Wars" where everyone tossed every 3 years and which gave them constant churn and that just isn't the case anymore. Hell i always built myself a new PC every year and a half but my AMD quad is going on 3 years now and will probably last me another 5 or more, why should I switch? My games play just fine, I have 8Gb of RAM and 3Tb of space, and I can always slap in a replacement for my HD4850 or upgrade my CPU to a 6 core later on down the road if I need more power. But as it is all my games play at my screens native 1600x900 smooth, video transcoding is nice, everything "just works" and now that I finally replaced my old laptop for a dual core netbook I honestly can't see myself needing another PC for several years.
So PCs aren't going anywhere, it is simply everybody has one. With cell phones folks chunk when the 2 year contract is up so that is creating churn and the tablets simply haven't be around long enough for everybody who wants one to have already bought one. I'm actually seeing quite good sales on the new AMD Brazos netbooks, I think the problem in that market is in the race to the bottom too many OEMs chose Atom without ION and that equals painful, but the Brazos has a nice Radeon built in and does full 1080P and plays WoW so everyone likes those. hell in my own family we have something like 7 desktop and 4 laptops, what would we do with more?
The ones that survive are gonna be smart and doing value add like me. I show folks how they can organize and stream everything with an HTPC, how to make that late model P4 or early dual into a great PC media center for the kids, how to set up sharing networks so you can drag and drop between every machine in the house, how to have it all "just work" wirelessly. PCs aren't going anywhere, if anything everyone has so many of them now nobody knows what to do with them. the smart guys will be showing them how to get the most out of what they have.
Damn I'm sorry to hear that Barbara, what bit you in the butt this time? I'll be giving the FreeBSD a spin on turkey week just heard from one of my suppliers he has a load for me that he just hasn't had time to deliver so i figure i'll have plenty to play with.
Well if FreeBSD doesn't cut the mustard I can honestly say with the exception of the price Windows 7 is extremely nice. they got rid of the Vista irritants, low rights mode with Chromium based and IE means you don't have to worry about drive bys anymore, live Mesh and Easy Connect makes it beyond butt simple to remote in to boxes and control them just like you were sitting there, libraries and jumplists make managing huge amounts of data and getting to most used places quick and painless, the explorer jumplist especially is a Godsend as it remembers the last 10 folders you used and will pop up a list of them on right click so I don't even need to fire up explorer hardly anymore, and memory management with superfetch is awesome, the more memory you have the more of your programs are loaded into memory based on usage patterns. Oh and if you are into CLI administration I hear Powershell is quite good and is just as easy to admin a whole server farm as it is to control the local box and of course you can install and run Bash tools on Windows.
Meh if the BSDs just don't cut the mustard I'm gonna have to start looking for some sort of loophole in the family pack license so I can use that because $100 a pop for system builders HP just don't cut it in a down economy. I like to stay legit but I'm noticing more and more of the machines crossing my desk having the "Win 7 Razr1911 edition" simply because MSFT gouges system builders. Hell if I could get starter at $35 a pop or HP for $50 I probably wouldn't use anything else and with it being supported until 2020 there is no worries there.
I really hope the BSD works out as I like the IDEA of FLOSS and it would sure help my bottom line but if you, someone who has years of Linux admin experience, gets frustrated and has trouble keeping it running, what chance would Suzy the checkout girl have?
That is because we have a fanbase instead. No autographs please, i'll be here all week.
You really should try Win 7, its actually quite nice. I fully expected to hate it like I did Vista but it was the complete opposite, I found they finally got the perfect mix of power user features and making it easy for grandma that it all just fit.
You have the integrated search everywhere which makes finding features you didn't even know existed, like how my dad is learning voice control by simply typing mic into control panel, the jumplist for Explorer keeps up with the last ten folders you were using which makes it a Godsend, I love that damned thing so much I feel like my hands are tied behind my back with I have to work in XP, memory usage is much better with smart prefetch making sure your favorite programs are already waiting in RAM, Readyboost is quite nice for netbooks although I've found it also is a nice addition to full desktops, libraries are fricking awesome, you can have folders all over a dozen drives and Windows will give you a central folder that will let you organize and control them all no matter where they are, real sweet, oh and finally yes they have a TweakUI for 7 only its called Windows Ultimate Tweaker. The first thing I do on a new 7 build is fire it off of my thumbstick and use it to kill those stupid fade in/out effects. Why MSFT loves that crap I don't know, it just irritates IMHO.
I have to agree though that the new UIs suck, as I said nobody wants Win 8, and I tried Unity and I could not stand it, and this is from someone who has used a dock on his Windows PCs for more than half a decade so I have NO problem with docks. But what idiot thought putting the stupid thing on the left side of the screen when we all have widescreens was a good idea? Vertical is NOT where widescreens have the most space! I guess is it for people that will never use more than one or two apps at a time which leaves me out. I have nearly 20 items I use a lot on my Rocketdock and being able to just slam my mouse straight up and hit the dock makes it a hell of a lot easier to use IMHO.
But hopefully the world will speak and they will listen. the Linux guys seems to be migrating to XFCE and LXDE, good for them, and as you said it looks like Win 7 will be the new XP and Win 8 the new Vista. Oh and for the guy below that said the users must have been running as admin? Nope its just that Vista would scream about ANY change. Need to change something in control panel? Cancel/allow. you want to uninstall a program? Cancel/allow. hell i had one machine where Vista would throw up about three cancel/allow dialogs when emptying temp crap into the trash! With Win 7 ONLY changes that will affect the system, such as new program installs, throw up the box. I personally went from a dozen 'ZOMG cancel allow?" boxes a day to maybe twice a week and those twice a week were where I would EXPECT Win 7 to ask me, not for dumb shit.
What innovation? I have YET to see an HTML V5 site that didn't suck! I can watch full screen SD video even on this 1.8GHz Sempron I use as a nettop with NO GPU acceleration and it plays just fine, no skips no stutters. I try to play any site bragging about HTML V5 and even on my brand new dual core netbook its beats the CPU like a pimp dealing with a bitch late with his money. Of course it also looks like the video tag (which is all it is you know, its up to the browsers to decide what it means and Apple and MSFT have already said won't be Theora or WebM, seeing as how they both want to "fucking kill Google") will end up being H.264 so it will be just as damned proprietary as flash, so no gains there either.
So what do we gain? we get a "solution" that uses more resources than the one we had, is just as proprietary if not more so that the one we had, and which will mean many more machines that can play the original solution won't be able to play the new and will have to be shitcanned. You guys SERIOUSLY call this progress? Are you sure you don't work for Oracle or MSFT?
Huh? Paranoid much? where was I "proud" of anything? I stated a need based on my customer's usage patterns, they all go to YouTube and other video sites and they all play FB games, that means no flash and as far as they are concerned the machine is "broken" and unsuitable for purpose.
As far as HTML V5 dear lord i hope not, its sucks! As another poster pointed out its just a tag and from the looks of thing H.264 is gonna win, so its just as proprietary as flash and I've found even SD video to be a slideshow on anything short of a P4 3.2GHz with HT! Compare this to flash where with a Chromium based browser such as Comodo Dragon I can play SD flash video smooth as butter on a circa 2003 1.8GHz Sempron with 1.5GHz RAM I keep at the shop as a nettop. With many companies dumping their XP machines as part of the great XP EOL migration I'm getting tons of late model XP PCs and laptops cheap and in a down economy I'd found refurbing these quickly and cheaply lets me make a decent profit on them while having them priced to move, the sub $150 laptops I've found literally get bought before I can even finish with them!
So I don't care if it emulation, native, or magic, as long as it works and is rock solid long term. I have plenty of machines I sold 5, 6, 7 years ago out in the field being used or handed down to family so it has to just work and KEEP just working, no driver borkage or having the user be forced to do a clean install every new release or do the upgrade "crap my drivers broke!" find the fix game.
So since you know the subject, some questions, how long does the latest version get security updates? software backported? Does it have anything similar to WINE so if they have some program they love I can install it for them and make it work? How is its support for printers, especially the all in ones? What about PMPs like iPod, how well does it support them? Is there an easy to use media player that will let them get songs on and off, hopefully with ripping support? How about DVDs, is it hard to get them to play?
Just remember we aren't talking geeks or programmers, we are talking Suzy the checkout girl and Marty the meter reader types, so simple and solid is a must as my initial setup will most likely be the LAST time a geek touches it. i'm leaning towards Enlightenment or LXDE as those are both light, any experience with them? But I wouldn't be wasting my time coming up with and typing all these questions if all I cared about was proprietary, I'd just stick with Windows or strip the machines. I already give my users a lot of FOSS like VLC and LO and like and have no trouble walking them through chromium, so if I can find a solid free OS that will let me lower my price further I'm all for it.
But how long does it get security updates if you don't upgrade? i know with most Linux distros that isn't very long and often newer software just doesn't get backported. The problem here is most folks in my area are big on "If it works it stays" and as I've said having a PC I sold in the field 6 or 7 years isn't unheard of and most end up at 5 years plus. I even had a checkout girl recently (which is why I always talk about Suzy the checkout girl) who asked me if I could "Look and see if I could make this PC given to her go faster" only to get out there and its a box I built back in 99! When it looked like the poor thing was gonna cry because i laughed i told what was funny and it turned out that box had gone through one entire family before being passed to another where it was on its third owner. I sold her a nice late model P4 board with CPU+RAM for $60 and its still going!
So that is why I make such a big deal about the OS not breaking because with a little tweaking and a good AV my machines are known for just working for ages. If I were to switch to an OS that even caused them to have to bring it in once a year that would hurt my rep and in this business rep is everything. One of the other posters says freeBSD comes in LXDE and Enlightenment so I'll probably go with one of those on my test, I just hope i can get them solid and stable.
And allow me to chime in from the other side of the aisle since he also mentions Windows 8. my customers are just your ordinary folks, the kind MSFT expects to sell Win 8 to. Suzy the checkout girl, Brian who runs a backhoe, everyday Joes. Now to put what I am about to say in perspective I showed screencaps of Win 7 as well as ran the beta when it became available and the reaction across the board was one of curiosity, they wanted to know what it did and how it stacked up to XP since nobody really liked Vista. oh and if everyone wants to know what killed Visa for ordinary folks, Canel/allow? constantly drove them nuts!
But I'm now up to about 130 of these normal folks that I've shown the Win 8 screengrabs to and about 20 that actually watched a little of the video and they all to a man absolutely fucking HATE it and have made it quite clear they don't give a shit WHAT it does its a giant DO NOT WANT. In fact the closest I got to an "endorsement" was this exchange by a sweet little middle aged female customer "Oh that is a nice looking cell phone picture, is it that Android? I heard that is supposed to be quite nice....what do you mean Windows? Windows what? Well that is just stupid! Why would I want a cell phone on my computer?"
And from the mouth of an ordinary person comes truth. Instead of the curiosity I saw with Win 7 the biggest question they had for me was "But if I need another Windows 7 you'll be able to get me one, right?" which I would say is a sign that Ballmer's Folly does not look to be in a good position right from the start. I didn't even see this kind of hate for Vista this early, most like myself hoped they'd fix it. Hell the only nice thing I can say about Win 8 is maybe Ballmer will be forced to "pursue other interests" and someone decent can be brought in to right the ship.
So I feel for ya Linux guys, I really do. Its like all the DE designers drank the same poorly mixed Kool Aid and became Bizarro developers "Quick things am stable and users am happy! Must make big mess, throw out years of work, and make things am confusing! Users am unhappy now? We do good!"
Aww crap, just my luck. How is FreeBSD with flash support? Resource usage? Does it have a nice clean GUI similar to LXDE that would allow users to easily switch from Windows? And how does the rolling release bit fare with regards to sound, video, and wifi? Those are the big three i have seen borked the most. the machines will most likely be Intel or nvidia GPUs with Realtek sound and possibly Broadcom or one of the generic wireless, the laptops standard Intel and AMD late models, 1.5-1.8Ghz with Intel or ATI everything.
Funny you should mention the classic "never upgrade windows" meme because for shits and giggles I upgraded from Vista to 7 on a machine i planned to wipe anyway, damned if it didn't just drop the old windows into a folder called "Windows.old" and work like a charm. I was actually shocked, kinda ironic though that Linux and Windows would switch places on that huh?
As long as its low resource and doesn't break I'll give it a whirl though, I really hate having to shitcan working hardware if I don't have to and the last batch that came through only about half had XP CALs. I ended up stripping for parts as I couldn't get either PCLOS or Mepis to keep from borking and the Ubuntu one borked right off the bat, I got bit by that "black desktop" bug, like my users would have had a prayer with THAT! But there is no way in hell my users can wipe and reinstall every 6 months and I sure as hell can't afford to do that for free.
Actually you'd be surprised at the Soviet stuff some of them goat herders have. i can't remember the name of the battle off hand but during the invasion of Iraq we actually had ourselves a good old fashioned WWII style tank battle between the M1 and the "Lion of Babylon" tank I believed they called it? it was a heavily modified soviet T-series (A T55 IIRC) that they had been tweaking and modifying to make it more in line with current tanks, similar to what the Chinese have done with many Soviet era tech.
Have you seen what the Pakistanis and Chinese have done with the MiG 21 and 23 designs? They are actually not bad modern aircraft. And of course if Israel stirs up shit and ends up trying to drag us into Iran (which frankly wouldn't surprise me, I've actually gotten to talk to some of the ring wing high muckety mucks thanks to living next to a conservative college and they think "We gotta make sure Jesus comes back!" is a valid strategy for the ME) much of their tech is actually based on OUR stuff, such as they have their own highly modified fighter based on the design of the F5 Freedom Fighter (talk about irony) that we sold the shah in the 70s. Go to some of the aircraft and defense sites and they think with the current blend of American and French designs it'll actually be a pretty decent fighter with a hell of a turning ratio and power to spare since the frame is so small and light, kinda a ME answer to the F16.
So I worry about the attitude we have now. remember the japs were pretty damned arrogant at the start of the war and thought WE were the goat herders. Their plane was the fastest in the sky and was nimble whereas we were flying the aptly named Buffalo. Just because those goat herders are working with Soviet era shit doesn't mean they can't make it kick ass. For a perfect example look at the "dear little cobra" as the soviets called the Airacobra. We couldn't do shit with it, they stripped out the wing mounted guns and just stuck with the cannons and chopped Nazis all to hell with it.
Has anyone tried the LXDE Mint edition here? How stable is it? How about the Debian based version? I'm having a load of refurbs dropped off in the next few days and really want to give something user friendly a shot. Ms Hudson says OpenSUSE so that is on my list although I haven't been able to find a copy from 3 years ago for my "is it safe?" test yet. any OS I put on these machines needs to be able to update for at LEAST 5 years without drivers breaking so I download a version from 3 years ago, update to current and see if it passes. So far no dice, and I've tried Ubuntu, PCLOS, Mepis, some other one I can't remember off the top of my head and Fedora (because I had one guy insist Fedora could do it) so I'm starting to run out of user friendly distros here folks.
I don't need lots of bling, just one that will update to current without breaking ANY drivers, easy for the average person (think Suzy the checkout girl) and will run comfortably on a standard P4 office box, that is a 2.2- 3.6GHz with 512Mb of RAM and a 40Gb HDD. I don't mind having to jump through a few hoops on initial setup but once handed to the user there should be ZERO need for tweaking or playing find the fix.
Surely there has got to be at least one that fits the bill and since I'll be off for turkey week i'll have plenty of time to fiddle with them, any suggestions? The ones I have lined up are openSUSE and Linux Mint LXDE and if a distro works well with laptops that's a bonus as I may be getting in a load of off lease laptops soon.
As for TFA I gotta agree Ubuntu has been all over the place of late. Wanting to jump into the crowded ARM tablet arena with the 8000 pound gorilla that is Google? What are they nuts? Why not just concentrate on making the best damned Linux desktop ever so that when the 2014 EOL comes we retailers will have something nice to stick on all those trade ins? Android has too much brand recognition and Apple has the top in sewed shut, hell I even had a 68 year old lady asking me today "What do you think of that cute little green robot thingy tablet, are they good?". When even the grannies know the Android bot you can bet getting into that market? suicide. no wonder HP is looking to sell WebOS.
I'd just be happy if they'd figure out what they broke after the 3.0x branch and please please PLEASE undo it? because through 3.0x I could play SD video fine, even on a nettop. after 4.0 it started getting stuttery, after 5 it was simply unwatchable. You launch a video in new tab and the CPU is slammed to 100% and pretty much stays there until i close the link or use downloadhelper to download the video (thus allowing me to close the link).
In the latest Dragon, chrome, and opera i can still watch SD video just fine, I also NEVER have the CPU slam to 100% and stay there, even on launch or while having multiple tabs open. With FF it really seems to like to bitchslap the CPU and on anything lower than a P4 3.06Ghz at least from what I've seen, its so hard on the CPU it'll actually make the machine itself jerky, like the screen isn't updating. I just downloaded and launched the new FF and WHAM, slam the CPU for about 5 seconds, then launched a video WHAM BAM the CPU stayed slammed until I closed it. Again with the others I just don't see that, I even disabled all my add ons just to see, no dice. It doesn't seem to like having tons of bookmarks in folders either, it gets real jerky when I try to go down the tree. same bookmarks in the others? No problem.
I'm really starting to wonder if its Gecko. If the engine simply can't take all the stuff that's been done to it and its time for a rewrite. The chromium based like Dragon may use more RAM because they have a separate process per tab but it doesn't feel slow or jerky or bloated. A single SD video doesn't make the entire browser slam the CPU, or even make the whole OS jerk, but with FF it does, at least for me.
This isn't some "yay everyone else, FF boo!" as I really miss FF and want it to get better. I even downloaded and tried the Pale moon fork hoping that stripped of the cruft and having it optimized for SSE it would be better. it was a little but not enough to matter. so I really do hope that things get better, that they have some new guts they are working on that will blow webkit and presto away, but so far i'm just not seeing it, which is why I've been switching my users to Dragon when they complain.
Hell its even worse than that. Everybody here knows the niche for something like that would be parties, where you could just snap off a pic of friends and hand it to them. well this thing only lets you print 25 pics and then the printer part, the ONLY real selling point this thing has because as your link explains it isn't even as good a picture as the newer smartphones, is kaput. dead, toast.
WTF good is that? 25 pics? sure it says it can also save another 75 in memory before it goes completely dead, but if all you wanted to do was save you'd have just point a $70 Olympus or just used your smartphone.
Sorry Polaroid, and this is from someone that loved your old "zebra cam" 70s model and still has his grandma's fold up unit in a closet but $300 for a cam that can only do 25 shots on a charge just don't cut it, especially not with $25 film. I agree at $99 it might have found a niche but I bet at $300 this thing will be on Woot! in a year for less than a hundred bucks, but good luck finding the film by then.
Oh please! Energy weapons? you trying to sell us that it has laser beams mounted to its head? they have been trying to get that crap to work for damned near 30 years and it STILL sucks!
And if you are wanting a test platform that can land on a carrier and be stealth then the better solution is UCAV which is what the Russians are working on. with a drone you don't have the man rating so its faster to market, it can do turns that would pop a human like a zit, uses less fuel, and won't cost more than paying off half the mortgages in Oklahoma if you lose the damned thing.
The F35 is the same damned story we have seen ever since we started the whole stealth kick, yet another multibillion dollar turkey that will have MAYBE 100 of them built and will cost frankly insane amounts of money to fly and operate. meanwhile the enemy will be able to spam with MiG29s and SU35s (Since they are cheap and Russia will sell to anybody with cash) and I don't care if the thing does a square dance in the sky to "Danger Zone" if the enemy has 50 or even 75 to 1 when it comes to numbers you be screwed friend.
Just ask the Germans whose FW190s and BF109s were frankly nicer than what we had in their later models, not to mention their ME262. the B17 may have been a slow ass flying target but once we were able to spam them with P47s and P51s it was all over but the crying, or look at their Panther and King Tiger compared to the Sherman. it would take TEN Shermans to defeat a KT but we were cranking out 500+ to every 1 they could produce.
In the end it frankly doesn't matter how damned slick the stealth is if we can only afford 1 for every 30+ the future enemies have, they'll just spam us out of the sky.
Actually YOU sir don't know what you are talking about, as the registry grows it can become fragmented just like the file system and if those dead entries are called upon, like say the right click menu which is often had crap dumped by third parties, then windows will waste time trying to load it before giving up. may not be much but over time that adds up.
But hey don't believe me, there is a butt simple way to test this yourself. take ANY windows machine that has been running more than a year and has had a decent amount of activity, lets say daily usage. use a solid benchmark tool like PCWizard made by the nice folks at CPUID. Then instal and run tuneup, make the profile and let it do its thing, run the one click maintenance and THEN benchmark. I bet your benchmark scores WILL be better. How much or little better will depend on the system but they WILL be better.
It also does a lot more than just the registry, but you'd know that if you'd have actually tried it instead of just spouting off. the link I gave you is 100% free, what do you have to lose?
I'll play, before they actually had to follow you, which meant they had to put in hours, file expense reports, they had to WORK for it. Now they can just spam GPS units which will naturally make their threshold for what is "worth watching" drop significantly.
any tool can and WILL be abused if proper safeguards aren't in place and I'd say there simply aren't enough safeguards in place to make up for the natural barriers that traditional surveillance placed upon the police.
I don't know, as someone who was the victim of nearly two years of police harassment i know what kind of effect it can have. For nearly two years I had a police escort EVERYWHERE, when i pulled out of school, the grocery store, you name it he was there. any excuse to pull me over (not to give me a ticket, as that would give me proof to fight with, just to fuck with me and intimidate me) sometimes as many as three times a day. what was my crime? My GF at the time was the babysitter for his ex and his son (whom he lost all custody of by being a right bastard) and while his son hated his father he thought the world of me, even got his mom to get him a leather jacket like mine. hell I wasn't trying to be his dad, i just felt sorry for the kid, everyone ignored him or treated him like shit.
The only way I got the bullshit to end was my dad got tired of sending me to the store or the parts supply and it taking me half a day thanks to the constant bullshit so he went to go see a county judge he was buddies with and when the judge said one of HIS cops would do that he told the judge to get in the car, since he took my Mustang, and see for himself. Sure enough once they got to one of the places I usually hung out here come the blue lights. when that bastard cop walked up to the door boy did he get a fucking shock. Last I heard he ended up on a police force more than 150 miles away after that judge made it clear the only duty he'd be getting in this county was shit detail!
So I can tell you it don't take much to start getting on your nerves and lets not forget the guy ALREADY had a tracker mounted on his SUV and possibly his GFs as well so he is already on somebody's shit list. I'd love to know who he pissed off and why..
Well he may be a spammer but I can tell you how to actually help your aunt without her needing any degrees or even doing anything difficult. (disclaimer, not affiliated with nor do I even get a discount, in fact i'm gonna say how to get a version for free and how to use it to get the newer version for cheaper than list)
I've found what slows a PC down more than anything is shitty third party programs that spam the registry and leave dead keys, eventually causing what is known as winrot. to get rid of it and have the PC remain fresh and snappy even years after install the easy peasy way just use Tuneup Utilities which after install will automatically keep the PC clean and if your auntie will just answer a couple of questions by simply double clicking on the taskbar icon and following its recommendations it'll customize itself to her PC and give her even better performance.
That link is not warez, its the 08 version they give away in the hopes you'll like it and spring for the new version. I've found with each version it gets better and has even more excellent tools so I think its worth it, and you can install the 2008 and then buy the upgrade version for $29 instead of $49 if you want the latest and greatest. if not the 08 version works on XP/Vista/7 32 bit and IIRC 64 bit as well. The best thing is once you've installed it even if you don't touch a thing it will do the work for your auntie every 3 days like clockwork, registry, temp junk, defrag if she needs it, broken shortcuts, all the clutter that badly written programs can crap all over the PC is a thing of the past. Answer those few questions in the taskbar it gets better and more customized for your particular PC.
as for TFA here's a silly question....WTF are the prison systems doing being accessible from the fricking net? Seriously WTF? Does the warden want to be able to let the rapist in cell 356 out of his unit from his iPhone? WTF people? Some systems should NEVER EVER be able to be connected to the net, electric grids, nuclear powerplants, vital defense systems and oh yeah PRISONS! what bozo decided that having them net connected was a good idea? And I apologize if TFA explains why the braintrust wanted them hooked as it doesn't want to load for me ATM.
I know I shouldn't feed a racist troll but he brings up something that maybe someone here can answer because it has been puzzling me...How in the fuck do those "Thug Life!"ers walk down the damned street with their pants THAT low and they don't fall off? hell how do they even stand? Do they use glue? Tape? Because I have seen thug lifers stand on a corner for hours like that and NEVER have to adjust or pull those things up and gravity dictates that they should be around their ankles. Hooks attached to the outer thigh?
As for TFA why wouldn't there be spotted horses? mother nature is pretty well known for having offshoots and variants and as we have seen with many animals spots can make for a good camouflage, so it would just seem natural that at sometime in the past horses would have offshoots that had mixed colors. Now pink polka dot or something like that I could see doubting, but mixed coloring on animals is probably as old as time. After all if we can have hobbit sized people and elephants the size of horses i doubt horses having spots would be THAT big a leap.
I also doubt there would be much fibbing on the part of the painters, as from the cave paintings I've seen anyway they appear to be telling the tribal stories, the men dropping game, migrating herds, the things that would actually affect their lives. I wouldn't be surprised if the horse migrations were watched and followed like any other large game.
Are you still butthurt that your OS can't function without CLI and is more like Win98 than a modern OS? Poor baby, I can understand then why you would be afraid to use the entire quote then since it make your magical woobie OS look even more like shit on a shingle.
As for what the other guy was trying to point out, which apparently like your inability to even copypasta is just beyond your tiny mind, is that Bill Gates is part of an exclusive club, the .01% percent. They are so high above even the 1%ers that they could buy their own third world and even second world countries and have themselves set as "King god of the mountain" if that is what tickled their fancy. And while the Koch bros use theirs to try to buttfuck as many people in the USA as they possibly can bill uses his to try to help people and even to advocate raising his own taxes. If you weren't completely clueless then you'd know the man even went so far as to go against the current CEO of MSFT in trying to get Washington state to raise taxes on the rich.
But hey, what can anyone expect from a moran that can't even copypasta a single sentence because the truth of that sentence makes him shit himself with fear. So thanks for this opportunity to show yet again what a fail both you AND the product you shill for is.. the correct sentence is as far as the user is concerned THERE IS NO COMMAND LINE IN WINDOWS and that statement is as true as the sky is blue. ask the next 20 people you meet on the street how to call up CLI in Windows and see what you get, but you know this don't you? This is why that little sentence makes you afraid. It is also why you bring up server even in talks about desktops, hoping to move the goalposts, but server ain't doing so well either it turns out. Here enjoy some fail pudding..
Not only does Linux have 4x++ the amount of unpatched security vulnerabilities its competitor Windows Server 2008 does, but it bears 3 remotely exploitable unpatched security vulnerabilities strike one, strike two strike three and you're out of there! Let me end with a little food for thought, did you know that THREE out of the FOUR recently breached CAs are running Linux? Be happy to show you the Netcraft report if you like, but i think I'd rather show some other recent uber fails.
In light of this evidence I can see why that sentence scares you so much you would corrupt it to make your sig, like a talisman to ward off the stench of fail and death that surrounds you. But numbers can't be warded off and after twenty years of slaving, after all that money wasted by Shuttleworth you are STILL lower than JavaME and there is a whole website dedicated To your bullshit and excuses that you use to cover your wasted effort. I'd laugh but its kinda sad more than anything else. And you wonder why retailers like me won't touch your product?
I'll give it a shot, my supplier is supposed to swing by some more refurbs for me to turn and the building super also works at the local college so I end up with their turnovers. I'll probably go with the LXDE as most of the refurbs I get are what I call "standard office boxes", that is a 2.4-3.6Ghz P4 with 512mb of RAM and a 40gb HDD which should be plenty for LXDE.
I'll just never understand why they threw away years of hard work and bug fixes on GNOME and KDE just to chase the bling, it still blows my mind. What was wrong with what they had? It wasn't ugly, far from it. It had nice looks, smooth functionality, mature software, I ran KDE 3.x from 05 to 07 on my personal laptop and found it quite lovely and fast. Its a shame that with all the work going to the new bling fests the old ones will just slowly die out,IMHO forks that don't take over the slot held by the original just don't last long as they lose momentum.
I just wish someone would make a "one repo to rule them all" with drivers. Just imagine, your disc could have basic network and graphics driver and then just hook up to the driver repo to take care of ALL the drivers, no matter what the hardware. After an upgrade it could just do a scan and hit the driver repo for any drivers it had messed up, all without the user doing squat.
Even better they could make a disc version with X86 and X64 flavors so a guy like me could just pop in the disc and it would have enough drivers that you could get ANY machine up and running quickly. If they can do it with the tons and tons of third party drivers in windows with driverpacks surely it could be done with Linux. as a bonus one could have a "local driver store' on disc that contained the what I call 80% drivers, the big name hardware like ATI and Nvidia, Broadcom and Atheros,Realek and Sigmatel, all the major all in one and printer drivers, compressed and stored so that if you plugged ANY new hardware in there would at least be a generic driver already waiting that would at least get them functional. I'd personally be happy to give up 5Gb on each drive just to not have to worry about hardware.
But like I said i'll download the version from 3 years ago and give it the "is it safe" test, I just hope that it works. There is gonna be a ton of really nice dual cores that are gonna be EOLed with XP that would make great Linux boxes and laptops but I have to know when I hand it to a customer they aren't gonna have to bring it back in 6 months or less because 'update foo broke my stuff!' as my users just don't have the skills to be doing the "find the fix" tango.
I'll give you one better, put the "80%" as I call them, AMD, Intel and Nvidia chipsets and GPUs, Broadcom and Atheros wireless, Realtek and SiS networking, Realtek and Simatel sound, and put them on a disc similar to what we have with Windows. I have a pair of discs, one 32bit and one 64bit, that I can put into ANY box or laptop and it WILL have the driver. There REALLY needs to be something similar for Linux. like you said they don't have to be optimized, hell don't have to be the most current, just something that will "just work" and allow someone to get ANY machine up and functional. After that as you said a central driver repo could take care of the rest.
The sad part is despite all the experience Linux has with repos MSFT is actually gotten ahead of them on this. When I left my dad's new PC at his home and told him I'd be back on the weekend to install Win 7 he got impatient and decided to do it himself, thanks to the new Windows Update which runs during install and downloads any and all drivers you need (it comes with just about every generic networking driver, along with a basic driver for most others, the rest is hosted at WU) when I got there the machine was running beautifully, didn't even need the driver disc. it all "just worked".
I truly want Linux to succeed and carve out a decent niche, I really do. I'm old enough to remember when the market was plumb full of choices, we had Atari and Commodore, Tandy and Apple and IBM clones up the butt, plenty to choose from. Hell I even think it would be better for Apple and MSFT as they'd have to stay on their toes. But until the driver problem is fixed or there is a hell of a lot longer support schedule I just can't carry it, the updates/upgrades just break too much stuff. I need an OS that once i hand it to the customer they don't need me anymore except for hardware upgrades or replacement, with a good AV I can get that with windows. With Linux I just end up spending all my time dealing with forums and looking for fixes. Surely there has to be a better way!
Molten salt solar I think would be the better path, also has the advantage of just needing mirrors and a salt tower instead of solar cells that have to be replaced. At night there is enough heat in the salt to use it as a battery.
Of course they'll have to be built in the deserts but it isn't like we don't have plenty of desert land right? I bet with some work one could use salt as a battery for the solar cells as well, but I don't know how much would be lost in the conversion.
Which is why I mentioned the B-2 for taking out the radar, after that we can bring out the B-52 for any 'pile on the pounding" and use the A-10 for more precision strike.
That sad part is the ONLY thing the F35 does really well is suck money, you can't load on the pounds without blowing its stealth, without the stealth its an easy target, it can't fight like a fighter, it can't bomb like a bomber. Frankly the whole stealth idea is pretty damned lame anyway. with modern HARM missiles anybody that points a radar at us is gonna be blown into the afterlife and the HARM is a hell of a lot cheaper than even the cheapest stealth, and for those rolls where it absolutely positively HAS to be stealth, whatever those rolls are, we have the B-2 and F22 just sitting there.
That is why we need to use the bounty system. We say "Here is what we want, here is how much we will pay, GO!" and let them fight it out. It has become too much a good old boys club, with senator kickbackus and congressman porkus getting their palms greased and "bringing home the bacon" no matter how worthless the final project is.