Re:Only "troubled" if you're not Lockheed Martin
on
The F-35 Story
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· Score: 2, Insightful
But for that mission wouldn't we be better off with just building more warthogs? I've seen A-10s with frankly insane levels of damage that come home, and when you are ground pounding that is what you are gonna need if you are expecting anything worse than goat herders. The A-10 can carry plenty of weaponry, take insane amounts of punishment and is affordable. We can use the B-2s to take out radar before sending in the hogs, might as well get our money out of those suckers.
Re:Only "troubled" if you're not Lockheed Martin
on
The F-35 Story
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· Score: 1
What I found telling was when the OZ government ran a test comparing the SU Series (the 27 and up I believe) the MiG 29 and 31, all the American teen series still being produced, and the F22 and F35. I believe one can find it under "F35 red flag tests" on YouTube, kinda in the middle of work so I don't have time to Google.
The results were BOTH the F22 and F35 as well as the teen series were spanked and spanked HARD by the Sukov and to a lesser degree by the MiG. IIRC the most telling part of the report went "In our tests the F35 is a disaster. it can't outgun, outfight, or out maneuver the aircraft it will most likely have to face. in combat it would be a dead duck".
So it kinda reminds me of what Japan and Germany had in WWII, only worse. At least the Germans had superior designs, they were simply too costly, while the Japanese had designs that were quickly outclassed and never could catch up. With our current fleet the teen series (F15, 16, 18) simply can't compete head to head with the MiG and Sukov while costing twice as much based on fly away costs, while the F22 and F35 aren't a match while being insanely over priced. So the future enemy will have tons of cheap fighters while we will have REALLY expensive turkeys.
Maybe we should just ask Putin to sell us the MiG and Sukov? Hell we've outsourced everything else, might as well go ahead and go full out. At least the miG and Sukov would be a hell of a lot cheaper while still giving us good aircraft, all the F35 is gonna do is make a shitload of MIC contractors rich as sin!
Oh Please we charged y'all less than 12c on the dollar! You show me where you could get kick ass tanks (y'all didn't have shit that could touch the Sherman, that is why you mounted that 17 pounder on it instead of using your own crappy tanks) and boats for 12c on the dollar! We should have done like them dang Ruskies and just kept everything we put boots on, we could have made the planet use respectable Imperial units and drive on the right side of the damned road!
And don't bitch at us because y'all's food sucks, that ain't OUR fault! you don't see anybody opening up McLimey's now do you? Nobody wants that mushy pea crap, which is why we own the food business, we make good stuff that is bad for you but tastes great!
And as for as culture y'all ain't had none since the 80s so again NOT our fault! You USED to send us good stuff like "are you being served?" and Vicar of Dibley and French and Saunders but lately you ain't had shit! what are y'all gonna send us, Chavs? We got enough trash over here with the Osbournes (YOUR FAULT!) and all them damn Kardashians.
So y'all ain't got NO REASON to bitch, hell we gave you 50 damned years to pay it back with stupidly low interest and even then y'all pushed it right to the end by skipping as many payments as were allowed! Hell we'd have been better off with Jerry, at least HE knows how to make a decent car! So stick that in your scones, ya dang tea swiller!
Actually I'd just like to point out you are wrong about windows 8 for two reasons. One windows 8 aka Ballmer's Folly has a simple reg entry that can be used to kill the shitastic Metro UI and instead you'll have the Win 7 desktop with a square button for start instead of round, big whoop. Second if the users decide that is too much and Ballmer's Folly does suckth the big wet titty (which is what i'm predicting) then according to the roadmap windows 7 is supported until 2020 which means just like how we saw all these "Vista" machines sold with XP and a "Here is the disc if you actually cared" copy of Vista so too will we see the OEMs selling "Windows 8" machines with Win 7.
As for TFA when the next batch of PCs come through the shop I intend to try out Linux Mint so I have a question...what was the Mint release from 3 years ago? Because before i'll let a machine be sold in my shop it has to pass the "is it safe?" test which sadly so far no Linux has managed to do yet, which simulates a user owning the machine for a few years. I load up the distro from 3 years ago, make sure everything is working, then let it upgrade to current, just as a normal user could be expected to do. If ALL of the hardware continues to function then it is safe, and I think this is a fair test since I have XP machines that have been in the field for 7+ years and are current so I don't think 3 years worth of updates is too much to ask.
So if someone lets me know what version I need to look for I'll get in on the weekend and when the new boxes get here I'll slap it on a couple of random machines and see if it passes. i do like the looks of it though, especially the LXDE version. It has a nice clean look and supposedly is pretty low resource which will help on the P4s, i just hope it passes the test.
I hate to tell you something friend but there is NO free market, the Chinese are rigging their currency and using slaves, all the other countries except the EU likewise have almost no regulation and allow their people to be poisoned. We would be doing the world a favor, a hell of a lot more than stirring up wars in third world shitholes.
I'll have to give mint my "is it safe?" test when the next batch of boxes roll in. I download a version from two or three releases back and then update to current to simulate what a customer would have if they had the machine for a couple of years. If it works? Then its safe. So far I've tried that with a half a dozen and yet to have one pass without breaking something.
But the whole DE thing just left me scratching my head. Were they REALLY so enamored of the Vista/7 bling? Because unless it was just to keep up with the MSFT bling the whole thing was just bizarro. it was like "Quick, things am stable! Must throw out years of work and bug fixes to make am users happy! Now everything broken again, all is good!" it was just nuts. Personally i thought KDE 3 and Gnome II looked quite lovely and didn't suck RAM and CPU like a drunk at a free bar, but i guess I was the minority.
Hell that doesn't surprise me about the "its a feature" bit, like I said this "club" mentality where people treat every thought that doesn't follow groupthink as an insult to their favorite ball club is like a cancer. Hell look at the Mozilla mobile OS thread, someone points out "I wish they would just concentrate on making FF less bloated, jerky, and memory hogging" and they kept right on with screams of "Its FUD! Ur a SHILL!" even when one user posted an image of task manager showing quite clearly that while Chrome was using 400Mb on his machine FF was blowing through 1.1Gb!
I just can't understand why so many in the community seem so happy to trip over themselves in a race to lose. as you noted everything is in their favor, yet they smile while shooting themselves in the foot. It reminds me of that old Python sketch where they were trying to find who was the biggest twit or something, where to "win" they had to shoot themselves and they couldn't even get that right. Here you have the other guy practically giving them more than half the race length as a head start and the community promptly shoots themselves in the foot and then sits down in the middle of the course to write a bash script while the competition just walks across the finish line. Its like group insanity or something.
Oh so you agree that the "year of the Linux desktop" stuff should be thrown in the bin and this is a hobbyist OS? You can't have your cake and eat it to friend, either this is "Bob's OS" that will be as rare as a set of mint condition purple velvet bell bottoms or they will have to step up, your choice, can't be both, its one or the other.
BTW if they are truly taking that attitude its already dead, yes? because i hate to break the news to ya but to rip off a former POTUS its the APPS stupid. Nobody is gonna give a wet fart about your "free" OS, I don't care if its so damn free it sings the RMS hacker song on startup, if it doesn't have the big name apps like everybody else. No Angry Birds? no latest flavor of the month app? you're toast, nobody will care or carry it, you won't move enough units to even get put on the back aisle of Walmart.
It is this attitude that is probably gonna doom FOSS OSes to an also ran, you can't just stick your toes in the edge of the water, you gotta jump in there. if you want the hardware manufacturers to use YOUR OS instead of the other guy's? You need to fight, want the specs on the hardware? want the big software houses to make sure the big apps are on YOUR platform? you gotta fight and more importantly give the people what they want and "free as in freedom!" may make YOU weak in the knees but the numbers don't lie, folks don't give a rat's ass about that.
But if you want your OS to be more than a hobbyist OS you HAVE TO give the people what they DO want or you simply won't get the numbers. Look at it from a marketing perspective, you've been yelling "free as in freedom" for 20 years, the reports come in and you head of marketing says "That slogan just ain't selling shit, what else we got"....well? What else you got? sadly all I've seen is "free as in beer/freedom" which again the iShiny proves those aren't big selling points either. Nobody buys Android because it is free, it is because Google is a fricking verb now.
So I truly hope they have something more to bring to the game, otherwise this is gonna be as big a mismatch as putting your HS football team against the NE Patriots.
Are you saying smart people can't have dumb ideas? How about Vista? Apple pippin? MSFT Bob? Smart people can have dumb ideas just like everyone else Mikey. BTW how many UIDs did you end up going to before you switched handles? Just curious.
It ain't hatin, its just we in the USA got legitimate beefs!
/steps up to podium with giant American flag and puts his Patton helmet on/
Lets start with the Brits shall we? I mean there we go and bust our butts, not to mention give you TONS of killer hardware at below cost, just so we can save your tea swilling butts from them Nazis, and what do you do? You go to that dang blasted metric system invented by them Frenchies, a group that can't even do the wave at a football game because once their hands are up they start looking for a German to surrender to! But we got history so say your sorry and go back to Imperial units like God and the Queen intended and all is forgiven. But what you did weren't nuthin' compared to them dang Ozzies!
To the folks of the land of OZ...what did we do to you? Didn't we come down there and save your butts from the Japs and give you good stuff too? We thought you was actually nice guys, we save your butts, you give us Foster's followed by one of the best damned movies of modern cinema, i'm of course speaking of Mad Max. Sure you also sent over Olivia Newton John but you were probably just blinded by the cuteness, that's understandable. But then you go right out and do a double attack on the poor old unsuspecting US of A by dropping Paul Hogan and Yahoo fricking Serious on us!! WTF OZ? What did we do to deserve THAT much pain? You'd think we'd been mounting kangaroos on the front of our pickup trucks and stuffing koala bears! That was just...it was wrong and YOU KNOW IT! Now you come get every damned copy of Young Einstein and anything with Hogan in it and give everyone who was assaulted by that horror a Foster's and a nice apology and you too can be forgiven.
But you know who can NEVER be forgivin? God damned CANADA that's who! There they were pretending to be all peaceful and friendly and Bob & Doug lovable, give us bacon and CFL and hockey along with The Shat, so we think you're a nice bunch of folks and then BAM! You release that bitch harpy Celine Dion on us like a fricking Nazgul! And then when we were still reelin from that attack you hit us with Nickelback! WTF Canada! Y'all better consider yourselves on probation and keep those bioweapons safely locked up or we'll roll the tanks...of course it'll have to be summer though, we don't care for the cold.
So as you can see we have real reasons to dislike many of them other nasty countries. We've learned every time you try to play nice with folks the insult you or assault you! at least after we kicked their asses the Jerrys and Japs had the decency to just sell us quality goods and keep their caterwauling to themselves! Oh and the ONLY reason the Brits get off light is they did send us Python, and that lets them have a bigger "get away with shit free' card than everybody else. anybody that could give us dead parrot and cheese store sketches can't be bad, just confused.
The problem with that, as we have seen with Linux on the desktop and OpenMoko, is that simply yelling "free as in freedom!" won't give you ANY advantage in the marketplace. Just look at the lines when the new iShiny comes out and those things are so locked down they make Gates blush.
No for this to have a chance they can't just be freer than the other guys they are gonna HAVE TO be better, and not by a little either. They are gonna have to have a better memory footprint (so folks can run more apps and get better battery life) they are gonna have to have a nice and responsive UI, and they will have to have better apps, both in the default install AND in their market.
Those are gonna be some pretty tall orders to fill friend, and that they are such a small company compared to the competition only makes that order harder to fill. You can't just port the Linux catalog to this thing as mobile is a different ball game. they'll have to be made from scratch or serious porting work done to match the UI and power restraints of the new platform, and with all the buzz being around the app store again this is NOT gonna be easy.
So while i wish them luck if you think simply having the four freedoms will even get them a single percentage point in this market I'm afraid you are dreaming. Hell look at the trucks filled with money old Ballmer is throwing at it and is having trouble even buying his way to third place! with as much competition as their is in that market you can't even be as good as the other guy, you better be able to seriously kick his ass.
Hey friend, have you tried live bookmarks for chrome? I'm not really into live bookmarks so i can't tell you how well it works or not, but it sounds like what you are looking for.
Just so you know you aren't alone and so someone doesn't say its a Win 7 issue, i've run into the same thing on XP Home SP3, Sempron 1.8Ghz, 1.5Gb of RAM, and I have even replaced the Windows shell with AstonShell. my addons are only flash, adblock plus, downloadhelper, and forecast fox, the same add ons I have in Dragon with the exception of downloadhelper. I have seen the same behavior on a customers Win2K pro machine, 2Ghz P4 with 2gb of RAM, and a customers Vista SP2 with an Athlon 7550 dual with 2gb of RAM.
In all of the cases including my XP sempron if left alone with NO activity FF will eventually make the entire machine unresponsive. Not a programmer so don't ask me why, I'm just telling what i saw with my own peepers. The same machines with Dragon, Chrome, or Opera? NO problems. In fact the gal with Vista switched to Opera full time and hasn't had a single issue with performance or the machine lagging since. Most of my other customers have either joined me in using Dragon or switched to Chrome, and these folks aren't the type to switch on a whim, it has to be REALLY slowing them down or causing them problems for them to switch. I only have a single customer that hasn't given me a single complaint since FF started spinning up in numbers and that is a guy on a tri-core AMD with 8Gb of RAM and Win 7 X64. Maybe FF can't see the third core and therefor doesn't slam it?
All I know was I was a die HARD Mozilla fan and didn't think anybody would get me to switch ever. I was using FF before it was even called that and the suite before that. But since FF 4 I've seen the performance and responsiveness of FF go right in the shitter, it got bad enough that I started trying other browsers just to see if it WAS an OS issue and found it was FF giving me the trouble. i have the same extensions in Dragon, no hangs or CPU slams.
But by FF 6 it got so bad on both my Sempron and my netbook that I went out and bought a third party video download program just so I wouldn't need FF for downloading videos anymore. After that I removed ALL extensions but frankly i couldn't see that it helped, in fact removing ABP made it that much slower since it now had to load ads.
This isn't some "yay chrome, boo FF" thing I still miss Moz sometimes, enough I downloaded Pale Moon hoping they may have been able to fix the problems in FF. It helped a little but sadly not enough. i truly hope they fix FF, I really do, as I do miss it sometimes. But ATM on anything short of my quad it just sucks too much CPU, is too slow to load pages, seems to become unresponsive WAY too easily, I don't know what they did but its a real shame as it just killed any love I had for FF as a day to day browser. I still keep it installed and updated though, and with each new version I fire it up and try it for an hour hoping its gotten better, but it just ain't.
Oh I think it goes much deeper down the rabbit hole than that my friend, these multinationals have their dirty fingers in a LOT of pies, so the gov doesn't do squat or say squat no matter how nasty they get (BTW just FYI but you might want to look up how Goldman Sachs and their friend are quietly dumping their Greek and other toxic stocks on the Fed, in the end the US taxpayer may be on the hook for another 14 TRILLION in toxic assets while they drive away with the money trucks) and in return they kiss the ring and the gov can do no wrong. Hell look up what happened with QE 1 and QE 2, you have companies and banks being GIVEN money which they then LEND back to the gov and get interest for! That would be like you handing me a million dollars and I promptly hand it back and you pay me interests PLUS the original million for the privilege of holding it for a few seconds!
No friend the whole thing goes deeper than anybody wants to admit and it is REALLY ugly and nasty, shit that would make Watergate look like a 6 year old's tea party which is why i think both the left AND the right have been trying to bury fast and furious, they are afraid even taking a peek in the closet will cause the mountain of skeletons to start tumbling out. You will probably call me a tinfoil hatter or a loonie but you should really watch "Aaron Russo on 9/11" which the man recorded as kind of a deathbed confession. Before the bombs started falling on Baghdad he laid out WHAT was gonna happen and more importantly WHY it was gonna happen, and it all comes back to a handful of uber rich at the very top. These families have been manipulating world events so as to rake in truly disgusting levels of wealth and frankly if a million have to die so they make 100 billion? so be it. According to him their ultimate goal is a worldwide disaster of the economic system so they can gain control of ALL of the finances. there wouldn't be a single cent that didn't go through their hands at some point, truly scary shit. They wanted him in on it, as a "fellow traveler" and a mouthpiece but what he learned spooked him too much.
So while i think you are correct that those corps are happy to take those billions in campaign finances (which they gave in the first place, so they get the favors AND they get their money back) but i truly believe that is chump change compared to some of the shit they have cooking with the knowledge and cooperation of some of the most powerful governments on the planet. Russo has been dead for years but he called many of the things we are seeing in the mid east right now and predicted thay will eventually roll over every leader in that region, as they want the control over the largest oil reserves on the planet. To these guys a couple of billion is nothing, the money Obama and Mittens or whomever gets the Rep go ahead is just small potatoes. Their real goal is worldwide control of the sources of ALL wealth and production. I wouldn't be surprised if OWS starts to look like its gonna go anywhere they will label them terrorists and the crack downs will begin. like I said these guys at the top have NO care for anyone that isn't on their level.
The scary part is thanks to Citizens United I bet things will get a hell of a lot worse, not better. Remember once upon a time we had relatively sane copyright laws as well, then the megacorps saw some of their cash cows were headed into PD territory and through treasonous bribery ended up with Valenti's "forever minus a single day" copyright laws.
I wouldn't be surprised if the MSFTs and the Googles and the Apples end up getting together and deciding no matter how much they dislike each other its in their own best interests to keep their patents and just cross license and then they'll start pushing for extensions and with citizens united they can just write a check and get it.
Hell I bet ya I can even predict what the spin will be as they ram it on through. It'll be "In this troubled economy companies are at risk of losing position and being forced to lay people off (gotta bring up job losses to scare the masses) because they simply can't make enough in a down economy to pay back the incredible expenses the research and development of cutting edge technology brings. Therefor we are going to enact new legislation which will give them a 10 year extension to existing patents so they can keep innovating, just until the economy gets back on its feet again".
Don't be surprised if you see some politician parroting those exact words in a year or two. If I can think of it big pharma and big tech can think of it as well and it'll allow them to keep their cash cows and make it a "good old boys club" where they can just "compete" with each other and not worry about the little guy with a new idea fucking with their cash flow. it'll be followed by back room cross licensing agreements between the big boys so you won't be seeing any money costing "Apple VS Google VS MSFT" lawsuits any more.
And the sad part is thanks again to Citizens United making corps better than you I doubt anyone in the MSM would say a word, except maybe in praise of the idea. The only reason this guy is bitching is because he is on the wrong end of the MSFT patents but a cross licensing agreement makes that butthurt all go bye bye while making sure Google doesn't have done to them what they did to yahoo and Altavista, have some young upstart come in with a better product and kick their ass.
I don't know about memory MR AC but I know that FF since FF 4 has just about been unusable on the older office boxes and netbooks that I have to support. I keep a 1.8Ghz Sempron around both as a low power nettop and as a test bed for older office boxes and frankly FF is just scary in its level of suckiness now. You try to launch a new tab and watching AnVir Task Manager I can sit there and watch it pound the living hell out of the CPU and if that tab has video? better go make a sandwich friend it'll be awhile and the video will be a slideshow. compare this to Comodo Dragon which I've been switching my users over to for awhile now (based on Chromium) and it doesn't ever seem to slam, nor does it make the computer unable to multitask while opening a new tab. oh and SD video actually plays quite well, with around 65% CPU usage but it is still snappy as far as browser response goes.
As for TFA I have a silly question...why? We already got chromeOS, Android, iOS, WinPhone and soon Win 8, RIM, and if they sell it off WebOS, do we REALLY need yet another competitor in such an already crowded market? Maybe its just me but it seems like Moz kinda slipped off the tracks when Chrome came along and started climbing. I mean none of my long time FF users like the new UI, as i pointed out at least on AMD CPUs it sucks performance wise, it just doesn't "feel" nice or responsive, yet they are suddenly gonna go off on this new tangent, why? What can they offer that is so much better than Android?
Wouldn't it make more sense to just make the best damned browser and try to take back the share they've been losing to Chrome and its derivatives? This just smacks to me of a case of the "me too!" syndrome with Moz trying to do everything Google does like MSFT trying to copy Apple.
But that comes down to the individual not the tech. When I was 14, the age most start really learning to be social animals, I nearly killed myself in a bike wreck. I pretty much removed all the skin off of my front, nearly ripped my jaw completely off (kids wear a helmet!), knocked out all my teeth, and had gravel and pavement literally embedded in my body. On a funny note i get rushed to the ER and the ER doc pops out and say "Jesus Christ what a day! Listen man, if I give you a whomping shot of morphine you think you'll hold? We had some kids roll a convertible and limbs were ripped off." So I say sure and he hits me a BIG dose so i'm feeling quite nice and sits me down next to a guy holding his throat together, also giddy. I say "WTF happened to you?" and he's like "barb wire fence on a 3 wheeler, WTF happened to you?" hit a dog at 65MPH? and the two of us were laughing like idiots while holding ourselves together.
By the time I wasn't held together with stitches or looked like the Frankenstein's monster I was nearly 23. Part of me wanted to do just as you did and stay hidden in my room with my gadgets but I basically forced myself to face the world. I picked up my bass guitar and ended up going on club tours all over the south. Was I scared shitless? oh hell yeah, but I knew that just like with my bass and computers the only way to learn was to go out and do it.
So I'd say it is more about the personality than the technology, everyone deals with horrible things in different ways. you retreated to escape the mess, I developed a "kiss my scarred ass" attitude. In the end I'm now in my mid 40s and am about at the stage of development I'd have been in my late 20s thanks to that wreck ripping nearly a decade out of my life, but hey they say 50 is the new 30 anyway.
I can solve that. See that disc you are using, the one that says "XP" on it? Yeah its older than the shit in the bottom of your fridge, now throw that stinky shit away!
Now you see this real pretty little DVD that says "Windows 7" on it? yeah try that....what did you say? Windows found all the drivers and did all the work while you had a soda? Congratulations, its called progress.
As for Linux IF and ONLY IF all of your hardware is supported OOTB by your distro of choice are you gonna be having anything as close to easy as 7. Otherwise its "welcome to the forum dance!" which is kind of like a square dance but even less fun and nobody wears pretty clothes. you better know the make/rev/ firmware of said device and hope somebody has a 'fix" for whatever is FUBAR, and you'll probably either have to tweak it, because they wrote it for kernel X-hardware-y make Z and you have kernel x4 hardware y6 and make za rev 2, or you'll get a tarball and get to figure out what needs to be fiddled with to get it going.
Hell if my 71 year old dad can install Windows 7 with nothing but the DVD, not even the driver CD that came with the box (because I wasn't planning on letting him install it so it was in the bottom of the case) and when I show up a week later not a single thing is wrong or broken, or needs fiddling with, it even popped up on first launch "hey you don't have an AV, would you like us to take you to a page with several to choose from?" all nicely labeled into two separate groups for free and for pay and the ONLY thing I had to do was show him where to get Firefox from? you are gonna HONESTLY say Linux is simpler than that? Because i'm gonna have to call bullshit as according to Gartner Linux is at 1.1% which it wouldn't be if it was THAT simple. Which at least in my experience from a half a dozen distros its not.
Which is why I say that while Linux guys compare themselves to Windows constantly the truer comparison would be to Mac. Unlike Windows which has support for just about every piece of current hardware Linux, like Mac OSX, really runs well IF you stick strictly with Linux hardware with strong Linux support in a Linux ecosystem, problem is you don't have Linux stores with Guru bars to make it easy for folks to FIND the Linux hardware and if you try to use Windows hardware? Well unless you are damned lucky you just earned yourself a seat at the forum dance every 6 months for the life of the machine.
Linux is GREAT for embedded, its damned nice for programmers, its good for admins, but saying "its as easy to set up and use as Windows!" is like saying "and giant batwings pop out of my ass and I fly south for the winter!" you've just passed believable about 3 exits back bud. Unless of course you wanna compare it to an OS 2 and soon to be 3 versions behind like XP, which is that case we really should be comparing it to the first release of Ubuntu or even the 2001 release of Debian, whatever that was.
No they don't and here is why: You manage to get enough people to boycott (not easy since their goals are now the complete control of the channels so you can't hear or see anything but pre-packaged crap) to seriously hurt their bottom line and what will happen?
They will blame their losses on piracy, walk into the halls of power with a nice PPT that shows conclusively that "If we made X that year than logically we should have made X+Y by now so it HAS to be the pirates!" and then after handing out the customary bribes they WILL get ever more draconian laws and copyright extensions!
You see this is like "too big to fail' which is "heads I win, tails you lose" as they have long since figured out how to game the system so ANY action results in increased power and profits for them! Hell if you were to cause enough damage they'd just have a "piracy tax" added to every single HDD, flash drive, anything that can hold a scrap of data, and pick the money straight out of your pockets!
You have to give them credit, its a great scam. there is literally not a single answer you can give that won't give them more money and power! You copy their content you're a pirate, you don't copy but don't buy you're a pirate, you don't copy and DO buy you're not giving them the year over year gains their PPT says they should be so you must be a pirate! It is like xkcd only every road leads to " we get more money and/or power" for the megacorps. like I said, pretty slick scam.
Wow I hadn't thought of NeXT (yes I am old enough to remember who it was written, man I wanted one of those cubes back in the day!) since jobs went to Apple. and while i have no idea how it handles (don't have any spare PCs ATM) All I want is a nice, simple, GUI based, pretty OS that I can guarantee will actually update for the next 7 years without crapping over its own drivers and choking, is that so much to ask for? you mentioned XP but I have XP boxes in the field that's been there since 2001, that is 11 years, THREE service packs, and about 1500 updates and NO driver failures, and NO CLI fixes required. the most I had to do to them was upgrade the RAM when it got cheap. Hell I have a customer that just NOW retired the Win2k box i built him in 2000!
Oh and finally as for your XP instruction given by the ISP? That is caused from something going badly wrong NOT from the OS simply updating itself! There is a BIG difference from needing CLI because you had a network outage and needing CLI because you dared to apply updates, totally different things. if the only time I needed CLI was when the network went down in Linux? I'd have NO problem with that. But when Dell has to run their own repos because even THEY can't get decent enough QA in Linux to keep their machines running without custom building their own distro? I'd say there be trouble in paradise friend.
All I want is a distro that will work and KEEP working without my customers having to drop into term for the life of the box or 7 years, whichever comes first. Is that REALLY too much to ask for? And I don't care if they have to upgrade once a year or two as long as the upgrade process is as simple as "click button, let it do its thing, reboot". But at least in my experience it has been "run upgrade, reboot, find broken hardware, enjoy three days of trying to get it to work again, oh and enjoy the forum hunts".
The reason I'm against CLI is because frankly i think its become a crutch. The GUI is a second class citizen compared to "open up bash and type" which is treated as the number 42 in Linux. So I truly hope that somebody proves me wrong, I truly hope that by 2014 when me and hundreds of thousands of retailers are sitting on pallets full of XP boxes and laptops they'll be a version of Linux we can just slap on and sit in the window. But so far I've gone through over a half a dozen and have yet to find one that would fit the bill. I might give GNUSTEP a spin when the next load comes through in a week or two, but it'll have to have Flash support and be able to work with all the major sites like FB for it to work for my customers.
I wouldn't say its a vendetta so much as i've seen too many use it as a crutch. Nothing ever gets fixed in GUI land because they always say "open up bash and type" while ignoring that 1.- that is assuming the network isn't what has been borked, and 2.-that they will manage to copy paste PERFECTLY and without a single error or flub. Now that is two pretty dang big assumptions in my book, especially seeing as how many folks are going wireless and how flaky wireless can be in Linux ATM. A user on another forum i think pretty much nailed it when he said "If I give this to an average user, just a blank PC and a disc, can they get it to work without Google? if something goes wrong can they figure things out on their own?" and we simply aren't anywhere near there yet IMHO.
And its nice to see i'm not alone in seeing things have gone astray. kinda tiring and frustrating to be called a liar and crazy when i know what I saw. folks were friendly, goals were set, progress while slow was steady and the goal made clear that Linux was SUPPOSED to be for the masses, a true "third way" to give folks choice. Now as I said its like the ground has soured. Whereas before the developers seemed to welcome users that have real questions and requests and took pride in making their software more useful you get this "We are going THIS way, get on board or suck it" attitude, just rude.
I mean look at GNOME, KDE, and Unity. there are a few that seem to like KDE now but I bet even they would admit its not up to the level of KDE 3 yet on features or usability, and GNOME probably ran off more people than they kept and unity? WTF were they thinking making the bar vertical when every machine on the planet is a widescreen now?
I can see what you mean about the whole cultist thing though, I actually had one the other day on another forum cursing the day i was born and jumping through HUGE logic hoops trying to "prove" that this big huge driver script was a better idea than a simple 'find drivers" button. He never would accept that your average user didn't have the skills to write their own bash scripts! hell look at the Linux troll we have here on/. that has made his signature HALF of one of my sentences because he believes half a sentence proves...something, hell if i know. he wastes mod points once a month or so just to hunt me down for daring to say "As far as the user is concerned there is no CLI in Windows".
But I agree that power users should be able to do whatever they want and script all day, i have NO problem with that. hell I fire up CLI when i need to do an IPConfig once in awhile and have a sweet little.exe that will read an entire MP3 folder and tell you how many hours and minutes worth of music you have thanks to CLI. But the problem I have is this: My customers are normal folks. Joe the captain of the football team, little Suzy the checkout girl, Brian who runs a backhoe, just good honest normal folks that don't want to be programmers, or learn scripting, they just want to turn on their PC and have it get the hell out of their way so they can do what THEY want it to do.
And that is to me what really bites about all this, never before in PC history has things been more in favor of FOSS, with one gift after another dropped into the communities laps, yet even the developers seem more than happy to throw it away while singing the RMS hacker song! You have windows 8, aka Ballmer's Folly, you have nearly 400 million PCs that are frankly overpowered about to be EOLed, you have folks wanting to save money in a down economy, and finally never before in history have you had so many folks that just live on the net.
Frankly that doesn't surprise me they have run off all the testers though, if the attitude I've been getting is any indication your only correct response anymore is "Gee isn't (insert software) perfect? Why it sure is Biff and (insert developer) is a genius!" because anything else is treated as hearasay. I mean why is having a button a bad thing? Is it gonna jump
Well if there is strictly no state then by that very definition wouldn't "vengeance be mine so saith me"? I mean if there were no government and no law then if you fucked with what's mine you would be talking to Mr 357 Magnum and trust me, he is kinda cranky.
So I just don't see how one could have NO central authority and not have vengeance, because you just know someone is gonna piss with someone else, that much is a given. Rape, robbery, murder, molestation, all of these things are older than time and so is revenge so I don't see how ANY system could eliminate such a basic human desire, anymore than you could wipe out the human animal's desire for food, sex, companionship, etc. Its just the way we are wired friend.
Well I know anecdotes aren't evidence but my boys were practically born with a controller in their hands and an Ethernet cable in their laps, one is kicking ass in premed, has a wonderful GF, and is generally a hell of a great guy and the younger is trying to decide whether to go with his love of cooking or his love of computer art, helps out his elderly relatives,hates having a dime spent on him because he always thinks there could be good done with the money, and is also a hell of a nice guy.
Both of them have been on the net practically since they could walk (I had the PCs set to where they would only go to approved kids sites at the time of course) and both have been models of trustworthiness and never had any problems as far as autism or anything else. of course i treated them as intelligent human beings that deserve to be talked to and not down to and was more than happy to sit there with them and explain how things worked, from how data is turned from analog into digital and finally is drawn upon a screen to how a packet is formed and where it goes when they click the button.
And THAT, that right there, i think is the REAL problem. too many have turned to PCs, DVDs, game systems etc as cheap babysitters rather than as useful devices that can help their child learn. I would let the boys visit their friends growing up and when I would pick them up it always amazed and saddened me how many households didn't even have a single book in them, and the kids were given every kind of electronic junk they could possibly want as long as they left the grow ups alone and there was practically NO interaction between parent and child unless the parent had some order to bark at them like clean up their room.
So I don't think the problem is the machine per se, but the parents simply not stepping up and being parents. Parenting is a damned hard job but if you want a child to grow up into a responsible smart young person you just gotta put in the time. Hell I'm probably down about 3 years sleep and lost more than one GF because she gave me an ultimatum of the boys or her and I told her where the door was, but now that I see two happy young men starting out into the world i think it was worth it. The net is a tool, not a babysitter, simple as that.
Wouldn't it be more of a heisenberg uncertainty principle kind of thing? after all we are talking about millions of lines of code in the average OS, and on top of that who knows how many LOC and how many programs, all interacting or biding for CPU time.
So I could see how you could have no real bugs per se yet still have random quirks, simply because each person while doing just fine on their own particular piece of the puzzle and not seeing how each will be affected by the whole, especially with regards to third part programs.
As for TFA and wanting random numbers here is something I'v always wondered, and not being a random number guy I might be missing some 'hidden pattern' or something, but why not use the sports page? Take the scores from the first game listed of each sport, then the second and so on. that should give you a pretty decent range from single digits of boxing to the sometimes triple digit basketball outcomes, that would give you a pretty decent spread to work with wouldn't it? You could even do a letter to number substitution on team names, like say picking the first name from every third team and the second name from every fourth.
Anyway i know stocks and the market as a whole generally follows patterns so it probably wouldn't be a good source but if one picked random teams or even as i said the first score from each sport playing one would have a pretty wide variable for a random number generator to use as a seed, wouldn't you?
Simple, it can read the discs are blank, but after burning when it comes to verification it says "disc not inserted" and hangs. Place the just burnt disc into a good DVD and do a verification (I like Emsa Disk check myself) and it reads perfectly fine, it is just the drive itself won't read it.
So don't ask me why dude, that is just what i've seen with my own two peepers. Now when I come across one usually I just strip the box for parts and hand the dead drive to an old engineer buddy of mine who strips them for the laser and motor.
If I had to guess though I'd say that it is able to see the very front of the TOC and see that it is blank but then when it tries to verify it can't see the end of the disc and hangs. i know the light will just flash for a good 10 minutes if you leave it before either Windows throws a disc read error or the burning program (I've tried Burning Studio by ashampoo as well as IMGBurn and even the built in windows burning) so fuck if I know, all i know is the discs check out fine, you can easily pull the contents off with ANOTHER drive, but the drive that burned it won't read shit. Hell maybe its a +/- thing, who knows. It burns and reads CDs fine though, I even gave some to a guy that wanted to make a cheap CD duplicator for his band, last I heard it was still humming along. Weird huh?
That would be true IF we were talking about possible threats, but how do you explain Wikileaks? They showed some truly sick and evil shit being condoned and covered up by our government, for example the PMC that was gaining contracts by selling little boys as sex toys, the same PMC had done the SAME THING in Kosovo with 10 year old girls over a decade ago!
But what did they do? they ALL rushed and tripped over themselves to kiss the ring and tell the world what an evil sick fuck Assange was for daring to say anything bad about the government! I even saw a few equate HIM with terrorism because he dared to point out the government was condoning child sex trafficking!
No it is actually VERY simple and can be traced back to a single man...Ronald Reagan. he sold us out by deregulating everything he could get his hands on including removing the rules that for years had kept the multinationals from owning too many stations. Now more than 80% of the media in the United States, from movies to music to TV, is ALL owned by just SEVEN corps, that's right, seven.
So it is quite simple, Reagan makes it so they can own all the media, they then gets laws passed that benefit themselves such as "forever minus a single day" copyrights and no matter how nasty the government gets as long as they will take the checks and give the multinationals what they want they sure as hell ain't gonna bite the hand that feeds. if a reporter wants to keep their job? better kiss the ring.
For a perfect example of how "one must toe the party line or else" look no further than a guy most of us would agree is batshit...Glenn Beck. it didn't matter HOW batshit he got, Fox had his back, then it all changed and suddenly he was a pariah...why? because he dared to say that "Maybe it was time for America to be Switzerland" and stay out of third world shitholes. this of course didn't follow the party line, which is NeoCon expansionism and corporatism, so his ass was grass. One of his last days there I saw O' Reilly call him just about everything, fool, idiot, stupid, just because he said we shouldn't have our kids dying in third world countries.
so sadly like everything else in this corrupt former superpower it all comes down to money. the megacorps make money on weapons and no bid contracts, as well as the mineral rights in Afghanistan and that little pipeline they wanted to the Caspian sea (didn't think it was about WMDs did you?) so all must stir up shit with any country they are interested in. the government takes the checks so they can do no wrong, both are in bed together so the reporters that want a job tomorrow kiss the ring. hell if Nixon would have bugged Watergate today he'd have BOTH parties rushing to cover it up and blame the reporters!
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But for that mission wouldn't we be better off with just building more warthogs? I've seen A-10s with frankly insane levels of damage that come home, and when you are ground pounding that is what you are gonna need if you are expecting anything worse than goat herders. The A-10 can carry plenty of weaponry, take insane amounts of punishment and is affordable. We can use the B-2s to take out radar before sending in the hogs, might as well get our money out of those suckers.
What I found telling was when the OZ government ran a test comparing the SU Series (the 27 and up I believe) the MiG 29 and 31, all the American teen series still being produced, and the F22 and F35. I believe one can find it under "F35 red flag tests" on YouTube, kinda in the middle of work so I don't have time to Google.
The results were BOTH the F22 and F35 as well as the teen series were spanked and spanked HARD by the Sukov and to a lesser degree by the MiG. IIRC the most telling part of the report went "In our tests the F35 is a disaster. it can't outgun, outfight, or out maneuver the aircraft it will most likely have to face. in combat it would be a dead duck".
So it kinda reminds me of what Japan and Germany had in WWII, only worse. At least the Germans had superior designs, they were simply too costly, while the Japanese had designs that were quickly outclassed and never could catch up. With our current fleet the teen series (F15, 16, 18) simply can't compete head to head with the MiG and Sukov while costing twice as much based on fly away costs, while the F22 and F35 aren't a match while being insanely over priced. So the future enemy will have tons of cheap fighters while we will have REALLY expensive turkeys.
Maybe we should just ask Putin to sell us the MiG and Sukov? Hell we've outsourced everything else, might as well go ahead and go full out. At least the miG and Sukov would be a hell of a lot cheaper while still giving us good aircraft, all the F35 is gonna do is make a shitload of MIC contractors rich as sin!
Oh Please we charged y'all less than 12c on the dollar! You show me where you could get kick ass tanks (y'all didn't have shit that could touch the Sherman, that is why you mounted that 17 pounder on it instead of using your own crappy tanks) and boats for 12c on the dollar! We should have done like them dang Ruskies and just kept everything we put boots on, we could have made the planet use respectable Imperial units and drive on the right side of the damned road!
And don't bitch at us because y'all's food sucks, that ain't OUR fault! you don't see anybody opening up McLimey's now do you? Nobody wants that mushy pea crap, which is why we own the food business, we make good stuff that is bad for you but tastes great!
And as for as culture y'all ain't had none since the 80s so again NOT our fault! You USED to send us good stuff like "are you being served?" and Vicar of Dibley and French and Saunders but lately you ain't had shit! what are y'all gonna send us, Chavs? We got enough trash over here with the Osbournes (YOUR FAULT!) and all them damn Kardashians.
So y'all ain't got NO REASON to bitch, hell we gave you 50 damned years to pay it back with stupidly low interest and even then y'all pushed it right to the end by skipping as many payments as were allowed! Hell we'd have been better off with Jerry, at least HE knows how to make a decent car! So stick that in your scones, ya dang tea swiller!
Actually I'd just like to point out you are wrong about windows 8 for two reasons. One windows 8 aka Ballmer's Folly has a simple reg entry that can be used to kill the shitastic Metro UI and instead you'll have the Win 7 desktop with a square button for start instead of round, big whoop. Second if the users decide that is too much and Ballmer's Folly does suckth the big wet titty (which is what i'm predicting) then according to the roadmap windows 7 is supported until 2020 which means just like how we saw all these "Vista" machines sold with XP and a "Here is the disc if you actually cared" copy of Vista so too will we see the OEMs selling "Windows 8" machines with Win 7.
As for TFA when the next batch of PCs come through the shop I intend to try out Linux Mint so I have a question...what was the Mint release from 3 years ago? Because before i'll let a machine be sold in my shop it has to pass the "is it safe?" test which sadly so far no Linux has managed to do yet, which simulates a user owning the machine for a few years. I load up the distro from 3 years ago, make sure everything is working, then let it upgrade to current, just as a normal user could be expected to do. If ALL of the hardware continues to function then it is safe, and I think this is a fair test since I have XP machines that have been in the field for 7+ years and are current so I don't think 3 years worth of updates is too much to ask.
So if someone lets me know what version I need to look for I'll get in on the weekend and when the new boxes get here I'll slap it on a couple of random machines and see if it passes. i do like the looks of it though, especially the LXDE version. It has a nice clean look and supposedly is pretty low resource which will help on the P4s, i just hope it passes the test.
I hate to tell you something friend but there is NO free market, the Chinese are rigging their currency and using slaves, all the other countries except the EU likewise have almost no regulation and allow their people to be poisoned. We would be doing the world a favor, a hell of a lot more than stirring up wars in third world shitholes.
I'll have to give mint my "is it safe?" test when the next batch of boxes roll in. I download a version from two or three releases back and then update to current to simulate what a customer would have if they had the machine for a couple of years. If it works? Then its safe. So far I've tried that with a half a dozen and yet to have one pass without breaking something.
But the whole DE thing just left me scratching my head. Were they REALLY so enamored of the Vista/7 bling? Because unless it was just to keep up with the MSFT bling the whole thing was just bizarro. it was like "Quick, things am stable! Must throw out years of work and bug fixes to make am users happy! Now everything broken again, all is good!" it was just nuts. Personally i thought KDE 3 and Gnome II looked quite lovely and didn't suck RAM and CPU like a drunk at a free bar, but i guess I was the minority.
Hell that doesn't surprise me about the "its a feature" bit, like I said this "club" mentality where people treat every thought that doesn't follow groupthink as an insult to their favorite ball club is like a cancer. Hell look at the Mozilla mobile OS thread, someone points out "I wish they would just concentrate on making FF less bloated, jerky, and memory hogging" and they kept right on with screams of "Its FUD! Ur a SHILL!" even when one user posted an image of task manager showing quite clearly that while Chrome was using 400Mb on his machine FF was blowing through 1.1Gb!
I just can't understand why so many in the community seem so happy to trip over themselves in a race to lose. as you noted everything is in their favor, yet they smile while shooting themselves in the foot. It reminds me of that old Python sketch where they were trying to find who was the biggest twit or something, where to "win" they had to shoot themselves and they couldn't even get that right. Here you have the other guy practically giving them more than half the race length as a head start and the community promptly shoots themselves in the foot and then sits down in the middle of the course to write a bash script while the competition just walks across the finish line. Its like group insanity or something.
Oh so you agree that the "year of the Linux desktop" stuff should be thrown in the bin and this is a hobbyist OS? You can't have your cake and eat it to friend, either this is "Bob's OS" that will be as rare as a set of mint condition purple velvet bell bottoms or they will have to step up, your choice, can't be both, its one or the other.
BTW if they are truly taking that attitude its already dead, yes? because i hate to break the news to ya but to rip off a former POTUS its the APPS stupid. Nobody is gonna give a wet fart about your "free" OS, I don't care if its so damn free it sings the RMS hacker song on startup, if it doesn't have the big name apps like everybody else. No Angry Birds? no latest flavor of the month app? you're toast, nobody will care or carry it, you won't move enough units to even get put on the back aisle of Walmart.
It is this attitude that is probably gonna doom FOSS OSes to an also ran, you can't just stick your toes in the edge of the water, you gotta jump in there. if you want the hardware manufacturers to use YOUR OS instead of the other guy's? You need to fight, want the specs on the hardware? want the big software houses to make sure the big apps are on YOUR platform? you gotta fight and more importantly give the people what they want and "free as in freedom!" may make YOU weak in the knees but the numbers don't lie, folks don't give a rat's ass about that.
But if you want your OS to be more than a hobbyist OS you HAVE TO give the people what they DO want or you simply won't get the numbers. Look at it from a marketing perspective, you've been yelling "free as in freedom" for 20 years, the reports come in and you head of marketing says "That slogan just ain't selling shit, what else we got"....well? What else you got? sadly all I've seen is "free as in beer/freedom" which again the iShiny proves those aren't big selling points either. Nobody buys Android because it is free, it is because Google is a fricking verb now.
So I truly hope they have something more to bring to the game, otherwise this is gonna be as big a mismatch as putting your HS football team against the NE Patriots.
Are you saying smart people can't have dumb ideas? How about Vista? Apple pippin? MSFT Bob? Smart people can have dumb ideas just like everyone else Mikey. BTW how many UIDs did you end up going to before you switched handles? Just curious.
It ain't hatin, its just we in the USA got legitimate beefs!
/steps up to podium with giant American flag and puts his Patton helmet on/
Lets start with the Brits shall we? I mean there we go and bust our butts, not to mention give you TONS of killer hardware at below cost, just so we can save your tea swilling butts from them Nazis, and what do you do? You go to that dang blasted metric system invented by them Frenchies, a group that can't even do the wave at a football game because once their hands are up they start looking for a German to surrender to! But we got history so say your sorry and go back to Imperial units like God and the Queen intended and all is forgiven. But what you did weren't nuthin' compared to them dang Ozzies!
To the folks of the land of OZ...what did we do to you? Didn't we come down there and save your butts from the Japs and give you good stuff too? We thought you was actually nice guys, we save your butts, you give us Foster's followed by one of the best damned movies of modern cinema, i'm of course speaking of Mad Max. Sure you also sent over Olivia Newton John but you were probably just blinded by the cuteness, that's understandable. But then you go right out and do a double attack on the poor old unsuspecting US of A by dropping Paul Hogan and Yahoo fricking Serious on us!! WTF OZ? What did we do to deserve THAT much pain? You'd think we'd been mounting kangaroos on the front of our pickup trucks and stuffing koala bears! That was just...it was wrong and YOU KNOW IT! Now you come get every damned copy of Young Einstein and anything with Hogan in it and give everyone who was assaulted by that horror a Foster's and a nice apology and you too can be forgiven.
But you know who can NEVER be forgivin? God damned CANADA that's who! There they were pretending to be all peaceful and friendly and Bob & Doug lovable, give us bacon and CFL and hockey along with The Shat, so we think you're a nice bunch of folks and then BAM! You release that bitch harpy Celine Dion on us like a fricking Nazgul! And then when we were still reelin from that attack you hit us with Nickelback! WTF Canada! Y'all better consider yourselves on probation and keep those bioweapons safely locked up or we'll roll the tanks...of course it'll have to be summer though, we don't care for the cold.
So as you can see we have real reasons to dislike many of them other nasty countries. We've learned every time you try to play nice with folks the insult you or assault you! at least after we kicked their asses the Jerrys and Japs had the decency to just sell us quality goods and keep their caterwauling to themselves! Oh and the ONLY reason the Brits get off light is they did send us Python, and that lets them have a bigger "get away with shit free' card than everybody else. anybody that could give us dead parrot and cheese store sketches can't be bad, just confused.
The problem with that, as we have seen with Linux on the desktop and OpenMoko, is that simply yelling "free as in freedom!" won't give you ANY advantage in the marketplace. Just look at the lines when the new iShiny comes out and those things are so locked down they make Gates blush.
No for this to have a chance they can't just be freer than the other guys they are gonna HAVE TO be better, and not by a little either. They are gonna have to have a better memory footprint (so folks can run more apps and get better battery life) they are gonna have to have a nice and responsive UI, and they will have to have better apps, both in the default install AND in their market.
Those are gonna be some pretty tall orders to fill friend, and that they are such a small company compared to the competition only makes that order harder to fill. You can't just port the Linux catalog to this thing as mobile is a different ball game. they'll have to be made from scratch or serious porting work done to match the UI and power restraints of the new platform, and with all the buzz being around the app store again this is NOT gonna be easy.
So while i wish them luck if you think simply having the four freedoms will even get them a single percentage point in this market I'm afraid you are dreaming. Hell look at the trucks filled with money old Ballmer is throwing at it and is having trouble even buying his way to third place! with as much competition as their is in that market you can't even be as good as the other guy, you better be able to seriously kick his ass.
Hey friend, have you tried live bookmarks for chrome? I'm not really into live bookmarks so i can't tell you how well it works or not, but it sounds like what you are looking for.
Just so you know you aren't alone and so someone doesn't say its a Win 7 issue, i've run into the same thing on XP Home SP3, Sempron 1.8Ghz, 1.5Gb of RAM, and I have even replaced the Windows shell with AstonShell. my addons are only flash, adblock plus, downloadhelper, and forecast fox, the same add ons I have in Dragon with the exception of downloadhelper. I have seen the same behavior on a customers Win2K pro machine, 2Ghz P4 with 2gb of RAM, and a customers Vista SP2 with an Athlon 7550 dual with 2gb of RAM.
In all of the cases including my XP sempron if left alone with NO activity FF will eventually make the entire machine unresponsive. Not a programmer so don't ask me why, I'm just telling what i saw with my own peepers. The same machines with Dragon, Chrome, or Opera? NO problems. In fact the gal with Vista switched to Opera full time and hasn't had a single issue with performance or the machine lagging since. Most of my other customers have either joined me in using Dragon or switched to Chrome, and these folks aren't the type to switch on a whim, it has to be REALLY slowing them down or causing them problems for them to switch. I only have a single customer that hasn't given me a single complaint since FF started spinning up in numbers and that is a guy on a tri-core AMD with 8Gb of RAM and Win 7 X64. Maybe FF can't see the third core and therefor doesn't slam it?
All I know was I was a die HARD Mozilla fan and didn't think anybody would get me to switch ever. I was using FF before it was even called that and the suite before that. But since FF 4 I've seen the performance and responsiveness of FF go right in the shitter, it got bad enough that I started trying other browsers just to see if it WAS an OS issue and found it was FF giving me the trouble. i have the same extensions in Dragon, no hangs or CPU slams.
But by FF 6 it got so bad on both my Sempron and my netbook that I went out and bought a third party video download program just so I wouldn't need FF for downloading videos anymore. After that I removed ALL extensions but frankly i couldn't see that it helped, in fact removing ABP made it that much slower since it now had to load ads.
This isn't some "yay chrome, boo FF" thing I still miss Moz sometimes, enough I downloaded Pale Moon hoping they may have been able to fix the problems in FF. It helped a little but sadly not enough. i truly hope they fix FF, I really do, as I do miss it sometimes. But ATM on anything short of my quad it just sucks too much CPU, is too slow to load pages, seems to become unresponsive WAY too easily, I don't know what they did but its a real shame as it just killed any love I had for FF as a day to day browser. I still keep it installed and updated though, and with each new version I fire it up and try it for an hour hoping its gotten better, but it just ain't.
Oh I think it goes much deeper down the rabbit hole than that my friend, these multinationals have their dirty fingers in a LOT of pies, so the gov doesn't do squat or say squat no matter how nasty they get (BTW just FYI but you might want to look up how Goldman Sachs and their friend are quietly dumping their Greek and other toxic stocks on the Fed, in the end the US taxpayer may be on the hook for another 14 TRILLION in toxic assets while they drive away with the money trucks) and in return they kiss the ring and the gov can do no wrong. Hell look up what happened with QE 1 and QE 2, you have companies and banks being GIVEN money which they then LEND back to the gov and get interest for! That would be like you handing me a million dollars and I promptly hand it back and you pay me interests PLUS the original million for the privilege of holding it for a few seconds!
No friend the whole thing goes deeper than anybody wants to admit and it is REALLY ugly and nasty, shit that would make Watergate look like a 6 year old's tea party which is why i think both the left AND the right have been trying to bury fast and furious, they are afraid even taking a peek in the closet will cause the mountain of skeletons to start tumbling out. You will probably call me a tinfoil hatter or a loonie but you should really watch "Aaron Russo on 9/11" which the man recorded as kind of a deathbed confession. Before the bombs started falling on Baghdad he laid out WHAT was gonna happen and more importantly WHY it was gonna happen, and it all comes back to a handful of uber rich at the very top. These families have been manipulating world events so as to rake in truly disgusting levels of wealth and frankly if a million have to die so they make 100 billion? so be it. According to him their ultimate goal is a worldwide disaster of the economic system so they can gain control of ALL of the finances. there wouldn't be a single cent that didn't go through their hands at some point, truly scary shit. They wanted him in on it, as a "fellow traveler" and a mouthpiece but what he learned spooked him too much.
So while i think you are correct that those corps are happy to take those billions in campaign finances (which they gave in the first place, so they get the favors AND they get their money back) but i truly believe that is chump change compared to some of the shit they have cooking with the knowledge and cooperation of some of the most powerful governments on the planet. Russo has been dead for years but he called many of the things we are seeing in the mid east right now and predicted thay will eventually roll over every leader in that region, as they want the control over the largest oil reserves on the planet. To these guys a couple of billion is nothing, the money Obama and Mittens or whomever gets the Rep go ahead is just small potatoes. Their real goal is worldwide control of the sources of ALL wealth and production. I wouldn't be surprised if OWS starts to look like its gonna go anywhere they will label them terrorists and the crack downs will begin. like I said these guys at the top have NO care for anyone that isn't on their level.
The scary part is thanks to Citizens United I bet things will get a hell of a lot worse, not better. Remember once upon a time we had relatively sane copyright laws as well, then the megacorps saw some of their cash cows were headed into PD territory and through treasonous bribery ended up with Valenti's "forever minus a single day" copyright laws.
I wouldn't be surprised if the MSFTs and the Googles and the Apples end up getting together and deciding no matter how much they dislike each other its in their own best interests to keep their patents and just cross license and then they'll start pushing for extensions and with citizens united they can just write a check and get it.
Hell I bet ya I can even predict what the spin will be as they ram it on through. It'll be "In this troubled economy companies are at risk of losing position and being forced to lay people off (gotta bring up job losses to scare the masses) because they simply can't make enough in a down economy to pay back the incredible expenses the research and development of cutting edge technology brings. Therefor we are going to enact new legislation which will give them a 10 year extension to existing patents so they can keep innovating, just until the economy gets back on its feet again".
Don't be surprised if you see some politician parroting those exact words in a year or two. If I can think of it big pharma and big tech can think of it as well and it'll allow them to keep their cash cows and make it a "good old boys club" where they can just "compete" with each other and not worry about the little guy with a new idea fucking with their cash flow. it'll be followed by back room cross licensing agreements between the big boys so you won't be seeing any money costing "Apple VS Google VS MSFT" lawsuits any more.
And the sad part is thanks again to Citizens United making corps better than you I doubt anyone in the MSM would say a word, except maybe in praise of the idea. The only reason this guy is bitching is because he is on the wrong end of the MSFT patents but a cross licensing agreement makes that butthurt all go bye bye while making sure Google doesn't have done to them what they did to yahoo and Altavista, have some young upstart come in with a better product and kick their ass.
I don't know about memory MR AC but I know that FF since FF 4 has just about been unusable on the older office boxes and netbooks that I have to support. I keep a 1.8Ghz Sempron around both as a low power nettop and as a test bed for older office boxes and frankly FF is just scary in its level of suckiness now. You try to launch a new tab and watching AnVir Task Manager I can sit there and watch it pound the living hell out of the CPU and if that tab has video? better go make a sandwich friend it'll be awhile and the video will be a slideshow. compare this to Comodo Dragon which I've been switching my users over to for awhile now (based on Chromium) and it doesn't ever seem to slam, nor does it make the computer unable to multitask while opening a new tab. oh and SD video actually plays quite well, with around 65% CPU usage but it is still snappy as far as browser response goes.
As for TFA I have a silly question...why? We already got chromeOS, Android, iOS, WinPhone and soon Win 8, RIM, and if they sell it off WebOS, do we REALLY need yet another competitor in such an already crowded market? Maybe its just me but it seems like Moz kinda slipped off the tracks when Chrome came along and started climbing. I mean none of my long time FF users like the new UI, as i pointed out at least on AMD CPUs it sucks performance wise, it just doesn't "feel" nice or responsive, yet they are suddenly gonna go off on this new tangent, why? What can they offer that is so much better than Android?
Wouldn't it make more sense to just make the best damned browser and try to take back the share they've been losing to Chrome and its derivatives? This just smacks to me of a case of the "me too!" syndrome with Moz trying to do everything Google does like MSFT trying to copy Apple.
But that comes down to the individual not the tech. When I was 14, the age most start really learning to be social animals, I nearly killed myself in a bike wreck. I pretty much removed all the skin off of my front, nearly ripped my jaw completely off (kids wear a helmet!), knocked out all my teeth, and had gravel and pavement literally embedded in my body. On a funny note i get rushed to the ER and the ER doc pops out and say "Jesus Christ what a day! Listen man, if I give you a whomping shot of morphine you think you'll hold? We had some kids roll a convertible and limbs were ripped off." So I say sure and he hits me a BIG dose so i'm feeling quite nice and sits me down next to a guy holding his throat together, also giddy. I say "WTF happened to you?" and he's like "barb wire fence on a 3 wheeler, WTF happened to you?" hit a dog at 65MPH? and the two of us were laughing like idiots while holding ourselves together.
By the time I wasn't held together with stitches or looked like the Frankenstein's monster I was nearly 23. Part of me wanted to do just as you did and stay hidden in my room with my gadgets but I basically forced myself to face the world. I picked up my bass guitar and ended up going on club tours all over the south. Was I scared shitless? oh hell yeah, but I knew that just like with my bass and computers the only way to learn was to go out and do it.
So I'd say it is more about the personality than the technology, everyone deals with horrible things in different ways. you retreated to escape the mess, I developed a "kiss my scarred ass" attitude. In the end I'm now in my mid 40s and am about at the stage of development I'd have been in my late 20s thanks to that wreck ripping nearly a decade out of my life, but hey they say 50 is the new 30 anyway.
I can solve that. See that disc you are using, the one that says "XP" on it? Yeah its older than the shit in the bottom of your fridge, now throw that stinky shit away!
Now you see this real pretty little DVD that says "Windows 7" on it? yeah try that....what did you say? Windows found all the drivers and did all the work while you had a soda? Congratulations, its called progress.
As for Linux IF and ONLY IF all of your hardware is supported OOTB by your distro of choice are you gonna be having anything as close to easy as 7. Otherwise its "welcome to the forum dance!" which is kind of like a square dance but even less fun and nobody wears pretty clothes. you better know the make/rev/ firmware of said device and hope somebody has a 'fix" for whatever is FUBAR, and you'll probably either have to tweak it, because they wrote it for kernel X-hardware-y make Z and you have kernel x4 hardware y6 and make za rev 2, or you'll get a tarball and get to figure out what needs to be fiddled with to get it going.
Hell if my 71 year old dad can install Windows 7 with nothing but the DVD, not even the driver CD that came with the box (because I wasn't planning on letting him install it so it was in the bottom of the case) and when I show up a week later not a single thing is wrong or broken, or needs fiddling with, it even popped up on first launch "hey you don't have an AV, would you like us to take you to a page with several to choose from?" all nicely labeled into two separate groups for free and for pay and the ONLY thing I had to do was show him where to get Firefox from? you are gonna HONESTLY say Linux is simpler than that? Because i'm gonna have to call bullshit as according to Gartner Linux is at 1.1% which it wouldn't be if it was THAT simple. Which at least in my experience from a half a dozen distros its not.
Which is why I say that while Linux guys compare themselves to Windows constantly the truer comparison would be to Mac. Unlike Windows which has support for just about every piece of current hardware Linux, like Mac OSX, really runs well IF you stick strictly with Linux hardware with strong Linux support in a Linux ecosystem, problem is you don't have Linux stores with Guru bars to make it easy for folks to FIND the Linux hardware and if you try to use Windows hardware? Well unless you are damned lucky you just earned yourself a seat at the forum dance every 6 months for the life of the machine.
Linux is GREAT for embedded, its damned nice for programmers, its good for admins, but saying "its as easy to set up and use as Windows!" is like saying "and giant batwings pop out of my ass and I fly south for the winter!" you've just passed believable about 3 exits back bud. Unless of course you wanna compare it to an OS 2 and soon to be 3 versions behind like XP, which is that case we really should be comparing it to the first release of Ubuntu or even the 2001 release of Debian, whatever that was.
No they don't and here is why: You manage to get enough people to boycott (not easy since their goals are now the complete control of the channels so you can't hear or see anything but pre-packaged crap) to seriously hurt their bottom line and what will happen?
They will blame their losses on piracy, walk into the halls of power with a nice PPT that shows conclusively that "If we made X that year than logically we should have made X+Y by now so it HAS to be the pirates!" and then after handing out the customary bribes they WILL get ever more draconian laws and copyright extensions!
You see this is like "too big to fail' which is "heads I win, tails you lose" as they have long since figured out how to game the system so ANY action results in increased power and profits for them! Hell if you were to cause enough damage they'd just have a "piracy tax" added to every single HDD, flash drive, anything that can hold a scrap of data, and pick the money straight out of your pockets!
You have to give them credit, its a great scam. there is literally not a single answer you can give that won't give them more money and power! You copy their content you're a pirate, you don't copy but don't buy you're a pirate, you don't copy and DO buy you're not giving them the year over year gains their PPT says they should be so you must be a pirate! It is like xkcd only every road leads to " we get more money and/or power" for the megacorps. like I said, pretty slick scam.
Wow I hadn't thought of NeXT (yes I am old enough to remember who it was written, man I wanted one of those cubes back in the day!) since jobs went to Apple. and while i have no idea how it handles (don't have any spare PCs ATM) All I want is a nice, simple, GUI based, pretty OS that I can guarantee will actually update for the next 7 years without crapping over its own drivers and choking, is that so much to ask for? you mentioned XP but I have XP boxes in the field that's been there since 2001, that is 11 years, THREE service packs, and about 1500 updates and NO driver failures, and NO CLI fixes required. the most I had to do to them was upgrade the RAM when it got cheap. Hell I have a customer that just NOW retired the Win2k box i built him in 2000!
Oh and finally as for your XP instruction given by the ISP? That is caused from something going badly wrong NOT from the OS simply updating itself! There is a BIG difference from needing CLI because you had a network outage and needing CLI because you dared to apply updates, totally different things. if the only time I needed CLI was when the network went down in Linux? I'd have NO problem with that. But when Dell has to run their own repos because even THEY can't get decent enough QA in Linux to keep their machines running without custom building their own distro? I'd say there be trouble in paradise friend.
All I want is a distro that will work and KEEP working without my customers having to drop into term for the life of the box or 7 years, whichever comes first. Is that REALLY too much to ask for? And I don't care if they have to upgrade once a year or two as long as the upgrade process is as simple as "click button, let it do its thing, reboot". But at least in my experience it has been "run upgrade, reboot, find broken hardware, enjoy three days of trying to get it to work again, oh and enjoy the forum hunts".
The reason I'm against CLI is because frankly i think its become a crutch. The GUI is a second class citizen compared to "open up bash and type" which is treated as the number 42 in Linux. So I truly hope that somebody proves me wrong, I truly hope that by 2014 when me and hundreds of thousands of retailers are sitting on pallets full of XP boxes and laptops they'll be a version of Linux we can just slap on and sit in the window. But so far I've gone through over a half a dozen and have yet to find one that would fit the bill. I might give GNUSTEP a spin when the next load comes through in a week or two, but it'll have to have Flash support and be able to work with all the major sites like FB for it to work for my customers.
I wouldn't say its a vendetta so much as i've seen too many use it as a crutch. Nothing ever gets fixed in GUI land because they always say "open up bash and type" while ignoring that 1.- that is assuming the network isn't what has been borked, and 2.-that they will manage to copy paste PERFECTLY and without a single error or flub. Now that is two pretty dang big assumptions in my book, especially seeing as how many folks are going wireless and how flaky wireless can be in Linux ATM. A user on another forum i think pretty much nailed it when he said "If I give this to an average user, just a blank PC and a disc, can they get it to work without Google? if something goes wrong can they figure things out on their own?" and we simply aren't anywhere near there yet IMHO.
And its nice to see i'm not alone in seeing things have gone astray. kinda tiring and frustrating to be called a liar and crazy when i know what I saw. folks were friendly, goals were set, progress while slow was steady and the goal made clear that Linux was SUPPOSED to be for the masses, a true "third way" to give folks choice. Now as I said its like the ground has soured. Whereas before the developers seemed to welcome users that have real questions and requests and took pride in making their software more useful you get this "We are going THIS way, get on board or suck it" attitude, just rude.
I mean look at GNOME, KDE, and Unity. there are a few that seem to like KDE now but I bet even they would admit its not up to the level of KDE 3 yet on features or usability, and GNOME probably ran off more people than they kept and unity? WTF were they thinking making the bar vertical when every machine on the planet is a widescreen now?
I can see what you mean about the whole cultist thing though, I actually had one the other day on another forum cursing the day i was born and jumping through HUGE logic hoops trying to "prove" that this big huge driver script was a better idea than a simple 'find drivers" button. He never would accept that your average user didn't have the skills to write their own bash scripts! hell look at the Linux troll we have here on /. that has made his signature HALF of one of my sentences because he believes half a sentence proves...something, hell if i know. he wastes mod points once a month or so just to hunt me down for daring to say "As far as the user is concerned there is no CLI in Windows".
But I agree that power users should be able to do whatever they want and script all day, i have NO problem with that. hell I fire up CLI when i need to do an IPConfig once in awhile and have a sweet little .exe that will read an entire MP3 folder and tell you how many hours and minutes worth of music you have thanks to CLI. But the problem I have is this: My customers are normal folks. Joe the captain of the football team, little Suzy the checkout girl, Brian who runs a backhoe, just good honest normal folks that don't want to be programmers, or learn scripting, they just want to turn on their PC and have it get the hell out of their way so they can do what THEY want it to do.
And that is to me what really bites about all this, never before in PC history has things been more in favor of FOSS, with one gift after another dropped into the communities laps, yet even the developers seem more than happy to throw it away while singing the RMS hacker song! You have windows 8, aka Ballmer's Folly, you have nearly 400 million PCs that are frankly overpowered about to be EOLed, you have folks wanting to save money in a down economy, and finally never before in history have you had so many folks that just live on the net.
Frankly that doesn't surprise me they have run off all the testers though, if the attitude I've been getting is any indication your only correct response anymore is "Gee isn't (insert software) perfect? Why it sure is Biff and (insert developer) is a genius!" because anything else is treated as hearasay. I mean why is having a button a bad thing? Is it gonna jump
Well if there is strictly no state then by that very definition wouldn't "vengeance be mine so saith me"? I mean if there were no government and no law then if you fucked with what's mine you would be talking to Mr 357 Magnum and trust me, he is kinda cranky.
So I just don't see how one could have NO central authority and not have vengeance, because you just know someone is gonna piss with someone else, that much is a given. Rape, robbery, murder, molestation, all of these things are older than time and so is revenge so I don't see how ANY system could eliminate such a basic human desire, anymore than you could wipe out the human animal's desire for food, sex, companionship, etc. Its just the way we are wired friend.
Well I know anecdotes aren't evidence but my boys were practically born with a controller in their hands and an Ethernet cable in their laps, one is kicking ass in premed, has a wonderful GF, and is generally a hell of a great guy and the younger is trying to decide whether to go with his love of cooking or his love of computer art, helps out his elderly relatives,hates having a dime spent on him because he always thinks there could be good done with the money, and is also a hell of a nice guy.
Both of them have been on the net practically since they could walk (I had the PCs set to where they would only go to approved kids sites at the time of course) and both have been models of trustworthiness and never had any problems as far as autism or anything else. of course i treated them as intelligent human beings that deserve to be talked to and not down to and was more than happy to sit there with them and explain how things worked, from how data is turned from analog into digital and finally is drawn upon a screen to how a packet is formed and where it goes when they click the button.
And THAT, that right there, i think is the REAL problem. too many have turned to PCs, DVDs, game systems etc as cheap babysitters rather than as useful devices that can help their child learn. I would let the boys visit their friends growing up and when I would pick them up it always amazed and saddened me how many households didn't even have a single book in them, and the kids were given every kind of electronic junk they could possibly want as long as they left the grow ups alone and there was practically NO interaction between parent and child unless the parent had some order to bark at them like clean up their room.
So I don't think the problem is the machine per se, but the parents simply not stepping up and being parents. Parenting is a damned hard job but if you want a child to grow up into a responsible smart young person you just gotta put in the time. Hell I'm probably down about 3 years sleep and lost more than one GF because she gave me an ultimatum of the boys or her and I told her where the door was, but now that I see two happy young men starting out into the world i think it was worth it. The net is a tool, not a babysitter, simple as that.
Wouldn't it be more of a heisenberg uncertainty principle kind of thing? after all we are talking about millions of lines of code in the average OS, and on top of that who knows how many LOC and how many programs, all interacting or biding for CPU time.
So I could see how you could have no real bugs per se yet still have random quirks, simply because each person while doing just fine on their own particular piece of the puzzle and not seeing how each will be affected by the whole, especially with regards to third part programs.
As for TFA and wanting random numbers here is something I'v always wondered, and not being a random number guy I might be missing some 'hidden pattern' or something, but why not use the sports page? Take the scores from the first game listed of each sport, then the second and so on. that should give you a pretty decent range from single digits of boxing to the sometimes triple digit basketball outcomes, that would give you a pretty decent spread to work with wouldn't it? You could even do a letter to number substitution on team names, like say picking the first name from every third team and the second name from every fourth.
Anyway i know stocks and the market as a whole generally follows patterns so it probably wouldn't be a good source but if one picked random teams or even as i said the first score from each sport playing one would have a pretty wide variable for a random number generator to use as a seed, wouldn't you?
Simple, it can read the discs are blank, but after burning when it comes to verification it says "disc not inserted" and hangs. Place the just burnt disc into a good DVD and do a verification (I like Emsa Disk check myself) and it reads perfectly fine, it is just the drive itself won't read it.
So don't ask me why dude, that is just what i've seen with my own two peepers. Now when I come across one usually I just strip the box for parts and hand the dead drive to an old engineer buddy of mine who strips them for the laser and motor.
If I had to guess though I'd say that it is able to see the very front of the TOC and see that it is blank but then when it tries to verify it can't see the end of the disc and hangs. i know the light will just flash for a good 10 minutes if you leave it before either Windows throws a disc read error or the burning program (I've tried Burning Studio by ashampoo as well as IMGBurn and even the built in windows burning) so fuck if I know, all i know is the discs check out fine, you can easily pull the contents off with ANOTHER drive, but the drive that burned it won't read shit. Hell maybe its a +/- thing, who knows. It burns and reads CDs fine though, I even gave some to a guy that wanted to make a cheap CD duplicator for his band, last I heard it was still humming along. Weird huh?
That would be true IF we were talking about possible threats, but how do you explain Wikileaks? They showed some truly sick and evil shit being condoned and covered up by our government, for example the PMC that was gaining contracts by selling little boys as sex toys, the same PMC had done the SAME THING in Kosovo with 10 year old girls over a decade ago!
But what did they do? they ALL rushed and tripped over themselves to kiss the ring and tell the world what an evil sick fuck Assange was for daring to say anything bad about the government! I even saw a few equate HIM with terrorism because he dared to point out the government was condoning child sex trafficking!
No it is actually VERY simple and can be traced back to a single man...Ronald Reagan. he sold us out by deregulating everything he could get his hands on including removing the rules that for years had kept the multinationals from owning too many stations. Now more than 80% of the media in the United States, from movies to music to TV, is ALL owned by just SEVEN corps, that's right, seven.
So it is quite simple, Reagan makes it so they can own all the media, they then gets laws passed that benefit themselves such as "forever minus a single day" copyrights and no matter how nasty the government gets as long as they will take the checks and give the multinationals what they want they sure as hell ain't gonna bite the hand that feeds. if a reporter wants to keep their job? better kiss the ring.
For a perfect example of how "one must toe the party line or else" look no further than a guy most of us would agree is batshit...Glenn Beck. it didn't matter HOW batshit he got, Fox had his back, then it all changed and suddenly he was a pariah...why? because he dared to say that "Maybe it was time for America to be Switzerland" and stay out of third world shitholes. this of course didn't follow the party line, which is NeoCon expansionism and corporatism, so his ass was grass. One of his last days there I saw O' Reilly call him just about everything, fool, idiot, stupid, just because he said we shouldn't have our kids dying in third world countries.
so sadly like everything else in this corrupt former superpower it all comes down to money. the megacorps make money on weapons and no bid contracts, as well as the mineral rights in Afghanistan and that little pipeline they wanted to the Caspian sea (didn't think it was about WMDs did you?) so all must stir up shit with any country they are interested in. the government takes the checks so they can do no wrong, both are in bed together so the reporters that want a job tomorrow kiss the ring. hell if Nixon would have bugged Watergate today he'd have BOTH parties rushing to cover it up and blame the reporters!