From Win2K Pro on up, that is 12 years, you can just right click on a folder, select properties and under advanced you will find "Compress contents to save disk space" as well as "Encrypt contents to secure data" but of course you can not encrypt and compress because the encryption makes the files look like a random scattering of 1s and 0s so naturally compression simply won't work.
You should try looking up sometime "77 things about windows 7" is I believe the name of the whitepaper or even some of the writings of the guy that writes the WinTechNet tools (Russinovich I believe) because frankly there is insane amounts of customization and advanced features of Windows NTFS that most users don't even know about, until they find a need for it of course. You have junction points, which was CLI until Vista but since has a GUI, you can encrypt files and folders, compression, alternative data streams, custom ACLs, there is frankly an insane number of features of the NTFS file system just sitting there. Hell the whole system has gotten insanely powerful, win 7 now has a built in tutorial tool where I can record a step by step tutorial to walk my customers through fixing a problem or I can just take control of their box in less than 5 minutes while they are on the phone and fix it by remote, so simple to use I walked a 73 year old grandmom through remote assistance over the phone.
But this gets to the heart of why I think Linux isn't gaining share, and it is thus: MSFT is busting their asses to make things EASIER for the user. Even the most advanced tasks can easily be found using WinSearch and has GUIs and helpful tutorials. Hell my 71 year old dad is learning voice command control for his PC all because he simply typed "mic" into control panel and found a tutorial on using his microphone for voice commands!
Sadly and I get infinite hate and venom for daring to say this but i truly believe it is this dark fact that the community doesn't want to admit which is Currently Linux IS Windows 98, no more and no less because while MSFT and Apple have seen that the key to users is making things easier for them, with Linux, just like Win98, the GUI is really nothing but a shell over a CLI underpinning, and instead of working to make the GUI a first class citizen the developers often just put the absolute most basic items in the GUI and instead of having an advanced GUI for advanced tasks expect the user to drop out of the GUI for CLI, just as we often had to do with Win98.
As a retailer and geek I want that to change. i remember the days of having shelves filled with choices, from Commodore to Atari, from Tandy to Compaq. I believe choice is healthier for the system as a whole and healthier for the user. Hell i even think having lots of choice is healthier for MSFT as it forces them to stay on their toes and listen even closer to the consumer. But we simply won't have that choice if the community doesn't stop acting like Linux is this little "club" where only CLI heads and nerd are allowed. I mean look at the post I was responding to, which i got labeled flamebait for daring to point out what was going on, where a user said he could really use a simple feature that has been in Windows for a decade. What happened? he was insulted repeatedly before someone came up with a truly Rube Goldbergesque workaround to create a compressed loopback mountpoint, a workaround i'm sure would involve a page and a half of CLI as well as writing and testing his own script.; That's just insane folks!
Oh don't worry friend I believe you. These others may doubt you had a 95% failure rate but I've personally seen bad batches come through the pipe. the last really nasty run i had was in 2005 with a load of Maxtors, sure they were consumer drives but these bitches would barely even start loading before taking a crap and failing. I'd say more than half didn't even get the OS loaded before they were throwing SMART errors, so yeah it happens.
But I found the key, at least for me, was to not lean too heavily on a single manufacturer and to load up when a really good batch came down the pipe. That is why i'm recommending the Samsung and Hitachi drives, as they are left with only what is still in the pipe (as they both sold out a few months ago, but luckily part of the agreement covers warranties on all drives currently in the pipe) and especially the Spinpoint and EcoGreen series these last couple of batches were really top notch. I can't even count how many of the Samsung drives i've sold in new builds and upgrades this year, some to truly hellish places like industrial sites and construction trailers where the dirt and grime getting in those machines is just unreal, and they just don't die.
But if I were you I'd avoid Seagate for awhile, probably the next 2 years. I don't know if you hang out at the parts sites or places where the system builder hang out but its pretty common knowledge in those circles than pretty much everything over 600Gb that Seagate has put out has been pretty much shite. Even their enterprise drives simply aren't holding up as well as the competition and the talk around the campfire has been that a combination of bad firmware and REALLY shitty ARM controller chips from the Maxtor division are the root of the cause. The skinny is it'll take probably a year (closer to two now that the factories have sunk) to get the bad chips out of the channel because in their greed Seagate would rather pass along the shite than have to take a loss on the substandard parts, and the talk is they were leaning on the cheap parts suppliers from the Maxtor purchase too much and there was a reason why Maxtors were cheap, they were crap.
so if it were me and I was taking care of a large farm I'd be buying up Samsung and Hitachi like there was no tomorrow, and when the channel went dry I'd use either Caviar Black or Green depending on the workload. But if you think ahead you can load up a RAID 5 with Samsung Spinpoints for less than 2 Seagate enterprise and frankly they'll last a hell of a lot longer than even the enterprise Seagates. Once those ran out I'd stick with WD until the channel is clear and then buying Seagate retail won't be a problem. Just check the comments at places like Newegg and Tigerdirect where the system builders hang out, we go through a LOT of drives and are quick to warn our fellow builders to steer clear of bad batches. If you see more than 20% negative rating? Its a bad batch and should be avoided. Follow this advice and I bet both your capacity as well as operating costs go down. It takes a little more work but in the end its well worth it IMHO.
Thanks but I knew I'd be modded down for daring not to follow the groupthink and hey...I was! surprise surprise. Doesn't make black into white nor will it change the facts and the facts are thus: Linux has been flatline for nearly 4 years now, that is 16 quarters of nearly ZERO growth. the last numbers I saw on servers had Linux losing share as well, even with the frankly crazy price of winServer, why?
Because as a Linux admin friend told me "If you give a Linux and Windows admin a task that the Linux admin has done repeatedly well then the Linux guy WILL win, but if you give them both a task that neither has done? before the Linux guy is done reading man pages and Googling the Windows guy will be at home making a sandwich" Its simple and the reason why CLI is dead everywhere else, GUIs reward exploration, CLIs reward repetition.
And nobody is saying you can't have CLI, hell with both OSX and Windows you can script all damned day long if that melts your butter, with Powershell on winServer you can automate the entire server farm, help yourself.
But the problem the Linux community has, and feel free to check ANY forum and see for yourself, is this: somewhere along the way the community was taken over by the "FLOSSie club" mentality, where those that use Linux are somehow "better" than everyone else and the goal is NOT to free people from not having control of their software as stated by RMS when he created the GPL, but instead to "keep out the noobs" and make sure the "unwashed masses go back to windblows" and like a cancer as this idea spreads it destroys all in its wake.
I've been called every filthy name in the book for daring to say things like "Users should be able to use CLI but it should NEVER be a HAVE TO". Now when did such an obvious statement become hearasay? I'm a retailer, I sell computers to normal folks, Suzy the checkout girl, Brian who runs a backhoe, the nice old guy in front of you in line at the bank, and right now Linux simply doesn't meet their needs. And the truly sad part is when retailers like myself say "This is what we need to help spread FLOSS" we get told "Fuck off and die parts monkey, go back to windblowz LOL!".
It is THIS attitude that is dooming FLOSS, not some conspiracy, not some secret bribery, just the simple fact that the community has become infested with groupthink and trolls and all that refuse to follow the party line are cast out and hatred spewed at them. In the end retailers like myself have practically begged for changes, only to be spit upon, so who is to blame for the lack of FLOSS adoption? The community who refuse to believe that the consumer market is worth having, not if it means things could be easy for the "noobs".
They can label it a rant, label me a shill, but it won't change reality nor will it get a single retailer to sell your product nor a single user to actively switch. In the end the community has no one but themselves to blame for the current lack of FLOSS adoption. And I think its just sad, as there are many that could be free from DRM and have choice but they simply aren't "leet" enough to be worthy of the FLOSSie club.
Sadly you speak the truth, just look at the history of aid to Africa and you see one failure after another. Hell does everyone know where we got the word "technical' to describe trucks turned into battlewagons? That was what the Red Cross would call the bribes paid out to warlords using improvised battle trucks, they would put down "technical expenses' which of course just gave the warlords more money to build more battlewagons.
While I'm all for helping out poor folks i'm reminded of the old "teach a man to fish" saying, as all we are doing now is simply pissing money down a rathole and i have no doubt hurting the poor more than we are helping by giving aid to the ones that are their oppressors!
As much as i think the man is batshit on...well just about everything I do have to agree with Glenn Beck on one thing, the idea that probably got him kicked off Fox News. Its time for us to "Be Switzerland" and stop trying to control the world and instead look to our own here at home. We have Americans living in tents, we have millions that are missing meals, no jobs, its time to take care of our own and let Africa take care of its own. I bet if we got the hell out and left people alone Africa would advance and join the rest of the world. it won't be pretty, and there will be probably several civil wars, but in the end the only TRUE change comes about from the people that live there wanting to change their conditions, not from somebody throwing food and money at them.
Thank you, and did you notice i got labeled flamebait for daring to point out such an obvious thing? I mean when did it become hearasay to say "Having a checkbox or button for the users is a good thing" in the community? Has it REALLY become so taken over by the "FLOSSie club" mentality that simply asking for a button is now evil? And what about the other two things I pointed out, having a "find drivers" and roll back drivers" button for when something goes wrong? That may not be something a regular user is gonna use every day but by George when something goes wrong they are gonna be damned glad its there!
I don't think its masochists though, I truly believe from my interactions in the forums that those that believe FLOSS is a "club" that its their job to actively deny members to has taken over too much of the Linux community. They actively fight making things easier or better for the users because that might let in "noobs" or "the unwashed masses" while ignoring the fact isn't that what FOSS and the whole movement was for? Wasn't it to free the world from software that was out of their control? According to the FLOSSie club that is only for those that believe, and whom don't think esoteric workarounds like loopbacks are difficult. Kinda sad really, that the trolls have taken over the movement, but there you go.
Paranoid much? Look folks, we all pretty much know WHY MSFT is pushing Secure Boot, its because their new OS has been cracked using the boot process and the hack works so well that it has been two years and it STILL passes WGA! Look up "Windows 7 all version pre activated" on any pirate site to see for yourself. So yes they probably won't want you fucking with the windows partition, well duh! If you can the pirates will just make a Linux based bootloader and they be back in the same spot they are with Windows 7!
But I have news for MSFT, this will work IF and ONLY IF they do the smart move and offer a version for the masses that makes Win 8 not worth pirating. they actually did that for awhile with windows 7, the $50 Win 7 HP upgrade turned more pirates legit than any stupid WGA crap ever has, yet Ballmer showed once again what a piss poor CEO is because instead of seeing the big picture he killed it to "maximize profit potential" and instead made the pirate version a better deal. At $50? Its not worth pirating and risking a possible bootloader bug that could pwn the whole machine and put the user at risk. At $100? the user WILL take the risk.
As for Linux? I'll get hate for saying it but its your own fault for ignoring the users and treating it as an exclusive club instead of an OS. never before have users been more online, the home users especially live in the clouds, yet your OS is flatline, why? Because you don't listen, not to the retailers nor the OEMs nor the users. Too many think anything that makes Linux more obtuse and fiddly is "smarter and more powerful" and anything that makes Linux easier and user friend;y is "dumbing down" or as I was told recently here was "rampant consumerism" of all things.
Make a better product than your competitors and your numbers WILL climb, its business 101. shout "free as in freedom man, fight teh powerz!"and expect the users to jump through flaming hoops to be "worthy" of this freedom? watch how quickly they run to the competition. Things the other guy has had for a decade, like "find drivers" and "roll back drivers" isn't even implemented, why? do you think "open up bash and type" a huge string of crap is EASIER than a button? The market is yours to take, the competition simply can't cut the price any lower (although the OEM HP is practically free or even less than free thanks to trialware) nor can they support the older hardware and still maintain a decent speed like your OS can. you just need to listen, learn, and implement. again business 101 folks.
So a user states a simple need, one filled by the competitor for a decade, and in less than five posts he gets insulted before getting the classic use esoteric workarounds followed by you giving him a snarky version of the also classic you don't need that, and you wonder why Linux is stuck at 1%?
Waste your mod points all you want but this is a truth that needs to be spoken, it is THIS, this right here, that keeps Linux in last place. Somewhere along the way making F/LOSS accessible to the masses was thrown to the wayside in favor of the "FLOSSie club" as I call it, where You must prove your "worthy" of using the gifts the great Torvalds and RMS have bestowed upon thee. In this club anything that makes F/LOSS more useful, easier, and friendlier? why that is bad, its "rampant consumerism" or "dumbing down" and anything that makes Linux more complex, obtuse, or fiddly is "smarter" and "more powerful". I have actually been told by a member of the FLOSSie club when i pointed out that Linux was too CLI heavy for my consumers "to make them embrace the power of CLI" like its the Goddamn force!
Never before in all of history has things been more favorable to your OS in the consumer market, you are being given multiple great gifts yet are just pissing them away. You have Windows 8, or "Ballmer's Folly" that is gonna make Vista look like XP, you have nearly 400 million laptops and netbooks and desktops that are gonna be EOLed that are frankly insanely overpowered for what the vast majority do with computers, and finally you have a populace that lives and breathes online. while the business market still has tons of proprietary apps if your OS can get to FaceBook, play Farmville and Angry Birds you have covered more than 80% of the home users right there!
But what do you do with these great gifts? do you ask the fundamental questions, which for an OS that has been around 20 years and is still lower than the margin for error shouldn't even have to be uttered? Do you ask "What am I doing wrong that my competitors are doing right?". Nope, because thanks to this new "club" mentality those users are "noobs" and not worthy of the usage of your "blessed" OS, they aren't worthy of joining the clic. Instead you expect the entire planet to do things YOUR way, arrogant much?
A wise person once said "You know what the definition of insanity is? Its doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result" and that is EXACTLY what the community has been doing. Insane release schedule, broken drivers, none of that matter because the users will embrace the power of CLI and learn "the Unix way" even though Unix was NEVER supposed to be a consumer OS and died out over a decade ago!
I wise man would look at those linux TMs and others on that site and learn from them. Every one of them is based on the constant stream of excuses and accusations thrown by those in the club. I'm sure if one were to look at it one would see the same ones being used here over and over AND OVER. But numbers don't lie folks, never before in history have things been more favorable to your OS but everyone from Walmart to the little shops like mine treat your OS like the plague, why? Do you honestly believe Steve Ballmer is giving us all Swiss Bank accounts?
No it is because you do NOT listen. you don't listen to the users, you don't listen to the OEMs, you don't listen to the little retailers like me, or even the giant OEMs like Dell who has to run their own repos at not inconsiderable expense and just for a teeny tiny subset of hardware, simply to have functional drivers. look, listen, learn from your competitors and offer a better product. Its business 101 folks but if you continue to treat Linux as an exclusive club instead? you have nobody to blame whe
Sorry friend but you missed it, as I'm sure he was talking about "pre-flood" pricing. About a month before the flood i bought up some Samsung EcoGreens (Really great drives BTW, the big cache makes up for the lower RPM and they run really cool) and I paid $60 each for the 2Tb and $35 each for the 1Tb and now good luck on even finding the 2Tb and the 1Tb is $95 for a refurb or $147 new which is frankly just nuts. I'm just glad i kept 6Tb for myself before selling the rest to my customers as I'd hate like hell to have to buy drives now. I got a few sub 400Gb SATA and IDE drives i'm saving for customers that have one die and I'm gonna try to ride it out as best I can.
That said if you HAVE to buy a drive right now I'd look into snatching an EcoGreen before they are all gone. in my own tests I've found nothing but the perpendicular drives with 32Mb of cache or better beats 'em and the temp difference is well worth it. I even changed out my OS drive for an EcoGreen and I went from 94 benchmark with a Seagate Barracuda 500Gb to 131 with a burst rate of 129ms and a temp drop of nearly 40 degrees F with the Samsung.
As for TFA? If you still work corp my heart goes out to you friends, personally I got tired of the ulcers and headaches. it always seemed like they would give you impossible problems and expect you to 'just fix it" given nothing but $3 and some duct tape. And if you did a REALLY good job they might even cut your funding! I swear the janitors are treated as more important in some places than the IT guys. The PHBs act like its all magic and the IT staff are just sitting around drinking coffee and playing an MMO. I saw too many of my friends bust their asses only to have their job cut out from under them or even worse be forced to train some H1-B hack to take their place, fuck that mess.
Maybe IT guys should have a union? Or maybe do like the cops and have a case of "blue flu" and let management see how important they really are by all calling in sick for a few days? I know that stupid shit like TFA is just a symptom of a bigger problem, and that's lack of respect for the role IT plays. And if that doesn't change frankly I'd be amazed if there is even any new IT guys in 10 years, as according to my oldest IT courses at the local college are a ghost town, nobody wants to be in IT anymore and frankly I can't blame 'em.
All that means is Seagate is pulling the better drives out of the bunch and leaving the absolute shite at the bottom of the barrel for consumers. Personally I'd buy up Samsung and Hitachi drives while you can if I was you, I've put those drives in some pretty hellish places and they take serious abuse.
But if you are serious about a 95% failure rate I'd say you were buying off the back of a truck or ur doin it wrong.Even with the cheap ass bottom of the barrel Maxtors I've never seen higher than 10% and even with those one good stress test when first unpacked (I keep an old box around loaded with Spinrite for just such a job, Spinrite level II will cause those drives that are shit from the factory to overheat and die hard) fixes that problem so a 95% failure rate tells me you had a shite controller, a failing part, possibly PSU, screwing the drives, or you got them from "Handy Bob's House O' Drives" where they were selling you cheap ass refurbs as new.
Dude I grew up in the 80s, remember the "bag" phones? it was like carrying a car battery. that doesn't change the fact it was the iPhone that mades phone a fashion item and brought about the whole "thin is in" bit. hell look at what laptops were like before the Air came along, they were like bricks!
It also doesn't change the fact that these bozos harping on about 'the death of X86" are still just wasting space. I mean what is the point? hell I get 6 hours of HD movie watching on my Brazos netbook thanks to it having a dual core PLUS a 40 stream processor GPU that all runs in a less than 9 watt envelope! And that isn't even as low as x86 can go, some of the high end Intel CULV can frankly just sip power and still give performance that is miles above anything ARM can provide.
The troll that got butthurt because i burst his little bubble about ARM coming along and killing X86 (and I'm sure in his mind taking "they who shall not be named" along with it) can waste his mod points but it don't change reality. NSTAAFL, if you get ARM up to X86-64 levels of performance all its battery saving will be gone right out the window. in fact i bet if one were to make an ARM CPU that kept up with the latest AMD and Intel chips it would probably suck MORE power than X86 simply because AMD and Intel have had a hell of a lot more experience in lowering power than they have had in cranking up that kind of performance.
I mean when you see the amount of data a new multicore X86 can crunch its truly amazing. If you'd have told me when i started out on the VIC or even when I got my first X86, which was a whole 60MHz, that we would have this much power on our desktops and even on the go I would have said you were insane. We have jumped to insane levels of performance in just this last decade, going from barely 1Ghz to 4Ghz multicores with GPU performance built in.
ARM is great for mobile where power is everything, although frankly after getting to play with an ARM based netbook I'll stick with my Brazos E-350 thanks, and its great for embedded and industrial where hardening and lack of fans is a boon, and for certain niches I'm sure it'll be great for some server jobs, but to act like ARM is suddenly gonna come along and cause folks to throw out decades worth of X86 code and fall to their knees weeping in wonder is just delusional.
Which is a shame that they didn't push Zune to Windows 7, because the new WMP12 interface is beyond easy to manage even large media libraries. I have mine set so on my tunes I transfer to my netbook the files are converted to 192k (to save space) and on my little 4gb flash PMP that i listen to while working its 64k (because frankly its just background music and I can't tell the difference on those earbuds) and on my USB drive its the full 320k. Its all easy, its all simple, hell my dad could use WMP12.
As for TFA it just goes to show what I've been saying for years is true, that Ballmer is a piss poor CEO and that it was him being gates little buddy that got him the job. But Gates has been out of the loop too long and hasn't been keeping on top of the market. frankly if they hadn't brought in the Office guys to help build Windows 7 they would have had double failures on their hands. Courier was a perfect design for a consumption device and if they wanted Office so bad they could have always ported it to the new interface.
I just hope when Ballmer screws the pooch with Windows 8, which everyone I've shown screencaps of it to have absolutely HATED the new UI, that he will be forced to 'pursue other interests" and they will bring someone in to right the company and bring some much needed vision. MSFT today reminds me of Apple back when the Pepsi guy was at the helm, a bunch of different groups going in different directions and no real overarching strategy at play. Just look at the moves under Ballmer, Zune, kin, rushing out the X360 despite a fatal flaw with the cooling system, killing playsforsure for the Zune market, its just been one stupid move after another. The man just has no vision and to steal a line from the late Jobs, no taste.
Oh don't bring up DOS, I've been thre and had to do that. I had a guy come into the shop I was working at in 2005 practically in tears and said "Can you PLEASE sell me a machine that will run this? I've been everywhere and I'll gladly pay" and the boss looks and says "Is that an ISA card? WTH? Man I could order you something that could be here in a week but NOBODY has those slots in PCs anymore, sorry" and I thought the guy was gonna faint when I popped my head over the wall and said "I think I got a couple of running PCs with ISA slots in my shed at home".
It turned out the kid had been put in charge of the lumber factory while dad took his first vacation in 20 years and the C&C for the lathe naturally took a big shit and he HAD to have these custom columns done by the end of the week! And of course we are talking about a machine that cost over $100K and whose manufacturer had been out of business since 1992. So I had to dig the HDD out of this dead machine that was practically buried in sawdust, clone the DOS 3 onto my old gamer rigs so he'd have a spare, seal up the boxes so the dust couldn't get in, and do ALL of that in a single day. I stayed up all night and was about to drop but the guy gave me a $300 bonus PLUS $150 each for boxes that weren't worth $40 by then PLUS ended up having us do the complete rollout for the lumber mill. All because that stupid thing wouldn't run on anything but DOS 3.
But as for why F/LOSS is failing to thrive I think my little story is a good example. When I set it up I ran it through its paces and frankly a 5 year old could have run that lathe. It was all GUI and pictures and with the basic shapes you could cut any kind of column you wanted and have it crank out 1 or 1000. in other words it was SIMPLE, it got out of your way, it was EASY, and it let you get your work done with a bare minimum of fuss.
But look at the poster I was originally responding to, who took ANY attempt to make things easier as some sort of an attack. it is THIS, this right here, that has infected F/LOSS like a cancer. they don't treat it as an OS, they treat it as a religion which you have to show your "devotion" to by learning esoteric workarounds to prove your "worthy" of being in the club. Like I said ask for a Non CLI solution to a problem, don't be ugly, just say you have poor eyesight (I was given an esoteric workaround for making the fonts huge in bash) or that you have trouble typing (I was told to use a pencil eraser side down) and if you are lucky after the insults you'll get one guy who will come on and say "uhhhh...you can't really fix that without CLI, sorry".
The sad and terrible truth, the truth that nobody will admit, much less fix, is that it isn't marketing, it isn't some new bling that is keeping F/LOSS so low in the polls, it is this simple fact: In its current form Linux IS Windows 98 no more, no less. Like Win98 you have a GUI on top of a CLI OS and like early Win98 most of what your GUI actually does (if it works) is send commands to the CLI underneath. If you remove CLI from 2K/XP/Vista/7, or from any variant of OSX it WILL continue to function just fine. but if you remove the shell from Linux, just like trying to remove DOS from win98 it WILL fail.
Ultimately I think the community is gonna have to sit down and decide "Do we want to win, or do we want to be a club?" because as you've pointed out if you want to win there has to be SOME way for those doing the work to profit from their labor. as you pointed out who is gonna write a 100 million dollar GPL program? right now, whether by services or selling CDs, it ALL comes down to charity. The developers are holding out a tin cup and hoping they get enough nickels to pay their bills. that just won't do, you can't plan long term if you don't even know if the bills are gonna be paid.
So that has to be dealt with an the "We're leet!" brigade has to be dealt with, because the world isn't gonna sit around learning esoteric workarounds or memorizing bash commands. There is a reason why
Well I can understand wanting to keep the camera if for nothing else the nostalgia factor, after all there are fan clubs for Brownies too, but film died FOR A REASON, its frankly a really shitty format until you get into high end. I grew up with the Polaroid, hell i probably got one or two of the old "zebra case" instamatics, but I'm also smart enough to know the pictures? Frankly weren't great. they were a little fuzzy, resolution wasn't hot, and the colors were always a little...off.
In the end there isn't anything they can do about the resolution, the short shelf life of the film (less than 2 years IIRC and on some brands less than 9 months before the color started getting wonky) and of course the toxic byproducts from the manufacturing process.
But what they CAN do is what I saw done to the old high end Hassalbad 35mm, which is create a CMOS pack that fits into the former film slot. this would let them get EVERY picture at max resolution (which for an instamatic? probably 3Mp MAX, more likely 1Mp) and with a decent NAND cache they could probably take 300 pictures with it before needing to offload, hell they could even put a little screen in the bottom of the "film pack" if they wanted to see the results instantly or even have a little thermal printer that would plug into the edge of the film slot and print what you took instantly.
So while I agree you can get an insanely overpowered camera cheap now, such as the 7MP I got my mom for less than $40 on sale, if they want to keep the bulky old camera trying to replicate the film is NOT the correct way to go. It would be like an 8 track fan club trying to buy the old production lines and get 8 tracks cranked out again, they are ignoring there were reasons why they died out and trying to make this stuff in small batches will just make the prices worse and leave them with more unsold stock.
Because nostalgia factor or no I doubt very seriously they are gonna find too many folks willing to shell out $60 for a 30 pack of instamatic film. Digital is higher quality, easier to use, less wasteful, can be trivially copied and exchanged, its just a better medium. The only ones that really have an excuse to even use film anymore are filmmakers and other high end professionals and even with them once the RED cameras go down in price film will be useless for them as well. They were great fun in the age of bell bottoms and the Chevy Vega but those days are long past.
And this is why I truly believe that we are gonna live to see another revolution in this country, whether peaceful or bloody I don't know. But the whole reason why the Arab springs are spreading is because those at the top could make their feelings about those below them more clear if they sent everyone in the country a Goatse full color poster with "this is our response to your pleas" written in gold leaf at the bottom.
Everything that caused our forefathers to rise up against tyranny we now have again in this country, taxation without representation, oppression of the masses by the few at the top, ignoring of grievances, its all there. Only now thanks to the rise of the multinational we have this situation being played out worldwide with the money men screwing everyone and thinking they can continue to put poor against poor while they continue to loot. But it won't work this time as they became SO greedy and SO destructive in their pursuit of ever richer gains they have fucked the planet and frankly there will be no place for them to hide.
"Merchants have no country. The mere spot they stand on does not constitute so strong an attachment as that from which they draw their gains." Thomas Jefferson. In the end it is the wise words of our forefathers that should guide our way in the coming struggle, for even back then he and many others saw the threats and tried to do all they could to stop it.
Well I don't know about after, because usually i'm more sleepy and happy than cranky, but I know if some green eater tried to grab my BBQ sammich there ass will be drawing back a stump! They got one of them little family owned BBQ stands down the street, where they slow cook that meat until it melts in your mouth, just a hint of sauce too, they don't drown it like those places that use cheap meat....mmmmm... dammit now I'm gonna have to go get me a sammich!
As for TFA frankly I figured most of the vegans were batshit after PETA tried to have fish labeled "sea kittens' to make people not eat them. you think I'm bullshitting? look it up, I swear to God, they want to relabel Tuna and trout and all other fish as "sea kittens" because they think folks won't eat a sea kitten sandwich!
Personally I say if you don't want to eat me for personal reasons that's your business, I don't dig swine myself but that's just cause i was raised on a farm and I know what filthy little scavengers they are, but don't be trying to make us switch to your beliefs, okay? I would never tell someone they couldn't have that pork chop, I just don't like it for myself.
I miss the days when we actually had personal responsibility and people left each other the fuck alone. If I wanna smoke, or have a beer, or eat some tasty BBQ, what business is it of yours? Oh and before someone chimes in with "medical costs" let me say this: I'll be MORE than happy to sign an ironclad waiver that says if I get cancer the ONLY thing I'll be given if morphine which is dirt cheap, and in return you quit taxing the fuck out of me, do we have a deal? I've actually put that offer to politicians and they hem and haw but it comes down to THEY want the money for THEIR pet projects and what THEY think is best for YOU.
Can we PLEASE stop with the frankly batshit "Hey lets kill X86 herp derp" bullshit please? AMD is cranking out sub 9w dual cores WITH GPUs built in, Intel is cranking out CULV that get similar numbers so power draw on X86? Ain't shit folks unless you are talking about cell phones which thanks to Apple and the iSliver batteries means you have to run INSANELY low power to get any battery life.
Each chip has its place, ARM for mobile and a few specialized niches (like in TFA where I'm sure it'll be for webservers that aren't getting many hits and thus the lower load makes it more advantageous to worry about power) and X86 for the big loads and and number crunching. Because like it or not cycle for cycle ARM gets royally stomped by even the lowest AMD and Intel X86 chips, go for the higher end chips and it isn't even funny.
NSTAAFL folks and ARM is for power sipping and power sipping ALONE. Ramp it up so it can even crunch the kind of numbers a Core2Duo could from 2 generations ago? watch those power savings dry up and blow away like a fart in the breeze. saying ARM can replace X86-64 is like saying "Now that we have these mopeds we don't need trucks anymore!" Different tools for different jobs and I'd love to see you move a couch on that moped. The ONLY way ARM competes is by having tons of specialized chips like for decoding using DSPs which again raises the power usage and bye bye savings.
Well if it needs root that pretty much leaves out Vista and 7, unless you have a user that is dumb enough to click yes on "Hey you didn't try to install anything but this (insert huge random number) wants to have admin rights, yes or no" which if they click yes you have worse problems. I'm also gonna assume that Office 2K10 does like 2K7 and by default disables scripting and running code unless you specifically enable it (since TFA is seriously light on any details more than "ZOMG weesa gonna die!") so that removes Office 2K7 and 2K10.
So you are looking at XP users, running as root, accepting Word docs and having Word 2k or 2K3. Not a small number but most businesses shouldn't be letting users run as root and should have all incoming docs scanned for malware so that should seriously cut down the numbers. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of their infections can't be traced down to luring the suckers, using age old tricks like "Free porn passwords.doc" or "Free WoW keys.doc" or some other classic social engineering trick. Most of the infection I see nowadays can be traced straight to PEBKAC, either wanting something for nothing, ala "New_Hit_Pop_Song.mp3.exe" or trying to see teh boobies ala "Free porn passwords.doc". In the end there is only so much you can do about stupid and still let them have control over their machines.
If I was trying to protect money? Metals and weapon stocks. Take a look at what always continues, even in times of world war, you need all major metals to forge new weapons and weapon merchants tend to make out like bandits.
I predict the Arab springs will continue to spread until they are no longer contained in the middle east. EU will be next, the USA by 2013 or 2014. You can't go around gorging at the trough while ignoring the suffering of the people because before long they turn on you, just ask the French what happens when you tell them to eat cake. Gold, Silver, Copper, Aluminum, and gun stocks, that is where I'd put my money if the inflation wasn't quickly taking it all that is.
Riiiight, because if given the choice of the big fat checks and the cushy job as a lobbyist for the industry they sucked off, or listening to the people, they are gonna choose listening to the people? What are you smoking and can I have some?
Why do you think there is OWS and Arab Springs all over the planet? the incredible consolidation of power has made the entire electoral process corrupted beyond repair. they don't give a fuck what you think, you can write petitions, protest, vote until your little fingers bleed, they don't give a fuck. Its a revolving door between the corridors of power and the big multinationals and once you make it to the big leagues you are set for life.
Why the hell would they care what a peasant like you thinks? The ONLY "people" they care about are corporations and guys with names like Gates and Dell that can write them big fat checks. He who has the gold makes the rules and the top 1%, who are the same ones locking all the IP into "forever minus a single day" copyrights, are making damned sure that ain't YOU! Hell didn't you read Obama's responses to the petitions? it was frankly the most nicely worded 'please go fuck off and die" I've ever read!
Kinda sad they don't know the difference between Florian KAPS and florian MUELEER, I guess everyone that is named Steve better have an umbrella handy in case a FLOSSie troll start flinging poo at them because he shares the same first name as the head of "the company that shall not be named". I swear everytime I think/. has reached the absolute peak of batshit then someone shows up with a tanker full of crazy and blows my scale all to hell.
As for TFA, here is a crazy question.....why? Wouldn't it be smarter if you wanted to save all those Polaroid cameras to just develop a CMOS sensor that would fit in the old film slot and let you convert it to digital? I mean we have adapters to let you play MP3s through a cassette slot, so why not a CMOS that turns an analog into a digital?
it just seems to me to be a better long term solution than trying to keep a funky film format alive. Sure they were cool back in the day but IIRC their shelf life wasn't great, and I wouldn't be surprised if the process to make the film didn't leave you ended up with some seriously nasty toxic wate from the manufacturing process. After all when the film was designed we didn't really know how dangerous a lot of those chemicals were and were big on a "better living through chemistry" kick. So unless they are gonna charge $100 a pack or make it in a third world hellhole where they can just dump the waste in the local river i bet its gonna be a money bleeding operation. If it wasn't Polaroid would still be making it now wouldn't they?
Meh, wouldn't be that hard to take it back, just make the land beside it into a nice garbage dump, maybe even toxic waste. See how many of them want to trudge through shit and hold their meetings while the stench from rotting diapers fills the air, hell they'd give it back within a week!
Personally i think the UN should be HQed in the Hague, but lets face it, it was a cold war era idea and is pretty much worthless now., I mean have you seen some of the countries given spots on the human rights commission? Its like giving pimps spots on a committee for women's rights, talk about a joke.
Then by your argument loan sharking and preying on the elderly with scams should be 100% legal, after all they should know better, right? Ponzi schemes, pyramid scams, ALL of that should be legal, is that what you are advocating?
Because we have a long history in this country of protecting the most vulnerable from scams and this is EXACTLY what these are. These people are poor, probably can't pass a college entrance exam, and these groups prey on their misery and cause BOTH the student AND the US taxpayer misery, or do you think all those federal student loans that will NEVER be paid back just came from thin air?
I'm not allowed to say my snake oil will cure cancer, and we are starting to shut down the infomercial hucksters that likewise lied for a living, now it is time to shut down the paper mills. if they can't show at LEAST a 15% placement rate? Then they should be barred from ALL federal and state money PERIOD. If they can't even get 1 in 5 an entry level job in the field they have supposedly been trained in it would be better to use that money more wisely rather than pissing it down a rathole. These guys use every scam and high pressure tactic in the book to prey on the poor and those caught in dead end jobs with no way out, its high time we stop allowing federal and state tax dollars be given to scammers.
He does actually make a perfect example of the "I'm leet, go back to windblowz!" attitude I was talking about earlier. Notice how he equates something as simple and logical as making F/LOSS more useful for the masses as "rampant consumerism" and a betrayal of "the cause"?
The community has ended up trapped in this black is white world where ANYTHING that makes lives easier or F/LOSS more acceptable is "bad "and anything that makes it more difficult, fiddly, and obtuse is "good". It is like F/LOSS has become this "club" where only fat loser nerds are allowed and the goal is no longer empowering people to have choice but to run off as many as you can so the ones that are left can be "worthy" of being in the club.
Sadly this is why I think F/LOSS is doomed to relative failure along with your observation that ultimately i can just take anyone's code and profit from it in the app stores while they get nothing. We are seeing more and more of this BTW, especially in the games dept. But a wise man once said "if you aren't busy growing you're busy dying" and frankly the community has stagnated, with the "we're leet!" crazy wing taking over the platform and trying their damnedest to run as many folks off as they can. I mean where is a new user gonna turn if they need help? The forums, and what will they find? They'll be told to use esoteric workarounds that are frankly over their head and when they ask for something simpler they get "RTFM or go back to windblowz noob LOL!".
Meanwhile Apple and MSFT just keep on coming, they keep investing in R&D and advertising and focus groups and unlike the "We're leet!" trolls they are actively busting their asses to make things easier for the masses so as another poster here put it "They'll exercise their free choice alright, they'll choose to ignore the irritation and mess and just go back to Windows or Mac OSX" and no truer words have been spoken.
Kinda sad really, that such a great idea and all that work will in the end be ruined by poo flinging trolls and a license that thinks a communist utopia is still possible while ignoring that if someone can profit from someone's work without paying them often they WILL do just that. My next prediction is that Google will slowly lock up Android. With GPL V2 they can TiVo it easy with code signing and while there are many benefits to locking to down the downsides frankly don't exist. The "we're leet!" have made sure that too few use F/LOSS or give a damn and the masses simply won't care, and by locking it down they get more revenue by ensuring their search and apps are always included and they may even try to monetize the code, since their only competition will be MSFT in mobile OSes and the Nokia deal has the other OEMs scared.
If one needs further proof that "taxation without representation" is the law of the land you must be blind. We tell them to quit sending our kids to die in third world shitholes, they ignore us, tell them to stop throwing kids in jail for pot, they ignore us, tell them to do something about the border, to not give our money away to the top 1% with bailouts, to stop giving the 1% tax breaks, and bonuses for offshoring and H1-Bs...and they ignore us.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." Thomas Jefferson. What else can you call it when your vote no longer matters, the will of the people no longer matters, the corruption has become so bad they blatantly and without fear of repercussion ignore and disparage the will of the people for the TRUE government, by the corporate master and FOR the corporate masters? Tyranny, there is no other word for it.
OWS is only the beginning, as their insatiable greed destroys more and more of the country the people will get nastier and nastier and I doubt VERY seriously they'll quietly slink off to starve like they did during the great depression. When the other three bubbles they've blown, stocks, student loans, and retirement funds ALL blow, my guess is 2013 when that happens, its gonna get nasty folks. When even my late grandma who had voted every year since before WWII, refused to vote any longer because "The thing is so rigged its not like they are gonna listen to us anyway' then you know their little MSM bullshit and lies isn't working any more. Its gonna get nasty folks, maybe even our own Arab Spring.
And I know a guy that still runs WinME, so do we blame MSFT if he gets hacked? Unlike certain OSes I can name MSFT lets you choose to upgrade are not, but that don't mean running old shit is always the smartest idea. Show me any other OS with THAT long a support cycle though, we are talking a good decade an OS in most cases. Windows 7 gets patches until 2020, WinXP 2014, Win2K ended in 2010. Frankly if you can't get your shit together enough to migrate in 5 years it sounds like a personal problem to me, but at least MSFT IS patching and providing fixes, even if it ain't the smartest OS to be running anymore. what are the anti-MSFT crowd gonna do though when winXP ends?
MSFT has done some REALLY stupid things, kin, Zune, Vista...but I can't believe someone is here ragging them for actually providing support for older OSes. Would you prefer if they did it the Apple way and told you to piss off a year and a half after the new one comes out? That would have killed XP last year and Vista next, that wouldn't be very nice now would it?
As for TFA I still haven't had anyone explain to me EXACTLY what is wrong with paper ballots. Are we out of recycled paper or something? Frankly the machines my state used last election (sorry I didn't notice the brand) had it right. It had a nice big easy to read touchscreen with a nice "Is this your choice?" final chance to change your mind for the old folks and with every "yes I'm sure" it would print the ballot in a nice little glass window so you could see it. when the voting was over a volunteer came by, copied the electronic vote to this little device (which i was told the electronic vote was being used for the early results the networks love) and the paper ballot was handed to you, which after you looked it over to triple check it was right, was THEN and ONLY THEN put in the ballot box. Since it was printed electronically it was easy for the scanners to tabulate at the end of polling, and everything nice and neat and no hanging chad crap.
I really have to give them credit, they had the whole place running like a well oiled machine. Used to it was like a trip to the DMV, but now its fast and painless. the part that impressed me most was there were ZERO disenfranchised voters, none. if someone showed up and they didn't show up on the roll or went to the wrong place? They simply had them pull over for a minute while they called the place they had voted last and had it all straightened out and they were back in line. I saw two while I was there and they had less than 4 minutes added to a less than 10 minute wait, really top notch work. Hell they even had coffee and donuts.
Now if they could only give us someone worth actually voting for it'd be perfect. for the past 3 elections I just vote straight green party even though i know beyond the local level they have no chance, simply because I can't stomach actually voting for either of the corporate shills. 2012 looks to be even worse than 2008, with the reps basically handing it to Obama because they can't find a single candidate that isn't a complete sellout or a whackjob. Well it lets them see what the Dems must have felt like when they ended up with the ketchup guy I guess, but it sure don't help the country none.
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From Win2K Pro on up, that is 12 years, you can just right click on a folder, select properties and under advanced you will find "Compress contents to save disk space" as well as "Encrypt contents to secure data" but of course you can not encrypt and compress because the encryption makes the files look like a random scattering of 1s and 0s so naturally compression simply won't work.
You should try looking up sometime "77 things about windows 7" is I believe the name of the whitepaper or even some of the writings of the guy that writes the WinTechNet tools (Russinovich I believe) because frankly there is insane amounts of customization and advanced features of Windows NTFS that most users don't even know about, until they find a need for it of course. You have junction points, which was CLI until Vista but since has a GUI, you can encrypt files and folders, compression, alternative data streams, custom ACLs, there is frankly an insane number of features of the NTFS file system just sitting there. Hell the whole system has gotten insanely powerful, win 7 now has a built in tutorial tool where I can record a step by step tutorial to walk my customers through fixing a problem or I can just take control of their box in less than 5 minutes while they are on the phone and fix it by remote, so simple to use I walked a 73 year old grandmom through remote assistance over the phone.
But this gets to the heart of why I think Linux isn't gaining share, and it is thus: MSFT is busting their asses to make things EASIER for the user. Even the most advanced tasks can easily be found using WinSearch and has GUIs and helpful tutorials. Hell my 71 year old dad is learning voice command control for his PC all because he simply typed "mic" into control panel and found a tutorial on using his microphone for voice commands!
Sadly and I get infinite hate and venom for daring to say this but i truly believe it is this dark fact that the community doesn't want to admit which is Currently Linux IS Windows 98, no more and no less because while MSFT and Apple have seen that the key to users is making things easier for them, with Linux, just like Win98, the GUI is really nothing but a shell over a CLI underpinning, and instead of working to make the GUI a first class citizen the developers often just put the absolute most basic items in the GUI and instead of having an advanced GUI for advanced tasks expect the user to drop out of the GUI for CLI, just as we often had to do with Win98.
As a retailer and geek I want that to change. i remember the days of having shelves filled with choices, from Commodore to Atari, from Tandy to Compaq. I believe choice is healthier for the system as a whole and healthier for the user. Hell i even think having lots of choice is healthier for MSFT as it forces them to stay on their toes and listen even closer to the consumer. But we simply won't have that choice if the community doesn't stop acting like Linux is this little "club" where only CLI heads and nerd are allowed. I mean look at the post I was responding to, which i got labeled flamebait for daring to point out what was going on, where a user said he could really use a simple feature that has been in Windows for a decade. What happened? he was insulted repeatedly before someone came up with a truly Rube Goldbergesque workaround to create a compressed loopback mountpoint, a workaround i'm sure would involve a page and a half of CLI as well as writing and testing his own script.; That's just insane folks!
Oh don't worry friend I believe you. These others may doubt you had a 95% failure rate but I've personally seen bad batches come through the pipe. the last really nasty run i had was in 2005 with a load of Maxtors, sure they were consumer drives but these bitches would barely even start loading before taking a crap and failing. I'd say more than half didn't even get the OS loaded before they were throwing SMART errors, so yeah it happens.
But I found the key, at least for me, was to not lean too heavily on a single manufacturer and to load up when a really good batch came down the pipe. That is why i'm recommending the Samsung and Hitachi drives, as they are left with only what is still in the pipe (as they both sold out a few months ago, but luckily part of the agreement covers warranties on all drives currently in the pipe) and especially the Spinpoint and EcoGreen series these last couple of batches were really top notch. I can't even count how many of the Samsung drives i've sold in new builds and upgrades this year, some to truly hellish places like industrial sites and construction trailers where the dirt and grime getting in those machines is just unreal, and they just don't die.
But if I were you I'd avoid Seagate for awhile, probably the next 2 years. I don't know if you hang out at the parts sites or places where the system builder hang out but its pretty common knowledge in those circles than pretty much everything over 600Gb that Seagate has put out has been pretty much shite. Even their enterprise drives simply aren't holding up as well as the competition and the talk around the campfire has been that a combination of bad firmware and REALLY shitty ARM controller chips from the Maxtor division are the root of the cause. The skinny is it'll take probably a year (closer to two now that the factories have sunk) to get the bad chips out of the channel because in their greed Seagate would rather pass along the shite than have to take a loss on the substandard parts, and the talk is they were leaning on the cheap parts suppliers from the Maxtor purchase too much and there was a reason why Maxtors were cheap, they were crap.
so if it were me and I was taking care of a large farm I'd be buying up Samsung and Hitachi like there was no tomorrow, and when the channel went dry I'd use either Caviar Black or Green depending on the workload. But if you think ahead you can load up a RAID 5 with Samsung Spinpoints for less than 2 Seagate enterprise and frankly they'll last a hell of a lot longer than even the enterprise Seagates. Once those ran out I'd stick with WD until the channel is clear and then buying Seagate retail won't be a problem. Just check the comments at places like Newegg and Tigerdirect where the system builders hang out, we go through a LOT of drives and are quick to warn our fellow builders to steer clear of bad batches. If you see more than 20% negative rating? Its a bad batch and should be avoided. Follow this advice and I bet both your capacity as well as operating costs go down. It takes a little more work but in the end its well worth it IMHO.
Thanks but I knew I'd be modded down for daring not to follow the groupthink and hey...I was! surprise surprise. Doesn't make black into white nor will it change the facts and the facts are thus: Linux has been flatline for nearly 4 years now, that is 16 quarters of nearly ZERO growth. the last numbers I saw on servers had Linux losing share as well, even with the frankly crazy price of winServer, why?
Because as a Linux admin friend told me "If you give a Linux and Windows admin a task that the Linux admin has done repeatedly well then the Linux guy WILL win, but if you give them both a task that neither has done? before the Linux guy is done reading man pages and Googling the Windows guy will be at home making a sandwich" Its simple and the reason why CLI is dead everywhere else, GUIs reward exploration, CLIs reward repetition.
And nobody is saying you can't have CLI, hell with both OSX and Windows you can script all damned day long if that melts your butter, with Powershell on winServer you can automate the entire server farm, help yourself.
But the problem the Linux community has, and feel free to check ANY forum and see for yourself, is this: somewhere along the way the community was taken over by the "FLOSSie club" mentality, where those that use Linux are somehow "better" than everyone else and the goal is NOT to free people from not having control of their software as stated by RMS when he created the GPL, but instead to "keep out the noobs" and make sure the "unwashed masses go back to windblows" and like a cancer as this idea spreads it destroys all in its wake.
I've been called every filthy name in the book for daring to say things like "Users should be able to use CLI but it should NEVER be a HAVE TO". Now when did such an obvious statement become hearasay? I'm a retailer, I sell computers to normal folks, Suzy the checkout girl, Brian who runs a backhoe, the nice old guy in front of you in line at the bank, and right now Linux simply doesn't meet their needs. And the truly sad part is when retailers like myself say "This is what we need to help spread FLOSS" we get told "Fuck off and die parts monkey, go back to windblowz LOL!".
It is THIS attitude that is dooming FLOSS, not some conspiracy, not some secret bribery, just the simple fact that the community has become infested with groupthink and trolls and all that refuse to follow the party line are cast out and hatred spewed at them. In the end retailers like myself have practically begged for changes, only to be spit upon, so who is to blame for the lack of FLOSS adoption? The community who refuse to believe that the consumer market is worth having, not if it means things could be easy for the "noobs".
They can label it a rant, label me a shill, but it won't change reality nor will it get a single retailer to sell your product nor a single user to actively switch. In the end the community has no one but themselves to blame for the current lack of FLOSS adoption. And I think its just sad, as there are many that could be free from DRM and have choice but they simply aren't "leet" enough to be worthy of the FLOSSie club.
Sadly you speak the truth, just look at the history of aid to Africa and you see one failure after another. Hell does everyone know where we got the word "technical' to describe trucks turned into battlewagons? That was what the Red Cross would call the bribes paid out to warlords using improvised battle trucks, they would put down "technical expenses' which of course just gave the warlords more money to build more battlewagons.
While I'm all for helping out poor folks i'm reminded of the old "teach a man to fish" saying, as all we are doing now is simply pissing money down a rathole and i have no doubt hurting the poor more than we are helping by giving aid to the ones that are their oppressors!
As much as i think the man is batshit on...well just about everything I do have to agree with Glenn Beck on one thing, the idea that probably got him kicked off Fox News. Its time for us to "Be Switzerland" and stop trying to control the world and instead look to our own here at home. We have Americans living in tents, we have millions that are missing meals, no jobs, its time to take care of our own and let Africa take care of its own. I bet if we got the hell out and left people alone Africa would advance and join the rest of the world. it won't be pretty, and there will be probably several civil wars, but in the end the only TRUE change comes about from the people that live there wanting to change their conditions, not from somebody throwing food and money at them.
Thank you, and did you notice i got labeled flamebait for daring to point out such an obvious thing? I mean when did it become hearasay to say "Having a checkbox or button for the users is a good thing" in the community? Has it REALLY become so taken over by the "FLOSSie club" mentality that simply asking for a button is now evil? And what about the other two things I pointed out, having a "find drivers" and roll back drivers" button for when something goes wrong? That may not be something a regular user is gonna use every day but by George when something goes wrong they are gonna be damned glad its there!
I don't think its masochists though, I truly believe from my interactions in the forums that those that believe FLOSS is a "club" that its their job to actively deny members to has taken over too much of the Linux community. They actively fight making things easier or better for the users because that might let in "noobs" or "the unwashed masses" while ignoring the fact isn't that what FOSS and the whole movement was for? Wasn't it to free the world from software that was out of their control? According to the FLOSSie club that is only for those that believe, and whom don't think esoteric workarounds like loopbacks are difficult. Kinda sad really, that the trolls have taken over the movement, but there you go.
Paranoid much? Look folks, we all pretty much know WHY MSFT is pushing Secure Boot, its because their new OS has been cracked using the boot process and the hack works so well that it has been two years and it STILL passes WGA! Look up "Windows 7 all version pre activated" on any pirate site to see for yourself. So yes they probably won't want you fucking with the windows partition, well duh! If you can the pirates will just make a Linux based bootloader and they be back in the same spot they are with Windows 7!
But I have news for MSFT, this will work IF and ONLY IF they do the smart move and offer a version for the masses that makes Win 8 not worth pirating. they actually did that for awhile with windows 7, the $50 Win 7 HP upgrade turned more pirates legit than any stupid WGA crap ever has, yet Ballmer showed once again what a piss poor CEO is because instead of seeing the big picture he killed it to "maximize profit potential" and instead made the pirate version a better deal. At $50? Its not worth pirating and risking a possible bootloader bug that could pwn the whole machine and put the user at risk. At $100? the user WILL take the risk.
As for Linux? I'll get hate for saying it but its your own fault for ignoring the users and treating it as an exclusive club instead of an OS. never before have users been more online, the home users especially live in the clouds, yet your OS is flatline, why? Because you don't listen, not to the retailers nor the OEMs nor the users. Too many think anything that makes Linux more obtuse and fiddly is "smarter and more powerful" and anything that makes Linux easier and user friend;y is "dumbing down" or as I was told recently here was "rampant consumerism" of all things.
Make a better product than your competitors and your numbers WILL climb, its business 101. shout "free as in freedom man, fight teh powerz!"and expect the users to jump through flaming hoops to be "worthy" of this freedom? watch how quickly they run to the competition. Things the other guy has had for a decade, like "find drivers" and "roll back drivers" isn't even implemented, why? do you think "open up bash and type" a huge string of crap is EASIER than a button? The market is yours to take, the competition simply can't cut the price any lower (although the OEM HP is practically free or even less than free thanks to trialware) nor can they support the older hardware and still maintain a decent speed like your OS can. you just need to listen, learn, and implement. again business 101 folks.
So a user states a simple need, one filled by the competitor for a decade, and in less than five posts he gets insulted before getting the classic use esoteric workarounds followed by you giving him a snarky version of the also classic you don't need that, and you wonder why Linux is stuck at 1%?
Waste your mod points all you want but this is a truth that needs to be spoken, it is THIS, this right here, that keeps Linux in last place. Somewhere along the way making F/LOSS accessible to the masses was thrown to the wayside in favor of the "FLOSSie club" as I call it, where You must prove your "worthy" of using the gifts the great Torvalds and RMS have bestowed upon thee. In this club anything that makes F/LOSS more useful, easier, and friendlier? why that is bad, its "rampant consumerism" or "dumbing down" and anything that makes Linux more complex, obtuse, or fiddly is "smarter" and "more powerful". I have actually been told by a member of the FLOSSie club when i pointed out that Linux was too CLI heavy for my consumers "to make them embrace the power of CLI" like its the Goddamn force!
Never before in all of history has things been more favorable to your OS in the consumer market, you are being given multiple great gifts yet are just pissing them away. You have Windows 8, or "Ballmer's Folly" that is gonna make Vista look like XP, you have nearly 400 million laptops and netbooks and desktops that are gonna be EOLed that are frankly insanely overpowered for what the vast majority do with computers, and finally you have a populace that lives and breathes online. while the business market still has tons of proprietary apps if your OS can get to FaceBook, play Farmville and Angry Birds you have covered more than 80% of the home users right there!
But what do you do with these great gifts? do you ask the fundamental questions, which for an OS that has been around 20 years and is still lower than the margin for error shouldn't even have to be uttered? Do you ask "What am I doing wrong that my competitors are doing right?". Nope, because thanks to this new "club" mentality those users are "noobs" and not worthy of the usage of your "blessed" OS, they aren't worthy of joining the clic. Instead you expect the entire planet to do things YOUR way, arrogant much?
A wise person once said "You know what the definition of insanity is? Its doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result" and that is EXACTLY what the community has been doing. Insane release schedule, broken drivers, none of that matter because the users will embrace the power of CLI and learn "the Unix way" even though Unix was NEVER supposed to be a consumer OS and died out over a decade ago!
I wise man would look at those linux TMs and others on that site and learn from them. Every one of them is based on the constant stream of excuses and accusations thrown by those in the club. I'm sure if one were to look at it one would see the same ones being used here over and over AND OVER. But numbers don't lie folks, never before in history have things been more favorable to your OS but everyone from Walmart to the little shops like mine treat your OS like the plague, why? Do you honestly believe Steve Ballmer is giving us all Swiss Bank accounts?
No it is because you do NOT listen. you don't listen to the users, you don't listen to the OEMs, you don't listen to the little retailers like me, or even the giant OEMs like Dell who has to run their own repos at not inconsiderable expense and just for a teeny tiny subset of hardware, simply to have functional drivers. look, listen, learn from your competitors and offer a better product. Its business 101 folks but if you continue to treat Linux as an exclusive club instead? you have nobody to blame whe
Sorry friend but you missed it, as I'm sure he was talking about "pre-flood" pricing. About a month before the flood i bought up some Samsung EcoGreens (Really great drives BTW, the big cache makes up for the lower RPM and they run really cool) and I paid $60 each for the 2Tb and $35 each for the 1Tb and now good luck on even finding the 2Tb and the 1Tb is $95 for a refurb or $147 new which is frankly just nuts. I'm just glad i kept 6Tb for myself before selling the rest to my customers as I'd hate like hell to have to buy drives now. I got a few sub 400Gb SATA and IDE drives i'm saving for customers that have one die and I'm gonna try to ride it out as best I can.
That said if you HAVE to buy a drive right now I'd look into snatching an EcoGreen before they are all gone. in my own tests I've found nothing but the perpendicular drives with 32Mb of cache or better beats 'em and the temp difference is well worth it. I even changed out my OS drive for an EcoGreen and I went from 94 benchmark with a Seagate Barracuda 500Gb to 131 with a burst rate of 129ms and a temp drop of nearly 40 degrees F with the Samsung.
As for TFA? If you still work corp my heart goes out to you friends, personally I got tired of the ulcers and headaches. it always seemed like they would give you impossible problems and expect you to 'just fix it" given nothing but $3 and some duct tape. And if you did a REALLY good job they might even cut your funding! I swear the janitors are treated as more important in some places than the IT guys. The PHBs act like its all magic and the IT staff are just sitting around drinking coffee and playing an MMO. I saw too many of my friends bust their asses only to have their job cut out from under them or even worse be forced to train some H1-B hack to take their place, fuck that mess.
Maybe IT guys should have a union? Or maybe do like the cops and have a case of "blue flu" and let management see how important they really are by all calling in sick for a few days? I know that stupid shit like TFA is just a symptom of a bigger problem, and that's lack of respect for the role IT plays. And if that doesn't change frankly I'd be amazed if there is even any new IT guys in 10 years, as according to my oldest IT courses at the local college are a ghost town, nobody wants to be in IT anymore and frankly I can't blame 'em.
All that means is Seagate is pulling the better drives out of the bunch and leaving the absolute shite at the bottom of the barrel for consumers. Personally I'd buy up Samsung and Hitachi drives while you can if I was you, I've put those drives in some pretty hellish places and they take serious abuse.
But if you are serious about a 95% failure rate I'd say you were buying off the back of a truck or ur doin it wrong.Even with the cheap ass bottom of the barrel Maxtors I've never seen higher than 10% and even with those one good stress test when first unpacked (I keep an old box around loaded with Spinrite for just such a job, Spinrite level II will cause those drives that are shit from the factory to overheat and die hard) fixes that problem so a 95% failure rate tells me you had a shite controller, a failing part, possibly PSU, screwing the drives, or you got them from "Handy Bob's House O' Drives" where they were selling you cheap ass refurbs as new.
Dude I grew up in the 80s, remember the "bag" phones? it was like carrying a car battery. that doesn't change the fact it was the iPhone that mades phone a fashion item and brought about the whole "thin is in" bit. hell look at what laptops were like before the Air came along, they were like bricks!
It also doesn't change the fact that these bozos harping on about 'the death of X86" are still just wasting space. I mean what is the point? hell I get 6 hours of HD movie watching on my Brazos netbook thanks to it having a dual core PLUS a 40 stream processor GPU that all runs in a less than 9 watt envelope! And that isn't even as low as x86 can go, some of the high end Intel CULV can frankly just sip power and still give performance that is miles above anything ARM can provide.
The troll that got butthurt because i burst his little bubble about ARM coming along and killing X86 (and I'm sure in his mind taking "they who shall not be named" along with it) can waste his mod points but it don't change reality. NSTAAFL, if you get ARM up to X86-64 levels of performance all its battery saving will be gone right out the window. in fact i bet if one were to make an ARM CPU that kept up with the latest AMD and Intel chips it would probably suck MORE power than X86 simply because AMD and Intel have had a hell of a lot more experience in lowering power than they have had in cranking up that kind of performance.
I mean when you see the amount of data a new multicore X86 can crunch its truly amazing. If you'd have told me when i started out on the VIC or even when I got my first X86, which was a whole 60MHz, that we would have this much power on our desktops and even on the go I would have said you were insane. We have jumped to insane levels of performance in just this last decade, going from barely 1Ghz to 4Ghz multicores with GPU performance built in.
ARM is great for mobile where power is everything, although frankly after getting to play with an ARM based netbook I'll stick with my Brazos E-350 thanks, and its great for embedded and industrial where hardening and lack of fans is a boon, and for certain niches I'm sure it'll be great for some server jobs, but to act like ARM is suddenly gonna come along and cause folks to throw out decades worth of X86 code and fall to their knees weeping in wonder is just delusional.
Which is a shame that they didn't push Zune to Windows 7, because the new WMP12 interface is beyond easy to manage even large media libraries. I have mine set so on my tunes I transfer to my netbook the files are converted to 192k (to save space) and on my little 4gb flash PMP that i listen to while working its 64k (because frankly its just background music and I can't tell the difference on those earbuds) and on my USB drive its the full 320k. Its all easy, its all simple, hell my dad could use WMP12.
As for TFA it just goes to show what I've been saying for years is true, that Ballmer is a piss poor CEO and that it was him being gates little buddy that got him the job. But Gates has been out of the loop too long and hasn't been keeping on top of the market. frankly if they hadn't brought in the Office guys to help build Windows 7 they would have had double failures on their hands. Courier was a perfect design for a consumption device and if they wanted Office so bad they could have always ported it to the new interface.
I just hope when Ballmer screws the pooch with Windows 8, which everyone I've shown screencaps of it to have absolutely HATED the new UI, that he will be forced to 'pursue other interests" and they will bring someone in to right the company and bring some much needed vision. MSFT today reminds me of Apple back when the Pepsi guy was at the helm, a bunch of different groups going in different directions and no real overarching strategy at play. Just look at the moves under Ballmer, Zune, kin, rushing out the X360 despite a fatal flaw with the cooling system, killing playsforsure for the Zune market, its just been one stupid move after another. The man just has no vision and to steal a line from the late Jobs, no taste.
Oh don't bring up DOS, I've been thre and had to do that. I had a guy come into the shop I was working at in 2005 practically in tears and said "Can you PLEASE sell me a machine that will run this? I've been everywhere and I'll gladly pay" and the boss looks and says "Is that an ISA card? WTH? Man I could order you something that could be here in a week but NOBODY has those slots in PCs anymore, sorry" and I thought the guy was gonna faint when I popped my head over the wall and said "I think I got a couple of running PCs with ISA slots in my shed at home".
It turned out the kid had been put in charge of the lumber factory while dad took his first vacation in 20 years and the C&C for the lathe naturally took a big shit and he HAD to have these custom columns done by the end of the week! And of course we are talking about a machine that cost over $100K and whose manufacturer had been out of business since 1992. So I had to dig the HDD out of this dead machine that was practically buried in sawdust, clone the DOS 3 onto my old gamer rigs so he'd have a spare, seal up the boxes so the dust couldn't get in, and do ALL of that in a single day. I stayed up all night and was about to drop but the guy gave me a $300 bonus PLUS $150 each for boxes that weren't worth $40 by then PLUS ended up having us do the complete rollout for the lumber mill. All because that stupid thing wouldn't run on anything but DOS 3.
But as for why F/LOSS is failing to thrive I think my little story is a good example. When I set it up I ran it through its paces and frankly a 5 year old could have run that lathe. It was all GUI and pictures and with the basic shapes you could cut any kind of column you wanted and have it crank out 1 or 1000. in other words it was SIMPLE, it got out of your way, it was EASY, and it let you get your work done with a bare minimum of fuss.
But look at the poster I was originally responding to, who took ANY attempt to make things easier as some sort of an attack. it is THIS, this right here, that has infected F/LOSS like a cancer. they don't treat it as an OS, they treat it as a religion which you have to show your "devotion" to by learning esoteric workarounds to prove your "worthy" of being in the club. Like I said ask for a Non CLI solution to a problem, don't be ugly, just say you have poor eyesight (I was given an esoteric workaround for making the fonts huge in bash) or that you have trouble typing (I was told to use a pencil eraser side down) and if you are lucky after the insults you'll get one guy who will come on and say "uhhhh...you can't really fix that without CLI, sorry".
The sad and terrible truth, the truth that nobody will admit, much less fix, is that it isn't marketing, it isn't some new bling that is keeping F/LOSS so low in the polls, it is this simple fact: In its current form Linux IS Windows 98 no more, no less. Like Win98 you have a GUI on top of a CLI OS and like early Win98 most of what your GUI actually does (if it works) is send commands to the CLI underneath. If you remove CLI from 2K/XP/Vista/7, or from any variant of OSX it WILL continue to function just fine. but if you remove the shell from Linux, just like trying to remove DOS from win98 it WILL fail.
Ultimately I think the community is gonna have to sit down and decide "Do we want to win, or do we want to be a club?" because as you've pointed out if you want to win there has to be SOME way for those doing the work to profit from their labor. as you pointed out who is gonna write a 100 million dollar GPL program? right now, whether by services or selling CDs, it ALL comes down to charity. The developers are holding out a tin cup and hoping they get enough nickels to pay their bills. that just won't do, you can't plan long term if you don't even know if the bills are gonna be paid.
So that has to be dealt with an the "We're leet!" brigade has to be dealt with, because the world isn't gonna sit around learning esoteric workarounds or memorizing bash commands. There is a reason why
Well I can understand wanting to keep the camera if for nothing else the nostalgia factor, after all there are fan clubs for Brownies too, but film died FOR A REASON, its frankly a really shitty format until you get into high end. I grew up with the Polaroid, hell i probably got one or two of the old "zebra case" instamatics, but I'm also smart enough to know the pictures? Frankly weren't great. they were a little fuzzy, resolution wasn't hot, and the colors were always a little...off.
In the end there isn't anything they can do about the resolution, the short shelf life of the film (less than 2 years IIRC and on some brands less than 9 months before the color started getting wonky) and of course the toxic byproducts from the manufacturing process.
But what they CAN do is what I saw done to the old high end Hassalbad 35mm, which is create a CMOS pack that fits into the former film slot. this would let them get EVERY picture at max resolution (which for an instamatic? probably 3Mp MAX, more likely 1Mp) and with a decent NAND cache they could probably take 300 pictures with it before needing to offload, hell they could even put a little screen in the bottom of the "film pack" if they wanted to see the results instantly or even have a little thermal printer that would plug into the edge of the film slot and print what you took instantly.
So while I agree you can get an insanely overpowered camera cheap now, such as the 7MP I got my mom for less than $40 on sale, if they want to keep the bulky old camera trying to replicate the film is NOT the correct way to go. It would be like an 8 track fan club trying to buy the old production lines and get 8 tracks cranked out again, they are ignoring there were reasons why they died out and trying to make this stuff in small batches will just make the prices worse and leave them with more unsold stock.
Because nostalgia factor or no I doubt very seriously they are gonna find too many folks willing to shell out $60 for a 30 pack of instamatic film. Digital is higher quality, easier to use, less wasteful, can be trivially copied and exchanged, its just a better medium. The only ones that really have an excuse to even use film anymore are filmmakers and other high end professionals and even with them once the RED cameras go down in price film will be useless for them as well. They were great fun in the age of bell bottoms and the Chevy Vega but those days are long past.
And this is why I truly believe that we are gonna live to see another revolution in this country, whether peaceful or bloody I don't know. But the whole reason why the Arab springs are spreading is because those at the top could make their feelings about those below them more clear if they sent everyone in the country a Goatse full color poster with "this is our response to your pleas" written in gold leaf at the bottom.
Everything that caused our forefathers to rise up against tyranny we now have again in this country, taxation without representation, oppression of the masses by the few at the top, ignoring of grievances, its all there. Only now thanks to the rise of the multinational we have this situation being played out worldwide with the money men screwing everyone and thinking they can continue to put poor against poor while they continue to loot. But it won't work this time as they became SO greedy and SO destructive in their pursuit of ever richer gains they have fucked the planet and frankly there will be no place for them to hide.
"Merchants have no country. The mere spot they stand on does not constitute so strong an attachment as that from which they draw their gains." Thomas Jefferson. In the end it is the wise words of our forefathers that should guide our way in the coming struggle, for even back then he and many others saw the threats and tried to do all they could to stop it.
Well I don't know about after, because usually i'm more sleepy and happy than cranky, but I know if some green eater tried to grab my BBQ sammich there ass will be drawing back a stump! They got one of them little family owned BBQ stands down the street, where they slow cook that meat until it melts in your mouth, just a hint of sauce too, they don't drown it like those places that use cheap meat....mmmmm... dammit now I'm gonna have to go get me a sammich!
As for TFA frankly I figured most of the vegans were batshit after PETA tried to have fish labeled "sea kittens' to make people not eat them. you think I'm bullshitting? look it up, I swear to God, they want to relabel Tuna and trout and all other fish as "sea kittens" because they think folks won't eat a sea kitten sandwich!
Personally I say if you don't want to eat me for personal reasons that's your business, I don't dig swine myself but that's just cause i was raised on a farm and I know what filthy little scavengers they are, but don't be trying to make us switch to your beliefs, okay? I would never tell someone they couldn't have that pork chop, I just don't like it for myself.
I miss the days when we actually had personal responsibility and people left each other the fuck alone. If I wanna smoke, or have a beer, or eat some tasty BBQ, what business is it of yours? Oh and before someone chimes in with "medical costs" let me say this: I'll be MORE than happy to sign an ironclad waiver that says if I get cancer the ONLY thing I'll be given if morphine which is dirt cheap, and in return you quit taxing the fuck out of me, do we have a deal? I've actually put that offer to politicians and they hem and haw but it comes down to THEY want the money for THEIR pet projects and what THEY think is best for YOU.
Can we PLEASE stop with the frankly batshit "Hey lets kill X86 herp derp" bullshit please? AMD is cranking out sub 9w dual cores WITH GPUs built in, Intel is cranking out CULV that get similar numbers so power draw on X86? Ain't shit folks unless you are talking about cell phones which thanks to Apple and the iSliver batteries means you have to run INSANELY low power to get any battery life.
Each chip has its place, ARM for mobile and a few specialized niches (like in TFA where I'm sure it'll be for webservers that aren't getting many hits and thus the lower load makes it more advantageous to worry about power) and X86 for the big loads and and number crunching. Because like it or not cycle for cycle ARM gets royally stomped by even the lowest AMD and Intel X86 chips, go for the higher end chips and it isn't even funny.
NSTAAFL folks and ARM is for power sipping and power sipping ALONE. Ramp it up so it can even crunch the kind of numbers a Core2Duo could from 2 generations ago? watch those power savings dry up and blow away like a fart in the breeze. saying ARM can replace X86-64 is like saying "Now that we have these mopeds we don't need trucks anymore!" Different tools for different jobs and I'd love to see you move a couch on that moped. The ONLY way ARM competes is by having tons of specialized chips like for decoding using DSPs which again raises the power usage and bye bye savings.
Well if it needs root that pretty much leaves out Vista and 7, unless you have a user that is dumb enough to click yes on "Hey you didn't try to install anything but this (insert huge random number) wants to have admin rights, yes or no" which if they click yes you have worse problems. I'm also gonna assume that Office 2K10 does like 2K7 and by default disables scripting and running code unless you specifically enable it (since TFA is seriously light on any details more than "ZOMG weesa gonna die!") so that removes Office 2K7 and 2K10.
So you are looking at XP users, running as root, accepting Word docs and having Word 2k or 2K3. Not a small number but most businesses shouldn't be letting users run as root and should have all incoming docs scanned for malware so that should seriously cut down the numbers. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of their infections can't be traced down to luring the suckers, using age old tricks like "Free porn passwords.doc" or "Free WoW keys.doc" or some other classic social engineering trick. Most of the infection I see nowadays can be traced straight to PEBKAC, either wanting something for nothing, ala "New_Hit_Pop_Song.mp3.exe" or trying to see teh boobies ala "Free porn passwords.doc". In the end there is only so much you can do about stupid and still let them have control over their machines.
If I was trying to protect money? Metals and weapon stocks. Take a look at what always continues, even in times of world war, you need all major metals to forge new weapons and weapon merchants tend to make out like bandits.
I predict the Arab springs will continue to spread until they are no longer contained in the middle east. EU will be next, the USA by 2013 or 2014. You can't go around gorging at the trough while ignoring the suffering of the people because before long they turn on you, just ask the French what happens when you tell them to eat cake. Gold, Silver, Copper, Aluminum, and gun stocks, that is where I'd put my money if the inflation wasn't quickly taking it all that is.
Riiiight, because if given the choice of the big fat checks and the cushy job as a lobbyist for the industry they sucked off, or listening to the people, they are gonna choose listening to the people? What are you smoking and can I have some?
Why do you think there is OWS and Arab Springs all over the planet? the incredible consolidation of power has made the entire electoral process corrupted beyond repair. they don't give a fuck what you think, you can write petitions, protest, vote until your little fingers bleed, they don't give a fuck. Its a revolving door between the corridors of power and the big multinationals and once you make it to the big leagues you are set for life.
Why the hell would they care what a peasant like you thinks? The ONLY "people" they care about are corporations and guys with names like Gates and Dell that can write them big fat checks. He who has the gold makes the rules and the top 1%, who are the same ones locking all the IP into "forever minus a single day" copyrights, are making damned sure that ain't YOU! Hell didn't you read Obama's responses to the petitions? it was frankly the most nicely worded 'please go fuck off and die" I've ever read!
Kinda sad they don't know the difference between Florian KAPS and florian MUELEER, I guess everyone that is named Steve better have an umbrella handy in case a FLOSSie troll start flinging poo at them because he shares the same first name as the head of "the company that shall not be named". I swear everytime I think /. has reached the absolute peak of batshit then someone shows up with a tanker full of crazy and blows my scale all to hell.
As for TFA, here is a crazy question.....why? Wouldn't it be smarter if you wanted to save all those Polaroid cameras to just develop a CMOS sensor that would fit in the old film slot and let you convert it to digital? I mean we have adapters to let you play MP3s through a cassette slot, so why not a CMOS that turns an analog into a digital?
it just seems to me to be a better long term solution than trying to keep a funky film format alive. Sure they were cool back in the day but IIRC their shelf life wasn't great, and I wouldn't be surprised if the process to make the film didn't leave you ended up with some seriously nasty toxic wate from the manufacturing process. After all when the film was designed we didn't really know how dangerous a lot of those chemicals were and were big on a "better living through chemistry" kick. So unless they are gonna charge $100 a pack or make it in a third world hellhole where they can just dump the waste in the local river i bet its gonna be a money bleeding operation. If it wasn't Polaroid would still be making it now wouldn't they?
Meh, wouldn't be that hard to take it back, just make the land beside it into a nice garbage dump, maybe even toxic waste. See how many of them want to trudge through shit and hold their meetings while the stench from rotting diapers fills the air, hell they'd give it back within a week!
Personally i think the UN should be HQed in the Hague, but lets face it, it was a cold war era idea and is pretty much worthless now., I mean have you seen some of the countries given spots on the human rights commission? Its like giving pimps spots on a committee for women's rights, talk about a joke.
Then by your argument loan sharking and preying on the elderly with scams should be 100% legal, after all they should know better, right? Ponzi schemes, pyramid scams, ALL of that should be legal, is that what you are advocating?
Because we have a long history in this country of protecting the most vulnerable from scams and this is EXACTLY what these are. These people are poor, probably can't pass a college entrance exam, and these groups prey on their misery and cause BOTH the student AND the US taxpayer misery, or do you think all those federal student loans that will NEVER be paid back just came from thin air?
I'm not allowed to say my snake oil will cure cancer, and we are starting to shut down the infomercial hucksters that likewise lied for a living, now it is time to shut down the paper mills. if they can't show at LEAST a 15% placement rate? Then they should be barred from ALL federal and state money PERIOD. If they can't even get 1 in 5 an entry level job in the field they have supposedly been trained in it would be better to use that money more wisely rather than pissing it down a rathole. These guys use every scam and high pressure tactic in the book to prey on the poor and those caught in dead end jobs with no way out, its high time we stop allowing federal and state tax dollars be given to scammers.
He does actually make a perfect example of the "I'm leet, go back to windblowz!" attitude I was talking about earlier. Notice how he equates something as simple and logical as making F/LOSS more useful for the masses as "rampant consumerism" and a betrayal of "the cause"?
The community has ended up trapped in this black is white world where ANYTHING that makes lives easier or F/LOSS more acceptable is "bad "and anything that makes it more difficult, fiddly, and obtuse is "good". It is like F/LOSS has become this "club" where only fat loser nerds are allowed and the goal is no longer empowering people to have choice but to run off as many as you can so the ones that are left can be "worthy" of being in the club.
Sadly this is why I think F/LOSS is doomed to relative failure along with your observation that ultimately i can just take anyone's code and profit from it in the app stores while they get nothing. We are seeing more and more of this BTW, especially in the games dept. But a wise man once said "if you aren't busy growing you're busy dying" and frankly the community has stagnated, with the "we're leet!" crazy wing taking over the platform and trying their damnedest to run as many folks off as they can. I mean where is a new user gonna turn if they need help? The forums, and what will they find? They'll be told to use esoteric workarounds that are frankly over their head and when they ask for something simpler they get "RTFM or go back to windblowz noob LOL!".
Meanwhile Apple and MSFT just keep on coming, they keep investing in R&D and advertising and focus groups and unlike the "We're leet!" trolls they are actively busting their asses to make things easier for the masses so as another poster here put it "They'll exercise their free choice alright, they'll choose to ignore the irritation and mess and just go back to Windows or Mac OSX" and no truer words have been spoken.
Kinda sad really, that such a great idea and all that work will in the end be ruined by poo flinging trolls and a license that thinks a communist utopia is still possible while ignoring that if someone can profit from someone's work without paying them often they WILL do just that. My next prediction is that Google will slowly lock up Android. With GPL V2 they can TiVo it easy with code signing and while there are many benefits to locking to down the downsides frankly don't exist. The "we're leet!" have made sure that too few use F/LOSS or give a damn and the masses simply won't care, and by locking it down they get more revenue by ensuring their search and apps are always included and they may even try to monetize the code, since their only competition will be MSFT in mobile OSes and the Nokia deal has the other OEMs scared.
If one needs further proof that "taxation without representation" is the law of the land you must be blind. We tell them to quit sending our kids to die in third world shitholes, they ignore us, tell them to stop throwing kids in jail for pot, they ignore us, tell them to do something about the border, to not give our money away to the top 1% with bailouts, to stop giving the 1% tax breaks, and bonuses for offshoring and H1-Bs...and they ignore us.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." Thomas Jefferson. What else can you call it when your vote no longer matters, the will of the people no longer matters, the corruption has become so bad they blatantly and without fear of repercussion ignore and disparage the will of the people for the TRUE government, by the corporate master and FOR the corporate masters? Tyranny, there is no other word for it.
OWS is only the beginning, as their insatiable greed destroys more and more of the country the people will get nastier and nastier and I doubt VERY seriously they'll quietly slink off to starve like they did during the great depression. When the other three bubbles they've blown, stocks, student loans, and retirement funds ALL blow, my guess is 2013 when that happens, its gonna get nasty folks. When even my late grandma who had voted every year since before WWII, refused to vote any longer because "The thing is so rigged its not like they are gonna listen to us anyway' then you know their little MSM bullshit and lies isn't working any more. Its gonna get nasty folks, maybe even our own Arab Spring.
And I know a guy that still runs WinME, so do we blame MSFT if he gets hacked? Unlike certain OSes I can name MSFT lets you choose to upgrade are not, but that don't mean running old shit is always the smartest idea. Show me any other OS with THAT long a support cycle though, we are talking a good decade an OS in most cases. Windows 7 gets patches until 2020, WinXP 2014, Win2K ended in 2010. Frankly if you can't get your shit together enough to migrate in 5 years it sounds like a personal problem to me, but at least MSFT IS patching and providing fixes, even if it ain't the smartest OS to be running anymore. what are the anti-MSFT crowd gonna do though when winXP ends?
MSFT has done some REALLY stupid things, kin, Zune, Vista...but I can't believe someone is here ragging them for actually providing support for older OSes. Would you prefer if they did it the Apple way and told you to piss off a year and a half after the new one comes out? That would have killed XP last year and Vista next, that wouldn't be very nice now would it?
As for TFA I still haven't had anyone explain to me EXACTLY what is wrong with paper ballots. Are we out of recycled paper or something? Frankly the machines my state used last election (sorry I didn't notice the brand) had it right. It had a nice big easy to read touchscreen with a nice "Is this your choice?" final chance to change your mind for the old folks and with every "yes I'm sure" it would print the ballot in a nice little glass window so you could see it. when the voting was over a volunteer came by, copied the electronic vote to this little device (which i was told the electronic vote was being used for the early results the networks love) and the paper ballot was handed to you, which after you looked it over to triple check it was right, was THEN and ONLY THEN put in the ballot box. Since it was printed electronically it was easy for the scanners to tabulate at the end of polling, and everything nice and neat and no hanging chad crap.
I really have to give them credit, they had the whole place running like a well oiled machine. Used to it was like a trip to the DMV, but now its fast and painless. the part that impressed me most was there were ZERO disenfranchised voters, none. if someone showed up and they didn't show up on the roll or went to the wrong place? They simply had them pull over for a minute while they called the place they had voted last and had it all straightened out and they were back in line. I saw two while I was there and they had less than 4 minutes added to a less than 10 minute wait, really top notch work. Hell they even had coffee and donuts.
Now if they could only give us someone worth actually voting for it'd be perfect. for the past 3 elections I just vote straight green party even though i know beyond the local level they have no chance, simply because I can't stomach actually voting for either of the corporate shills. 2012 looks to be even worse than 2008, with the reps basically handing it to Obama because they can't find a single candidate that isn't a complete sellout or a whackjob. Well it lets them see what the Dems must have felt like when they ended up with the ketchup guy I guess, but it sure don't help the country none.