Exactly! Mistakes get made folks, nobody is perfect, but the way to tell a good company from a bad company is how they react when the poo hits the fan which is why I still use Comodo products even though they did have a breach last year. Once they found out they had a compromise they were updating Comodo Dragon browser to revoke those keys as well as sending updates to the other browser teams, they even got MSFT to release an out of cycle patch for windows that revoked those keys.
So it all comes down to how they react when a breach has been found, do they do everything they can to fix the problem ASAP, or do they try to cover it up and bury it? If they do everything they can to fix the problem and repair the weakness that caused the breach I'd say they are still a trustworthy company, if they try to hide their mistakes then some sort of punishment should be looked into. But until we can find some sort of replacement system (which I haven't seen any proposed yet that would be completely workable or not put the net at risk of greater government control) all we can do is see how companies react to breaches and decide whether or not to trust them based on those reactions.
But the flip side of that friend is that PDFs have traditionally also been one of the biggest sources of exploits on the net and now the bad guys will know that if the browser is FF they can simply target the PDF interpreter.
Personally I'd rather have Firefox do something like "You need a PDF reader to read this document, might we suggest" followed by a link to several PDF readers, especially FOSS readers like Sumatra since Firefox is a FOSS browser. But I would have links to Adobe, Foxit, Sumatra, and let the user choose, this not only puts choice in the hands of the user but makes it much harder for a bad guy to guess which PDF reader a FF users would have.
Besides adding non browser features leads to bloat and FF hasn't been very skinny of late to start with. There are a lot of Word docs on the net too, should they build in LO Writer? hell why not just build in eMacs, since the meme is eMacs does everything already?
While part of me hopes the guy's design works, as it could herald a new chapter in our energy usage and frankly we seem to have just scratched the surface of our knowledge of how things work, especially with regards to quantum theory that it wouldn't surprise me if someone tripped over cold fusion, what worries me every time someone talks about cold fusion is this episode of The Outer Limits from 98.
The thing about today's tech is generating massive amounts of power is insanely difficult, but what if it becomes insanely easy? How might this power be misused? Frankly with all the crazies and religious nutballs screaming "My skybully is better than yours Aiee ie yee!" I honestly don't know if we are ready for Star Trek levels of power just yet, we may need to grow for a few more centuries to weed out the crazy and the stupid.
I've been thinking about this and I think the solution to the future lies in the past. Anybody remember the old trolley cars and how they would get power from an overhead line, why can't we do something similar with electric cars? Maybe a line overhead or embedded in the freeway to run the unit on the highway and then you'd only need to use the batteries for in town which typically is less than 50 miles in a day last study I saw, why not that instead of trying to get insane times on the batteries?
Sure it won't be cheap but neither was building a national highway system and with so many out of work this along with nationwide broadband sounds like good ways to put those out of a job back to work helping us all get off foreign oil. Maybe I'm missing something but considering how long we've been trying to make better batteries and how long it has taken just to get the gains we have it sounds to me like a better way to go than trying to come up with a battery that will charge as fast as you can fill a tank, or the whole "chraging stations" thing where you'd have to switch batteries instead of fill up.
BWA HA HA HA HA AH HA HA HA....damn, that is funny! That is why my 70 year old dad, faced with NOTHING but a Windows 7 disc and a blank computer had no sound and everything broke....oh wait a tick, it ALL "just worked" and took less than 15 minutes. The worst question it asked him? "Are you at home or at work?" so it could set up the firewall rules. hell it even popped up a little message on first boot that said "You don't have an antivirus, would you like me to show you a page with several different antivirus programs to choose from?" and gave him a choice of free and pay AV.
I'm sorry but until you can hand someone a blank machine and a Linux CD and with NO googling or forum dances or anything else have them able to install AND update it without broken hardware? that would be a fail.Go to ANY forum, your choice, and look at the pages and pages of hardware fails. the sad part? Most of it is what I call the 80% hardware, that's the hardware that is on 80%+ of machines and should NEVER break on initial install, the Realtek, SiS, broadcom, aetheros, and the big three GPUs.
But now instead of facing the fact your driver model be busted you'll just insult me, or make excuses. Its the OEMs fault, its the hardware manufacturers fault, its everyone else's fault. you know what they say about excuses and assholes right? A final little fact you can't excuse, the fact that Dell has to run their own repos even though they only offer Linux on a TEENY TINY SUBSET of their hardware. you know why they have to run their own repos friend? because one of the top four OEMs on the planet can't even run the default repos on a tiny subset because the drivers in linux shit themselves and die hard if they do. explain THAT away friend. Linux has better hardware support....BWA HA HA HA HA!
It wasn't just the non profit part though, it was also that it was considered a public service. As I said in the former case it was advocating a change in the laws and therefor was a grass roots advocacy group, and in this case it is a former prosecutor gathering data on a very rare form of murder case to help prosecutors deal with such a rare occurrence.
in BOTH cases you are using the data to serve the greater public good and IIRC according to the judge in the Oregon case fair use is MUCH more lenient when it is being used as a public service.
Except there isn't anything to learn by doing a "what if here because it wasn't MSFT that killed Netscape it was their own incompetence, just as it wasn't Mozilla that caused the surge of free browsers it was the fact MSFT screwed the pooch by saying "We won!" and then promptly firing all the IE team and letting IE 6 rot.
And lets not forget that BOTH browsers were proprietary as hell back in the day, or has everyone forgotten the innovation that was the blink tag? But then NS blew it with NS 4, that was such a buggy POS that you were lucky to get it to run at all so IE won. Then IE rotted and became a virus laden whore so Mozilla came along.
If Moz wouldn't have come along because MSFT had bought them it would have just been someone else, Opera or Safari or something based on webkit. In both cases while the press like to make it some big "battle' it was simply a case of a better product taking out a shittier one. NS4 was shitty and back in the day IE 5 wasn't bad, then IE6 became shitty and moldy so another browser came along and took some serious share. Now we are seeing this again as Mozilla becomes shitty with stupid number changing and crazy release schedules so chrome is taking share.
So I'd say the only real lesson to learn here is history repeats and companies become too insulated to learn from the mistakes of their competitors.
I'm sorry Gameboy but that would be FUD from RMS and friends. Do you know how MANY ways there are to buy older versions from MSFT? I saw the list one time, it was something like half a dozen. the two I've dealt with are MSDNs and software assurance. With BOTH of those I have the legal right to go as far back as i want, in fact the last time I had an MSDN I could go alllll the way back to Windows 3.1 if I so chose all with MSFT's blessing.
So I'm sorry but they would be slitting their own throats, throwing all those millions in MSDNs and software assurance contracts right down the shitter (because its kinda pointless to have the right and the ISOs to go back if I can't actually use them) and on top of that if nothing else the EU would probably throw a banhammer until they changed it like they did with the ballot screen.
So i'm sorry but its FUD. Most likely it will be as simple to change as downloading the free WinPE that MSFT currently offers which will have a special switch in it that allows you to flip the bit from safe to unsafe and still allow booting. They will do this so as to CYA that way they can say "I'm sorry, you flipped the switch therefor you voided your support" and I'm sure the OEMs will say the same thing, they'll use it as a CYA so they can say "Sorry you flipped the bit, your warranty is void" but geeks that actually change their OSes? Don't give a crap about tier 1 support.
Shit they'd be the easiest to buy off as well. Big blue LIKES teh monies. I can imagine how that conversation would go: "Hey IBM? Yeah its MSFT, have you SEEN the sales figures for the X360? Sweet huh? And you remember how some corps used PS3s as HPCs? yeah we're planning on slaughtering that segment too...picture this, an X720 that can be BOTH a game machine and rack mountable blade! Cool huh? Now imagine it saying in giant letters "The MSFT X720...powered by IBM" doesn't that sound nice? You could have the big blue logo in front of every kid in America! And of course your Lenovo division would have special code provided by us so YOU WOULD BE THE ONLY ONE that could provide dual boot workstations. Oh and we'd need you guys to be the official workstation for the X720, I'm sure you can make an awesome developer box right? Of course you'd have to have a price floor, don't want big blue associated with cheap crap ya know. Sounds good, lets do lunch"
and THAT would be the end of that friend. If it comes down to making big monies or being a friend of FOSS they'll happily throw RMS under a bus while wearing "FOSS is socialist!" t-shirts...provided by MSFT of course. I hear they're nice, 100% cotton.
Oh what I wouldn't give for mod points right now, your idea sounds like heaven and would actually be affordable IF the courts didn't let the monopolies sue every time they have competition or use their position to fuck the other guy. as it is I ended up having to put mom on a WISP that is more off than it is on and costs nearly $100 a month for lousy service. Frankly I doubt they'll be here more than another year as the backbone provider (which also sells local service and should be illegal for conflict of interest) will just keep jacking the prices until they go under. true story:
I had a friend that worked at a business maybe a mile out of town. in that area they could ONLY get sub 33k dialup and they were frankly getting assraped on the price and had to deal with lots of bullshit like the ISP forcing you to run mouse scripts just to keep them from kicking you off while you read a page. so he talks his boss into running a T-1 out there to the tune of nearly $25k. he then sets up a server to offer tons of freeware as well as WSUS and begins to sell connections to all those getting stuck on dialup who of course are overjoyed to hand them their money. The American way right? Find a market and serve it?
Well the local ISP didn't like losing $100 a month dialup screwjobs so they jacked their price by 400% and then added a bunch of "per connection" fees that ended up jacking their total cost over 1000%. They then found out the ISP had made a few calls and the only other sources of backbone connection wouldn't sell to them either, orders from the ISP. They were told "Just try and sue us" and were told by their lawyer "Oh no doubt you'll win but it'll take 10 years and cost a million and a half because they'll just keeping piling the bullshit motions".
so they ended up closing down their business and moving away, costing the area another dozen good paying jobs. Those people TO THIS VERY DAY can only get dialup at an average cost of nearly $90 when the phone service they don't use and other bullshit is figurd in, and the ISP hasn't moved an inch in 20 years, just like the cableco. Honestly if we don't nationalize I don't see things getting any better, if anything they'll label more and more users as "chronic downloaders" or some such bullshit and further degrade their services while raking in the cash. I know in my area the poor can't even afford Internet and have to use the library because its $125 a month for Cablenet and nearly $100 a month for DSL that caps at 2Mbit. Dialup in the cheapest cases is still over $60 a month. Needless to say the ISPs are happy, everyone else is just fucked.
Uhhh you DO realize your commands won't work in Windows either so saying "its inter-operable" while ignoring it won't work with the most popular OS in the world is SERIOUS logic hoop jumping, yes?
I DO think you accidently hit upon the problem though without realizing it, and its the way the Linux community hangs onto that "Unix/Posix" horseshit. Unix has been dead damned near 20 years, okay? When Unix was popular and all these "Unix" standards were written computer memory was more precious than gold and CPU resources practically didn't exist. It didn't matter how much of a hoop jumping verbose clusterfuck something was as long as it saved precious memory and cycles, that in the end was all that matter when the average home computer had less power than a $1 watch today and big iron ruled.
But it ain't 1978 anymore yet the community clings to "The Unix way" like its their own blue blankie or something! Ultimately the community would be better off to throw out that old Unix/Posix bullshit and start over with modern machinery in mind. I bet my last dollar if the Unix/Posix crap was banhammered the community could come up with something easy to read and use, elegant, fast, and which worked wonderfully.
Do THAT and MSFT would have no choice but to support it as every admin would want to use it. but as that other guy pointed out MSFT is sinking serious money behind powershell and giving away GUI IDEs and adding to its power and as he pointed out ATM it is simply a better product. Its easier, its commands are consistent, it doesn't take 50 commands just to do the most common tasks, in short its just better. but instead of doing the smart thing and learning from your competition I have no doubt you'll just insult me and mod me down and THAT is why linux isn't gaining ANY real traction. The other guys learn and modernize while the community hangs onto the old ways like a hippie hanging onto bell bottoms and 8-tracks. The 70s is over, let it go okay?
Exactly, what happened to free will and the right of the consumer to choose? I run a little mom and pop PC shop so naturally I sell and service MSFT products. I knew that going in and have had to deal with more than one headache thanks to MSFT dumbshit, like having to wipe Vista and install XP for a year and a half because nobody at MSFT had enough sense to listen to the beta testers which included me. But you know what? That is MY choice. I've tried Apple, Linux (several flavors) BSD, and back when it existed Opensolaris (yes I know there is an offshoot but it is no longer supported by the parent corp) and for me and the needs of my customers the MSFT products were the best fit.
Do I wish they did some things differently? Oh Lord Yes, fire the damned monkey and put the Office team in charge of OSes for one thing, or actually listen to the beta testers! But quit whining like a bunch of little girls and if you don't like a product be man enough to NOT BUY IT instead of coming up with this lame "tax" bullshit. News Flash: OEMs GET PAID FOR TRIALWARE so Windows will ALWAYS be cheaper than Linux, okay? Not a conspiracy, its that nobody will pay to install 30 day trials onto Ubuntu and most of the time those trials when added up are worth MORE than the OEM cost of Windows, which last I heard was something like $15 for Windows HP, $30 for Pro, and $60 for Ultimate.
But I wanted to point out the connector "tax" just to illustrate the hypocritical bullshit. you have company A (MSFT) that unless you are buying a product that has Pro or better COSTS YOU NOTHING and actually in many cases SAVES YOU MONEY because of the nature of the cutthroat pricing in OEM PC sales they often apply the money they make on trialware to further lower the cost per unit, and on the other hand you have company B (apple) that due to its popularity is costing you money on every single item with a dock connector which of course is in all likelihood NOT absorbed by the company but passed straight to the consumer, yet one is called a tax and one is not.
Bullshit, you can't just change the definition because you think the products made by company B are nice and shiny, either they BOTH are a tax, and it should again be noted that in the first case it is a "tax" that can actually end up be rebating below its cost, or neither are. Or even better why not just fricking exercise free choice and buy what you like? i'm sure System76 and ZaReason would be happy for that business if you don't like MSFT. They even have some machines more powerful than the Apple offering. but you'll note the machines often cost more than a Windows machine with the same specs, again the crap everyone complains about on a new PC lowers the price. Personally I say just use PC Decrapifier or wipe and put on any OS you like and STFU with the whining. We're supposed to be geeks not not one of these bitchy politically correct groups. And as far as Apple goes while I think they make some great products I don't care for their policies so I DON'T BUY THEM, is that really so hard?
Sorry but even if he copypasta'd the whole thing it would have still be covered under fair use since it was a non profit public service. Sorry i can't remember the case ATM but I believe it was in Oregon that the precedent was set that even copying a whole article was considered fair use if it was for a non commercial public service. In that case IIRC the article was over an issue that they were organizing against and the judge ruled they were simply gathering data to a single point so they could better advocate their position, and in this case it is a prosecutor that is gathering as much as he can about 'no body' murder cases into a single area to help other prosecutors know how to deal with such a rare type of case.
So I'm with the other poster that it would have been nice if there had been more precedent added in this case but at least there IS precedent for doing a large copypasta of even whole articles if the purpose is to inform and not for profit. funnily enough if my memory serves it was the Righthaven trolls that caused the precedent to be set in Oregon in the first place. Maybe we should have a "Righthaven Effect" for those that end up being better advocates for the other side than they are their own?
Question: Is the fast boot Linux Expressgate? Because if it is you really ought to spend some time playing with it, its pretty fun and nice. I don't know if it is the same on the HP but my Asus Expressgate has a really nice appstore, it has around 100 free and pay radio stations (easy to sort by free or pay), a nice bookstore for eBooks, games, and a pretty zippy Chrome browser. It will also play any of the media off the HDD but of course that uses more battery than just using the web.
As for TFA I think its gonna take a hell of a lot more than not selling the PC business to right that ship. HP hasn't really been innovative in awhile and even when they have a killer product they have NO clue on how to capitalize on it! I mean have you seen their Brazos based all in one, its brilliant! Just about the perfect housewife or small office PC, its thin, light, doesn't use hardly any power, nice bright 20 inch screen, dual core with a Radeon chip, and all for around $300. They should crank these babies out in a few different screen sizes and advertise the hell out of them! Hell they even have built in WiFi and are brain dead simple to set up!
No just keeping the PC division isn't gonna help, what they are gonna need is someone to actually RUN that PC division with some vision and a brain!
So let me see if I understand correctly...so many here scream bloody murder about a "Microsoft tax" on PCs, but the fact that everything and its dog now has an Apple doc which they must pay a royalty to use is just....what? a gift of appreciation to the memory of the great one?
Lock in is lock in is lock in friend, and just because your garden has flowers and pretty paintings on the wall doesn't make those walls any shorter. Oh and some forms of iPods use encryption on the playlists IIRC so good luck using anything but iTunes. That was cooked up to get rid of Real giving you choice BTW.
Hey don't pick on Norton! Do you have ANY idea how much work we repairshops get from that flaming POS? Hell its nearly as good as being located next to a Best Buy!
As for TFA I've never cared for Avira much myself, having always preferred either Comodo (for those that like to tweak) and Avast (for those that don't) although more and more I'm sticking with avast since it has been included in the PC builder's best friend Ninite.
If you have to support any friends or family as an admin, even if they live far away, or if you build boxes? Ninite should be your best bud and "go to" first response. they get told some site "needs to install flash" so they can watch the content? tell 'em to go to Ninte and check the flash box and if the site still asks to install flash its a Trojan. you need to get them off IE? Install codecs because a file won't play? Need a new media player? Libre Office?.NET or Java? Ninite has you covered.
I'm glad TFA worked out alright, unlike the AVG bug that boned the boot, but if Avira keeps making bonehead moves I'd have them uninstall it and get Avast or MSE from ninite. It is simple enough you can walk your grandma through it, no "clicky clicky next next next" oh and NO TOOLBARS ALLOWED even on the apps that try to give you Chrome or Bing bar now like CCleaner or Java. So if anybody has to deal with users I'd say bookmark this site, its really top drawer..
Thank you AdamJS that is EXACTLY what I mean, although I was downmodded (and if like the last time will be on unrelated subjects for a day or two) for saying it. I deal with users 6 days a week, not programmers, not compSci majors, users. people like Sherry who is the checkout girl at the local grocery, or Brian who runs a backhoe or terry the truck driver. if I sell a PC to these people I need the GUI to work and not be an afterthought which sadly ATM in Linux it pretty much is. I need to be able to easily and simply walk them through basic tasks using ONLY the mouse and preferably with as few clicks as possible, because one mistyped word in bash can equal disaster and I can't afford to give away free lifetime support.
With Windows if a customer has a problem a good 85%+ of the time I can straighten them out in less than 4 minutes in control panel, if that. hell with windows 7 HP I can even take remote control of their PC in under 3 minutes with Remote assistance, all GUI and so trivial and simple I walked a 73 year old woman through initiating a remote request when she messed up her sound and was afraid to go into control panel. again it was trivial, easy, and because I was willing to take a few minutes out of my day to help that woman at no charge I ended up with 3 repairs and a new build, as she ended up insisting her entire family use me as their shop.
But Linux simply isn't close to that level, or as you said "make the GUI a first class citizen' and in fact there is a large vocal minority that actively fights to NOT make things easier for the user, which they look down upon as "noobs". If this attitude doesn't change, if distros don't insist that the programs they carry have a first class GUI and that ALL major and minor non edge case tasks have a functional GUI then it really is never gonna gain any share.
What is driving me up the wall about it is the clock is ticking. already I'm seeing late model P4s and early dual cores being traded in by the crate because XP is getting close to EOL. These machines could EASILY run the apps people use now like Farmville and Facebook, Hell I'm seeing Athlon X2s and Pentium Ds with a Gb of RAM, that is MORE than plenty. And Windows 8 looks to be another Vista turkey, and when you throw in the facts that the economy is down (so folks will happily buy refurbs to save money) and more and more of my customers do NOTHING with their PC that isn't net related? you have the "perfect storm" for FOSS adoption. and I think the idea of FOSS, of ending planned obsolescence and putting the user as the ultimate master of the machine, are good and just ideas.
But sadly I get the sinking feeling that this golden opportunity will be thrown away, like all these trade ins i'm getting that frankly the cost of new Windows licenses will make not worth the effort. and in the end it is NOT because FOSS is a bad idea, or that there simply isn't the skills to get it done, but the simple fact that like we have seen in politics the hardcore fanatics have hijacked the platform and are pushing FOSS not as a way to help people, but as an agenda. Its all about making those "noobs" do things THEIR way and if they won't? well they can just go back to windBlowz. and that is EXACTLY what is gonna happen. the shop owners like mine will shake their heads at the insanity, strip as much parts as they can, and throw billions of dollars worth of gear in the trash while lining our shelves with Windows machines.
Not because we are "shills" or astroturfers or M$ Ninjas, not because we are unwilling to learn new ideas, but just because nobody will listen to us. Just like they haven't listened to us for over 20 years, just like they ignored us when Vista came out and we begged for an alternative, nope we'll get told "Make 'em learn bash and RTFM windblowz luzer LOL!" and we'll leave the Linux Bash trolls to their CLI circlejerks and go on about our days.
Notice I got modded down and will CONTINUE to get modded down for at least two days in unrelated subjects? This is what I find funny about the teabagger wing of the FOSSies, they think by burying anything that isn't "Gee isn't Linux perfect for the world? Why it sure is Skip, and RMS's farts smells like roses and cure AGW!" they can magically "make it not true! make it all go away, I can't hear you la la la!".
But the funny thing about the truth, one can always produce facts to back it up. Like how Dell have to run their own repos because the current driver model is so fucked up that if they dare to run the default repos the machines will shit all over themselves. not opinion, cold hard fact. How about how a decade old Windows beat the shit out of Linux on netbooks which should tell you something, when people would rather have a decade old fisher price GUI than the latest and greatest because its too fiddly and a PITA, or how about how the ones that invented the netbook ASUS has given up on the bullshit? I would bet my last dollar their support costs were THROUGH THE ROOF because of "update foo broke my stuff!" along with having to try to walk someone through a three page CLI "fix" over the phone. I bet the metrics on the calls were just nuts, or how about the kings of "low price at all costs" Walmart running away from Linux as fast as it can which again I bet my last dollar the support costs killed it. don't see that with the iShiny, even though that is about as unfamiliar a UI as you could get for a lifelong Windows user you do you? Maybe because they make it intuitive and easy instead of flipping the user the bird and typing "RTFM Windblowz Luserz LOL!"? How about how the community has the nerve to actually CELEBRATE 1% market share like that is something to be proud of when IRL after TWENTY YEARS of work Linux is actually lower than JavaME and the craziness and logic hoop jumping by the lunatic fringe has gotten so bad there is actually a website that turns the bullshit and excuses into memes which you then see once you know what to look for over and over AND OVER again.
You see, that is the thing about the truth, they can call me "nigger cocksucker faggot" all day long, aka shill troll astroturfer but you know what? It doesn't make black into white, up into down, nor can it change a single number or add a single user to the crazy parade. We retailers have been fucking BEGGING you to straighten your shit and give us some real choice, we have practically DRAWN YOU A MAP and handed you a GPS to keep you from getting off track, and now the competition is gonna give you a fricking 60 yard head start in the hundred meters by shooting itself in the foot TWICE with the fucked Windows 8 GUI and all those late model P4s and early dual cores being EOLed that could play farmville and run FB just fine.
NEVER BEFORE IN HISTORY has so much been in your favor, your competition is run by an idiot, now more than ever before the world is doing more and more of their work and play exclusively online, and the visionary behind the second front has died and left a vacuum that they may not be able to fill. Oh and the economy sucks so folks want to save money and are willing to try things that will help them do so. You have the market wide open, the field is yours, so what do you do? say "Don't look at me!" and promptly start waving a gun around the track while masturbating to a Bash script.
I don't know about his sitch but I actually tried that with my mom. She is exactly TWO BLOCKS from the end of their connections on both DSL and cable and NEITHER would run it. So I contacted a friend that was a lineman at the time, had him come out and figure up the cost of the line (about $2300 including the time for him and the bucket truck) and ran the line in my mom's place to the road and contacted the cableco. I was told they would need $35,000 PLUS at least a dozen homes PLUS a guarantee that each home would take the max package PLUS another 35% surcharge on TOP of all that!
Finally in a level of sheer POed I cornered the PHB at the cableco and said WTF did he think he was doing and was told it is SOP to not run a single inch where they can't guarantee at LEAST 100% profit above the cost of the run IMMEDIATELY along with a similar profit for at least two years, but that was only for large jobs with big payoffs, for small jobs try ten times or more for their "effort". This is why they haven't run a single inch except to some condos that signed a crazy exclusive agreement in damned near 20 years, nobody will do shit in this country anymore unless insane profits are handed to them the instant they do it.
Frankly is it any wonder why we get the short bus to the info superhighway folks? Frankly we ought to nationalize the lines since they have ALREADY stolen $200 billion from We, The PEOPLE for nationwide broadband and all we got was the finger and an autographed pic of the CxOs snorting coke off their $1000 hookers with the "free' bonuses we gave them. Well after dealing with them for over 20 damned years trying to get them to run a lousy two fucking blocks I say, to quote Mr garrison "You go to hell! You go to hell and you die!" We need to nationalize and FORCE competition if we are ever to get anywhere. If they want a monopoly? That's fiber to door in return for 15 years. If its a place that currently isn't being served (REALLY served, not the horseshit like that.gov self reporting site which says my mom has 6 choices not counting sat when even in the middle of town i only have two and she has none) we'll give them 25. if they fall down on the job and stop hooking people in the neighborhood up, or trying claiming a single house on the edge of the area means the whole area is served? then bye bye monopoly, the lines are opened and its a free for all.
Just look at how opening up the POTS gave us all this new tech and new devices. If we could take the lines away from the cartels (who should be banned from having both lines and media as a conflict of interest) we could see a similar explosion of new ideas in broadband. but as it is its just the 1%ers at the top bleeding the country dry and giving back ever shittier service in return.
Actually you can't really judge by how they look. I use those spots all the time when I drive my mom and at first glance it would look like she is just fine, but if anyone followed her they would notice she goes straight to the carts which she then uses almost like a walker. she had a bad flu two years ago that ended up causing blood clots that killed portions of her lung so she needs the extra assistance of the cart and if she had to walk any real distance to get TO the cart she'd probably face plant. also long walks put too much strain on her and she'll be so winded you'd think she had been running a race, not walking through a parking lot. Now if there isn't a handicapped spot I'll let her out right in front of the door and then go find a parking spot and meet her inside, large lots are just too much for her.
So don't judge a book by its cover friend, there are plenty of diseases like heart and lung that don't make you look crippled on the outside but can cause serious enough problems that those parking spots are required for safety reasons.
Well I'm always getting accused of being an "M$ Ninja!" and you know what? I fricking HATE Bing but LOVE Yahoo Search. Now that is gonna seem more than a little nutty because yahoo uses Bing's data, but in the end it isn't the data, its the UI.
With Google it seems the SEOs have taken a big shit all over it as ALL I ever seem to get are ads. Try looking up a "review" for any piece of tech lately? you'll get a couple of MILLION hits and out of that maybe THREE actual honest to goodness reviews of the product. it is like trying to pick a single pearl out of an arena full of dog shit. After the third of fourth "non review review site" I want to punch the damned screen, i know am I'm not alone.
With bing while I get actual reviews it just "feels' like i'm fighting the damned thing. I don't know why, i can't put my finger on it, and it isn't just not knowing the layout as I gave it a good solid month to just be fair. it just "feels" lousy and I feel like I'm getting what i want in SPITE of and not BECAUSE of bing.
But with yahoo I don't seem to have that problem, i don't feel like its working against me. i get the good results like bing but it just seems easier to "jump off" of searches and go to relational items and work my way deeper. when i was researching my netbook for example (The EEE 1215B, great fucking netbook if anyone is in the market, i really love it) with google I got ads, with bing i got reviews but never really was able to go any farther, with yahoo i got reviews and ended up checking out everything from different batteries that were compatible with the unit to videos on youtube of people comparing it to both atom as well as the AMD C-Series APU and playing different games like L4D on the unit.
In the end the yahoo search gave me MUCH more data that helped me come to my decision than either google OR bing alone. With google I got nothing, with bing I got info that frankly had me a little confused as one of the reviewers was saying ultimately the C- Series APUs were the better buy, but with the combo of reviews plus seeing both chips side by side I was able to determine that the E-350 was a better fit and that the 1215B would take 8gb of RAM (which it even gave me a nice link where I got the RAM upgrade for cheap) so of the three yahoo really helped.
And at the end of the day frankly doesn't that matter more than which company is behind the product? Which one helps us get to the data we need the quickest and with the most meaningful results for our needs? as for TFA I thought switching from Google to bing in FF was as simple as pulling a drop down? sorry if i'm incorrect as I switched my customers and myself to Dragon after FF 4 came out and took a big dump on performance. I frankly don't care what some benchmarks say, i know what I hear from my customers and see with my peepers and for the sites they and I use FF seems to get slower each turn while Dragon gets faster.
Thank you Mr AC but you want to know what the REALLY sad part is? A good 90% of it is geeker dick waving, that's all. you gvo to ANY forum and simply ask for a non CLI way to do a simple task and you'll get called everything filthy name in the book and get told go back to Windblowz LOL! because these fudnuckers think being a PITA makes them cool and CLI givez gonad powerz which if one thinks about that logically even for a second can see they are so full of shit the net ought to be choked on their stench!
After all do they code in ASM? do they load their kernel on punchcards? All tech since then has been created to make things easier going all the way to visicalc. For the love of God THAT IS WHAT COMPUTERS ARE FOR PEOPLE, to make things EASIER FOR THE USER so they don't have to sit there with a fucking pencil and paper! why the fuck is these people even using PCs when there is a perfectly good Abacus that could give them supergonad powerz!
In the end most of the block are there. you have click N Run that is a hell of a lot like an app store, you have some nice DEs and even some cool new ideas like Expressgate instant on OS, but in the end the geeker dick waving dooms the whole community because anyone that even tries to make things better gets howls of geeker rage! Its like politics where the lunatics have taken over, something as common fucking sense as "hey shouldn't we make things easier for the user, you know, so they can actually use the OS to do their work?" gets treated like fucking blasphemy and simple obvious things like "Shouldn't they be able to accomplish this in the GUI?" gets treated like you just said Elvis lives on the moon.
I think its sad, I really truly do. You have this frankly revolutionary idea, to open computers up for the masses, to get rid of planned obsolescence and make computers even cheaper and more inter-operable for everyone, but then when it comes to the execution you let basement trolls and anti-social developers just piss it all away so they can feel superior to the masses, and that is just sad. Not only sad but pointless, like copypasta into a term makes you some leet hacker, its fucking stupid! If you WANT TO use CLI there should always be the option but you should never HAVE TO, yet you let basement trolls and developers that if they had their way all you'd get on first boot would be a term with "RTFM Noob LOL!" written across the screen actually dictate policy!
I repeat you are about to get not ONE but TWO incredible opportunities just dumped in your lap like its Xmas morning and the only question is are you gonna unwrap them and claim your prize, or are you gonna take a big shit on the table and set the tree on fire? The ball is about to be in your court, probably for the last time. The competition has a CEO that is totally batshit and about to fuck his company hard, the world is more net centric than EVER before, and there is literally gonna be a couple of billion dollars in hardware that the other guy is gonna say "LOL we won't support it" and ALL OF THAT can be the biggest boon in the history of OSS. If you refuse YET AGAIN to capitalize on the gifts given you? Frankly you deserve to lose and have nobody to blame but yourself.
Riiiight, because the average users writes scripts and uses ssh clients oh and by the way giant bat wings pop out of my ass and I fly south for the winter, did you know that?
It is THIS, this kind of delusional dumbshit right here, that has kept Linux in last place, even when the sweaty monkey was practically committing corporate suicide with dead ducks like Vista.
Why is it soooo damned hard to accept that NORMAL USERS ARE NOT LIKE YOU, they will NOT use CLI, they will NOT script their fucking programs, they will NOT read man pages, do the 'find the fix" forum dances, write code or give a wet fart about what kind of programming languages your OS uses, alright?
It is so simple folks, the key word is CONSUMERS in giant flaming 50 foot neon, but do you listen? Nope, you pretend that inside every grandma there is a C coder just dying to get out and little Suzy the checkout girl goes home to read programming books in the bathtub.
You are about to be given not one but TWO frankly once in a lifetime gifts on a silver platter and you watch, you'll just piss them both away and stay dead fricking last and you know what? if they hand you a 20 yard head start and instead of sprinting for the finish you promptly shoot yourself in the foot and start masturbating in the middle of the course YOU DESERVE TO LOSE just for throwing the fucking race!
You have gift #1, Windows 8 which I'm betting will make Vista look like a gold plated OS brought to you by $1000 hookers by the amount of sheer HATE I've gotten from the public after showing them the UI, and gift #2 you have at last count something like 200 MILLION PLUS late model P4s and early dual cores that are gonna go EOL and will be just begging for an easy to use free OS, because lets face it Farmville and Facebook? NOT that resource intensive folks.
But you have to do things THEIR way, give them a product that will do what THEY want, and none of this fiddly CLI heavy geeker bullshit or YOU WILL LOSE period. I mean an OS with a fricking $1000 barrier to entry gained share during Vista while Linux stayed flatline, and despite all the hype even with the most wildly pulled out of your ass numbers the much vaunted Ubuntu is at the MAX maybe 3/4ths of a percent, even after all the press!
But you know what the definition of insanity is? It is doing the same thing over and over AND over and expecting a different result. Me and the other retailers have practically drawn you a map on how to gain serious share, there has NEVER been a better time in history, with so many hooked on web based games and sites, and you have TWO gifts thanks to the sweaty monkey having no brain about to be dropped in your lap, what fucking more do you need? An engraved invitation?
Just give the consumer what they want, that's all. Either do that or just give up, quit all these "Next year will be the year of Linux on the desktop!" total horseshit, and accept that you only want to be a hobbyist OS for geekers. Because as it is hell you ain't even growing in servers any longer, in fact last numbers I saw had you losing share. you DON'T listen to the consumer, you DON'T listen to the retailers, you DON'T listen to the OEMs, instead you expect the entire planet to bend over backwards and learn to do things YOUR way. Arrogant much?
Actually the scary part? The pirate version RUNS BETTER and is MORE stable on old hardware than the full version! honestly the guys at MSFT really ought to hire the guy that makes "Tiny Windows (insert version)" because he makes a better light OS than even embedded and winFLP. we are talking about an XP that uses 56Mb of RAM on the desktop, 63Mb for Win2k3, 386Mb for Vista (even he can't work miracles) and 248Mb for Windows 7. I of course don't sell units with it and have only played with it for my own amusement but the speed this guy gets is just nuts. you can tell it isn't some Vlite job, he really tore into the guts and rebuilt like like a hot rod. Here is the only changes I would make if I was using the Tiny version. One it doesn't have UAC by default on, you have to make a second account to enable it. Two it doesn't have WMC which I like, but in both cases I can understand why, as its mainly built for gamers that want to squeeze that last drop of performance and not for HTPCs.
But I have to disagree on netbooks unless you are talking about atom which frankly is shite on a crusty roll no matter WHAT OS you are using. I have one of the new AMD Brazos netbooks and honestly even the default non tweaked Windows 7 X64 HP runs like a dream on it. Its snappy, apps loaded quick even before i stuck 8Gb of RAM in it (which yeah i know its overkill, but hell with the gift card I got 8Gb for $31. How could I turn THAT down friend?) and both HD video and games play with nary a stutter. While I'm not the type to game while i'm mobile there are even videos of guys playing L4D and other shooters on it and getting decent framerates. Just because its a netbook doesn't mean it has to suck the big wet titty. Oh and I get a full 6 hours under Windows 7 and if all I want is the web it also comes with ExpressGate which gives me 6 seconds from cold start and an extra 2 hours on the battery. Its the EEE 1215B and they have it with 2Gb for $299 at Tigerdirect if you know somebody that wants a good Windows 7 netbook. With the RAM and a carrying case i got out at less than $350 for the whole smash, you just can't beat that for a dual core with Radeon graphics.
Finally if you want to know how to get Windows 7 running decently on even a shite Atom may I suggest you check this out friend? Its a central repo of links to how tos for squeezing every last bit of performance out of Windows 7 . I've found that if one wants a that runs fast this site really gives some good performance tips and have used a few on customers whose hardware was borderline Windows 7 capable and by the time i was done they were actually enjoying 7 more than XP. It won't crank out the speed like tiny 7 does but it will make windows 7 faster, especially if you are talking about running it on shit like the Atom. although to be honest my advice to customers on Atom since the beginning has been a giant NO WAY. You can get an AMD based unit for just a tiny bit more money and the performance just stomps a mudhole in Atom's skinny ass. I've sold plenty of both the MSI Wind and the Asus EEE AMD netbooks and they are worlds better than Atom when it comes to actual feel and user experience, its like night and day. if you haven't tried one you really should, they are sweeeeet!
What you need to do to "fix" search and indexing is simply to go in and be VERY SPECIFIC about where its allowed to index. you have pretty fine grained control over indexing in win 7 so you can be pretty precise and still have search. I allowed mine to have the Windows folders, the program files, my music, my docs, and my videos and THAT IS IT. nothing else. that still leave 3 drives and two partitions completely unindexed on my machine. What this will do is allow full search of programs and features of Windows 7 (which is actually quite handy) along with music and docs. I keep about a Tb and a half of music and video on my HDDs and it only took a couple of hours on low priority to index them initially and after that it will only add new items.
So basically what you've done is fix a hanging branch by nuking it from orbit. sure that is one way to get rid of that limb buts its frankly insanely overkill. to find the tool its under control panel/indexing options. if you want to get REALLY precise you can even click on advanced and tell it to only index certain file types and ignore others. so it is beyond simply to set up a set of really useful search and indexing options with only a couple of click. as for your other annoyances look up "Ultimate Windows Tweaker" for a nice freeware tool that will let you fully customize the hell out of Windows 7. Its all easily undoable if you change your mind, all simple checkboxes, so no worries and it'll let you mold windows 7 into your own personal preferences.
But that freeware i linked to is totally self contained so frankly it doesn't matter what features you turn on or off you can still have custom folders and workspaces. The thing you have to remember with windows is if it doesn't do what you want OOTB there is usually a freeware tool that will give you that function. there are tons of VS programmers and anything that has ever bugged you about windows I assure you has bugged one of them first and since they know the Win APIs it isn't anything for one of them to whip off a tool that fixes the problem. Enjoy your folder views!
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Exactly! Mistakes get made folks, nobody is perfect, but the way to tell a good company from a bad company is how they react when the poo hits the fan which is why I still use Comodo products even though they did have a breach last year. Once they found out they had a compromise they were updating Comodo Dragon browser to revoke those keys as well as sending updates to the other browser teams, they even got MSFT to release an out of cycle patch for windows that revoked those keys.
So it all comes down to how they react when a breach has been found, do they do everything they can to fix the problem ASAP, or do they try to cover it up and bury it? If they do everything they can to fix the problem and repair the weakness that caused the breach I'd say they are still a trustworthy company, if they try to hide their mistakes then some sort of punishment should be looked into. But until we can find some sort of replacement system (which I haven't seen any proposed yet that would be completely workable or not put the net at risk of greater government control) all we can do is see how companies react to breaches and decide whether or not to trust them based on those reactions.
But the flip side of that friend is that PDFs have traditionally also been one of the biggest sources of exploits on the net and now the bad guys will know that if the browser is FF they can simply target the PDF interpreter.
Personally I'd rather have Firefox do something like "You need a PDF reader to read this document, might we suggest" followed by a link to several PDF readers, especially FOSS readers like Sumatra since Firefox is a FOSS browser. But I would have links to Adobe, Foxit, Sumatra, and let the user choose, this not only puts choice in the hands of the user but makes it much harder for a bad guy to guess which PDF reader a FF users would have.
Besides adding non browser features leads to bloat and FF hasn't been very skinny of late to start with. There are a lot of Word docs on the net too, should they build in LO Writer? hell why not just build in eMacs, since the meme is eMacs does everything already?
While part of me hopes the guy's design works, as it could herald a new chapter in our energy usage and frankly we seem to have just scratched the surface of our knowledge of how things work, especially with regards to quantum theory that it wouldn't surprise me if someone tripped over cold fusion, what worries me every time someone talks about cold fusion is this episode of The Outer Limits from 98.
The thing about today's tech is generating massive amounts of power is insanely difficult, but what if it becomes insanely easy? How might this power be misused? Frankly with all the crazies and religious nutballs screaming "My skybully is better than yours Aiee ie yee!" I honestly don't know if we are ready for Star Trek levels of power just yet, we may need to grow for a few more centuries to weed out the crazy and the stupid.
I've been thinking about this and I think the solution to the future lies in the past. Anybody remember the old trolley cars and how they would get power from an overhead line, why can't we do something similar with electric cars? Maybe a line overhead or embedded in the freeway to run the unit on the highway and then you'd only need to use the batteries for in town which typically is less than 50 miles in a day last study I saw, why not that instead of trying to get insane times on the batteries?
Sure it won't be cheap but neither was building a national highway system and with so many out of work this along with nationwide broadband sounds like good ways to put those out of a job back to work helping us all get off foreign oil. Maybe I'm missing something but considering how long we've been trying to make better batteries and how long it has taken just to get the gains we have it sounds to me like a better way to go than trying to come up with a battery that will charge as fast as you can fill a tank, or the whole "chraging stations" thing where you'd have to switch batteries instead of fill up.
BWA HA HA HA HA AH HA HA HA....damn, that is funny! That is why my 70 year old dad, faced with NOTHING but a Windows 7 disc and a blank computer had no sound and everything broke....oh wait a tick, it ALL "just worked" and took less than 15 minutes. The worst question it asked him? "Are you at home or at work?" so it could set up the firewall rules. hell it even popped up a little message on first boot that said "You don't have an antivirus, would you like me to show you a page with several different antivirus programs to choose from?" and gave him a choice of free and pay AV.
I'm sorry but until you can hand someone a blank machine and a Linux CD and with NO googling or forum dances or anything else have them able to install AND update it without broken hardware? that would be a fail.Go to ANY forum, your choice, and look at the pages and pages of hardware fails. the sad part? Most of it is what I call the 80% hardware, that's the hardware that is on 80%+ of machines and should NEVER break on initial install, the Realtek, SiS, broadcom, aetheros, and the big three GPUs.
But now instead of facing the fact your driver model be busted you'll just insult me, or make excuses. Its the OEMs fault, its the hardware manufacturers fault, its everyone else's fault. you know what they say about excuses and assholes right? A final little fact you can't excuse, the fact that Dell has to run their own repos even though they only offer Linux on a TEENY TINY SUBSET of their hardware. you know why they have to run their own repos friend? because one of the top four OEMs on the planet can't even run the default repos on a tiny subset because the drivers in linux shit themselves and die hard if they do. explain THAT away friend. Linux has better hardware support....BWA HA HA HA HA!
It wasn't just the non profit part though, it was also that it was considered a public service. As I said in the former case it was advocating a change in the laws and therefor was a grass roots advocacy group, and in this case it is a former prosecutor gathering data on a very rare form of murder case to help prosecutors deal with such a rare occurrence.
in BOTH cases you are using the data to serve the greater public good and IIRC according to the judge in the Oregon case fair use is MUCH more lenient when it is being used as a public service.
Except there isn't anything to learn by doing a "what if here because it wasn't MSFT that killed Netscape it was their own incompetence, just as it wasn't Mozilla that caused the surge of free browsers it was the fact MSFT screwed the pooch by saying "We won!" and then promptly firing all the IE team and letting IE 6 rot.
And lets not forget that BOTH browsers were proprietary as hell back in the day, or has everyone forgotten the innovation that was the blink tag? But then NS blew it with NS 4, that was such a buggy POS that you were lucky to get it to run at all so IE won. Then IE rotted and became a virus laden whore so Mozilla came along.
If Moz wouldn't have come along because MSFT had bought them it would have just been someone else, Opera or Safari or something based on webkit. In both cases while the press like to make it some big "battle' it was simply a case of a better product taking out a shittier one. NS4 was shitty and back in the day IE 5 wasn't bad, then IE6 became shitty and moldy so another browser came along and took some serious share. Now we are seeing this again as Mozilla becomes shitty with stupid number changing and crazy release schedules so chrome is taking share.
So I'd say the only real lesson to learn here is history repeats and companies become too insulated to learn from the mistakes of their competitors.
I'm sorry Gameboy but that would be FUD from RMS and friends. Do you know how MANY ways there are to buy older versions from MSFT? I saw the list one time, it was something like half a dozen. the two I've dealt with are MSDNs and software assurance. With BOTH of those I have the legal right to go as far back as i want, in fact the last time I had an MSDN I could go alllll the way back to Windows 3.1 if I so chose all with MSFT's blessing.
So I'm sorry but they would be slitting their own throats, throwing all those millions in MSDNs and software assurance contracts right down the shitter (because its kinda pointless to have the right and the ISOs to go back if I can't actually use them) and on top of that if nothing else the EU would probably throw a banhammer until they changed it like they did with the ballot screen.
So i'm sorry but its FUD. Most likely it will be as simple to change as downloading the free WinPE that MSFT currently offers which will have a special switch in it that allows you to flip the bit from safe to unsafe and still allow booting. They will do this so as to CYA that way they can say "I'm sorry, you flipped the switch therefor you voided your support" and I'm sure the OEMs will say the same thing, they'll use it as a CYA so they can say "Sorry you flipped the bit, your warranty is void" but geeks that actually change their OSes? Don't give a crap about tier 1 support.
Shit they'd be the easiest to buy off as well. Big blue LIKES teh monies. I can imagine how that conversation would go: "Hey IBM? Yeah its MSFT, have you SEEN the sales figures for the X360? Sweet huh? And you remember how some corps used PS3s as HPCs? yeah we're planning on slaughtering that segment too...picture this, an X720 that can be BOTH a game machine and rack mountable blade! Cool huh? Now imagine it saying in giant letters "The MSFT X720...powered by IBM" doesn't that sound nice? You could have the big blue logo in front of every kid in America! And of course your Lenovo division would have special code provided by us so YOU WOULD BE THE ONLY ONE that could provide dual boot workstations. Oh and we'd need you guys to be the official workstation for the X720, I'm sure you can make an awesome developer box right? Of course you'd have to have a price floor, don't want big blue associated with cheap crap ya know. Sounds good, lets do lunch"
and THAT would be the end of that friend. If it comes down to making big monies or being a friend of FOSS they'll happily throw RMS under a bus while wearing "FOSS is socialist!" t-shirts...provided by MSFT of course. I hear they're nice, 100% cotton.
Oh what I wouldn't give for mod points right now, your idea sounds like heaven and would actually be affordable IF the courts didn't let the monopolies sue every time they have competition or use their position to fuck the other guy. as it is I ended up having to put mom on a WISP that is more off than it is on and costs nearly $100 a month for lousy service. Frankly I doubt they'll be here more than another year as the backbone provider (which also sells local service and should be illegal for conflict of interest) will just keep jacking the prices until they go under. true story:
I had a friend that worked at a business maybe a mile out of town. in that area they could ONLY get sub 33k dialup and they were frankly getting assraped on the price and had to deal with lots of bullshit like the ISP forcing you to run mouse scripts just to keep them from kicking you off while you read a page. so he talks his boss into running a T-1 out there to the tune of nearly $25k. he then sets up a server to offer tons of freeware as well as WSUS and begins to sell connections to all those getting stuck on dialup who of course are overjoyed to hand them their money. The American way right? Find a market and serve it?
Well the local ISP didn't like losing $100 a month dialup screwjobs so they jacked their price by 400% and then added a bunch of "per connection" fees that ended up jacking their total cost over 1000%. They then found out the ISP had made a few calls and the only other sources of backbone connection wouldn't sell to them either, orders from the ISP. They were told "Just try and sue us" and were told by their lawyer "Oh no doubt you'll win but it'll take 10 years and cost a million and a half because they'll just keeping piling the bullshit motions".
so they ended up closing down their business and moving away, costing the area another dozen good paying jobs. Those people TO THIS VERY DAY can only get dialup at an average cost of nearly $90 when the phone service they don't use and other bullshit is figurd in, and the ISP hasn't moved an inch in 20 years, just like the cableco. Honestly if we don't nationalize I don't see things getting any better, if anything they'll label more and more users as "chronic downloaders" or some such bullshit and further degrade their services while raking in the cash. I know in my area the poor can't even afford Internet and have to use the library because its $125 a month for Cablenet and nearly $100 a month for DSL that caps at 2Mbit. Dialup in the cheapest cases is still over $60 a month. Needless to say the ISPs are happy, everyone else is just fucked.
Uhhh you DO realize your commands won't work in Windows either so saying "its inter-operable" while ignoring it won't work with the most popular OS in the world is SERIOUS logic hoop jumping, yes?
I DO think you accidently hit upon the problem though without realizing it, and its the way the Linux community hangs onto that "Unix/Posix" horseshit. Unix has been dead damned near 20 years, okay? When Unix was popular and all these "Unix" standards were written computer memory was more precious than gold and CPU resources practically didn't exist. It didn't matter how much of a hoop jumping verbose clusterfuck something was as long as it saved precious memory and cycles, that in the end was all that matter when the average home computer had less power than a $1 watch today and big iron ruled.
But it ain't 1978 anymore yet the community clings to "The Unix way" like its their own blue blankie or something! Ultimately the community would be better off to throw out that old Unix/Posix bullshit and start over with modern machinery in mind. I bet my last dollar if the Unix/Posix crap was banhammered the community could come up with something easy to read and use, elegant, fast, and which worked wonderfully.
Do THAT and MSFT would have no choice but to support it as every admin would want to use it. but as that other guy pointed out MSFT is sinking serious money behind powershell and giving away GUI IDEs and adding to its power and as he pointed out ATM it is simply a better product. Its easier, its commands are consistent, it doesn't take 50 commands just to do the most common tasks, in short its just better. but instead of doing the smart thing and learning from your competition I have no doubt you'll just insult me and mod me down and THAT is why linux isn't gaining ANY real traction. The other guys learn and modernize while the community hangs onto the old ways like a hippie hanging onto bell bottoms and 8-tracks. The 70s is over, let it go okay?
Exactly, what happened to free will and the right of the consumer to choose? I run a little mom and pop PC shop so naturally I sell and service MSFT products. I knew that going in and have had to deal with more than one headache thanks to MSFT dumbshit, like having to wipe Vista and install XP for a year and a half because nobody at MSFT had enough sense to listen to the beta testers which included me. But you know what? That is MY choice. I've tried Apple, Linux (several flavors) BSD, and back when it existed Opensolaris (yes I know there is an offshoot but it is no longer supported by the parent corp) and for me and the needs of my customers the MSFT products were the best fit.
Do I wish they did some things differently? Oh Lord Yes, fire the damned monkey and put the Office team in charge of OSes for one thing, or actually listen to the beta testers! But quit whining like a bunch of little girls and if you don't like a product be man enough to NOT BUY IT instead of coming up with this lame "tax" bullshit. News Flash: OEMs GET PAID FOR TRIALWARE so Windows will ALWAYS be cheaper than Linux, okay? Not a conspiracy, its that nobody will pay to install 30 day trials onto Ubuntu and most of the time those trials when added up are worth MORE than the OEM cost of Windows, which last I heard was something like $15 for Windows HP, $30 for Pro, and $60 for Ultimate.
But I wanted to point out the connector "tax" just to illustrate the hypocritical bullshit. you have company A (MSFT) that unless you are buying a product that has Pro or better COSTS YOU NOTHING and actually in many cases SAVES YOU MONEY because of the nature of the cutthroat pricing in OEM PC sales they often apply the money they make on trialware to further lower the cost per unit, and on the other hand you have company B (apple) that due to its popularity is costing you money on every single item with a dock connector which of course is in all likelihood NOT absorbed by the company but passed straight to the consumer, yet one is called a tax and one is not.
Bullshit, you can't just change the definition because you think the products made by company B are nice and shiny, either they BOTH are a tax, and it should again be noted that in the first case it is a "tax" that can actually end up be rebating below its cost, or neither are. Or even better why not just fricking exercise free choice and buy what you like? i'm sure System76 and ZaReason would be happy for that business if you don't like MSFT. They even have some machines more powerful than the Apple offering. but you'll note the machines often cost more than a Windows machine with the same specs, again the crap everyone complains about on a new PC lowers the price. Personally I say just use PC Decrapifier or wipe and put on any OS you like and STFU with the whining. We're supposed to be geeks not not one of these bitchy politically correct groups. And as far as Apple goes while I think they make some great products I don't care for their policies so I DON'T BUY THEM, is that really so hard?
Sorry but even if he copypasta'd the whole thing it would have still be covered under fair use since it was a non profit public service. Sorry i can't remember the case ATM but I believe it was in Oregon that the precedent was set that even copying a whole article was considered fair use if it was for a non commercial public service. In that case IIRC the article was over an issue that they were organizing against and the judge ruled they were simply gathering data to a single point so they could better advocate their position, and in this case it is a prosecutor that is gathering as much as he can about 'no body' murder cases into a single area to help other prosecutors know how to deal with such a rare type of case.
So I'm with the other poster that it would have been nice if there had been more precedent added in this case but at least there IS precedent for doing a large copypasta of even whole articles if the purpose is to inform and not for profit. funnily enough if my memory serves it was the Righthaven trolls that caused the precedent to be set in Oregon in the first place. Maybe we should have a "Righthaven Effect" for those that end up being better advocates for the other side than they are their own?
Question: Is the fast boot Linux Expressgate? Because if it is you really ought to spend some time playing with it, its pretty fun and nice. I don't know if it is the same on the HP but my Asus Expressgate has a really nice appstore, it has around 100 free and pay radio stations (easy to sort by free or pay), a nice bookstore for eBooks, games, and a pretty zippy Chrome browser. It will also play any of the media off the HDD but of course that uses more battery than just using the web.
As for TFA I think its gonna take a hell of a lot more than not selling the PC business to right that ship. HP hasn't really been innovative in awhile and even when they have a killer product they have NO clue on how to capitalize on it! I mean have you seen their Brazos based all in one, its brilliant! Just about the perfect housewife or small office PC, its thin, light, doesn't use hardly any power, nice bright 20 inch screen, dual core with a Radeon chip, and all for around $300. They should crank these babies out in a few different screen sizes and advertise the hell out of them! Hell they even have built in WiFi and are brain dead simple to set up!
No just keeping the PC division isn't gonna help, what they are gonna need is someone to actually RUN that PC division with some vision and a brain!
So let me see if I understand correctly...so many here scream bloody murder about a "Microsoft tax" on PCs, but the fact that everything and its dog now has an Apple doc which they must pay a royalty to use is just....what? a gift of appreciation to the memory of the great one?
Lock in is lock in is lock in friend, and just because your garden has flowers and pretty paintings on the wall doesn't make those walls any shorter. Oh and some forms of iPods use encryption on the playlists IIRC so good luck using anything but iTunes. That was cooked up to get rid of Real giving you choice BTW.
Hey don't pick on Norton! Do you have ANY idea how much work we repairshops get from that flaming POS? Hell its nearly as good as being located next to a Best Buy!
As for TFA I've never cared for Avira much myself, having always preferred either Comodo (for those that like to tweak) and Avast (for those that don't) although more and more I'm sticking with avast since it has been included in the PC builder's best friend Ninite.
If you have to support any friends or family as an admin, even if they live far away, or if you build boxes? Ninite should be your best bud and "go to" first response. they get told some site "needs to install flash" so they can watch the content? tell 'em to go to Ninte and check the flash box and if the site still asks to install flash its a Trojan. you need to get them off IE? Install codecs because a file won't play? Need a new media player? Libre Office? .NET or Java? Ninite has you covered.
I'm glad TFA worked out alright, unlike the AVG bug that boned the boot, but if Avira keeps making bonehead moves I'd have them uninstall it and get Avast or MSE from ninite. It is simple enough you can walk your grandma through it, no "clicky clicky next next next" oh and NO TOOLBARS ALLOWED even on the apps that try to give you Chrome or Bing bar now like CCleaner or Java. So if anybody has to deal with users I'd say bookmark this site, its really top drawer..
Thank you AdamJS that is EXACTLY what I mean, although I was downmodded (and if like the last time will be on unrelated subjects for a day or two) for saying it. I deal with users 6 days a week, not programmers, not compSci majors, users. people like Sherry who is the checkout girl at the local grocery, or Brian who runs a backhoe or terry the truck driver. if I sell a PC to these people I need the GUI to work and not be an afterthought which sadly ATM in Linux it pretty much is. I need to be able to easily and simply walk them through basic tasks using ONLY the mouse and preferably with as few clicks as possible, because one mistyped word in bash can equal disaster and I can't afford to give away free lifetime support.
With Windows if a customer has a problem a good 85%+ of the time I can straighten them out in less than 4 minutes in control panel, if that. hell with windows 7 HP I can even take remote control of their PC in under 3 minutes with Remote assistance, all GUI and so trivial and simple I walked a 73 year old woman through initiating a remote request when she messed up her sound and was afraid to go into control panel. again it was trivial, easy, and because I was willing to take a few minutes out of my day to help that woman at no charge I ended up with 3 repairs and a new build, as she ended up insisting her entire family use me as their shop.
But Linux simply isn't close to that level, or as you said "make the GUI a first class citizen' and in fact there is a large vocal minority that actively fights to NOT make things easier for the user, which they look down upon as "noobs". If this attitude doesn't change, if distros don't insist that the programs they carry have a first class GUI and that ALL major and minor non edge case tasks have a functional GUI then it really is never gonna gain any share.
What is driving me up the wall about it is the clock is ticking. already I'm seeing late model P4s and early dual cores being traded in by the crate because XP is getting close to EOL. These machines could EASILY run the apps people use now like Farmville and Facebook, Hell I'm seeing Athlon X2s and Pentium Ds with a Gb of RAM, that is MORE than plenty. And Windows 8 looks to be another Vista turkey, and when you throw in the facts that the economy is down (so folks will happily buy refurbs to save money) and more and more of my customers do NOTHING with their PC that isn't net related? you have the "perfect storm" for FOSS adoption. and I think the idea of FOSS, of ending planned obsolescence and putting the user as the ultimate master of the machine, are good and just ideas.
But sadly I get the sinking feeling that this golden opportunity will be thrown away, like all these trade ins i'm getting that frankly the cost of new Windows licenses will make not worth the effort. and in the end it is NOT because FOSS is a bad idea, or that there simply isn't the skills to get it done, but the simple fact that like we have seen in politics the hardcore fanatics have hijacked the platform and are pushing FOSS not as a way to help people, but as an agenda. Its all about making those "noobs" do things THEIR way and if they won't? well they can just go back to windBlowz. and that is EXACTLY what is gonna happen. the shop owners like mine will shake their heads at the insanity, strip as much parts as they can, and throw billions of dollars worth of gear in the trash while lining our shelves with Windows machines.
Not because we are "shills" or astroturfers or M$ Ninjas, not because we are unwilling to learn new ideas, but just because nobody will listen to us. Just like they haven't listened to us for over 20 years, just like they ignored us when Vista came out and we begged for an alternative, nope we'll get told "Make 'em learn bash and RTFM windblowz luzer LOL!" and we'll leave the Linux Bash trolls to their CLI circlejerks and go on about our days.
Notice I got modded down and will CONTINUE to get modded down for at least two days in unrelated subjects? This is what I find funny about the teabagger wing of the FOSSies, they think by burying anything that isn't "Gee isn't Linux perfect for the world? Why it sure is Skip, and RMS's farts smells like roses and cure AGW!" they can magically "make it not true! make it all go away, I can't hear you la la la!".
But the funny thing about the truth, one can always produce facts to back it up. Like how Dell have to run their own repos because the current driver model is so fucked up that if they dare to run the default repos the machines will shit all over themselves. not opinion, cold hard fact. How about how a decade old Windows beat the shit out of Linux on netbooks which should tell you something, when people would rather have a decade old fisher price GUI than the latest and greatest because its too fiddly and a PITA, or how about how the ones that invented the netbook ASUS has given up on the bullshit? I would bet my last dollar their support costs were THROUGH THE ROOF because of "update foo broke my stuff!" along with having to try to walk someone through a three page CLI "fix" over the phone. I bet the metrics on the calls were just nuts, or how about the kings of "low price at all costs" Walmart running away from Linux as fast as it can which again I bet my last dollar the support costs killed it. don't see that with the iShiny, even though that is about as unfamiliar a UI as you could get for a lifelong Windows user you do you? Maybe because they make it intuitive and easy instead of flipping the user the bird and typing "RTFM Windblowz Luserz LOL!"? How about how the community has the nerve to actually CELEBRATE 1% market share like that is something to be proud of when IRL after TWENTY YEARS of work Linux is actually lower than JavaME and the craziness and logic hoop jumping by the lunatic fringe has gotten so bad there is actually a website that turns the bullshit and excuses into memes which you then see once you know what to look for over and over AND OVER again.
You see, that is the thing about the truth, they can call me "nigger cocksucker faggot" all day long, aka shill troll astroturfer but you know what? It doesn't make black into white, up into down, nor can it change a single number or add a single user to the crazy parade. We retailers have been fucking BEGGING you to straighten your shit and give us some real choice, we have practically DRAWN YOU A MAP and handed you a GPS to keep you from getting off track, and now the competition is gonna give you a fricking 60 yard head start in the hundred meters by shooting itself in the foot TWICE with the fucked Windows 8 GUI and all those late model P4s and early dual cores being EOLed that could play farmville and run FB just fine.
NEVER BEFORE IN HISTORY has so much been in your favor, your competition is run by an idiot, now more than ever before the world is doing more and more of their work and play exclusively online, and the visionary behind the second front has died and left a vacuum that they may not be able to fill. Oh and the economy sucks so folks want to save money and are willing to try things that will help them do so. You have the market wide open, the field is yours, so what do you do? say "Don't look at me!" and promptly start waving a gun around the track while masturbating to a Bash script.
But you've run out of exc
I don't know about his sitch but I actually tried that with my mom. She is exactly TWO BLOCKS from the end of their connections on both DSL and cable and NEITHER would run it. So I contacted a friend that was a lineman at the time, had him come out and figure up the cost of the line (about $2300 including the time for him and the bucket truck) and ran the line in my mom's place to the road and contacted the cableco. I was told they would need $35,000 PLUS at least a dozen homes PLUS a guarantee that each home would take the max package PLUS another 35% surcharge on TOP of all that!
Finally in a level of sheer POed I cornered the PHB at the cableco and said WTF did he think he was doing and was told it is SOP to not run a single inch where they can't guarantee at LEAST 100% profit above the cost of the run IMMEDIATELY along with a similar profit for at least two years, but that was only for large jobs with big payoffs, for small jobs try ten times or more for their "effort". This is why they haven't run a single inch except to some condos that signed a crazy exclusive agreement in damned near 20 years, nobody will do shit in this country anymore unless insane profits are handed to them the instant they do it.
Frankly is it any wonder why we get the short bus to the info superhighway folks? Frankly we ought to nationalize the lines since they have ALREADY stolen $200 billion from We, The PEOPLE for nationwide broadband and all we got was the finger and an autographed pic of the CxOs snorting coke off their $1000 hookers with the "free' bonuses we gave them. Well after dealing with them for over 20 damned years trying to get them to run a lousy two fucking blocks I say, to quote Mr garrison "You go to hell! You go to hell and you die!" We need to nationalize and FORCE competition if we are ever to get anywhere. If they want a monopoly? That's fiber to door in return for 15 years. If its a place that currently isn't being served (REALLY served, not the horseshit like that .gov self reporting site which says my mom has 6 choices not counting sat when even in the middle of town i only have two and she has none) we'll give them 25. if they fall down on the job and stop hooking people in the neighborhood up, or trying claiming a single house on the edge of the area means the whole area is served? then bye bye monopoly, the lines are opened and its a free for all.
Just look at how opening up the POTS gave us all this new tech and new devices. If we could take the lines away from the cartels (who should be banned from having both lines and media as a conflict of interest) we could see a similar explosion of new ideas in broadband. but as it is its just the 1%ers at the top bleeding the country dry and giving back ever shittier service in return.
Actually you can't really judge by how they look. I use those spots all the time when I drive my mom and at first glance it would look like she is just fine, but if anyone followed her they would notice she goes straight to the carts which she then uses almost like a walker. she had a bad flu two years ago that ended up causing blood clots that killed portions of her lung so she needs the extra assistance of the cart and if she had to walk any real distance to get TO the cart she'd probably face plant. also long walks put too much strain on her and she'll be so winded you'd think she had been running a race, not walking through a parking lot. Now if there isn't a handicapped spot I'll let her out right in front of the door and then go find a parking spot and meet her inside, large lots are just too much for her.
So don't judge a book by its cover friend, there are plenty of diseases like heart and lung that don't make you look crippled on the outside but can cause serious enough problems that those parking spots are required for safety reasons.
Well I'm always getting accused of being an "M$ Ninja!" and you know what? I fricking HATE Bing but LOVE Yahoo Search. Now that is gonna seem more than a little nutty because yahoo uses Bing's data, but in the end it isn't the data, its the UI.
With Google it seems the SEOs have taken a big shit all over it as ALL I ever seem to get are ads. Try looking up a "review" for any piece of tech lately? you'll get a couple of MILLION hits and out of that maybe THREE actual honest to goodness reviews of the product. it is like trying to pick a single pearl out of an arena full of dog shit. After the third of fourth "non review review site" I want to punch the damned screen, i know am I'm not alone.
With bing while I get actual reviews it just "feels' like i'm fighting the damned thing. I don't know why, i can't put my finger on it, and it isn't just not knowing the layout as I gave it a good solid month to just be fair. it just "feels" lousy and I feel like I'm getting what i want in SPITE of and not BECAUSE of bing.
But with yahoo I don't seem to have that problem, i don't feel like its working against me. i get the good results like bing but it just seems easier to "jump off" of searches and go to relational items and work my way deeper. when i was researching my netbook for example (The EEE 1215B, great fucking netbook if anyone is in the market, i really love it) with google I got ads, with bing i got reviews but never really was able to go any farther, with yahoo i got reviews and ended up checking out everything from different batteries that were compatible with the unit to videos on youtube of people comparing it to both atom as well as the AMD C-Series APU and playing different games like L4D on the unit.
In the end the yahoo search gave me MUCH more data that helped me come to my decision than either google OR bing alone. With google I got nothing, with bing I got info that frankly had me a little confused as one of the reviewers was saying ultimately the C- Series APUs were the better buy, but with the combo of reviews plus seeing both chips side by side I was able to determine that the E-350 was a better fit and that the 1215B would take 8gb of RAM (which it even gave me a nice link where I got the RAM upgrade for cheap) so of the three yahoo really helped.
And at the end of the day frankly doesn't that matter more than which company is behind the product? Which one helps us get to the data we need the quickest and with the most meaningful results for our needs? as for TFA I thought switching from Google to bing in FF was as simple as pulling a drop down? sorry if i'm incorrect as I switched my customers and myself to Dragon after FF 4 came out and took a big dump on performance. I frankly don't care what some benchmarks say, i know what I hear from my customers and see with my peepers and for the sites they and I use FF seems to get slower each turn while Dragon gets faster.
Thank you Mr AC but you want to know what the REALLY sad part is? A good 90% of it is geeker dick waving, that's all. you gvo to ANY forum and simply ask for a non CLI way to do a simple task and you'll get called everything filthy name in the book and get told go back to Windblowz LOL! because these fudnuckers think being a PITA makes them cool and CLI givez gonad powerz which if one thinks about that logically even for a second can see they are so full of shit the net ought to be choked on their stench!
After all do they code in ASM? do they load their kernel on punchcards? All tech since then has been created to make things easier going all the way to visicalc. For the love of God THAT IS WHAT COMPUTERS ARE FOR PEOPLE, to make things EASIER FOR THE USER so they don't have to sit there with a fucking pencil and paper! why the fuck is these people even using PCs when there is a perfectly good Abacus that could give them supergonad powerz!
In the end most of the block are there. you have click N Run that is a hell of a lot like an app store, you have some nice DEs and even some cool new ideas like Expressgate instant on OS, but in the end the geeker dick waving dooms the whole community because anyone that even tries to make things better gets howls of geeker rage! Its like politics where the lunatics have taken over, something as common fucking sense as "hey shouldn't we make things easier for the user, you know, so they can actually use the OS to do their work?" gets treated like fucking blasphemy and simple obvious things like "Shouldn't they be able to accomplish this in the GUI?" gets treated like you just said Elvis lives on the moon.
I think its sad, I really truly do. You have this frankly revolutionary idea, to open computers up for the masses, to get rid of planned obsolescence and make computers even cheaper and more inter-operable for everyone, but then when it comes to the execution you let basement trolls and anti-social developers just piss it all away so they can feel superior to the masses, and that is just sad. Not only sad but pointless, like copypasta into a term makes you some leet hacker, its fucking stupid! If you WANT TO use CLI there should always be the option but you should never HAVE TO, yet you let basement trolls and developers that if they had their way all you'd get on first boot would be a term with "RTFM Noob LOL!" written across the screen actually dictate policy!
I repeat you are about to get not ONE but TWO incredible opportunities just dumped in your lap like its Xmas morning and the only question is are you gonna unwrap them and claim your prize, or are you gonna take a big shit on the table and set the tree on fire? The ball is about to be in your court, probably for the last time. The competition has a CEO that is totally batshit and about to fuck his company hard, the world is more net centric than EVER before, and there is literally gonna be a couple of billion dollars in hardware that the other guy is gonna say "LOL we won't support it" and ALL OF THAT can be the biggest boon in the history of OSS. If you refuse YET AGAIN to capitalize on the gifts given you? Frankly you deserve to lose and have nobody to blame but yourself.
Riiiight, because the average users writes scripts and uses ssh clients oh and by the way giant bat wings pop out of my ass and I fly south for the winter, did you know that?
It is THIS, this kind of delusional dumbshit right here, that has kept Linux in last place, even when the sweaty monkey was practically committing corporate suicide with dead ducks like Vista.
Why is it soooo damned hard to accept that NORMAL USERS ARE NOT LIKE YOU, they will NOT use CLI, they will NOT script their fucking programs, they will NOT read man pages, do the 'find the fix" forum dances, write code or give a wet fart about what kind of programming languages your OS uses, alright?
It is so simple folks, the key word is CONSUMERS in giant flaming 50 foot neon, but do you listen? Nope, you pretend that inside every grandma there is a C coder just dying to get out and little Suzy the checkout girl goes home to read programming books in the bathtub.
You are about to be given not one but TWO frankly once in a lifetime gifts on a silver platter and you watch, you'll just piss them both away and stay dead fricking last and you know what? if they hand you a 20 yard head start and instead of sprinting for the finish you promptly shoot yourself in the foot and start masturbating in the middle of the course YOU DESERVE TO LOSE just for throwing the fucking race!
You have gift #1, Windows 8 which I'm betting will make Vista look like a gold plated OS brought to you by $1000 hookers by the amount of sheer HATE I've gotten from the public after showing them the UI, and gift #2 you have at last count something like 200 MILLION PLUS late model P4s and early dual cores that are gonna go EOL and will be just begging for an easy to use free OS, because lets face it Farmville and Facebook? NOT that resource intensive folks.
But you have to do things THEIR way, give them a product that will do what THEY want, and none of this fiddly CLI heavy geeker bullshit or YOU WILL LOSE period. I mean an OS with a fricking $1000 barrier to entry gained share during Vista while Linux stayed flatline, and despite all the hype even with the most wildly pulled out of your ass numbers the much vaunted Ubuntu is at the MAX maybe 3/4ths of a percent, even after all the press!
But you know what the definition of insanity is? It is doing the same thing over and over AND over and expecting a different result. Me and the other retailers have practically drawn you a map on how to gain serious share, there has NEVER been a better time in history, with so many hooked on web based games and sites, and you have TWO gifts thanks to the sweaty monkey having no brain about to be dropped in your lap, what fucking more do you need? An engraved invitation?
Just give the consumer what they want, that's all. Either do that or just give up, quit all these "Next year will be the year of Linux on the desktop!" total horseshit, and accept that you only want to be a hobbyist OS for geekers. Because as it is hell you ain't even growing in servers any longer, in fact last numbers I saw had you losing share. you DON'T listen to the consumer, you DON'T listen to the retailers, you DON'T listen to the OEMs, instead you expect the entire planet to bend over backwards and learn to do things YOUR way. Arrogant much?
Actually the scary part? The pirate version RUNS BETTER and is MORE stable on old hardware than the full version! honestly the guys at MSFT really ought to hire the guy that makes "Tiny Windows (insert version)" because he makes a better light OS than even embedded and winFLP. we are talking about an XP that uses 56Mb of RAM on the desktop, 63Mb for Win2k3, 386Mb for Vista (even he can't work miracles) and 248Mb for Windows 7. I of course don't sell units with it and have only played with it for my own amusement but the speed this guy gets is just nuts. you can tell it isn't some Vlite job, he really tore into the guts and rebuilt like like a hot rod. Here is the only changes I would make if I was using the Tiny version. One it doesn't have UAC by default on, you have to make a second account to enable it. Two it doesn't have WMC which I like, but in both cases I can understand why, as its mainly built for gamers that want to squeeze that last drop of performance and not for HTPCs.
But I have to disagree on netbooks unless you are talking about atom which frankly is shite on a crusty roll no matter WHAT OS you are using. I have one of the new AMD Brazos netbooks and honestly even the default non tweaked Windows 7 X64 HP runs like a dream on it. Its snappy, apps loaded quick even before i stuck 8Gb of RAM in it (which yeah i know its overkill, but hell with the gift card I got 8Gb for $31. How could I turn THAT down friend?) and both HD video and games play with nary a stutter. While I'm not the type to game while i'm mobile there are even videos of guys playing L4D and other shooters on it and getting decent framerates. Just because its a netbook doesn't mean it has to suck the big wet titty. Oh and I get a full 6 hours under Windows 7 and if all I want is the web it also comes with ExpressGate which gives me 6 seconds from cold start and an extra 2 hours on the battery. Its the EEE 1215B and they have it with 2Gb for $299 at Tigerdirect if you know somebody that wants a good Windows 7 netbook. With the RAM and a carrying case i got out at less than $350 for the whole smash, you just can't beat that for a dual core with Radeon graphics.
Finally if you want to know how to get Windows 7 running decently on even a shite Atom may I suggest you check this out friend? Its a central repo of links to how tos for squeezing every last bit of performance out of Windows 7 . I've found that if one wants a that runs fast this site really gives some good performance tips and have used a few on customers whose hardware was borderline Windows 7 capable and by the time i was done they were actually enjoying 7 more than XP. It won't crank out the speed like tiny 7 does but it will make windows 7 faster, especially if you are talking about running it on shit like the Atom. although to be honest my advice to customers on Atom since the beginning has been a giant NO WAY. You can get an AMD based unit for just a tiny bit more money and the performance just stomps a mudhole in Atom's skinny ass. I've sold plenty of both the MSI Wind and the Asus EEE AMD netbooks and they are worlds better than Atom when it comes to actual feel and user experience, its like night and day. if you haven't tried one you really should, they are sweeeeet!
What you need to do to "fix" search and indexing is simply to go in and be VERY SPECIFIC about where its allowed to index. you have pretty fine grained control over indexing in win 7 so you can be pretty precise and still have search. I allowed mine to have the Windows folders, the program files, my music, my docs, and my videos and THAT IS IT. nothing else. that still leave 3 drives and two partitions completely unindexed on my machine. What this will do is allow full search of programs and features of Windows 7 (which is actually quite handy) along with music and docs. I keep about a Tb and a half of music and video on my HDDs and it only took a couple of hours on low priority to index them initially and after that it will only add new items.
So basically what you've done is fix a hanging branch by nuking it from orbit. sure that is one way to get rid of that limb buts its frankly insanely overkill. to find the tool its under control panel/indexing options. if you want to get REALLY precise you can even click on advanced and tell it to only index certain file types and ignore others. so it is beyond simply to set up a set of really useful search and indexing options with only a couple of click. as for your other annoyances look up "Ultimate Windows Tweaker" for a nice freeware tool that will let you fully customize the hell out of Windows 7. Its all easily undoable if you change your mind, all simple checkboxes, so no worries and it'll let you mold windows 7 into your own personal preferences.
But that freeware i linked to is totally self contained so frankly it doesn't matter what features you turn on or off you can still have custom folders and workspaces. The thing you have to remember with windows is if it doesn't do what you want OOTB there is usually a freeware tool that will give you that function. there are tons of VS programmers and anything that has ever bugged you about windows I assure you has bugged one of them first and since they know the Win APIs it isn't anything for one of them to whip off a tool that fixes the problem. Enjoy your folder views!