I hate to break it to ya, but what Jobs did was appeal to vanity. Everybody WANTS to be rich, or at least make OTHERS feel they are doing better than them. Its called keeping up with the Joneses and living next to what used to be an Apple heavy college (it isn't anymore because Jobs missed a crucial market, the college kids. They found the iPad couldn't really do schoolwork and nobody wanted to risk something as expensive as an Air to lug to class so netbooks and small laptops have taken over) and I have actually watched a couple of guys nearly come to blows over which was "cooler" the air or the top o' the line MBP.
Now don't get me wrong, not saying the man didn't make quality gear because he obviously did, just look at what happened to the Gap when they tried to keep prices high while selling poor quality products. But you have to admit a LOT of what made Apple under Steve was the IMAGE he projected of the company, the whole "cool wealthy thinks outside the box" image he pushed with the think different and Mac VS PC ads. Its no different than how Porsche tried to sell an entry level car and found ALL their sales tank. if Porsche wasn't expensive then their customers simply didn't want it.
let me put it THIS way, can you picture ANY other brand where one could sell a mobile app that simply shown a red jewel and said "I'm rich" and costs $10,000 and actually SELL ANY of them at all? Can you picture that on Android? WinPhone? To say such a thing with those brands sounds like a bad joke, but Apple? frankly it doesn't even sound far fetched.
Actually 5 will get you 10 when all is said and done it'll come down to a little thing called DirectX. As we all know DirectX 10 and 11 weren't backported to XP because they were calling parts of the new WPF that would have been a royal bitch to rewrite for XP (there is a hacked DirectX 10 beta for XP and i've tried it but frankly its buggy as hell) and i'm willing to bet my last dollar they are using DirectX to speed rendering and any video.
For those of us that's seen the Metro UI, which i personally think is gonna bomb HARD as i've shown the screencaps to over 120 customer so far and have YET to get a SINGLE positive comment about Metro, whereas those i showed 7 before it was released all wanted to know about features and what it could do, anyway for those that have seen film of metro in action they are using these little 'auto-updating" windows in the "desktop" that will have all kinds of feeds from weather to video, i bet my last dollar its all IE with DirectX under the hood which is why its tied in so deep and can't be backported. They do something similar with their Internet TV in windows 7 which uses IE and Adobe Flash tied together with some DirectX glue which you can tell by removing IE Flash or watching your GPU usage through the AMD System Monitor (don't know if there's a tool for Nvidia and Intel that shows how much load is GPU and how much CPU)
Personally i think windows 8 is gonna be the new Vista turkey and Windows 7 the new XP. I only hope this will be the final nail in the coffin for the sweaty monkey and the board will make him 'pursue other interests' as he makes the Pepsi guy look competent. That guy just doesn't have a fucking clue how to run a company and if he wasn't Bill's buddy from back in the day his ass would have never gotten past PHB middle management. kin, Zune, Vista, rushing the X360 when it had a fatal flaw, the man's resume is one clusterfuck after another and only the Office team being brought in saved Windows 7. Now I bet anything that Windows 8 Metro bullshit is HIS baby, its his classic "Me too, oooh me too!" badly done Apple ripoff that is just his style. at least Apple has the common sense not to try to stick iOS on the MBP, but someone forgot to give the sweaty monkey the memo.
Instead you are gonna throw away all the hard work the office guys did for Windows 7 by tying IE so damned tightly to the bowels of the OS that a single bug will slaughter the thing, all so Ballmer can have his own iPad OS bling bling nightmare on the desktop. are you listening Linux guys? you blew one shot with Vista DO NOT fucking blow it! We retailers want a simple as hell, all GUI, net friendly OS that is easy peasy for grandma and NO CLI. Hell you ALREADY have the basic idea with Expressgate/Splashtop, which is GUItasic and fast as hell. Write a ton of apps for it, make sure it works on the "80%" hardware, that the big three GPUs along with Realtek, SiS, Broadcom, Sigmatel and Aetheros and you guys could seriously kick some ass. This is your shot, and probably your last as i doubt the monkey will survive another epic fail, so do NOT miss, okay?
yep as it is a third party freeware app that uses its own DB file and not the indexing service. Although why you'd kill indexing is beyond me, I have 3Tb loaded with stuff and just set indexing to only be on the places where indexing would matter and not take forever, like my movie collection and documents.
Exactly, its no different than all the "Will (insert new Linux thing) finally bring about Linux on the desktop?" or variations thereof, or the "Here is another Windows article on Windows (insert number or just general OS)" as its pretty common knowledge a good flame war generates a hell of a lot of comments and that translates into a hell of a lot of ad views. hell sites like El Reg and Winsupersite and anything by Nichols are practically nothing BUT giant pieces of trollbait to crank up the flames. Its just business folks, nothing personal.
As for TFA here is basically everything you need to know about Jobs summed into a single sentence "Steve jobs was an asshole with very good taste". and just like every other rich tech guy that is both loved and hated, Gates, Ellison, etc he was in the right place at the right time with the right product and had the brains to capitalize on it. you'd think that would be easy once you had the hit but that is actually the hard part and why there are very few that have had the staying power of Gates, Jobs, and Ellison, because they tend to lose sight of the forest for the trees and shoot themselves right in the head. See DBASE, Netscape (which i'm sure some will try to blame on IE but as someone who lived it NS4 killed Netscape, it was the buggiest POS I'd ever had the misfortune of using) Commodore, Atari, etc for examples. Hell we nearly saw that with Apple thanks to the Pepsi guy and if they aren't careful Ballmer and his "Me too! Ooooh me too!" stupidity like giving Win 8 a cell phone UI may do the same to MSFT.
in the end it all comes down to being able to capitalize on that big break and having the brains not to kill the company and like him or hate him jobs did have the brains and the vision to not only build a corp from nothing but to basically have to do it all over again after years of mismanagement and managed to turn it into one of the biggest companies on the planet. Even though I don't use Apple products I give credit where credit is due and the man definitely knew his shit.
How EXACTLY is that a troll? you see THIS, this right here, is what has been bugging the shit out of me lately with regards to science, the fact that certain ideas or studies are not allowed because they aren't PC or go against dogma. I thought dogma was the place of religion not science?
In science there should be NO theory that is taboo, none. They should be able to come up with a theory, test it, present their findings and either the scientific community runs further studies that finds those results invalid, inconclusive, or if they are correct then studies should be done to find out WHY those results are the way they are.
I always thought this is how we progress folks. if someone does studies that conclude blacks have lower IQ or there are faults in the AGW theory or whatever they should be treated no different than any other scientist presently conclusions. the community should do further studies to prove or disprove their findings and then we go from there. If it were me and it was shown blacks had consistently lower scores in IQ tests I'd personally want to know WHY that is instead of screaming or playing the racism card which gets us nowhere. I'd instead be asking questions like "Is it the diet? environmental causes? Is it the discouragement of education by certain sections of the black community bringing scores down for the whole?".
But instead we just get the race card and PC bullshit like instead of teaching the uneducated how to speak correctly claiming Ebonics is a legitimate language. sadly the last lines in this this song seems to be the way we are going, with everything sacrificed on the alter of PC. Kinda sad if you ask me that questions can't be asked without screams and pulling the race card even in the scientific community at the start of the 21st century.
Re:What is my overriding reason to migrate off XP?
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10 Years of Windows XP
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Are ALL the sticks matched? And I DO mean ALL the sticks, because I've run into that on some boards. its the reason i prefer the ECS business class boards whenever possible as they'll happily deal with any combo when it comes to RAM. Also look into whether your board is in ganged or unganged mode as i've found certain boards prefer one or the other depending on the sticks. Finally as another poster pointed out look to see if there are BIOS updates and run a Memtest Can be found in the Win 7 control panel or on the win 7 DVD under recovery, or if you prefer the classic Memtestx86 you can download ultimate boot CD for free.
While I hope that one of the above helps you in the end you may just have a picky little bitch of a board and would be better off swapping it out. Personally i'd go for an ECS business class with 4 slots and an AMD Thuban 6 core, since the new socket came out those have been going for pretty cheap and the ECS boards aren't picky at all. I even scored a couple of 2Gb "OCed from the factory" Patriot sticks real cheap and for shits and giggle threw it in my spare two slots, fully expecting it not to run, but the ECS board just automatically underclocked them to a speed both they and my DDR 800 would run at and happily booted up, been purring like a kitten ever since. I've used a lot of ECS boards for industrial and construction businesses and those things take a hell of a lot of abuse, just really solid business boards.
I don't know about his reg tweaks since according to everything I've read that functionality was removed but don't you worry none friend, old hairyfeet knows how to get around that little PITA and actually give you MORE functionality than it had under XP!
What you need to do is go here and download this little handy dandy freeware tool. this baby will not only remember from 300-10,000 folders (user configurable) but you can even save multiple folders as workspaces and then call them all back up to the original position and view you had set up with a single click! Quite handy when you need multiple folders set certain ways for certain tasks, i found it just wonderful for when i'm editing my multitrack recordings. Just pin it to your tasklists and keep her running, it only uses a few hundred Kb of RAM.
So don't worry friend, there is always more than one way to skin that kitty in Windows!
Actually you are partially incorrect. while its true that Metro is a serious clusterfuck of a UI (I've shown the screencaps to over 120 customers so far and NOT A SINGLE ONE liked the look or thought they would want to try it. The closest I got to an endorsement was this exchange "That is a nice looking cell phone screen, what kind of cell phone is it? Is it Android? i've heard those are quite nice....what do you mean Windows? Windows what? why that's just stupid! Why would I want a cell phone for my desktop?") there is also a "classic mode" which you can see in some of the developer's presentation which is just the Windows 7 GUI with a square start button instead of round and from what I've heard a simple registry change makes it default.
So actually in this case with BOTH Windows and ubuntu you don't have to take the clusterfuck UI, although I hear its more of a PITA to strip out unity and get something decent running than it is to just run Xubuntu or Kubuntu in the first place. Personally if it were me I'd be looking at Vector Linux which not only has 6 versions tailored for what kind of machine you want to run it on, from ultra light live to workstation, but they also have a "KDE Classic' version that has a fully updated KDE 3 as the default DE. I've been playing with it and its pretty nice, especially the light live for older laptops.
Question: Have you tried any of the Corel offerings like Painter or Pain Shop pro? While i too find PS to be a royal PITA for most jobs i've found painter and PSP to be quite easy and actually pleasant to use. They both also work really well even with the low end tablet inputs which at least for me is a hell of a lot nicer way to work than trying to deal with a mouse. you can pick up a tablet input at Monoprice for as low as $23 and get the big ten incher for $48 so it isn't like they are expensive. I gave one of the 10 inchers along with a copy of Painter for my youngest boy's BDay and he loves it. in windows 7 it all just works as smooth as butter and it allows him to really get fine detail in his drawing.
So you really ought to look at getting a pad input and Corel Painter or PSP. Even if you don't deal with photos that often it makes it a hell of a lot nicer experience and Adobe has always been a steeper learning curve, at least for me.
Uhhh...You CAN buy nicer screens for windows too you know billy, they just ain't cheap, kinda like how they ain't cheap when it comes to Apple either. Hell you can use an Apple cinema display if that is what melts your butter.
I don't know, maybe its just me, but frankly i don't see anything wrong with the new screens as long as you calibrate them. as you pointed out Win 7 has great ICC support and while I'm not a photoshop guy I do have a customer that does lots of graphics work (signs, logos, painting ex wives out of photos LOL!) and he is quite happy with the picture on windows 7 and a new 24 inch Dell monitor. in the end what he sees on the screen is what comes out the printer and isn't that what matters?
Actually you need to look up the way they rigged their compiler friend. if you ran a program through say GCC and then ran it on both a late model P3 and an early P4? The P3 would WIN by about 30%. If you ran the exact same code through the Intel compiler after I believe it was Apr of 2003? Then the P4 would win by as much as 45%.
The reason that was is their purposely look for a "Genuine" flag and if it isn't found drop the code through an unoptimized x87 routine that frankly is like something from 1993. It really ties a boat anchor to any code that is run on a non intel CPU. this is why you can't trust benchmarks anymore as it has come out nearly all the benchmarking software has been compiled using the Intel compiler so every. single. test. if run on intel gets the full SSE treatment and for a P3 or non Intel CPU its shitty code city.
so look up "Intel compiler rigging tests" into the search engine of your choice and see for yourself. Several programmers have run significant testing involving changing the CPUID and the results are pretty damning. You can take the same program on ANY Intel machine and by changing the flag to authentic AMD you can watch it drop by nearly half performance wise. How in the hell they were allowed to get away with that can only be in my mind through the same way they controlled the OEM market, bribery. Frankly it couldn't be clearer if Intel made every program compiled with its compiler display Goatse if you have a non Intel approved CPU.
Bingo! If you had WDM ONLY all was gravy. if you had a mix of VxD and WDM (which is what the majority of OEM WinME installs were) then BAM! hell with my late sis' ME you could set your watch by it, exactly 23 minutes after startup it would crash even if you didn't do a thing to it and just left it on the desktop. IIRC there was also a timer bug that would cause WinME to crash hard if left on for a week as the clock timer would slowly but surely eat all available memory.
As for TFA while XP was and still is a great OS after SP2, and the X64 version frankly was kick ass, I'm glad I've finally got the last of my customers and family over to Windows 7. Its more stable, has a much nicer GUI thanks to breadcrumbs and jumplists along with integrated search, better drivers, all in all its just a better OS. XP was good but frankly PCs have come a hell of a long way since XP was released and the old gal just wasn't as good at managing the large resources we have now. When XP came out sub 1Ghz single cores with 256Mb of RAM or less was the order of the day and at its peak the amount of machines I saw with what I called the "standard XP setup' of 2.0-3.0Ghz P4 with 512Mb and 40Gb HDD was just nuts. But now we are dealing with as many as 8 cores on the desktop, 2Gb seems to be the minimum on RAM with 4-8gb becoming more common every day, the old gal just wasn't built for that.
Time to say thanks for the memories and then put XP out to pasture. I think we'll all agree X64 is the way to go, not only for the extra RAM but for the extra registers. XP was great for its time, and I still have an old socket 754 XP machine I use as a download box and nettop but when even my netbook comes with win 7 X64 its time to face the fact that the days of XP are coming to an end. XP X64 still makes a great file server and nettop though, its a damned shame they didn't push that OS when it first came out, it was and is pretty nice.
That would be wonderful but i just don't see it happening, the 1% like the guys on top of Verizon thanks to Citizens United can just pay off any lawmakers and get immunity. I mean when they didn't bust intel who frankly made MSFT's actions that got them busted look like choirboys? I mean if rigging the most used compiler to send any chip they don't approve of (including their own P3 to make the P4 look like a decent product) through the ringer by forcing all math to use x87 mode (which has been depreciated for nearly 15 years) while bribing the ENTIRE PC OEM INDUSTRY so badly that one CEO compared their bribes to cocaine and STILL they don't get busted? really?
Hell with today's climate they could replace the default picture on all Verizon phones with goatse and would probably have a line of politicians standing up to applaud and tell them how wonderful they were for teaching the public about the importance of rectal exams!
Lets face it, they'll just get a puny fine that isn't even 1/20th they make on the screwjob, just so the bribed officials can claim they "did something about it" and they'll slip the congress critters a check while writing their fines off on their taxes! This is why we are gonna end up (I would argue we are already) on the short bus to the information superhighway while Asia rolls out supernetworks.
And i'm strictly a layman sky gazer so apologies if I don't use the right terminology. 1.-What would you say our risk level for NEOs is? I know we make fun of the Naburu or whatever that crazy rogue planet thing is called but last I heard we had only mapped about 2% of the sky and with all that space it does make me wonder if we would actually see a NEO that was a danger before it was too late to do anything, and as a follow up 2.- If we were to spot a NEO that was a danger do you believe we could divert it with our current technology, if so how so? Gravity tractor, using nukes as shockwaves to divert, maybe solar sails? How far away would the NEO have to be detected at for these to work?
Again I apologize if I didn't use the exact terminology, just an average Joe who like looking at the stars and Jupiter through a friend's 6 foot telescope and these things I have been wondering. Thanks for your time and keep up with the debunking!
Oh I'm not saying the initial setup wouldn't be costly and bugs wouldn't need to be worked out, i'm saying we are already paying for this as "make work" simply because the wages they pay are so damned low one couldn't realistically feed themselves and get to work on what they pay, so it is YOU and I who are paying in government assistance. it is classic "make work" because if they HAD to pay a living wage? Then suddenly the costs you mentioned look a hell of a lot more feasible
BTW did you know that when you start at Walmart one of their training videos is how to get on food stamps and other government assistance? It has gotten to the point the corps consider government assistance for the workers to be as SOP as teaching them how to lock up. It is THAT, that right there, that will ultimately be the final nail. you simply can't have a nation of fast food workers and still get enough in taxes to pay government assistance, as the exploding debt proves.
In the end many workers are ONLY cheaper than the machine because the government makes it so and when that dole ends suddenly those machines will be a LOT more attractive. sure it will cost for the initial setup but once the bugs are ironed out? All you need is ONE functioning system and you can then make endless copies. And again with smart machines you won't need brain trusts to service them, you'll have parts monkeys that do what the machine tells them to. The few employees left will be controlled by machine, probably with headsets (like in a sci-fi i once read years ago) and you will have ONE guy servicing DOZENS of machines. in my own area a factory that once employed over 5000 is now run by less than 20 guys. THAT is the future, and unless we are gonna be Luddites and smash the machines it is simply unavoidable.
Let me put it THIS way: what would YOU do with the millions of unemployed that currently have no place in a technological society? not everyone can be educated and there are more unemployed college grads than ever before. what would YOU do with these people? with their families? Short of a final solution SOMETHING has to be done with them, because the poor simply won't go quietly into that good night, the Arab Springs have shown that. I'd say the only reason we don't have our own Arab Spring now is the dole keeping the poor docile but that is unsustainable. so what would YOU do to fix it?
Frankly the locking the living hell out of it with DRM (which should stand for "doesn't really matter" as all the pre-cracked X360s on CL should attest to) makes them pretty damned worthless at least for me. Years after the DC was EOLed my boys were having a blast with my Dreamcast thanks to how easy it was to load emulators on. it was a hell of a lot more fun for us to sit around playing the classic genesis and SNES games without digging the old consoles out the closet and blowing on carts. and the original Xbox was cool as hell. you could load XBMC and turn it into a hell of a media center, run all kinds of emulators and other cool stuff, it really gave you value for your money.
Now with the DRMtasic crap you have all this killer hardware that COULD be doing cool ideas that the console makers never thought of but its too crippled. Even Sony who i thought had 'gotten it" with OtherOS first crippled it by not allowing GPU access before throwing the banhammer on it.
That is why many of my customers have had me building them HTPCs. with wireless controllers they play games great, the AMD chips and boards are cheap enough you can build a nice one REALLY cheap, and when they are not playing games it can do so much more, from office work to transcoding to giving you a way to enjoy the net when the wife won't let go of the den PC because she's on farmville. If anyone hasn't tried it Lenovo makes a kick ass remote for HTPCs for less than $30 with a keyboard and trackball that if you are able to text on your phone works great for messaging when you don't feel like having the full wireless keyboard on your lap.
so while i think consoles will probably have their place for another generation or two at least where I'm sitting a lot of folks seem to be moving away from the things. even the last big holdout we had here, the frats and dorms of the local college, seems to be moving away. Now my oldest and all his buds just relax in the leisure areas with their netbooks and laptops having tournaments or raiding together in some MMO. with the AMD Radeon laptops/netbooks along with the atom + ION so cheap everybody and their dog has one and since they need them for class anyway everybody has it with them. I think mobile will eventually take a lot of the console market, between the cheap 1080p netbooks and the cells having higher and higher quality GPUs folks just don't seem to be as hot on the consoles anymore, at least not around here.
If they have to do all of that? Its pointless there are easier ways to pwn a machine. For Windows its as easy as "ZOMG! You got teh viruz! Run "Iz_Not_Viruz_iz_Cleaner.exe' to kill it ZOMG!" or "U want teh tittez and lezbos? We got teh tittez and lezbos and so can u! Just run "Iz_Not_Bug_iz_Codec.exe' and enjoy all teh tittez and lezbos today!" and for Linux the social engineering is a little different but idea is the same and the end result is a pwned machine, see the KDE screensaver malware that went around a couple of years back, or the infected Q III arena code that actually was sitting on one of the repos being passed out for quite awhile before it got caught.
In the end it would simply be easier to get the user to help pwn the machine FOR you than jump through this many hoops. Hell between social engineering, adobe products, and "JavaScript malware o' the day" there are now more than ever far easier ways to make a machine yours than deal with THIS much hoop jumping, it simply wouldn't be worth the effort if you can't somehow automate it.
Because how many people A.-Want to do the work installing the thing, and B.- Even know how to set it up, much less make it run decently?
I get paid decently well to build computers. This is something they could easily do themselves, hell there are step by step pictures with all the new motherboards, or they could buy a prebuilt from Dell and save some money, so why do they pay me? Because they would rather pay than deal with the bullshit, either the bullshit of DIYing or the bullshit of cleaning all the crap on your average Dell PC. With me they hand me the money, tell me what they want on it and like subway i build it fresh just for them, with the hardware and software customized for what they intend to do with it. The print shop has me load their graphics and printer software, the engineer his solidworks, and for joe and Jane average I have all the codecs, a full free AV, all the tweaks and settings are done, I even add the user accounts if they tell me how many will be using it.
I take out the bullshit and folks are willing to pay for that and the same goes here. How many could find a Snapdragon ARM based netbook that will even run AROS? Hoe about a tegra dual or quad? How much time would you waste finding the hardware, getting it set up, and dealing with the shit that didn't work? I know that at my average $35 an hour it really wouldn't take long for the bullshit to cost more than paying someone else to do it and THAT, that right there, is how they can carve out a niche. i might enjoy an Amiga netbook but I sure as fuck wouldn't go through the trouble of setting it all up and getting it working and i'm sure many feel the same.
Watch how simple that is to solve. you have a touch screen, you choose what you want based on combo or on individual ingredients, in your own language of course, and a robotic female voice reads back what you have chosen and says "If this is correct, please press 1, if incorrect please press cancel and try again" and voila! Its done. and you wouldn't need full industrial bots for the majority of the stuff, a simple assembly line could take care of it. Meat goes on belt through cooker and then rolls out onto bun, bun as it rolls down its own belt gets your choices placed in premeasured doses, it would all be even more perfectly uniform than anything you could ever hope for. a burger in Boston would be EXACTLY the same as a burger in Batesville.
Now imagine how many jobs are being done by third world peasants which if it weren't for being allowed to pollute and treat 'em like shit could just as easily be done by machine. Clothes? shoes? all could be done by machine, just as we've had looms for ages that could weave any pattern you want. hell have you sen the "food printer" MIT is working on? You pick from a menu and it builds and cooks the food in minutes. From what I've read they have veggies down but meat is still being tricky on the texture but they're working on it.
Here are some simple facts: 1.-The world is at 7 billion and growing. 2.-The average IQ is 105. 3.- We have a HUGE and growing underclass, many of whom are having trouble even feeding themselves or keeping a roof over their heads. 4.- We have pushed our young to get degrees while at the same time destroying any reason to actually have a degree with the combo of offshoring and H1-B and finally 5.- those that are only qualified for manual labor have had their jobs taken by illegals with the assistance and cooperation of the federal government, who has gone so far as to threaten states that try to uphold the law. Where once a manual labor could live a lower middle class life with a factory job now he'll be sleeping in his car.
These are BAD signs and I'd argue thgere is no way they will get ANYTHING but worse. you really only have TWO choices, one you can give away money to those that are increasingly left behind by having the government give them "make work" jobs, or you look to find a way that these people can live without working simply because there isn't a job where their skills are needed. BTW have you seen the robotic road builder they are testing in i believe its Korea? With GPS it goes from field to highway, all automated and controlled by computer. there is one more job that will not be needed. The machine don't get sick, get tired, get hurt, it doesn't think about moving up in life or have kids to feed, it don't take breaks or get holidays or get upset about not seeing its family, and over the long haul the machine can be cheaper simply because of all of the above. no 401k, no withholding, no need to plan breaks or worry it won't show up in the morning, and there is a hell of a lot less people that are even needed to service them anymore. Look at how the new blade servers load balance themselves, call the repairman when a part is failing and even tell him what he needs to replace? It won't be long before the admins are replaced by AI and parts monkeys. That's another job that will go from a 100,000 a year position to a 25k a year dead end. We just have more people than we need friend.
You are kinda leaving out a KEY fact there buddy, and that fact is this: Assange said if you want names redacted it will cost $200,000 to hire the staff to do the job otherwise the men who committed those warcrimes would be dead of old age before anything got released.
If YOU were handed more than a half a million REPORTS, not pages, reports, sometimes hundreds of pages long, and it was only you and a couple of volunteers do YOU think you could actually get the work done before dying of old age?
So if you are gonna make a statement at least make it a true one. Assange said he didn't have the staffing required to redact such a huge number, he even asked for help, and he simply didn't get it, so he released. in his shoes looking at Obama wanting to escalate again? i'd have done the same thing. in a perfect world he would have been able to redact the docs in a week because he would never be short staffed but the world ain't perfect friend and as many of us know sometimes you just gotta do the best you can with what you got.
There are many things you can legitimately nail Assange on, big ego, not really a people person (most geeky types aren't I've found), likes the spotlight, but I'd argue not redacting ain't one of them. Would you have rather had Obama get his "all troops have a get out of Iraq free card' when it comes to warcrimes? Just the fact that he had the balls to want that made me sick, it was an insult to all the guys like my grandfather that fought in WWII and did their damnedest to follow the rules.
People make money with a "free" OS every single day, so why not Amiga? all those failed businesses prove is that they had lousy business plans, that's all. if it were me I have NO doubt i could make it profitable. Oh I wouldn't be making no dell or HP money, but enough to pay my bills and keep a few employees working? its doable.
I would port the UI and "feel" if not the whole OS over to ARM and be looking at a "triple threat" approach. you would have the 1Ghz snapdragon single core for your entry level Amiga netbook, probably with 512Mb but upgrade-able to 1Gb of RAM, for the midrange a dual core Tegra tablet/netbook convertible with a low end SSD and probably 2Gb of RAM, and for the high end a Kal El Tegra quad core convertible with docking station and 4Gb of the fastest DDR3 and a lightning fast SSD.
That would give them a price point for every market, from sub $300 up, give the users as well as enthusiasts plenty to be excited about and by having an entry model you could probably help spur new app development as well. Finally I'd set up an app store with VERY developer friendly pricing and rules (probably something like a 90%-10% split in favor of devs) and make it clear that like Red hat the money you spend helps to make a better product and community.
Frankly I think it could sell, again not some iDevice breakaway best seller, but enough to keep a roof over your head and keep your employees from living in their cars. Its just gonna take someone at the head of the company that can see things long term and have vision, which sadly is all too rare in the business world right now.
Thank you, this is something that has been bothering me for a loooong time. We used to be about INVESTING and now its all about HFT and quick flips. What this does is distort the market and set unreasonable goals, so that any company that isn't cranking out profits to make the quarterly earnings gets hammered. you can't build the business, as any expense will cause your stock to fall. like I said i have NO doubt if a company announced they fired all the workers and that saved X billion so they made double the QER expectations their stocks would go through the roof!
And i'll have to remember that phrase of yours, as it describes it better than I've ever seen...slash and burn capitalism. it fits perfectly, because just as we had valuable rain-forest, which properly managed could have given us lifesaving drugs and other advances, were turned into deserts simply so one could get burgers cheaper (thus making more money for the parent corp) so too have we seen solid long term business planning thrown in the trash for quick burns that make quick cash, even if they torpedo the company later. For an example look at Circuit City, whose stock jumped after announcing they got rid of their most expensive employees even though those employees were their top sales reps which after two quarters of riding the quick burn saw the company go in the shitter. Didn't matter as the day traders had done cashed out, the CxOs got their golden chutes, it was only the employees and the American taxpayer who got shafted.
Personally I think we'll have our own Arab spring, its only a matter of time. Voting is now worthless, as BOTH sides ignore the people who elect them for their bribing corp masters, wall street has gutted the middle class and won't stop until the USA is a third world nation, our infrastructure is falling apart, we went from being the Internet leaders to a bad joke with speed worse than Romania, hell i could go on all day.
And what i think will be the final nail in the coffin for capitalism as a system is the simple fact that the machines can do it better and the musical chairs we have been playing for the last century is about to run out with the majority not having a seat. We ALL know that every single fast food joint could be replaced by a modern assembly line tomorrow, yes? its only the government subsidizing the pathetic wages with assistance that allows these companies to employ humans. make them pay a living wage and they would all be robotic by the end of next year.All we have done by stressing 'education at all costs!" is make more and more of our young people trapped under debts they will NEVER be able to pay, because the jobs simply aren't there. they simply aren't needed. What are you gonna do, make everyone a CxO? and the average IQ is just 105, that simply isn't enough to be a rocket scientist, not that we'd need millions of rocket scientists anyway.
Nope I predict just like communism and every other ism that has come and gone so too has capitalism had its day. the difference between the top and bottom has never been wider in history and short of winning the lotto most will never rise above their current level. We've created a serf class only we don't need serfs anymore and thanks to offshoring those degrees are quickly being only useful for wiping your broke ass behind. we have too many people, not enough jobs, and with our rapid advancing tech most of those jobs simply aren't needed. I bet if it wasn't for cheap third world labor the majority of our products would be assembled by machines now, but playing "dump the misery and pollution on the third world" is simply delaying the inevitable, that's all. In the end our system has to change, whether peacefully or by violent revolution things simply can't stay on their current path.
But i'm sure you'll agree that mobile is not only the future, its the present as well. i probably sell 5 laptops or netbooks for every desktop anymore, even folks that frankly won't ever go farther than a power cord will reach always seem to want laptops.
I'm sure Jobs saw this as well, and it isn't like apple didn't give IBM plenty of time to fix the problems but they simply couldn't. there is a reason why the POWER arch is only used by IBM for blades, its because along with speed it cranks out the heat, which is fine when you have some serious number crunching to do but i doubt those that still like Amiga will be trying to build the next video toaster out of the thing like they did in the old days.
Finally I'd point out that Kal El is a hell of a lot closer to the spirit of the original Amiga than the current PPC chips. what really set Amiga apart back then was its multithreading and GPU capability while not needing fans that sound like an F16 taxiing on the runway which Kal El fits better than PPC. While i'm not saying it would be a trivial task if these guys are serious about keeping Amiga alive (which I assume getting this far they love the OS like the fans do) then they really need to be on ARM to secure its future.
I have a feeling that desktops are gonna end up being more workstations/ gaming rigs than everyday appliances, at least from what i'm seeing here at the shop, and folks are more willing to give new mobile devices a fair shake than desktops. if they come up with a cool amiga based ARM netbook or convertable they could actually carve out a niche for themselves, but with a PPC they'll be locked into desktops and that appears to be a flat growth sector. ARM just makes more sense from a technical, power efficiency, and cost standpoint IMHO. Oh and from what I've seen you ain't getting PPC chips at affordable prices friend, they tend to be more than a little on the high side.
That is why I have been saying for years we need to have a minimum on the amount of time you can flip a stock, say have 90% capital gains for the first 24 hours, 80% for the first quarter, etc, so that Wall Street will stop being Vegas with nicer clothes. All this sub millisecond trading has made the entire western business world into one giant "fuck everything but the quarterly earnings report!" which is how we end up on the short bus. new lines don't get laid, new buildings don't get built, hell i bet if you fired everyone the stock would go through the roof!
We need to make stocks about INVESTING again and not gambling and quick flips which is what it is now. Reward companies for thinking long term instead of this "fuck everything" attitude. otherwise whileAsia builds out capacity and thinks big picture we'll get to enjoy higher prices while our shit falls around our ears. TFA is just another example of how instead of building more capacity they take it and let their shit get behind. I know in my area the big duopoly hasn't moved a single inch in nearly 20 years, even though the city has grown by nearly double since that time. Now there are sections of downtown that can't get any high speed, similar to what i saw in parts of Nashville a couple of years back. nobody builds anymore and that will leave us without a chair at the table in the future if we aren't careful.
For those on a chromium based browser (I'm using dragon but any chromium based will work) I'd suggest a little extension called readability redux which turns this irritating as hell "Hey lets spread it over more than a dozen pages to get more adviews!" crapola into a single page, it even lets you set the size so everything is nice and easy to read like a newspaper.
as for TFA whomever came up with a camera dock so you can work your iPod from across the room? A little too much time on their hands methinks.
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I hate to break it to ya, but what Jobs did was appeal to vanity. Everybody WANTS to be rich, or at least make OTHERS feel they are doing better than them. Its called keeping up with the Joneses and living next to what used to be an Apple heavy college (it isn't anymore because Jobs missed a crucial market, the college kids. They found the iPad couldn't really do schoolwork and nobody wanted to risk something as expensive as an Air to lug to class so netbooks and small laptops have taken over) and I have actually watched a couple of guys nearly come to blows over which was "cooler" the air or the top o' the line MBP.
Now don't get me wrong, not saying the man didn't make quality gear because he obviously did, just look at what happened to the Gap when they tried to keep prices high while selling poor quality products. But you have to admit a LOT of what made Apple under Steve was the IMAGE he projected of the company, the whole "cool wealthy thinks outside the box" image he pushed with the think different and Mac VS PC ads. Its no different than how Porsche tried to sell an entry level car and found ALL their sales tank. if Porsche wasn't expensive then their customers simply didn't want it.
let me put it THIS way, can you picture ANY other brand where one could sell a mobile app that simply shown a red jewel and said "I'm rich" and costs $10,000 and actually SELL ANY of them at all? Can you picture that on Android? WinPhone? To say such a thing with those brands sounds like a bad joke, but Apple? frankly it doesn't even sound far fetched.
Actually 5 will get you 10 when all is said and done it'll come down to a little thing called DirectX. As we all know DirectX 10 and 11 weren't backported to XP because they were calling parts of the new WPF that would have been a royal bitch to rewrite for XP (there is a hacked DirectX 10 beta for XP and i've tried it but frankly its buggy as hell) and i'm willing to bet my last dollar they are using DirectX to speed rendering and any video.
For those of us that's seen the Metro UI, which i personally think is gonna bomb HARD as i've shown the screencaps to over 120 customer so far and have YET to get a SINGLE positive comment about Metro, whereas those i showed 7 before it was released all wanted to know about features and what it could do, anyway for those that have seen film of metro in action they are using these little 'auto-updating" windows in the "desktop" that will have all kinds of feeds from weather to video, i bet my last dollar its all IE with DirectX under the hood which is why its tied in so deep and can't be backported. They do something similar with their Internet TV in windows 7 which uses IE and Adobe Flash tied together with some DirectX glue which you can tell by removing IE Flash or watching your GPU usage through the AMD System Monitor (don't know if there's a tool for Nvidia and Intel that shows how much load is GPU and how much CPU)
Personally i think windows 8 is gonna be the new Vista turkey and Windows 7 the new XP. I only hope this will be the final nail in the coffin for the sweaty monkey and the board will make him 'pursue other interests' as he makes the Pepsi guy look competent. That guy just doesn't have a fucking clue how to run a company and if he wasn't Bill's buddy from back in the day his ass would have never gotten past PHB middle management. kin, Zune, Vista, rushing the X360 when it had a fatal flaw, the man's resume is one clusterfuck after another and only the Office team being brought in saved Windows 7. Now I bet anything that Windows 8 Metro bullshit is HIS baby, its his classic "Me too, oooh me too!" badly done Apple ripoff that is just his style. at least Apple has the common sense not to try to stick iOS on the MBP, but someone forgot to give the sweaty monkey the memo.
Instead you are gonna throw away all the hard work the office guys did for Windows 7 by tying IE so damned tightly to the bowels of the OS that a single bug will slaughter the thing, all so Ballmer can have his own iPad OS bling bling nightmare on the desktop. are you listening Linux guys? you blew one shot with Vista DO NOT fucking blow it! We retailers want a simple as hell, all GUI, net friendly OS that is easy peasy for grandma and NO CLI. Hell you ALREADY have the basic idea with Expressgate/Splashtop, which is GUItasic and fast as hell. Write a ton of apps for it, make sure it works on the "80%" hardware, that the big three GPUs along with Realtek, SiS, Broadcom, Sigmatel and Aetheros and you guys could seriously kick some ass. This is your shot, and probably your last as i doubt the monkey will survive another epic fail, so do NOT miss, okay?
yep as it is a third party freeware app that uses its own DB file and not the indexing service. Although why you'd kill indexing is beyond me, I have 3Tb loaded with stuff and just set indexing to only be on the places where indexing would matter and not take forever, like my movie collection and documents.
Exactly, its no different than all the "Will (insert new Linux thing) finally bring about Linux on the desktop?" or variations thereof, or the "Here is another Windows article on Windows (insert number or just general OS)" as its pretty common knowledge a good flame war generates a hell of a lot of comments and that translates into a hell of a lot of ad views. hell sites like El Reg and Winsupersite and anything by Nichols are practically nothing BUT giant pieces of trollbait to crank up the flames. Its just business folks, nothing personal.
As for TFA here is basically everything you need to know about Jobs summed into a single sentence "Steve jobs was an asshole with very good taste". and just like every other rich tech guy that is both loved and hated, Gates, Ellison, etc he was in the right place at the right time with the right product and had the brains to capitalize on it. you'd think that would be easy once you had the hit but that is actually the hard part and why there are very few that have had the staying power of Gates, Jobs, and Ellison, because they tend to lose sight of the forest for the trees and shoot themselves right in the head. See DBASE, Netscape (which i'm sure some will try to blame on IE but as someone who lived it NS4 killed Netscape, it was the buggiest POS I'd ever had the misfortune of using) Commodore, Atari, etc for examples. Hell we nearly saw that with Apple thanks to the Pepsi guy and if they aren't careful Ballmer and his "Me too! Ooooh me too!" stupidity like giving Win 8 a cell phone UI may do the same to MSFT.
in the end it all comes down to being able to capitalize on that big break and having the brains not to kill the company and like him or hate him jobs did have the brains and the vision to not only build a corp from nothing but to basically have to do it all over again after years of mismanagement and managed to turn it into one of the biggest companies on the planet. Even though I don't use Apple products I give credit where credit is due and the man definitely knew his shit.
How EXACTLY is that a troll? you see THIS, this right here, is what has been bugging the shit out of me lately with regards to science, the fact that certain ideas or studies are not allowed because they aren't PC or go against dogma. I thought dogma was the place of religion not science?
In science there should be NO theory that is taboo, none. They should be able to come up with a theory, test it, present their findings and either the scientific community runs further studies that finds those results invalid, inconclusive, or if they are correct then studies should be done to find out WHY those results are the way they are.
I always thought this is how we progress folks. if someone does studies that conclude blacks have lower IQ or there are faults in the AGW theory or whatever they should be treated no different than any other scientist presently conclusions. the community should do further studies to prove or disprove their findings and then we go from there. If it were me and it was shown blacks had consistently lower scores in IQ tests I'd personally want to know WHY that is instead of screaming or playing the racism card which gets us nowhere. I'd instead be asking questions like "Is it the diet? environmental causes? Is it the discouragement of education by certain sections of the black community bringing scores down for the whole?".
But instead we just get the race card and PC bullshit like instead of teaching the uneducated how to speak correctly claiming Ebonics is a legitimate language. sadly the last lines in this this song seems to be the way we are going, with everything sacrificed on the alter of PC. Kinda sad if you ask me that questions can't be asked without screams and pulling the race card even in the scientific community at the start of the 21st century.
Are ALL the sticks matched? And I DO mean ALL the sticks, because I've run into that on some boards. its the reason i prefer the ECS business class boards whenever possible as they'll happily deal with any combo when it comes to RAM. Also look into whether your board is in ganged or unganged mode as i've found certain boards prefer one or the other depending on the sticks. Finally as another poster pointed out look to see if there are BIOS updates and run a Memtest Can be found in the Win 7 control panel or on the win 7 DVD under recovery, or if you prefer the classic Memtestx86 you can download ultimate boot CD for free.
While I hope that one of the above helps you in the end you may just have a picky little bitch of a board and would be better off swapping it out. Personally i'd go for an ECS business class with 4 slots and an AMD Thuban 6 core, since the new socket came out those have been going for pretty cheap and the ECS boards aren't picky at all. I even scored a couple of 2Gb "OCed from the factory" Patriot sticks real cheap and for shits and giggle threw it in my spare two slots, fully expecting it not to run, but the ECS board just automatically underclocked them to a speed both they and my DDR 800 would run at and happily booted up, been purring like a kitten ever since. I've used a lot of ECS boards for industrial and construction businesses and those things take a hell of a lot of abuse, just really solid business boards.
I don't know about his reg tweaks since according to everything I've read that functionality was removed but don't you worry none friend, old hairyfeet knows how to get around that little PITA and actually give you MORE functionality than it had under XP!
What you need to do is go here and download this little handy dandy freeware tool. this baby will not only remember from 300-10,000 folders (user configurable) but you can even save multiple folders as workspaces and then call them all back up to the original position and view you had set up with a single click! Quite handy when you need multiple folders set certain ways for certain tasks, i found it just wonderful for when i'm editing my multitrack recordings. Just pin it to your tasklists and keep her running, it only uses a few hundred Kb of RAM.
So don't worry friend, there is always more than one way to skin that kitty in Windows!
Actually you are partially incorrect. while its true that Metro is a serious clusterfuck of a UI (I've shown the screencaps to over 120 customers so far and NOT A SINGLE ONE liked the look or thought they would want to try it. The closest I got to an endorsement was this exchange "That is a nice looking cell phone screen, what kind of cell phone is it? Is it Android? i've heard those are quite nice....what do you mean Windows? Windows what? why that's just stupid! Why would I want a cell phone for my desktop?") there is also a "classic mode" which you can see in some of the developer's presentation which is just the Windows 7 GUI with a square start button instead of round and from what I've heard a simple registry change makes it default.
So actually in this case with BOTH Windows and ubuntu you don't have to take the clusterfuck UI, although I hear its more of a PITA to strip out unity and get something decent running than it is to just run Xubuntu or Kubuntu in the first place. Personally if it were me I'd be looking at Vector Linux which not only has 6 versions tailored for what kind of machine you want to run it on, from ultra light live to workstation, but they also have a "KDE Classic' version that has a fully updated KDE 3 as the default DE. I've been playing with it and its pretty nice, especially the light live for older laptops.
Question: Have you tried any of the Corel offerings like Painter or Pain Shop pro? While i too find PS to be a royal PITA for most jobs i've found painter and PSP to be quite easy and actually pleasant to use. They both also work really well even with the low end tablet inputs which at least for me is a hell of a lot nicer way to work than trying to deal with a mouse. you can pick up a tablet input at Monoprice for as low as $23 and get the big ten incher for $48 so it isn't like they are expensive. I gave one of the 10 inchers along with a copy of Painter for my youngest boy's BDay and he loves it. in windows 7 it all just works as smooth as butter and it allows him to really get fine detail in his drawing.
So you really ought to look at getting a pad input and Corel Painter or PSP. Even if you don't deal with photos that often it makes it a hell of a lot nicer experience and Adobe has always been a steeper learning curve, at least for me.
Uhhh...You CAN buy nicer screens for windows too you know billy, they just ain't cheap, kinda like how they ain't cheap when it comes to Apple either. Hell you can use an Apple cinema display if that is what melts your butter.
I don't know, maybe its just me, but frankly i don't see anything wrong with the new screens as long as you calibrate them. as you pointed out Win 7 has great ICC support and while I'm not a photoshop guy I do have a customer that does lots of graphics work (signs, logos, painting ex wives out of photos LOL!) and he is quite happy with the picture on windows 7 and a new 24 inch Dell monitor. in the end what he sees on the screen is what comes out the printer and isn't that what matters?
Actually you need to look up the way they rigged their compiler friend. if you ran a program through say GCC and then ran it on both a late model P3 and an early P4? The P3 would WIN by about 30%. If you ran the exact same code through the Intel compiler after I believe it was Apr of 2003? Then the P4 would win by as much as 45%.
The reason that was is their purposely look for a "Genuine" flag and if it isn't found drop the code through an unoptimized x87 routine that frankly is like something from 1993. It really ties a boat anchor to any code that is run on a non intel CPU. this is why you can't trust benchmarks anymore as it has come out nearly all the benchmarking software has been compiled using the Intel compiler so every. single. test. if run on intel gets the full SSE treatment and for a P3 or non Intel CPU its shitty code city.
so look up "Intel compiler rigging tests" into the search engine of your choice and see for yourself. Several programmers have run significant testing involving changing the CPUID and the results are pretty damning. You can take the same program on ANY Intel machine and by changing the flag to authentic AMD you can watch it drop by nearly half performance wise. How in the hell they were allowed to get away with that can only be in my mind through the same way they controlled the OEM market, bribery. Frankly it couldn't be clearer if Intel made every program compiled with its compiler display Goatse if you have a non Intel approved CPU.
Bingo! If you had WDM ONLY all was gravy. if you had a mix of VxD and WDM (which is what the majority of OEM WinME installs were) then BAM! hell with my late sis' ME you could set your watch by it, exactly 23 minutes after startup it would crash even if you didn't do a thing to it and just left it on the desktop. IIRC there was also a timer bug that would cause WinME to crash hard if left on for a week as the clock timer would slowly but surely eat all available memory.
As for TFA while XP was and still is a great OS after SP2, and the X64 version frankly was kick ass, I'm glad I've finally got the last of my customers and family over to Windows 7. Its more stable, has a much nicer GUI thanks to breadcrumbs and jumplists along with integrated search, better drivers, all in all its just a better OS. XP was good but frankly PCs have come a hell of a long way since XP was released and the old gal just wasn't as good at managing the large resources we have now. When XP came out sub 1Ghz single cores with 256Mb of RAM or less was the order of the day and at its peak the amount of machines I saw with what I called the "standard XP setup' of 2.0-3.0Ghz P4 with 512Mb and 40Gb HDD was just nuts. But now we are dealing with as many as 8 cores on the desktop, 2Gb seems to be the minimum on RAM with 4-8gb becoming more common every day, the old gal just wasn't built for that.
Time to say thanks for the memories and then put XP out to pasture. I think we'll all agree X64 is the way to go, not only for the extra RAM but for the extra registers. XP was great for its time, and I still have an old socket 754 XP machine I use as a download box and nettop but when even my netbook comes with win 7 X64 its time to face the fact that the days of XP are coming to an end. XP X64 still makes a great file server and nettop though, its a damned shame they didn't push that OS when it first came out, it was and is pretty nice.
That would be wonderful but i just don't see it happening, the 1% like the guys on top of Verizon thanks to Citizens United can just pay off any lawmakers and get immunity. I mean when they didn't bust intel who frankly made MSFT's actions that got them busted look like choirboys? I mean if rigging the most used compiler to send any chip they don't approve of (including their own P3 to make the P4 look like a decent product) through the ringer by forcing all math to use x87 mode (which has been depreciated for nearly 15 years) while bribing the ENTIRE PC OEM INDUSTRY so badly that one CEO compared their bribes to cocaine and STILL they don't get busted? really?
Hell with today's climate they could replace the default picture on all Verizon phones with goatse and would probably have a line of politicians standing up to applaud and tell them how wonderful they were for teaching the public about the importance of rectal exams!
Lets face it, they'll just get a puny fine that isn't even 1/20th they make on the screwjob, just so the bribed officials can claim they "did something about it" and they'll slip the congress critters a check while writing their fines off on their taxes! This is why we are gonna end up (I would argue we are already) on the short bus to the information superhighway while Asia rolls out supernetworks.
And i'm strictly a layman sky gazer so apologies if I don't use the right terminology. 1.-What would you say our risk level for NEOs is? I know we make fun of the Naburu or whatever that crazy rogue planet thing is called but last I heard we had only mapped about 2% of the sky and with all that space it does make me wonder if we would actually see a NEO that was a danger before it was too late to do anything, and as a follow up 2.- If we were to spot a NEO that was a danger do you believe we could divert it with our current technology, if so how so? Gravity tractor, using nukes as shockwaves to divert, maybe solar sails? How far away would the NEO have to be detected at for these to work?
Again I apologize if I didn't use the exact terminology, just an average Joe who like looking at the stars and Jupiter through a friend's 6 foot telescope and these things I have been wondering. Thanks for your time and keep up with the debunking!
Oh I'm not saying the initial setup wouldn't be costly and bugs wouldn't need to be worked out, i'm saying we are already paying for this as "make work" simply because the wages they pay are so damned low one couldn't realistically feed themselves and get to work on what they pay, so it is YOU and I who are paying in government assistance. it is classic "make work" because if they HAD to pay a living wage? Then suddenly the costs you mentioned look a hell of a lot more feasible
BTW did you know that when you start at Walmart one of their training videos is how to get on food stamps and other government assistance? It has gotten to the point the corps consider government assistance for the workers to be as SOP as teaching them how to lock up. It is THAT, that right there, that will ultimately be the final nail. you simply can't have a nation of fast food workers and still get enough in taxes to pay government assistance, as the exploding debt proves.
In the end many workers are ONLY cheaper than the machine because the government makes it so and when that dole ends suddenly those machines will be a LOT more attractive. sure it will cost for the initial setup but once the bugs are ironed out? All you need is ONE functioning system and you can then make endless copies. And again with smart machines you won't need brain trusts to service them, you'll have parts monkeys that do what the machine tells them to. The few employees left will be controlled by machine, probably with headsets (like in a sci-fi i once read years ago) and you will have ONE guy servicing DOZENS of machines. in my own area a factory that once employed over 5000 is now run by less than 20 guys. THAT is the future, and unless we are gonna be Luddites and smash the machines it is simply unavoidable.
Let me put it THIS way: what would YOU do with the millions of unemployed that currently have no place in a technological society? not everyone can be educated and there are more unemployed college grads than ever before. what would YOU do with these people? with their families? Short of a final solution SOMETHING has to be done with them, because the poor simply won't go quietly into that good night, the Arab Springs have shown that. I'd say the only reason we don't have our own Arab Spring now is the dole keeping the poor docile but that is unsustainable. so what would YOU do to fix it?
Frankly the locking the living hell out of it with DRM (which should stand for "doesn't really matter" as all the pre-cracked X360s on CL should attest to) makes them pretty damned worthless at least for me. Years after the DC was EOLed my boys were having a blast with my Dreamcast thanks to how easy it was to load emulators on. it was a hell of a lot more fun for us to sit around playing the classic genesis and SNES games without digging the old consoles out the closet and blowing on carts. and the original Xbox was cool as hell. you could load XBMC and turn it into a hell of a media center, run all kinds of emulators and other cool stuff, it really gave you value for your money.
Now with the DRMtasic crap you have all this killer hardware that COULD be doing cool ideas that the console makers never thought of but its too crippled. Even Sony who i thought had 'gotten it" with OtherOS first crippled it by not allowing GPU access before throwing the banhammer on it.
That is why many of my customers have had me building them HTPCs. with wireless controllers they play games great, the AMD chips and boards are cheap enough you can build a nice one REALLY cheap, and when they are not playing games it can do so much more, from office work to transcoding to giving you a way to enjoy the net when the wife won't let go of the den PC because she's on farmville. If anyone hasn't tried it Lenovo makes a kick ass remote for HTPCs for less than $30 with a keyboard and trackball that if you are able to text on your phone works great for messaging when you don't feel like having the full wireless keyboard on your lap.
so while i think consoles will probably have their place for another generation or two at least where I'm sitting a lot of folks seem to be moving away from the things. even the last big holdout we had here, the frats and dorms of the local college, seems to be moving away. Now my oldest and all his buds just relax in the leisure areas with their netbooks and laptops having tournaments or raiding together in some MMO. with the AMD Radeon laptops/netbooks along with the atom + ION so cheap everybody and their dog has one and since they need them for class anyway everybody has it with them. I think mobile will eventually take a lot of the console market, between the cheap 1080p netbooks and the cells having higher and higher quality GPUs folks just don't seem to be as hot on the consoles anymore, at least not around here.
If they have to do all of that? Its pointless there are easier ways to pwn a machine. For Windows its as easy as "ZOMG! You got teh viruz! Run "Iz_Not_Viruz_iz_Cleaner.exe' to kill it ZOMG!" or "U want teh tittez and lezbos? We got teh tittez and lezbos and so can u! Just run "Iz_Not_Bug_iz_Codec.exe' and enjoy all teh tittez and lezbos today!" and for Linux the social engineering is a little different but idea is the same and the end result is a pwned machine, see the KDE screensaver malware that went around a couple of years back, or the infected Q III arena code that actually was sitting on one of the repos being passed out for quite awhile before it got caught.
In the end it would simply be easier to get the user to help pwn the machine FOR you than jump through this many hoops. Hell between social engineering, adobe products, and "JavaScript malware o' the day" there are now more than ever far easier ways to make a machine yours than deal with THIS much hoop jumping, it simply wouldn't be worth the effort if you can't somehow automate it.
Because how many people A.-Want to do the work installing the thing, and B.- Even know how to set it up, much less make it run decently?
I get paid decently well to build computers. This is something they could easily do themselves, hell there are step by step pictures with all the new motherboards, or they could buy a prebuilt from Dell and save some money, so why do they pay me? Because they would rather pay than deal with the bullshit, either the bullshit of DIYing or the bullshit of cleaning all the crap on your average Dell PC. With me they hand me the money, tell me what they want on it and like subway i build it fresh just for them, with the hardware and software customized for what they intend to do with it. The print shop has me load their graphics and printer software, the engineer his solidworks, and for joe and Jane average I have all the codecs, a full free AV, all the tweaks and settings are done, I even add the user accounts if they tell me how many will be using it.
I take out the bullshit and folks are willing to pay for that and the same goes here. How many could find a Snapdragon ARM based netbook that will even run AROS? Hoe about a tegra dual or quad? How much time would you waste finding the hardware, getting it set up, and dealing with the shit that didn't work? I know that at my average $35 an hour it really wouldn't take long for the bullshit to cost more than paying someone else to do it and THAT, that right there, is how they can carve out a niche. i might enjoy an Amiga netbook but I sure as fuck wouldn't go through the trouble of setting it all up and getting it working and i'm sure many feel the same.
Watch how simple that is to solve. you have a touch screen, you choose what you want based on combo or on individual ingredients, in your own language of course, and a robotic female voice reads back what you have chosen and says "If this is correct, please press 1, if incorrect please press cancel and try again" and voila! Its done. and you wouldn't need full industrial bots for the majority of the stuff, a simple assembly line could take care of it. Meat goes on belt through cooker and then rolls out onto bun, bun as it rolls down its own belt gets your choices placed in premeasured doses, it would all be even more perfectly uniform than anything you could ever hope for. a burger in Boston would be EXACTLY the same as a burger in Batesville.
Now imagine how many jobs are being done by third world peasants which if it weren't for being allowed to pollute and treat 'em like shit could just as easily be done by machine. Clothes? shoes? all could be done by machine, just as we've had looms for ages that could weave any pattern you want. hell have you sen the "food printer" MIT is working on? You pick from a menu and it builds and cooks the food in minutes. From what I've read they have veggies down but meat is still being tricky on the texture but they're working on it.
Here are some simple facts: 1.-The world is at 7 billion and growing. 2.-The average IQ is 105. 3.- We have a HUGE and growing underclass, many of whom are having trouble even feeding themselves or keeping a roof over their heads. 4.- We have pushed our young to get degrees while at the same time destroying any reason to actually have a degree with the combo of offshoring and H1-B and finally 5.- those that are only qualified for manual labor have had their jobs taken by illegals with the assistance and cooperation of the federal government, who has gone so far as to threaten states that try to uphold the law. Where once a manual labor could live a lower middle class life with a factory job now he'll be sleeping in his car.
These are BAD signs and I'd argue thgere is no way they will get ANYTHING but worse. you really only have TWO choices, one you can give away money to those that are increasingly left behind by having the government give them "make work" jobs, or you look to find a way that these people can live without working simply because there isn't a job where their skills are needed. BTW have you seen the robotic road builder they are testing in i believe its Korea? With GPS it goes from field to highway, all automated and controlled by computer. there is one more job that will not be needed. The machine don't get sick, get tired, get hurt, it doesn't think about moving up in life or have kids to feed, it don't take breaks or get holidays or get upset about not seeing its family, and over the long haul the machine can be cheaper simply because of all of the above. no 401k, no withholding, no need to plan breaks or worry it won't show up in the morning, and there is a hell of a lot less people that are even needed to service them anymore. Look at how the new blade servers load balance themselves, call the repairman when a part is failing and even tell him what he needs to replace? It won't be long before the admins are replaced by AI and parts monkeys. That's another job that will go from a 100,000 a year position to a 25k a year dead end. We just have more people than we need friend.
You are kinda leaving out a KEY fact there buddy, and that fact is this: Assange said if you want names redacted it will cost $200,000 to hire the staff to do the job otherwise the men who committed those warcrimes would be dead of old age before anything got released.
If YOU were handed more than a half a million REPORTS, not pages, reports, sometimes hundreds of pages long, and it was only you and a couple of volunteers do YOU think you could actually get the work done before dying of old age?
So if you are gonna make a statement at least make it a true one. Assange said he didn't have the staffing required to redact such a huge number, he even asked for help, and he simply didn't get it, so he released. in his shoes looking at Obama wanting to escalate again? i'd have done the same thing. in a perfect world he would have been able to redact the docs in a week because he would never be short staffed but the world ain't perfect friend and as many of us know sometimes you just gotta do the best you can with what you got.
There are many things you can legitimately nail Assange on, big ego, not really a people person (most geeky types aren't I've found), likes the spotlight, but I'd argue not redacting ain't one of them. Would you have rather had Obama get his "all troops have a get out of Iraq free card' when it comes to warcrimes? Just the fact that he had the balls to want that made me sick, it was an insult to all the guys like my grandfather that fought in WWII and did their damnedest to follow the rules.
People make money with a "free" OS every single day, so why not Amiga? all those failed businesses prove is that they had lousy business plans, that's all. if it were me I have NO doubt i could make it profitable. Oh I wouldn't be making no dell or HP money, but enough to pay my bills and keep a few employees working? its doable.
I would port the UI and "feel" if not the whole OS over to ARM and be looking at a "triple threat" approach. you would have the 1Ghz snapdragon single core for your entry level Amiga netbook, probably with 512Mb but upgrade-able to 1Gb of RAM, for the midrange a dual core Tegra tablet/netbook convertible with a low end SSD and probably 2Gb of RAM, and for the high end a Kal El Tegra quad core convertible with docking station and 4Gb of the fastest DDR3 and a lightning fast SSD.
That would give them a price point for every market, from sub $300 up, give the users as well as enthusiasts plenty to be excited about and by having an entry model you could probably help spur new app development as well. Finally I'd set up an app store with VERY developer friendly pricing and rules (probably something like a 90%-10% split in favor of devs) and make it clear that like Red hat the money you spend helps to make a better product and community.
Frankly I think it could sell, again not some iDevice breakaway best seller, but enough to keep a roof over your head and keep your employees from living in their cars. Its just gonna take someone at the head of the company that can see things long term and have vision, which sadly is all too rare in the business world right now.
Thank you, this is something that has been bothering me for a loooong time. We used to be about INVESTING and now its all about HFT and quick flips. What this does is distort the market and set unreasonable goals, so that any company that isn't cranking out profits to make the quarterly earnings gets hammered. you can't build the business, as any expense will cause your stock to fall. like I said i have NO doubt if a company announced they fired all the workers and that saved X billion so they made double the QER expectations their stocks would go through the roof!
And i'll have to remember that phrase of yours, as it describes it better than I've ever seen...slash and burn capitalism. it fits perfectly, because just as we had valuable rain-forest, which properly managed could have given us lifesaving drugs and other advances, were turned into deserts simply so one could get burgers cheaper (thus making more money for the parent corp) so too have we seen solid long term business planning thrown in the trash for quick burns that make quick cash, even if they torpedo the company later. For an example look at Circuit City, whose stock jumped after announcing they got rid of their most expensive employees even though those employees were their top sales reps which after two quarters of riding the quick burn saw the company go in the shitter. Didn't matter as the day traders had done cashed out, the CxOs got their golden chutes, it was only the employees and the American taxpayer who got shafted.
Personally I think we'll have our own Arab spring, its only a matter of time. Voting is now worthless, as BOTH sides ignore the people who elect them for their bribing corp masters, wall street has gutted the middle class and won't stop until the USA is a third world nation, our infrastructure is falling apart, we went from being the Internet leaders to a bad joke with speed worse than Romania, hell i could go on all day.
And what i think will be the final nail in the coffin for capitalism as a system is the simple fact that the machines can do it better and the musical chairs we have been playing for the last century is about to run out with the majority not having a seat. We ALL know that every single fast food joint could be replaced by a modern assembly line tomorrow, yes? its only the government subsidizing the pathetic wages with assistance that allows these companies to employ humans. make them pay a living wage and they would all be robotic by the end of next year.All we have done by stressing 'education at all costs!" is make more and more of our young people trapped under debts they will NEVER be able to pay, because the jobs simply aren't there. they simply aren't needed. What are you gonna do, make everyone a CxO? and the average IQ is just 105, that simply isn't enough to be a rocket scientist, not that we'd need millions of rocket scientists anyway.
Nope I predict just like communism and every other ism that has come and gone so too has capitalism had its day. the difference between the top and bottom has never been wider in history and short of winning the lotto most will never rise above their current level. We've created a serf class only we don't need serfs anymore and thanks to offshoring those degrees are quickly being only useful for wiping your broke ass behind. we have too many people, not enough jobs, and with our rapid advancing tech most of those jobs simply aren't needed. I bet if it wasn't for cheap third world labor the majority of our products would be assembled by machines now, but playing "dump the misery and pollution on the third world" is simply delaying the inevitable, that's all. In the end our system has to change, whether peacefully or by violent revolution things simply can't stay on their current path.
But i'm sure you'll agree that mobile is not only the future, its the present as well. i probably sell 5 laptops or netbooks for every desktop anymore, even folks that frankly won't ever go farther than a power cord will reach always seem to want laptops.
I'm sure Jobs saw this as well, and it isn't like apple didn't give IBM plenty of time to fix the problems but they simply couldn't. there is a reason why the POWER arch is only used by IBM for blades, its because along with speed it cranks out the heat, which is fine when you have some serious number crunching to do but i doubt those that still like Amiga will be trying to build the next video toaster out of the thing like they did in the old days.
Finally I'd point out that Kal El is a hell of a lot closer to the spirit of the original Amiga than the current PPC chips. what really set Amiga apart back then was its multithreading and GPU capability while not needing fans that sound like an F16 taxiing on the runway which Kal El fits better than PPC. While i'm not saying it would be a trivial task if these guys are serious about keeping Amiga alive (which I assume getting this far they love the OS like the fans do) then they really need to be on ARM to secure its future.
I have a feeling that desktops are gonna end up being more workstations/ gaming rigs than everyday appliances, at least from what i'm seeing here at the shop, and folks are more willing to give new mobile devices a fair shake than desktops. if they come up with a cool amiga based ARM netbook or convertable they could actually carve out a niche for themselves, but with a PPC they'll be locked into desktops and that appears to be a flat growth sector. ARM just makes more sense from a technical, power efficiency, and cost standpoint IMHO. Oh and from what I've seen you ain't getting PPC chips at affordable prices friend, they tend to be more than a little on the high side.
That is why I have been saying for years we need to have a minimum on the amount of time you can flip a stock, say have 90% capital gains for the first 24 hours, 80% for the first quarter, etc, so that Wall Street will stop being Vegas with nicer clothes. All this sub millisecond trading has made the entire western business world into one giant "fuck everything but the quarterly earnings report!" which is how we end up on the short bus. new lines don't get laid, new buildings don't get built, hell i bet if you fired everyone the stock would go through the roof!
We need to make stocks about INVESTING again and not gambling and quick flips which is what it is now. Reward companies for thinking long term instead of this "fuck everything" attitude. otherwise whileAsia builds out capacity and thinks big picture we'll get to enjoy higher prices while our shit falls around our ears. TFA is just another example of how instead of building more capacity they take it and let their shit get behind. I know in my area the big duopoly hasn't moved a single inch in nearly 20 years, even though the city has grown by nearly double since that time. Now there are sections of downtown that can't get any high speed, similar to what i saw in parts of Nashville a couple of years back. nobody builds anymore and that will leave us without a chair at the table in the future if we aren't careful.
For those on a chromium based browser (I'm using dragon but any chromium based will work) I'd suggest a little extension called readability redux which turns this irritating as hell "Hey lets spread it over more than a dozen pages to get more adviews!" crapola into a single page, it even lets you set the size so everything is nice and easy to read like a newspaper.
as for TFA whomever came up with a camera dock so you can work your iPod from across the room? A little too much time on their hands methinks.