The only problem with the "judgement" you site is this: If you believe in a free market then its completely full of shit and here is why: If I have a product and I say 'If you buy from me you can't have a kitten" and reserve the right to check your house for kittehs? that is COMPLETELY WITHIN MY RIGHTS and you have NO right to tell me what I can and can't sell my product for. you have the right to accept, or to refuse, that's it.
If MSFT wanted to say "if you buy my product you can't have a discount and sell other companies products too?" that is COMPLETELY FINE and it is only activist judging to say otherwise. The free market says that as long as I don't ask for something that is illegal, such as to have your wife as a prostitute then I can set ANY conditions that I want, you are free to accept or refuse. that is one of the most basic core tenets of a free market.
What MSFT SHOULD have gotten busted for, and frankly what Intel should have gotten busted for as well, is the "It isn't done until lotus won't run" kind of bullshit, because that is rigging, pure and simple, and that is fraud. Both Intel rigging their compiler and MSFT rigging their OS should have been treated no differently than if Shell rigged their gas so if you bought from anyone other than Chevy you fouled your engine. Its using dirty tricks, plain and simple. same as Intel should have gotten busted for bribing the OEMs but NOT for setting terms in their sales that hurt AMD. if Intel wanted to say that PCs with Intel chips can only be blue? you are free to tell them no deal and walk away, that's it. when they start cutting checks under the table to OEMs is where they should have gotten busted.
You can believe what you want, but having the state set what terms you are allowed to offer with your product sets a BAD precedent in my book. What if some government bunch decides that contracts should be based on how "green" you are? Or whether you support unions? The free market comes down the the buyer and seller negotiating a price, at its core that is all capitalism is. if you subvert that badness happens. look at all the government meddling we've had in the housing markets, or bailing out wall Street for bad decisions.
Uhhh did you not just quote the fact that they have no choice in the matter as to support HDMI you have to support HDCP and if they compromise the DRM in HDCP then their keys get revoked and you can say goodbye to AMD?
That is like blaming MSFT because they have support for BD DRM built into Windows Vista and 7, or because they bought H.264 support for Win 7. If you don't use it then it NEVER gets turned on, but without it you have just cut a good chunk of the reason to have an HTPC right out. After all who would want an HTPC if you can't run HDMI?
And if you need support for the above tech you can still use the binary blob which is all you get from Nvidia so at least with AMD you have choice. So you are arguing choice is bad unless they break the law (DMCA says they can't break others encryption schemes legally) after they have ALREADY spent significant money in giving you the specs and paying developers to help the FOSS community?
Thanks. I usually use a tool called Easttec Eraser and use what is called a "quick two pass with verification" which I've found to be just about as fast as a single pass. it writes one set of zeroes followed by random numbers and then does a quick verification. So if what you are saying is true my method is overkill but should work no problem.
Anyway if anyone needs a quick Windows based wiper with a ton of options Easttec Eraser is pretty nice. I've been using it for a couple of years now and it gives you everything from one pass zeroes to DOD 3 to Bruce Scheneier's method to full Guttman, about 20 different ways to wipe data. It will even let you wipe slack space of existing files, although why one would want to do that exactly i'm not sure.
Exactly and IF it turns out to be true I really don't see the difference between this and the moves that got MSFT busted in the 90s. in both cases you have dominance in one arena (desktops and search respectively) being used to power their way into another market (browsers and shopping) which I believe would be a big no no under antitrust.
I have been wondering though about how google shopping does seem to always be towards the top and it smells funny to me. I mean be honest folks, how many of you have EVER bought anything from Google shopping? How many of you use Google shopping as your "go to" place for web shopping? I know for me its Amazon, Newegg and Tigerdirect, and if I just want price comparisons i use pricegrabber. i don't think I've ever used Yahoo or Google shopping for anything.
So unless there is a shitload of noobs somewhere shopping like mad with Google shopping it just smells "off" to me, but that's why there is an investigation, to see if it is off or not. But I have plenty of customers that do online shopping as well and frankly I can't recall a single one saying "Oh I got this from Google shopping" or Yahoo shopping either. Everyone just uses Amazon.
Oh please! like we haven't had like a bazillion browser bugs these past couple of years? And WHICH HTML V5, the H.264 HTML V5 or the Theora one or the WebM one?
And it amazes me how geeks here will sacrifice pretty much anything on the alter of cross compatibility with Linux. Have you TRIED HTML V5? try it on an older office machine or a new single core netbook, its a slideshow! And even on machines that it actually runs it sucks major resources. great way to kill batteries dead but most mobile users wouldn't be happy about that. compare to flash where even the 1.8GHz Sempron I use as a nettop and test bed for software for low power machines runs SD flash just beautifully. Hell I could add a $40 GPU and even go High Def.
So while I'm all for cross compatibility I don't want it if its gonna suck, which from what I've seen so far HTML V5 is gonna suck the big wet titty. there is just too much politics and too many with an agenda messing with it. Maybe in a decade they'll have the kinks worked out and the politics behind them it'll be good, but by then H.26x will be patent free so who will care.
They tried that with my mom, but apparently "mom logic" threw them so much they just sat there thinking about it for half a minute before saying a quick "thank you" and hanging up. When they said she had a bug mom told them "Oh I don't worry about such things, that is what having a geek son is for, along with paying for take out and driving me to the library". I guess that just didn't compute for them because she said they were just stunned for nearly a minute before giving up.
The question I have, which maybe someone who has read this book can answer, is this: Who is right, those that say you have to use Guttman and wipe a bazillion times, or the ones that say a simple zero out cleans a drive?
While I'm not worried about the MiB kicking my door i'm more worried about all the drives that end up coming through the shop. I get used drives from all over the place and usually just run a quick zero wipe and stuff it in a drawer, is that enough?
That wouldn't surprise me as from everything I've seen Bill Gates was brilliant but a right bastard and had NO problem crushing companies like bugs. Look at the whole drivespace/doublespace mess or Spyglass. But like Jobs you really have to give the man credit, if you haven't read it Microsoft's Yellow Road to Cairo is a great read as it shows how the man was able to control the entire tech sector with nothing but screenshots and bullshit which you do have to admit is pretty damned impressive. Sadly i'd take darth gates over the sweaty monkey any day of the week. Have you SEEN Win 8? Its a fricking cell phone UI for the desktop!
Anyway the Connor bug you are describing sounds EXACTLY like what I've run into, its always in the first dozen sectors and once Spinrite marks those as dead it'll work for years. i have a 200gb Seagate I've been using as a large flash drive for years that got bit by it. For whatever reason Windows just won't mark those as dead but having Spinrite go in and mark them seems to do the trick. The only diff between the bug i ran into and yours is these machines were run daily, it would just work fine one day and the next...nothing. It seemed to happen more after Seagate bought Maxtor so it may have been cheap rebadged Maxtors. That is why I'm glad i grabbed some Samsung drives before they are all gone. Their Ecogreen drives kick butt and actually score better on my benchmarks than 7200 RPM Seagates, probably thanks to the huge cache.
Anyway if the guy could find a copy of Norton 97 I'd say go for it, its just that I doubt seriously he'll actually find a copy of Norton 97. i know the Internet has a looong memory but most of the Win9x sites have been gone for half a decade and the old tools along with them. I probably have a copy on a CD somewhere, but since all my customers are either running XP or 7 it is kinda useless.
Who uses Fat32 or Win9x anymore?
Hell I don't think even more old junker machines have a floppy drive anymore, that is one tech I was damned glad died. Fussy buggy little bastards. When the first flash stick came out i happily paid nearly $80 for a 32mb stick just to get away from those POS floppies. Good riddance I say.
Because unless they changed to the Chrome model (which considering their aping the Chrome UI would be nice, but I haven't heard anything of it) you have to give users admin rights to install the thing, and most admins aren't gonna give every user on the network admin rights?
There is a simple way to see if their strategy is working, look at their numbers. last I checked those numbers were heading straight DOWN, so obviously the users aren't happy about the direction the company is taking or they wouldn't be jumping off in droves (me included, switched to Comodo Dragon because of the blat and CPU hogging).
Just because your software is free doesn't mean you can take a shit sandwich approach. I mean you can give shit sandwiches away all day long but I doubt seriously you'd get any takers. For Mozilla to get revenue through their search deals they need users, and the users have said DO NOT WANT in giant flaming 50 foot neon. What more needs to be said? you give the customer what they want or the customer goes away, simple as that.
I'm sure I'll get hate for pointing this out, but here goes: Yes Linux is infringing. So is frankly any other OS including OSX if you wanted to get technical. How do I know this? Have you SEEN their OS patent portfolio? We are talking about tens of thousands of patents! With THAT many patents it is pretty damned impossible NOT to infringe!
And someone pointed out that if MSFT were to name the patents could then be worked around and I would argue that is theoretically true but at what cost? If it takes your OS 45 steps to count 2+2 that is gonna cause your OS to take a pretty damned big hit performance wise. Using esoteric workarounds may be fine for bash scripting but we are talking about the guts of the OS here and a hell of a lot of those patents cover pretty much any straight forward way to get from point A to B. so if your OS has to go from A0 through FF and back around again just to get from A to B how badly is it gonna kill your performance?
This is why I have been arguing for years that free as in beer needs to die, to be replaced solely by free as in freedom. Even RMS says charging is just fine as long as you provide the source but free as in beer cripples the ability for Linux as a whole to fight back by building a huge patent warchest like the other big players have. The patents you are allowed access to, like IBM's, are all by companies that refuse to accept GPL V3, only GPL V2. What if they start TiVo'ing any code they use? As we have seen with Google you can't be assured because they release version A that they will release version B and I wouldn't be surprised if RMS is right and Android just ends up another iPhone, with a FOSS kernel that is worthless to FOSS because none of the stuff that will actually let you run the thing on your device is ever released.
So free as in beer really needs to go, even if it is only giving the distro $5 a release just to give them a steady income to buy patents. There is a reason why old rivals like Intel and AMD have cross licensing agreements in place, that is because they both know they infringing like mad on each other's work. But all free as in beer does is hurt those that are trying most to help! Look at Red Hat, who gives back more than any other company. did you know that nearly half the webservers out ther are running their code but they don't see a red cent? That is because a leech of a company that USED to pay Red hat for the OS they put on their devices decided they would just keep the code without giving RH back a penny, and thus CentOS was born. don't believe me, look it up. Think about how much better RH would be off, how many more coders, bug fixers, and for the purpose of this discussion how many more patents they could own if they even got 1/4th of the money for all those installs?
Like it or not money makes the world go around and he who has the gold makes the rules. To really fight something like this Linux needs a patent portfolio so damned large and scary that no company would DARE do anything other than a cross licensing agreement for fear of being crushed. How many FOSS companies like Sun or Novell will go out of business and have their patents snatched up by those that don't support FOSS? Without money you simply have no way to fight back, and free as in beer ends up a tragedy of the commons where you end up with more free riders than you do paying customers and thus ALL suffer, simply by having less resources all around. As the economy continues to sour I foresee things only getting worse on the FOSS front as companies like MSFT have guaranteed income while too many good distros and projects are dependent on the "tin cup" model which with a dead economy is gonna get less and less change in the cup. Its just human nature, if folks don't have to pay for something and money is tight then they won't.
Of course most would agree that the death of software patents should be the ultimate goal, but after Citizens United? Fat chance friend. Hell they don't have to be subtle in their bribe taking anymore!
Oh I have nothing against any of the tools by old Peter Norton, it is just the catch with those is this: How many folks are gonna have a copy of a tool from 1997? Because i can tell you from experience that after symantec bought them out they quickly went to shit. I should know because at the shop I worked at at the time Norton Utilities was our go to toolset, and we recommended strongly that anyone using Win9X buy a copy to go along with their new or repaired machine. IMNSHO Norton's tools were leagues better than what came with Win9X, and their disc doctor kicked the crap out of scandisk.
But by 1999 when their version came out that supported Win2K you could already see the foul hand of symantec at work. It was buggy, bloated, and often caused more damage than it fixed. We hung onto Norton 97 for as long as we could be its support for NTFS was poor so by 2002 it was useless except on Win9x machines. Frankly any version after that 97 release I'd be afraid to run on anything he'd want to keep as its libel to hose it in my experience.
And I would know about what Gibson did or didn't do back in the day as I didn't start using the tool until Spinrite 5 which by then supported IDE drives just fine. And with V6 I've tried it with SATA and IDE, both internal and USB, and frankly it works. I've found it can even "save" drives that have what I call "front dead drive" syndrome, that is where for some reason a few sectors at the very front of the drive become hosed and for whatever reason Windows refuses to mark them as dead and it causes the whole thing not to boot.
Of course with drives so cheap i don't let my customers actually run on the things, but USB drive enclosures are so cheap what I do after getting their files off the funky drive is slap it into an enclosure and let them use it like an oversized flash stick just for moving files back and forth between machines. You'd be surprised how many folks out there just can't get the concept of shared network folders no matter how many times you work with them but they get drag and drop. So for those folks those oversized flash sticks make for a cheap way to drag their stuff between machines.
You are not the only one. I used Firefox too since beta and before that Mozilla, but frankly this insane constant extension breaking mess is just too much. After trying several browsers i settled on Comodo Dragon, which has extra security features over Chrome and doesn't phone home to Google, but frankly all the Chromium based were just head and shoulders better.
I have to support a WIDE range of machines, from circa 2003 office desktops and Atom netbooks to the latest multicores and since FF 4 the fox has been more like a turtle. In my tests I found that anything short of a 3GHz P4 with HT is frankly unusable, with a new tab spiking the CPU to 100% and taking control away from the user for up to a minute, more like 3 minutes if they launch even an SD video. That is simply unacceptable, and that is with NO extensions but ABP and ForecastFox, the same as loaded on the Dragon. On the lowest machine i have, which is a 1.8GHz Sempron with 1.5Gb of RAM that I use as a nettop in the shop I found Firefox to be so sluggish it was just pathetic, the exact same machine with Dragon is a fine little web surfer.
I'd love to know what is really going on inside the Moz org right now. Is it arrogance? if so they don't have the numbers to back it up. Is it cargo cult usability, where they are so desperate to ape Chome's success that they are bolting on more crap than the Gecko engine can handle? possibly, I know that the plugin container seems to leak like a sieve and suck resources like a wino sucking down a bottle of Rosie. Hell if I didn't know any better I'd think it was someone high up in the company trying to torpedo their own corporation. Because frankly they couldn't do a better job of running off the users if they replaced the home page with a full color 3D Goatse!
Congratulations sir, you have integrity, something we have seen far too little of in this country of late. I have always been a supporter of the free market so when it came out that Intel was bribing OEMs and rigging compilers, and that Nvidia was in bed with OEMs to put out a 'fix" for the bumpgate chips that would simply crank the fans up until the warranty expired (followed by the chips) well I put my own money where my mouth is and went 100% AMD.
Did it cost me some money? some, i had a couple of gamer customers who cared only about benchmarks and when i told them I wouldn't be selling the i series they went somewhere else but I stand by my convictions and frankly the rest of my customers are quite happy with their AMD machines. They like getting more cores for a lower price, I like standing by my convictions and supporting the free market by voting with my dollars (as I urge everyone else to do).
So you should be congratulated sir, it is nice in this day and age of the "me me me" generation that someone actually stands by what they believe in. I truly think if more would follow your example we would see AMD sales go up and that would give FOSS advocates leverage into getting more companies to open their drivers. After all you can't persuade other companies to join AMD in giving full access if they don't see anything for their effort but increased costs. It all comes down to voting with your dollars, and I'm frankly surprised and more than a little saddened that after hearing that mantra so often here on/. when it comes to voting for convenience or FOSS they choose convenience.
I'm pretty sure that is what it is doing and frankly i don't care if it uses the blood of slaughtered hard drive engineers if it works WHICH IT DOES and quite well, thanks. I had a customer who had NEVER made a backup and her drive just went. on that drive were irreplaceable pictures of her late mother. She was crying when I told her the odds were against her but she begged so I told her I'd do my best.
Windows couldn't read it, Linux Live CD couldn't read it, SPINRITE FIXED IT, at least long enough for me to get a good 90% of the pictures off it before the drive finally died hard. She said the pics it missed were just pics of her dog but thank goodness it saved all those pics of her mom. I immediately made both a DVD as well as a copy to a flash drive and uploaded a zip of those pics to her Yahoo as well. I then gave her a lovely little GUI program that would check the differences between two folders and back up any missing or changed files.
Between that tool backing up her pics to the flash I sold her as well as her weekly DVD backups she should never lose another picture but if it wouldn't have been for Spinrite it would have been a disaster for her. I've priced data recovery services and you are looking at thousands which she just didn't have. The haters can hate but I know first hand Spinrite WORKS. Worth every penny to have that disc in my toolbox, thanks ever so.
Well when samba 4 comes out it should be tested and vetted and see if it is a possible replacement. But surely as a reasonable person you can't honestly expect to sell a corporation 'Hey get rid of your working turnkey solution, for this thing that should be out in a year or so. In the mean time here's this bunch of programs not written for each other, not even written by the same teams, and has NO guarantees that a major update for one won't break everything else. Have fun!"?
It is just amazing to me how religious zealotry seems to blind even the most common sense! I actually had a Linux zealot the other day stand their and bold faced argue that making anything easier is simply appealing to morons and when i pointed out that if one were to take that to its logical conclusion, that we should all have to go back to time sharing on a PDP11 and carrying our programs on punch cards, since pretty much every single advance since then has been in one way, shape, or form, designed to make things easier? I got told I'm a shill and M$ Ninja!
I swear it is like the PETA mess we saw here the other day. it seems like all the sane people went to Solaris and BSD and all that is left in the community is the batshit that consider the OS a religion instead of a tool and think CLI is some sort of deity to be worshipped. I simply use the best tool for the jobs, which for me is Windows on the desktop, FOSS in the embedded space. But to hear the zealots talk if I don't spend all my days in a bash shell I'm a cross between a moron and Satan.
No prob. One cool thing you may want to look into which the engineer was pushing for on their personal rockets (I don't know if he got it approved though) was to use an accelerometer plugged into the Ardunio to deploy the chutes. he said their proprietary board that deployed chutes was "seriously fussy" and had killed the last rocket while the Ardunio was easy to code for. He said it should be pretty trivial to use the accelerometer (sorry if I don't spell that right, I have a MASSIVE migraine ATM) to measure the change at the top of the arc and when the arc is reached have it deploy the chute using a small charge.
Anyway according to him the nice thing about using the Ardunio for that is because it is so small you could work the bugs out on a much smaller model rocket before deploying it on one of the big boys. you should have seen their last home made, I helped him paint the sucker. We are talking a good 5 feet tall and as big a round as a PVC drain pipe. so when you are building something THAT big, and planning on putting 5k worth of equipment into it, it makes sense to do a test firing with something much smaller (and cheaper) to work out the kinks.
But from what I have seen there is plenty of code for accelerometers for Ardunio so you should have no problem implementing his idea. like I said he is ex NASA and a hell of a smart guy. Have you ever seen those mock ups for the space shuttle? That was him. he built a 25 ton mock up of the front of the shuttle that a single man could push around it was THAT well balanced. Now that he is retired he helps out the college and makes models for oil companies. You ought to see the 3D models that guy cooks up in solidworks, so realistic you'd swear it was a photo, right down to the chips on the board. He said that is the trick for getting NASA approval, they respect those that go for the litle details and flesh out everything.
Wow, way to show undeniable proof that corporations should NOT support Linux! What did the community say? What were the words constantly used? "If you'll just give all your specs to the community why we'll not only do all the driver work FOR you, but we'll buy your product!"
Well AMD did EXACTLY what you asked for, every scrap was given to you, lock stock and barrel. So NOW what do you say? "Buy Nvidia, they don't give us squat but the drivers are better!"
So can we ALL admit that having a bunch of volunteers write drivers is a really BAD idea? I mean if you hand me Grey's Anatomy and a scalpel I might be able to to remove your appendix but that don't make it such a great idea. And if you want companies to support you then you have to come through on YOUR end, which means when you give promises like that you should follow through, even if your guys drop the ball. Because if not any company that is thinking of opening their specs is gonna look at the before and after sales of AMD chips and decide "Why bother? It didn't help their sales, Linux users just bought Nvidia while complaining about the drivers that they said they'd take care of so we shouldn't release and possibly give our competitor an advantage!"
You can't have your cake and eat it too. if you tell companies you will support them if they do what you say then you damned well better support them, otherwise you are just blowing smoke and the next company to come along won't give your "advice" a second thought. I know if I was AMD I'd be saying "What were you thinking? did our numbers go up? Then what is the point? No more releases" as they are costing AMD money with each release but I guarantee the Linux sales don't make up for the trouble.
Sorry but I'm not the coder on the project, I was just the guy that helped them fit the laptop and build the cantenna into the receiver station. If they have the new kid doing the code frankly you wouldn't want it anyway, he isn't nearly as good as the last one.
I've found that is the problem with college projects, as they get a really good coder he graduates all too soon and then you have a green ass kid that takes a while to get up to speed. As for what they were doing? Since I'm not an engineer I can only tell you what i managed to gather, something about using a spectroscope to take samples as the rocket goes up along with a couple of other readings that I wasn't able to follow. they have a deal with the Uni of Utah to share a slot on a sounder rocket in the spring, but I've been busy helping the volunteer engineer (former NASA guy, real cool and a hell of a nice guy) with the robot they are building for some sort of NASA contest . For that one they'll be using this funky proprietary board the college picked up and feeding it into a netbook which will both record the data as well as send control signals to the operator.
Anyway IIRC they started with some of the code samples floating out there for spectroscopes using Ardunio boards and then just tweaked it for the job. You should probably be able to pull of the same trick, my engineer friend the trick was syncing the timing but a lot of that was trial and error.
I swear to God its true! look it up! They even have videos where they went on shows saying everyone should now call fish seakittens! The look on some of the interviewers faces...you could see them thinking to themselves "I'm being punked, aren't I? Is there a hidden camera? Surely they can't be THIS batshit?"
But like I said its the same as MADD and how the one who originally started MADD after losing her child to a drunk driver won't have anything to do with them anymore, all these orgs that start out being a good cause seem to end up with the crazies running the asylum. Seakittens! can't you just picture Jaws remade this way? Look out its a seakitten!
Oh don't worry Vincent, thanks to bonehead Ballmer's one two punch of putting Win 8 on ARM, thus confusing the fuck out of consumers and screwing retailers when folks take all these windows ARM devices home, find it doesn't run their software, and bringing them back in droves, and the stupid ass metro UI, I have a feeling you won't have to worry about it! Neither will anyone else for that matter as this is gonna be a Vista sized bomb!
I have been showing the developer preview screencaps to customers and so far out of over 100 people I have YET to have a SINGLE ONE say "That looks nice, I'd like to use that." the closest I got was "That is a pretty cell phone picture, what kind of cell phone is that? Is that Android? I've heard about that, its supposed to be nice... What do you mean that's the new Windows desktop? why would I want a cell phone desktop? that's stupid!"
But Ballmer didn't listen when me and every other beta tester practically screamed Windows Vista wasn't ready for prime time, and I seriously doubt he'll listen now. The only nice thing about is we may actually see Ballmer forced to "pursue other interests" and then they can bring back Ozzie or get one of the office guys to right the ship, as this looks to be a clusterfuck of biblical proportions.
But it does seem to highlight something I have been wondering, and maybe someone here will have the figures.
Now the last report I saw estimated that Google was spending about 1 billion dollars a year on Android, when you count up development, marketing, and support. Now while i'm sure ads are lucrative I seriously doubt Google is getting over a billion dollars in cell phone ad revenue, so lets say for the sake of argument that get 200 million in ad revenue from Android phones.
So then the question becomes how long is Google willing to lose money? as we have seen with several other experiments in the past Google has no problem pulling the plug if they don't see a future in a product, and i'm sure Page and brin know you can't sell a product at a loss and make up for it on volume. so how much are they willing to lose? 10 billion? 5 billion? And what is their plan to actually make Android into a money maker instead of taker?
As for TFA is there anything that fits RMS' definition of free? I remember reading for awhile even Emacs didn't fit his uber strict definition of free. and as far as I know the only OS that fits his uber strict definition is Gnusense, So is there a "happy middle" or do you always get burnt in degrees, like with Android making it harder and harder to roll your own, thanks to lack of drivers and firmware?
Name a SINGLE THING I said that was in ANY way false. Do you know who Grover Norquist is? If not you better learn, because he is the guy famous for saying "Get the government small enough you can drown it in the bathtub and he is currently the darling of the teabagger crowd.
You see he is going through the halls of Washington carrying this "No new taxes evar!" pledge and over 60% of the teabaggers have already signed up. Now since we all saw what happened to Bush SR when he did his "read my lips" and flip flopped those that sign his pledge will NEVER vote to raise a cent, it would be suicide.
Now considering the fact that Netflix DVD by mail business depends on a functioning postal service and that the USPS is closing hundreds of facilities just to survive another year YOU TELL ME, how is Netflix supposed to keep DVD by mail afloat? Are they gonna send them by carrier pigeon? Are they gonna hike their rates AGAIN to pay for the increases?
Because as I just told you and gave you a link for the ultra right is signing a "no new taxes evar!" pledge which means the USPS is fucked. So lets hear it, you tell me, how is Netflix supposed to work with their rates for deliveries increased and many post offices just gone all together?
Nobody said there was. What I said is every time some new ARM something comes out the blogs explode with "its the death of x86!" articles.
As someone who has actually helped my local college get into Arduino and FOSS (they do some cool rocketry stuff which that little board fits nicely into) it is easy to see where each chip fits in. X86 for coding and processing the data, ARM for the ruggedness and power sipping when collecting the data.
Why all the blogs and journals have to act like this is a death match when they go together like PB&J is stupid, pointless, and makes no sense, which is what I pointed out. Just let each chip do what they do best and let the market decide. I bet you'll see it stay pretty much as it is now, with X86 doing the number crunching and ARM doing the mobile jobs.
So let me see if I have this straight, You are ADVOCATING throwing away a working turnkey solution for a "solution" that consists of a half a dozen programs, none of which are design to go together or are even by the same teams, will take a hell of a lot more work, and is at risk of breaking any second when one of those separate teams puts out an important update that hoses the rest, and you are saying you're NOT a zealot?
People you realize this kind of crazy loony tune bullshit makes you ALL look like nutballs, yes? that the reason Linux has the rep of the OS for crazy basement dwellers is EXACTLY because of what guys like you post, right? You mod down anyone who doesn't drink the koolaid, and when they point out something your OS can NOT DO, you say "sure it can" and then bring out the most backwards ass halfbaked solution that nobody with a functioning brain would EVER use in a fortune 500 company!
If you want to sell your product you have to have sane arguments folks. You can't go foaming at the mouth that Bill Gates is secretly running the Illuminati, and you sure as hell aren't gonna sell your product by saying a bunch of half assed products that aren't even designed by the same teams or guaranteed to work together equals a drop in turnkey solution. This kind of BS just makes you all look like zealots, and hurts the cause more than a thousand MSFT "Get the facts" campaigns because it smacks so badly of religious bullshit. Why didn't you just write "Free as in freedom, fight teh powerz!" while you were at it?
Don't they know you NEVER go full retard? Was there any doubt in their insanity after the "sea kitten" episode? For those that didn't hear, and I swear I ain't making this shit up, PETA demanded that all mentions of fish be replaced with the words 'sea kittens" because people wouldn't want to eat fish if they sounded cute and that several thousand years of tastes and diets could be changed by calling a trout a sea kitty. I guess someone forgot to tell them about catfish huh?
What is sad is we really do need someone speaking out for the rights of animals to be treated with respect, we shouldn't make food animals suffer, nor should people be killing animals for fun or sport, but PETA left normal about 5 exits back and is way into "total drooling batshit crazy" country and they ain't never coming back. kinda like how the new head of MADD said their ultimate goal is to bring back prohibition. We all know that is batshit, and is as far from the original mission as you can get, so far that the original organizer and creator of MADD won't have anything to do with them. But in all these orgs it seems like the loony tunes always end up running the show.
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The only problem with the "judgement" you site is this: If you believe in a free market then its completely full of shit and here is why: If I have a product and I say 'If you buy from me you can't have a kitten" and reserve the right to check your house for kittehs? that is COMPLETELY WITHIN MY RIGHTS and you have NO right to tell me what I can and can't sell my product for. you have the right to accept, or to refuse, that's it.
If MSFT wanted to say "if you buy my product you can't have a discount and sell other companies products too?" that is COMPLETELY FINE and it is only activist judging to say otherwise. The free market says that as long as I don't ask for something that is illegal, such as to have your wife as a prostitute then I can set ANY conditions that I want, you are free to accept or refuse. that is one of the most basic core tenets of a free market.
What MSFT SHOULD have gotten busted for, and frankly what Intel should have gotten busted for as well, is the "It isn't done until lotus won't run" kind of bullshit, because that is rigging, pure and simple, and that is fraud. Both Intel rigging their compiler and MSFT rigging their OS should have been treated no differently than if Shell rigged their gas so if you bought from anyone other than Chevy you fouled your engine. Its using dirty tricks, plain and simple. same as Intel should have gotten busted for bribing the OEMs but NOT for setting terms in their sales that hurt AMD. if Intel wanted to say that PCs with Intel chips can only be blue? you are free to tell them no deal and walk away, that's it. when they start cutting checks under the table to OEMs is where they should have gotten busted.
You can believe what you want, but having the state set what terms you are allowed to offer with your product sets a BAD precedent in my book. What if some government bunch decides that contracts should be based on how "green" you are? Or whether you support unions? The free market comes down the the buyer and seller negotiating a price, at its core that is all capitalism is. if you subvert that badness happens. look at all the government meddling we've had in the housing markets, or bailing out wall Street for bad decisions.
Uhhh did you not just quote the fact that they have no choice in the matter as to support HDMI you have to support HDCP and if they compromise the DRM in HDCP then their keys get revoked and you can say goodbye to AMD?
That is like blaming MSFT because they have support for BD DRM built into Windows Vista and 7, or because they bought H.264 support for Win 7. If you don't use it then it NEVER gets turned on, but without it you have just cut a good chunk of the reason to have an HTPC right out. After all who would want an HTPC if you can't run HDMI?
And if you need support for the above tech you can still use the binary blob which is all you get from Nvidia so at least with AMD you have choice. So you are arguing choice is bad unless they break the law (DMCA says they can't break others encryption schemes legally) after they have ALREADY spent significant money in giving you the specs and paying developers to help the FOSS community?
Thanks. I usually use a tool called Easttec Eraser and use what is called a "quick two pass with verification" which I've found to be just about as fast as a single pass. it writes one set of zeroes followed by random numbers and then does a quick verification. So if what you are saying is true my method is overkill but should work no problem.
Anyway if anyone needs a quick Windows based wiper with a ton of options Easttec Eraser is pretty nice. I've been using it for a couple of years now and it gives you everything from one pass zeroes to DOD 3 to Bruce Scheneier's method to full Guttman, about 20 different ways to wipe data. It will even let you wipe slack space of existing files, although why one would want to do that exactly i'm not sure.
Exactly and IF it turns out to be true I really don't see the difference between this and the moves that got MSFT busted in the 90s. in both cases you have dominance in one arena (desktops and search respectively) being used to power their way into another market (browsers and shopping) which I believe would be a big no no under antitrust.
I have been wondering though about how google shopping does seem to always be towards the top and it smells funny to me. I mean be honest folks, how many of you have EVER bought anything from Google shopping? How many of you use Google shopping as your "go to" place for web shopping? I know for me its Amazon, Newegg and Tigerdirect, and if I just want price comparisons i use pricegrabber. i don't think I've ever used Yahoo or Google shopping for anything.
So unless there is a shitload of noobs somewhere shopping like mad with Google shopping it just smells "off" to me, but that's why there is an investigation, to see if it is off or not. But I have plenty of customers that do online shopping as well and frankly I can't recall a single one saying "Oh I got this from Google shopping" or Yahoo shopping either. Everyone just uses Amazon.
Oh please! like we haven't had like a bazillion browser bugs these past couple of years? And WHICH HTML V5, the H.264 HTML V5 or the Theora one or the WebM one?
And it amazes me how geeks here will sacrifice pretty much anything on the alter of cross compatibility with Linux. Have you TRIED HTML V5? try it on an older office machine or a new single core netbook, its a slideshow! And even on machines that it actually runs it sucks major resources. great way to kill batteries dead but most mobile users wouldn't be happy about that. compare to flash where even the 1.8GHz Sempron I use as a nettop and test bed for software for low power machines runs SD flash just beautifully. Hell I could add a $40 GPU and even go High Def.
So while I'm all for cross compatibility I don't want it if its gonna suck, which from what I've seen so far HTML V5 is gonna suck the big wet titty. there is just too much politics and too many with an agenda messing with it. Maybe in a decade they'll have the kinks worked out and the politics behind them it'll be good, but by then H.26x will be patent free so who will care.
They tried that with my mom, but apparently "mom logic" threw them so much they just sat there thinking about it for half a minute before saying a quick "thank you" and hanging up. When they said she had a bug mom told them "Oh I don't worry about such things, that is what having a geek son is for, along with paying for take out and driving me to the library". I guess that just didn't compute for them because she said they were just stunned for nearly a minute before giving up.
The question I have, which maybe someone who has read this book can answer, is this: Who is right, those that say you have to use Guttman and wipe a bazillion times, or the ones that say a simple zero out cleans a drive?
While I'm not worried about the MiB kicking my door i'm more worried about all the drives that end up coming through the shop. I get used drives from all over the place and usually just run a quick zero wipe and stuff it in a drawer, is that enough?
That wouldn't surprise me as from everything I've seen Bill Gates was brilliant but a right bastard and had NO problem crushing companies like bugs. Look at the whole drivespace/doublespace mess or Spyglass. But like Jobs you really have to give the man credit, if you haven't read it Microsoft's Yellow Road to Cairo is a great read as it shows how the man was able to control the entire tech sector with nothing but screenshots and bullshit which you do have to admit is pretty damned impressive. Sadly i'd take darth gates over the sweaty monkey any day of the week. Have you SEEN Win 8? Its a fricking cell phone UI for the desktop!
Anyway the Connor bug you are describing sounds EXACTLY like what I've run into, its always in the first dozen sectors and once Spinrite marks those as dead it'll work for years. i have a 200gb Seagate I've been using as a large flash drive for years that got bit by it. For whatever reason Windows just won't mark those as dead but having Spinrite go in and mark them seems to do the trick. The only diff between the bug i ran into and yours is these machines were run daily, it would just work fine one day and the next...nothing. It seemed to happen more after Seagate bought Maxtor so it may have been cheap rebadged Maxtors. That is why I'm glad i grabbed some Samsung drives before they are all gone. Their Ecogreen drives kick butt and actually score better on my benchmarks than 7200 RPM Seagates, probably thanks to the huge cache.
Anyway if the guy could find a copy of Norton 97 I'd say go for it, its just that I doubt seriously he'll actually find a copy of Norton 97. i know the Internet has a looong memory but most of the Win9x sites have been gone for half a decade and the old tools along with them. I probably have a copy on a CD somewhere, but since all my customers are either running XP or 7 it is kinda useless. Who uses Fat32 or Win9x anymore?
Hell I don't think even more old junker machines have a floppy drive anymore, that is one tech I was damned glad died. Fussy buggy little bastards. When the first flash stick came out i happily paid nearly $80 for a 32mb stick just to get away from those POS floppies. Good riddance I say.
Because unless they changed to the Chrome model (which considering their aping the Chrome UI would be nice, but I haven't heard anything of it) you have to give users admin rights to install the thing, and most admins aren't gonna give every user on the network admin rights?
There is a simple way to see if their strategy is working, look at their numbers. last I checked those numbers were heading straight DOWN, so obviously the users aren't happy about the direction the company is taking or they wouldn't be jumping off in droves (me included, switched to Comodo Dragon because of the blat and CPU hogging).
Just because your software is free doesn't mean you can take a shit sandwich approach. I mean you can give shit sandwiches away all day long but I doubt seriously you'd get any takers. For Mozilla to get revenue through their search deals they need users, and the users have said DO NOT WANT in giant flaming 50 foot neon. What more needs to be said? you give the customer what they want or the customer goes away, simple as that.
I'm sure I'll get hate for pointing this out, but here goes: Yes Linux is infringing. So is frankly any other OS including OSX if you wanted to get technical. How do I know this? Have you SEEN their OS patent portfolio? We are talking about tens of thousands of patents! With THAT many patents it is pretty damned impossible NOT to infringe!
And someone pointed out that if MSFT were to name the patents could then be worked around and I would argue that is theoretically true but at what cost? If it takes your OS 45 steps to count 2+2 that is gonna cause your OS to take a pretty damned big hit performance wise. Using esoteric workarounds may be fine for bash scripting but we are talking about the guts of the OS here and a hell of a lot of those patents cover pretty much any straight forward way to get from point A to B. so if your OS has to go from A0 through FF and back around again just to get from A to B how badly is it gonna kill your performance?
This is why I have been arguing for years that free as in beer needs to die, to be replaced solely by free as in freedom. Even RMS says charging is just fine as long as you provide the source but free as in beer cripples the ability for Linux as a whole to fight back by building a huge patent warchest like the other big players have. The patents you are allowed access to, like IBM's, are all by companies that refuse to accept GPL V3, only GPL V2. What if they start TiVo'ing any code they use? As we have seen with Google you can't be assured because they release version A that they will release version B and I wouldn't be surprised if RMS is right and Android just ends up another iPhone, with a FOSS kernel that is worthless to FOSS because none of the stuff that will actually let you run the thing on your device is ever released.
So free as in beer really needs to go, even if it is only giving the distro $5 a release just to give them a steady income to buy patents. There is a reason why old rivals like Intel and AMD have cross licensing agreements in place, that is because they both know they infringing like mad on each other's work. But all free as in beer does is hurt those that are trying most to help! Look at Red Hat, who gives back more than any other company. did you know that nearly half the webservers out ther are running their code but they don't see a red cent? That is because a leech of a company that USED to pay Red hat for the OS they put on their devices decided they would just keep the code without giving RH back a penny, and thus CentOS was born. don't believe me, look it up. Think about how much better RH would be off, how many more coders, bug fixers, and for the purpose of this discussion how many more patents they could own if they even got 1/4th of the money for all those installs?
Like it or not money makes the world go around and he who has the gold makes the rules. To really fight something like this Linux needs a patent portfolio so damned large and scary that no company would DARE do anything other than a cross licensing agreement for fear of being crushed. How many FOSS companies like Sun or Novell will go out of business and have their patents snatched up by those that don't support FOSS? Without money you simply have no way to fight back, and free as in beer ends up a tragedy of the commons where you end up with more free riders than you do paying customers and thus ALL suffer, simply by having less resources all around. As the economy continues to sour I foresee things only getting worse on the FOSS front as companies like MSFT have guaranteed income while too many good distros and projects are dependent on the "tin cup" model which with a dead economy is gonna get less and less change in the cup. Its just human nature, if folks don't have to pay for something and money is tight then they won't.
Of course most would agree that the death of software patents should be the ultimate goal, but after Citizens United? Fat chance friend. Hell they don't have to be subtle in their bribe taking anymore!
Oh I have nothing against any of the tools by old Peter Norton, it is just the catch with those is this: How many folks are gonna have a copy of a tool from 1997? Because i can tell you from experience that after symantec bought them out they quickly went to shit. I should know because at the shop I worked at at the time Norton Utilities was our go to toolset, and we recommended strongly that anyone using Win9X buy a copy to go along with their new or repaired machine. IMNSHO Norton's tools were leagues better than what came with Win9X, and their disc doctor kicked the crap out of scandisk.
But by 1999 when their version came out that supported Win2K you could already see the foul hand of symantec at work. It was buggy, bloated, and often caused more damage than it fixed. We hung onto Norton 97 for as long as we could be its support for NTFS was poor so by 2002 it was useless except on Win9x machines. Frankly any version after that 97 release I'd be afraid to run on anything he'd want to keep as its libel to hose it in my experience.
And I would know about what Gibson did or didn't do back in the day as I didn't start using the tool until Spinrite 5 which by then supported IDE drives just fine. And with V6 I've tried it with SATA and IDE, both internal and USB, and frankly it works. I've found it can even "save" drives that have what I call "front dead drive" syndrome, that is where for some reason a few sectors at the very front of the drive become hosed and for whatever reason Windows refuses to mark them as dead and it causes the whole thing not to boot.
Of course with drives so cheap i don't let my customers actually run on the things, but USB drive enclosures are so cheap what I do after getting their files off the funky drive is slap it into an enclosure and let them use it like an oversized flash stick just for moving files back and forth between machines. You'd be surprised how many folks out there just can't get the concept of shared network folders no matter how many times you work with them but they get drag and drop. So for those folks those oversized flash sticks make for a cheap way to drag their stuff between machines.
You are not the only one. I used Firefox too since beta and before that Mozilla, but frankly this insane constant extension breaking mess is just too much. After trying several browsers i settled on Comodo Dragon, which has extra security features over Chrome and doesn't phone home to Google, but frankly all the Chromium based were just head and shoulders better.
I have to support a WIDE range of machines, from circa 2003 office desktops and Atom netbooks to the latest multicores and since FF 4 the fox has been more like a turtle. In my tests I found that anything short of a 3GHz P4 with HT is frankly unusable, with a new tab spiking the CPU to 100% and taking control away from the user for up to a minute, more like 3 minutes if they launch even an SD video. That is simply unacceptable, and that is with NO extensions but ABP and ForecastFox, the same as loaded on the Dragon. On the lowest machine i have, which is a 1.8GHz Sempron with 1.5Gb of RAM that I use as a nettop in the shop I found Firefox to be so sluggish it was just pathetic, the exact same machine with Dragon is a fine little web surfer.
I'd love to know what is really going on inside the Moz org right now. Is it arrogance? if so they don't have the numbers to back it up. Is it cargo cult usability, where they are so desperate to ape Chome's success that they are bolting on more crap than the Gecko engine can handle? possibly, I know that the plugin container seems to leak like a sieve and suck resources like a wino sucking down a bottle of Rosie. Hell if I didn't know any better I'd think it was someone high up in the company trying to torpedo their own corporation. Because frankly they couldn't do a better job of running off the users if they replaced the home page with a full color 3D Goatse!
Congratulations sir, you have integrity, something we have seen far too little of in this country of late. I have always been a supporter of the free market so when it came out that Intel was bribing OEMs and rigging compilers, and that Nvidia was in bed with OEMs to put out a 'fix" for the bumpgate chips that would simply crank the fans up until the warranty expired (followed by the chips) well I put my own money where my mouth is and went 100% AMD.
Did it cost me some money? some, i had a couple of gamer customers who cared only about benchmarks and when i told them I wouldn't be selling the i series they went somewhere else but I stand by my convictions and frankly the rest of my customers are quite happy with their AMD machines. They like getting more cores for a lower price, I like standing by my convictions and supporting the free market by voting with my dollars (as I urge everyone else to do).
So you should be congratulated sir, it is nice in this day and age of the "me me me" generation that someone actually stands by what they believe in. I truly think if more would follow your example we would see AMD sales go up and that would give FOSS advocates leverage into getting more companies to open their drivers. After all you can't persuade other companies to join AMD in giving full access if they don't see anything for their effort but increased costs. It all comes down to voting with your dollars, and I'm frankly surprised and more than a little saddened that after hearing that mantra so often here on /. when it comes to voting for convenience or FOSS they choose convenience.
I'm pretty sure that is what it is doing and frankly i don't care if it uses the blood of slaughtered hard drive engineers if it works WHICH IT DOES and quite well, thanks. I had a customer who had NEVER made a backup and her drive just went. on that drive were irreplaceable pictures of her late mother. She was crying when I told her the odds were against her but she begged so I told her I'd do my best.
Windows couldn't read it, Linux Live CD couldn't read it, SPINRITE FIXED IT, at least long enough for me to get a good 90% of the pictures off it before the drive finally died hard. She said the pics it missed were just pics of her dog but thank goodness it saved all those pics of her mom. I immediately made both a DVD as well as a copy to a flash drive and uploaded a zip of those pics to her Yahoo as well. I then gave her a lovely little GUI program that would check the differences between two folders and back up any missing or changed files.
Between that tool backing up her pics to the flash I sold her as well as her weekly DVD backups she should never lose another picture but if it wouldn't have been for Spinrite it would have been a disaster for her. I've priced data recovery services and you are looking at thousands which she just didn't have. The haters can hate but I know first hand Spinrite WORKS. Worth every penny to have that disc in my toolbox, thanks ever so.
Well when samba 4 comes out it should be tested and vetted and see if it is a possible replacement. But surely as a reasonable person you can't honestly expect to sell a corporation 'Hey get rid of your working turnkey solution, for this thing that should be out in a year or so. In the mean time here's this bunch of programs not written for each other, not even written by the same teams, and has NO guarantees that a major update for one won't break everything else. Have fun!"?
It is just amazing to me how religious zealotry seems to blind even the most common sense! I actually had a Linux zealot the other day stand their and bold faced argue that making anything easier is simply appealing to morons and when i pointed out that if one were to take that to its logical conclusion, that we should all have to go back to time sharing on a PDP11 and carrying our programs on punch cards, since pretty much every single advance since then has been in one way, shape, or form, designed to make things easier? I got told I'm a shill and M$ Ninja!
I swear it is like the PETA mess we saw here the other day. it seems like all the sane people went to Solaris and BSD and all that is left in the community is the batshit that consider the OS a religion instead of a tool and think CLI is some sort of deity to be worshipped. I simply use the best tool for the jobs, which for me is Windows on the desktop, FOSS in the embedded space. But to hear the zealots talk if I don't spend all my days in a bash shell I'm a cross between a moron and Satan.
No prob. One cool thing you may want to look into which the engineer was pushing for on their personal rockets (I don't know if he got it approved though) was to use an accelerometer plugged into the Ardunio to deploy the chutes. he said their proprietary board that deployed chutes was "seriously fussy" and had killed the last rocket while the Ardunio was easy to code for. He said it should be pretty trivial to use the accelerometer (sorry if I don't spell that right, I have a MASSIVE migraine ATM) to measure the change at the top of the arc and when the arc is reached have it deploy the chute using a small charge.
Anyway according to him the nice thing about using the Ardunio for that is because it is so small you could work the bugs out on a much smaller model rocket before deploying it on one of the big boys. you should have seen their last home made, I helped him paint the sucker. We are talking a good 5 feet tall and as big a round as a PVC drain pipe. so when you are building something THAT big, and planning on putting 5k worth of equipment into it, it makes sense to do a test firing with something much smaller (and cheaper) to work out the kinks.
But from what I have seen there is plenty of code for accelerometers for Ardunio so you should have no problem implementing his idea. like I said he is ex NASA and a hell of a smart guy. Have you ever seen those mock ups for the space shuttle? That was him. he built a 25 ton mock up of the front of the shuttle that a single man could push around it was THAT well balanced. Now that he is retired he helps out the college and makes models for oil companies. You ought to see the 3D models that guy cooks up in solidworks, so realistic you'd swear it was a photo, right down to the chips on the board. He said that is the trick for getting NASA approval, they respect those that go for the litle details and flesh out everything.
Wow, way to show undeniable proof that corporations should NOT support Linux! What did the community say? What were the words constantly used? "If you'll just give all your specs to the community why we'll not only do all the driver work FOR you, but we'll buy your product!"
Well AMD did EXACTLY what you asked for, every scrap was given to you, lock stock and barrel. So NOW what do you say? "Buy Nvidia, they don't give us squat but the drivers are better!"
So can we ALL admit that having a bunch of volunteers write drivers is a really BAD idea? I mean if you hand me Grey's Anatomy and a scalpel I might be able to to remove your appendix but that don't make it such a great idea. And if you want companies to support you then you have to come through on YOUR end, which means when you give promises like that you should follow through, even if your guys drop the ball. Because if not any company that is thinking of opening their specs is gonna look at the before and after sales of AMD chips and decide "Why bother? It didn't help their sales, Linux users just bought Nvidia while complaining about the drivers that they said they'd take care of so we shouldn't release and possibly give our competitor an advantage!"
You can't have your cake and eat it too. if you tell companies you will support them if they do what you say then you damned well better support them, otherwise you are just blowing smoke and the next company to come along won't give your "advice" a second thought. I know if I was AMD I'd be saying "What were you thinking? did our numbers go up? Then what is the point? No more releases" as they are costing AMD money with each release but I guarantee the Linux sales don't make up for the trouble.
Sorry but I'm not the coder on the project, I was just the guy that helped them fit the laptop and build the cantenna into the receiver station. If they have the new kid doing the code frankly you wouldn't want it anyway, he isn't nearly as good as the last one.
I've found that is the problem with college projects, as they get a really good coder he graduates all too soon and then you have a green ass kid that takes a while to get up to speed. As for what they were doing? Since I'm not an engineer I can only tell you what i managed to gather, something about using a spectroscope to take samples as the rocket goes up along with a couple of other readings that I wasn't able to follow. they have a deal with the Uni of Utah to share a slot on a sounder rocket in the spring, but I've been busy helping the volunteer engineer (former NASA guy, real cool and a hell of a nice guy) with the robot they are building for some sort of NASA contest . For that one they'll be using this funky proprietary board the college picked up and feeding it into a netbook which will both record the data as well as send control signals to the operator.
Anyway IIRC they started with some of the code samples floating out there for spectroscopes using Ardunio boards and then just tweaked it for the job. You should probably be able to pull of the same trick, my engineer friend the trick was syncing the timing but a lot of that was trial and error.
I swear to God its true! look it up! They even have videos where they went on shows saying everyone should now call fish seakittens! The look on some of the interviewers faces...you could see them thinking to themselves "I'm being punked, aren't I? Is there a hidden camera? Surely they can't be THIS batshit?"
But like I said its the same as MADD and how the one who originally started MADD after losing her child to a drunk driver won't have anything to do with them anymore, all these orgs that start out being a good cause seem to end up with the crazies running the asylum. Seakittens! can't you just picture Jaws remade this way? Look out its a seakitten!
Oh don't worry Vincent, thanks to bonehead Ballmer's one two punch of putting Win 8 on ARM, thus confusing the fuck out of consumers and screwing retailers when folks take all these windows ARM devices home, find it doesn't run their software, and bringing them back in droves, and the stupid ass metro UI, I have a feeling you won't have to worry about it! Neither will anyone else for that matter as this is gonna be a Vista sized bomb!
I have been showing the developer preview screencaps to customers and so far out of over 100 people I have YET to have a SINGLE ONE say "That looks nice, I'd like to use that." the closest I got was "That is a pretty cell phone picture, what kind of cell phone is that? Is that Android? I've heard about that, its supposed to be nice... What do you mean that's the new Windows desktop? why would I want a cell phone desktop? that's stupid!"
But Ballmer didn't listen when me and every other beta tester practically screamed Windows Vista wasn't ready for prime time, and I seriously doubt he'll listen now. The only nice thing about is we may actually see Ballmer forced to "pursue other interests" and then they can bring back Ozzie or get one of the office guys to right the ship, as this looks to be a clusterfuck of biblical proportions.
But it does seem to highlight something I have been wondering, and maybe someone here will have the figures.
Now the last report I saw estimated that Google was spending about 1 billion dollars a year on Android, when you count up development, marketing, and support. Now while i'm sure ads are lucrative I seriously doubt Google is getting over a billion dollars in cell phone ad revenue, so lets say for the sake of argument that get 200 million in ad revenue from Android phones.
So then the question becomes how long is Google willing to lose money? as we have seen with several other experiments in the past Google has no problem pulling the plug if they don't see a future in a product, and i'm sure Page and brin know you can't sell a product at a loss and make up for it on volume. so how much are they willing to lose? 10 billion? 5 billion? And what is their plan to actually make Android into a money maker instead of taker?
As for TFA is there anything that fits RMS' definition of free? I remember reading for awhile even Emacs didn't fit his uber strict definition of free. and as far as I know the only OS that fits his uber strict definition is Gnusense, So is there a "happy middle" or do you always get burnt in degrees, like with Android making it harder and harder to roll your own, thanks to lack of drivers and firmware?
Name a SINGLE THING I said that was in ANY way false. Do you know who Grover Norquist is? If not you better learn, because he is the guy famous for saying "Get the government small enough you can drown it in the bathtub and he is currently the darling of the teabagger crowd.
You see he is going through the halls of Washington carrying this "No new taxes evar!" pledge and over 60% of the teabaggers have already signed up. Now since we all saw what happened to Bush SR when he did his "read my lips" and flip flopped those that sign his pledge will NEVER vote to raise a cent, it would be suicide.
Now considering the fact that Netflix DVD by mail business depends on a functioning postal service and that the USPS is closing hundreds of facilities just to survive another year YOU TELL ME, how is Netflix supposed to keep DVD by mail afloat? Are they gonna send them by carrier pigeon? Are they gonna hike their rates AGAIN to pay for the increases?
Because as I just told you and gave you a link for the ultra right is signing a "no new taxes evar!" pledge which means the USPS is fucked. So lets hear it, you tell me, how is Netflix supposed to work with their rates for deliveries increased and many post offices just gone all together?
Nobody said there was. What I said is every time some new ARM something comes out the blogs explode with "its the death of x86!" articles.
As someone who has actually helped my local college get into Arduino and FOSS (they do some cool rocketry stuff which that little board fits nicely into) it is easy to see where each chip fits in. X86 for coding and processing the data, ARM for the ruggedness and power sipping when collecting the data.
Why all the blogs and journals have to act like this is a death match when they go together like PB&J is stupid, pointless, and makes no sense, which is what I pointed out. Just let each chip do what they do best and let the market decide. I bet you'll see it stay pretty much as it is now, with X86 doing the number crunching and ARM doing the mobile jobs.
So let me see if I have this straight, You are ADVOCATING throwing away a working turnkey solution for a "solution" that consists of a half a dozen programs, none of which are design to go together or are even by the same teams, will take a hell of a lot more work, and is at risk of breaking any second when one of those separate teams puts out an important update that hoses the rest, and you are saying you're NOT a zealot?
People you realize this kind of crazy loony tune bullshit makes you ALL look like nutballs, yes? that the reason Linux has the rep of the OS for crazy basement dwellers is EXACTLY because of what guys like you post, right? You mod down anyone who doesn't drink the koolaid, and when they point out something your OS can NOT DO, you say "sure it can" and then bring out the most backwards ass halfbaked solution that nobody with a functioning brain would EVER use in a fortune 500 company!
If you want to sell your product you have to have sane arguments folks. You can't go foaming at the mouth that Bill Gates is secretly running the Illuminati, and you sure as hell aren't gonna sell your product by saying a bunch of half assed products that aren't even designed by the same teams or guaranteed to work together equals a drop in turnkey solution. This kind of BS just makes you all look like zealots, and hurts the cause more than a thousand MSFT "Get the facts" campaigns because it smacks so badly of religious bullshit. Why didn't you just write "Free as in freedom, fight teh powerz!" while you were at it?
Don't they know you NEVER go full retard? Was there any doubt in their insanity after the "sea kitten" episode? For those that didn't hear, and I swear I ain't making this shit up, PETA demanded that all mentions of fish be replaced with the words 'sea kittens" because people wouldn't want to eat fish if they sounded cute and that several thousand years of tastes and diets could be changed by calling a trout a sea kitty. I guess someone forgot to tell them about catfish huh?
What is sad is we really do need someone speaking out for the rights of animals to be treated with respect, we shouldn't make food animals suffer, nor should people be killing animals for fun or sport, but PETA left normal about 5 exits back and is way into "total drooling batshit crazy" country and they ain't never coming back. kinda like how the new head of MADD said their ultimate goal is to bring back prohibition. We all know that is batshit, and is as far from the original mission as you can get, so far that the original organizer and creator of MADD won't have anything to do with them. But in all these orgs it seems like the loony tunes always end up running the show.