Wanna hear something funny? I ask folks here in the shop what Windows they are running and apparently the big difference according to average folks is the color, at least those that have been exposed to other versions at work or school. They say they are running "the blue one" (WinXP), "the black one" (WinVista) or "The silvery see through thing" (Win7) and surprisingly that description helps me immensely.
Now I just ask folks which color Windows they have and they go "Oh I know that!" and it keeps them from feeling like a dummy. Makes them feel good, gives me the info I need, a win/win all around. Now MSFT is gonna cock that up with ARM Windows. Stupid as fuck MSFT, just stupid as fuck.
You have NO CLUE how business works, do you? Its called loss leaders and it REALLY pisses off your potential customers when they get there and find you don't have squat. I will often get older laptops in bulk and sell them for VERY slight profit, now why would I do that? Because the thought of cheap laptops, even older laptops, gets folks through the door where I then get a chance to upsell them and hopefully build a long term business relationship with.
Many of my best long term customers, folks that have spent thousands in my shop buying everything from fixes to upgrades to new boxes, all started out as customers that showed up because they heard I had cheap laptops and they decided they needed a laptop NOW for some reason or another.Take the graphics designer that has probably spent a good $3000 at my shop for example. He was pitching a bid for a VERY lucrative job at the local college and his laptop had bought the farm so he needed one he could hook to a projector and show his works. I sold him an older P4 mobile with RCA and S-Video and he landed the job and has bought all his gear from me ever since. As soon as the bad weather passes I'll be giving his desktop a Win 7 upgrade and doing some software tweaks, another $150 profit for me.
So it all comes down to getting their butts through the door and that is what loss leaders do. most here would laugh at older laptops for $80-$100 but when someone is in a bind or needs a machine NOW and doesn't want to be assraped on price? That is a VERY attractive offer, and helps me to get their butts through the door where I can then sell them everything from upgrades to their existing desktops to new builds. But if someone was to come along and try to buy out my stock constantly that would kill the best way I've found to get butts through the door and while I personally would tell them to fuck right off I can see other businesses limiting customers or saying no commercial sales.
How about when my sis was left crippled and later died of cancer leaving two young kids I stepped up to the plate and did my job instead of being a selfish self centered twat? How about that? I would have even had an excuse to be a self centered twat as I planned to never have children, what is the excuse of all those that chose to have unprotected sex and then refuse to deal with the consequences?
NOBODY said being a parent was easy, after 20 years in the role I'm probably down 3 years on sleep alone, not to mention all the great sex I gave up from two different women I had to tell to hit the bricks because they tried to make me choose between them and being a parent to those two boys. But you know what? I DID MY FUCKING JOB and those two NEVER went without, not without love, attention, nor education.
So I feel NO SYMPATHY AT ALL for someone that chooses to bring a life into this world then refuses to do their fucking job as best they can. nobody is saying they have to be Dr Spock here, but when your idea of "parenting" is doing your damnedest to avoid any contact with your children, like they were your boss trying to make you work on a Saturday? Then FUCK YOU YOU SORRY BASTARD put those kids up for adoption while they still have a chance at finding someone who'll give a fuck about them.
Oh you don't need to break out the popcorn as i saw EXACTLY what this trainwreck is gonna do last Xmas. See there was this place selling "Windows netbooks" with in tiny print "Windows Compact Edition" but since it looks like XP and consumers have no fucking clue what any of that means they sold out on a "first come first served no refunds" sale. So what happened?
They were dumped en mass on Craigslist when folks found they couldn't run Win apps and that is EXACTLY what is gonna happen with this moronic clusterfuck. When folks see the word Windows they are gonna rightly assume that it actually runs WINDOWS PROGRAMS because if it don't? Then why would they buy Windows? hell they could just run Android or buy an Apple iDevice!
The only nice thing I predict that will come from the massive trainwreck that Win 8 is shaping up to be, complete with retailers having masses of ARM Win devices they'll have to take a Touchpad sized bath on, is that FINALLY Ballmer will end up forced to "pursue other interests" and hopefully they can get Ozzie back or maybe one of the Office guys to take the helm and right the ship. Because this is just another example of Ballmer having a raging hard on for his competitors and completely ignoring his companies strengths and weaknesses trying to play "Me too! Ohhhh me too!" and it WILL come back to bite him in his sweaty monkey ass.
I'd agree on everything but the head server case. We had a need at the last shop I worked for someone else at for a server with a crapload of drives, this was in the days of Win9X where every damned thing had to have a special driver and most drives topped off at 40Gb, so we just spot welded 3 ATX cases together. When we were done we had a skeleton case that held 20 drives, was beyond simple to keep cool, and made swapping drives a breeze. it was damned nice to have nearly 500Gb of drivers on the network ready to go. you just mount a good board with one of those cheap quads or Opterons from Starmicro and you'd be good to go!
When you are trying to squeeze every drop of bang for the buck it is the little things like that that can mean the difference in having a couple more quad nodes for your cluster or not. Sure it isn't pretty to look at, but who cares? it works great and you can cool the whole smash with a $10 Walmart box fan like we did at the shop.
That's weird because I fix their PCs 6 days a week and except for the little old ladies, which frankly never let go of anything, I've found the numbers for IE dropped like a stone and now find it primarily on the LOL machines. Everyone else is either FF or Chrome.
The funny part to me is the big seller for FF and Chrome at least for me was customization and apparently "normal" users never change off the defaults because they never have so much as a single plug in other than flash. Hell they are just amazed and shocked! Shocked i tell you! When I show them they can sync their bookmarks or never see ads again with ABP.
So maybe you are in a heavy LOL area? With very few teens? Because for everyone else I've found FF and now Chrome shooting up like crazy. Oh if you are in a LOL area an easy way to get them off of IE? Seamonkey. Apparently LOLs are old enough that many used Netscape at work and the Seamonkey UI reminds them of Netscape so they are happy to switch. Really cuts down on the infections IMHO to get them off IE.
"Children's violence is actually the fault of the child and his parents that use games and TV as a babysitter. News at 11." FTFY.
My boys have been pretty much allowed to play any games that they wanted to play from a young age and I never worried about it because I actually sat and taught them how it all works. No mixing up reality and fantasy when you see how you can alter scripts to alter character movements, or tweak a DOOM Wad (dating myself there) to put your name on the walls, or fire up Unreal ED and show them how the different pieces come together to make levels. Did make for some interesting "cursing" from the oldest though. I'd hear things like "Look at the tearing! Who designed this mess? And this AI is a bad joke, I'm clearly in the line of sight! DUCK OR FIRE YOU STUPID SCRIPT!"
But sadly I have picked them up from friends houses when they were younger and saw houses without a single book in them (my mom read "Sci/Fi writers of the 70s" to them like she did to me when I was little, aaww) where they frankly didn't care WHAT the kid did as long as it didn't involve them. Hell their kids could be watching snuff porn for all they knew, as long as the kid wasn't bugging them it was all good as far as they were concerned.
Now while their kids are in dead end crap jobs the oldest is in his second year of pre-med and on the dean's list , and the youngest is trying to decide whether he would prefer to go for something that would help with his love of computer art
or go with his love of cooking and be a chef.
Both of them are kind and decent human beings and both only play violent games if they have more than just violence to offer like a compelling story or well made levels. That is what happens when you treat kids like they actually have a mind and give them knowledge and help them develop the ability to decide on their own, you find they actually develop taste and critical thinking skills and judge based on merits, not just how many bodies they can throw in.
Oops, it seems I've woken up a delusional Linux zealot Sorry/.. At least he's very amusing. See how nicely that fits? Oh if I wanted I could smack your ass around with the truth all day long, you see that is the nice thing about reality, you have the truth on your side, how about a teeny tiny taste?
Now right there is a ton of links showing WHAT I HAVE SAID IS TRUE now can YOU do the same? Why no, instead you'll go "La la la I can't hear you, CLI gives me gonad powers and copypasta into a 70s term makes me leet! You must be an M$ Ninja!"
Now accept you are WRONG AND FULL OF SHIT and move on kid. Nobody cares or uses CLI or start>run in Windows except guys that ran DOS and have a raging case of nostalgia. Your OS CANNOT RUN WITHOUT CLI and frankly wouldn't last even a day without one in most cases.
I repeat, do you know what the definition of insanity is? Because here it is, 2011, and as I politely gave you the link to your numbers are worse than a shitty Java phone OS and the numbers don't lie. How big of a damned clue bat does someone have to smack you with before you accept that NOBODY WANTS CLI BUT NECKBEARDS and that a good 99.999998% of the population is NOT NECKBEARDS.
Accept it, give the customer what they want, or watch as they ignore your CLI heavy fiddly little mess. You see, that is the nice thing about a free market, we are free to NOT TAKE YOUR OS if it sucks or doesn't behave the way we want it to. you hang onto your CLI like a Tux blankie and see where your OS is in 5 years, because I'll tell you EXACTLY where it'll be in 5 years if you don't change....less than the margin for error, just where it is now and has been FOR TWENTY DAMNED YEARS NOW.
I'm your worst fucking nightmare...a retailer that still believes. I believe that the community doesn't have to take Torvalds shit sandwiches, I believe that things can be made better, I believe Linux can be something for more than elitist douchebags like you that will happily take a broken worthless garbage as long as you can say you are sticking to "teh man". I believe that there can be Linux boxes on actual shelves and penguins on boxes.
Uhhh...Its IE. Does ANYONE other than corporate drones forced by BOFHs still use IE? hell my dad is 70 years old and clueless and even HE don't use IE anymore!
And I'll be for HTML V5 when it stops being a piggy, thanks ever so. With flash even netbooks can run SD video smooth as butter, with HTML V5 the last i tried it anything less than a P4 3GHz with HT was a slideshow even in a window. Considering mobile and low power are the buzzwords of the day it amazes me so many here are happy to jump on a tech that sucks as much power as HTML V5. i guess nobody here cares about their batteries dropping like flies as long as its cross compatible. Hell of a price to pay for that though if you ask me.
Hell there was a security warning about a new bug that writes itself to Award BIOS chips coming out of China just last week, so how does mcCrappy think they can magically go any lower than that? Either you make it a ROM in which case good luck updating the thing when new threats figure out how to bypass it, or it is read/write which means that a bug can overwrite the thing.
That is why I say nothing beats a good bootable security CD. I use a Windows live CD which I then access a flash stick with the latest scanners once the boot CD has loaded. Even the BIOS bugs have to write some files to the HDD to make up for the tiny space they have in BIOS to work from so if those files are detected you can then reflash the BIOS and get it back up and running.
I think ultimately though if we want to do something about security we need to do something about the way browsers and JavaScript work. just running any third party code from the web willy nilly without even asking the user or OS is just asking for pain. Sandboxes are just bandaids on bullet wounds, there has to be a way to lock down the code before it ever runs so that it can't run malicious scripts. Hell look at that Yahoo FF porn bug script going around. If you suddenly start getting spam emails from a friend and he doesn't have an infection you'll know why, its the FF Yahoo porn bug. It spams your mail addresses while you look at teh titties, hell set up a password on your passwords in FF and see how many times the pop up asking for it gets called, its just nuts!
So in the end I think we are going the wrong way when it comes to security. We shouldn't be looking at drilling deeper and deeper into the hardware, we should be looking at the web and how we can change it so web designers can have their bling bling bullshit without crapping all over our security.
Uhhhh...nobody actually does that. I used to run an IRC for Windows problems, you know what a good 90% of that entailed? "Here run this.reg file, clicky clicky reboot" and that's it. That's all. no "open up CMD and type" 14 pages of horseshit, which BTW in a good 70%+ of the cases I saw you had damned well better be qualified to rewrite said 14 pages of horseshit, because it was written for hardware a rev d and you have hardware g rev h.
And frankly you could remove BOTH CMD and start>run off every computer on the planet and more than 90% would NEVER notice as THAT is how little they are used. Hell even the repair option on the Win 7 DVD now is a nice little GUI. Can YOU say the same?
Do you know what the definition of insanity is? it is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. The users HAVE SPOKEN and CLI is a giant flaming DO NOT WANT but do you listen? Nope you put a link to it on the desktop. Do you get a free neckbeard with it? do you think CLI gives you gonad powers?
CLI IS FOR ADMINISTRATORS AND SERVERS and NOT for home user's desktops, okay? Is that really so hard to understand? Hell Linux is so far behind it doesn't even have tech Windows has taken for granted for a decade. When the 6 month upgrade deathmarch hoses your drivers, do YOU have a find drivers button? How about a roll back drivers button? Hell how about a last known good config? nope the ONLY thing you have is "open up bash and type".
You know why nearly every distro has a terminal link on the desktop? it is because your OS doesn't work without a terminal it really really doesn't. try removing your terminal for 6 months, see how long it will function. Hell if you are running most distros not having a term will keep it from even booting. the term is God in Linux, too bad that disco is dead and the days of terminals and teletypes and punchcards will NEVER come back.
Linux was at 1% four years ago, it is at 1% now, guess what it'll be in 4 years? Why 1%. it is because YOU DON'T LISTEN and your post is proof. Do you HONESTLY think you will get users to "embrace the power of CLI" like it is the force? Dream on sparky.
Actually I am and more importantly I saw the Windows source code when it was leaked a few years back. Did you look at it? while it was well written there was a ton of places with comments like this: "HACK- Not sure what this does but if changed causes all Sim City games to bite it, DO NOT TOUCH" or "HACK-Changing this causes all Office Word and Excel before 2003 to crash hard, NO TOUCHIE"
Personally i love how with Windows I can run 15 year old programs right next to current ones but it really is a two sided sword. there is a hell of a lot of undocumented "hacks" that Windows programs use and/or Windows has kept over the years and if you are wanting to have even XP apps even from 7 years ago work with ReactOS then you WILL have to figure those out AND be able to replicate it.
Hell the fact that they have it running at all I think is a miracle and they deserve praise, but getting those hundreds of thousands of funky Chinese drivers PLUS all those buggy, hacked together Win32 apps to run? Don't forget the guys at ReactOS originally started targeting Win9X, followed by Win2K, followed by XP, and they haven't reached beta yet. XP is EOL in just 3 years and the Vista/7/8 model is VERY different from what came before.
So while I wish them all the luck in the world, I really do, because it would be nice to have a supported OS to put on all those boxes i'll end up with when XP is EOL, frankly I haven't seen anything to make me believe they are any closer than they were 3 years ago when it comes to having a truly functional and stable OS. I tried running the latest build in a VM and honestly i really couldn't get anything to work with it.
I truly hope they manage to pull it off though, as it is pretty damned obvious by now that the Linux community will never listen to the users and will therefor never be more than a teeny tiny niche. I mean here it is 2011 and they still expect people to use a terminal, read man pages, and jump through hoops every 6 months when the latest upgrade comes along and breaks everything, sigh. I had truly hoped that by now we would have Linux machines on shelves and penguins on labels making it beyond simple to shop and support Linux, but it is obvious all the community cares about is trying to force the world to go back to 1979 and that simply won't happen.
It is like how RMS insists on calling everyone "hackers" like he is at a computer club in 1977, it isn't even funny anymore, its just kinda sad. that is why I hope the ReactOS guys are able to pull it off, because otherwise the future is gonna be locked down between the big three, Apple, Google, and MSFT. And I predict that like what Apple did with BSD so too will Google eventually lock down Android. So if the React guys don't pull it off we'll have three proprietary OSes, it'll just be two of them are based on open source, not that it'll do you any good.
Question: How much bandwidth would that run? Because I've never had the chance to set up a cluster (most of my customers are SMBs and SOHOs) so I have no idea how much bandwidth you'd need to feed something like the Amazon cloud. If he is like many of us they probably have bandwidth limits and/or have to share that bandwidth with other users so if it takes a big ass pipe I could see that possibly being a problem.
That said if the cloud was out of the question I'd snatch up plenty of cheap AMD boards along with some cheap triples from Starmicro and simply mount the boards tray style in a simple home made rack. Those triples are last gen but at $40 a pop dirt cheap, any cheap cooler will work on those with an open tray design, and geeks sells AMD boards that they'll lost the I/O shields on for something like $20. Throw in some cheap DDR 3 and some small SATA drives along with Linux and voila! Cheap cluster.
But I have to agree with you and everyone else that if they are that tight on money the cloud would give them the most bang for the buck, and cut out a lot of the hassles and upkeep as well.
Oh if you want a slim Windows 7 you should try to get a hold of a copy of "Windows Tiny7" and give it a spin. They really need to hire the guy that makes the Tiny series to work for MSFT, because I've tried WinFLP and WinEmbedded and frankly it stomps the living hell out of both of those while being more compatible with existing programs than either of those.
How slim are we talking? Try a Win 7 that runs like a champ on a 1.4GHz with 512Mb of RAM, and which flies low on 1Gb or more. It idles at just 254Mb of RAM and the speed level is just pure insanity. But that is the thing about ALL of the Tiny series, just truly insane speed. His Tiny2K uses 49Mb of RAM, TinyXP uses just 65Mb of RAM, Tiny2K3 just 78Mb, and TinyVista which is the closest he has gotten to bloated uses around 380Mb.
But I have to say I think I'm just gonna sit this one out. Windows 7 runs great and with it being supported until 2020 I just haven't seen any real compelling reason to jump on Windows 8. If they have another one of those $50 upgrade deals I may buy a copy simply to play with in a VM but I can't see actually wanting to spend any time in metro unless I was running a tablet. Metro on a desktop? Just seems like a majorly dumb idea from the company whose current CEO seems to make the PHB in Dilbert look like Steve Jobs.
Riiight, and Windows is built upon DOS to this very day and all the drivers are VXDs with.ini files for configs...get real!
To be fair what the ReactOS guys want to accomplish, to have a Linux that can actually run Windows drivers AND programs without hoop jumping, is ambitious to say the least. Personally I don't see how they'll do it without the Windows source code to look at but I wish them luck.
As for TFA, how do you say "fuck the dissident loving pigs" in Russian? or has everyone already forgot that MSFT SEVERELY pissed off the Russian government by giving dissidents free Windows licenses thus taking away the Russian governments excuse de jure of "stopping pirates" in dissident groups by kicking in doors and seizing equipment
So I have NO doubt the Russian president might want to fund ReactOS, it would give him a way to flip the bird that MSFT gave to them by helping dissidents right back at MSFT by eliminating Windows or even possibly banning it outright in Russia without forcing their businesses to start over from scratch.
Well to be fair you can kill Metro and you'll have a bog standard Win 7 UI, which personally I think is the best damned UI MSFT has ever come out with by far. Breadcrumbs, jumplists, it makes it easier for power users while at the same time letting those that are clueless get around and find new features easily.
Frankly trying to pass Metro off on the desktop tells me what I already knew, that Ballmer isn't qualified to shine Gates shoes and he sure as hell ain't a decent CEO. he has a case of Apple envy so badly it hurts. i can just imagine him trying to fire up the troops "And with Metro we'll make Windows as hip and cool as Apple! Yes we will! We really will! STOP LAUGHING AT ME!!".
That is why I say its high time to replace the Gates borg, Hell Gates hasn't been there in years. Instead it should be Ballmer with his tongue out and an "I Heart Apple!" beanie, as that would better describe the current state at MSFT. While I'll wait to pass judgement on Metro until I try it frankly it looks stupid as hell for a desktop UI. I have a feeling I'll be killing Metro and sticking with Aero, if I don't just "pull a Vista" and bypass the whole thing. Win 7 is supported until 2020 you know, no reason to care if Ballmer cocks this one up.
I'm sorry, but I'm afraid your trolling simply doesn't measure up to the high standards we have here at Slashdot. You see, unlike at digg or fark, we here at Slashdot have a rich tradition of truly great trolling, and because of this we try to attract only the best and brightest of the trolling community. Our trolls have gone on to lead very rich and lucrative careers in exciting and rewarding fields such as shills for Microsoft and Intel management. Who do you think came up with the Intel x87 compiler trick and the OEM payoffs? That's right, a former Slashdot troll!
So please, in the future put more care and thought into your trolling. Remember that you are walking the path blazed by such luminaries as the GNAA and that you stand beside such greats as the shit eater troll and the ASCII goatse guy. So in the future try to remember the greats that came before you along with your trolling peers and live up to their high standards. Maybe if you troll hard you too will join the greats and have your portrait in the trolling hall of fame!* Thank you for your time and may you have a successful career trolling here at slashdot!
*-(Currently located in the mens room of the Hooters restaurant in Paramus,NJ, third stall from the front)
It means Intel can use the software without paying anything to the ones that actually wrote it number one, and number two in our first to file system Intel can patent things they didn't even invent, all they have to do is get a hold of it before anyone else does.
So while I would hope that it is Intel turning a new leaf, although frankly they would have to cut a check to Via, open up the new bus to Nvidia, and stop rigging their compilers for me to truly think that was true, IRL Intel not being vicious is about like believing MSFT is gonna make Win9X FOSS since they aren't using it anymore. nice thought, but fat fucking chance friend.
See that is what impressed me about JC II, they didn't make it impossible or penalize you for doing the crazy crap to civilians. You can do like that old Drew Carey bit "up on the sidewalk bop bop bop" launching civilians like strawmen, grab a 4 wheeler and tie the guy who just insulted you for bumping into him onto the back and see if you can hit the sign with him as you jump over an overpass, the truly batshit insane o' meter is way past redline with this one.
Someone complained about realism, but you know what? As long as the physics are decent (which they are) then the whole point of this thread is ITS A GAME and crazy shit is FUN. IRL you hit a single lampost and you've cracked the radiator, you sure as hell can't drive a car at 60MPH with two wheels down to metal and the hood on fire and at the last second jump off the roof onto a passing jeep and perfectly steal the fucker but guess what? That crazy shit is FUN. Look at RF: Guerrilla where your morale went down every time a civilian got it even when they stepped in front of you or decided it was time to charge the barricades even though you hadn't even fired a shot! And sure carrying a tiny amount of bullets is realistic, but where is the fun?
DOOM wasn't real but it was FUN, Quake wasn't realistic but it was FUN, Just Cause II is batshit nuts and is FUN. I agree with Yahtzee at ZP who says 'Who asked for all this realism? I don't remember saying I wanted fat space marines that can only carry two guns and waddle from one Chesty McWallhigh to another" and I agree completely. It should be about FUN with a capital F! Otherwise like I said it might as well be a paintball simulator or like in TFA have cities without a single civilian in the whole damned thing! Where is the FUN in that?
But you see, here is the thing about that. Unless you are one of the rare (although admittedly more of them exist here than in most places) people that are slamming the living hell out of your CPU and need to scrape up every single last flop you can CPUs are long past good enough for pretty much any task the common man can think up.
I was a lifelong Intel+Nvidia man until bumpgate and the massive bribery and compiler rigging came out, then for the first time since the K6 I built an AMD machine for myself, and you know what? Frankly even without going for the top o' the line chips its insanely overpowered. Video editing/transcoding, DVD ripping, gaming, you name it my 925 quad takes it like a champ and keeps right on coming and the whole thing, with 3Tb of HDDs, 8Gb of RAM, dual burners, HD4850, and Win 7 HP X64, cost me barely $700 before MIR, around $640 after. And that was before the prices dropped, now you can probably knock a good $150 or more off that easily.
I am a hell of a lot harder on a machine than the average folks which come to my shop so for them the bang for the buck is even more insane. When you can hand them a triple or quad for $500 or less and still make a decent profit? That is just nuts! But I bet if you were to check your CPU usage long term a good 80%+ of the time your CPU is twiddling its thumbs waiting for you to find some work for it to do. the only ones I've found that might need the extra 20-30% speed boost going Intel might give you and are willing to pay the 200% higher markup for that speed are guys doing a shitload of compiling. like I said there are more of those type here, but for everyone else? You can get an insanely overpowered and loaded to the brim machine for dirt cheap by going AMD. The bang for the buck is so far in the AMD camp now it isn't even funny and that is before you count the kick ass GPUs compared to the shite on a crusty roll that Intel calls a GPU.
So if you are not one of those 4% that slam their CPUs and push them to the absolute limit why would you spend the extra money on Intel? Like I said monster quads for less than $500 and you can even buy quad laptops for that price if being mobile is your thing. Its just nuts!
Exactly! Doing crazy shit is FUN with a capital F! hell that is why I started playing games in the first place, so I can do crazy shit nobody in real life would ever be able to do and possibly survive!
If you like truly crazy shit you really need to try Just Cause II, sadly I can think of no other game to even compare it to on the batshit insane o' meter. Try jumping out of an airplane to grab onto a helicopter, stomping the ass of the guy flying the chopper and toss him out, then take the chopper on a straffing run of a local base. Chopper get too shot up? Just jump out the bastard, rip the 20mm chain gun off a base defense and go T2 on their ass. Grab a bike and make Evil Knievel look like a pussy while dragging a little old lady behind you! Hell I even hook shot a soldier underneath a chopper and used his screaming ass as a wrecking ball to knock his buddies off a ledge! Cities, villages, jungles and mountains, this thing has to be the size of Bolivia and is FULL of shit to wreck or blow up!
Games are SUPPOSED to be crazy insanity, that is what makes them more than paintball simulators! i'm telling ya there is nothing like walking out a base in JC II that you entered by driving a tank off a cliff while surfing on the hood of the thing for a couple of thousand feet right into the center of enemy city, turning the whole thing into a mess of fireballs and bodies, and then as you are walking out and a few stragglers try to mount a defense you set off a half a dozen charges that makes a bigger mess than a Michael Bay action movie. Now THAT is fun crazy shit!!!
So we are just the lousy MOR race like in most RPGs? Not the fastest, smartest, strongest, just plain vanilla average across the board. We're like the unseasoned mashed potatoes of races! We're Oatmeal with no cinnamon!
As for TFA, we care about this.....why exactly? Personally I find it depressing as hell, its like "Hey look, here is another bunch of planets we will never see in person nor step foot on isn't that great?". What is the point when our engine tech frankly isn't any better than what they had 50 years ago? Sorry to be a killjoy but we could find a bazillion planets loaded with gold, candy, and three titted hookers, but if they are all light years away from us all you are doing is teasing.
Uhhhh...its pixels and polygons, so I should be able to blow up the barbie dolls if I wanna!
The problem is the dumbing down of society for the retarded. There is no personal responsibility anymore. you get some retard that was raised by games and the tube because mama was too busy being a whore and daddy don't even know he exists and this braintrust decides to play "GTA for real" and kill people the media blames the games instead of the shit for brains that deserves the blame.
IT IS A FUCKING GAME PEOPLE and we should be able to go completely apeshit in them because that is what games are for having fun and doing crazy shit you can't do in real life! What is next, some moron tries to swing on a grapple hook like Just Cause II? Or drives through houses like RF: Guerrilla? How sad is it that the last truly "Do what the fuck you want, whatever" game was fricking Postal II, and that was how many years ago?
For those that haven't tried it I highly recommend Just Cause II, it is truly the closest to a "do what the fuck you want" game I've seen in years. Having some civilian smart off to me when I am walking down the street and hook shot his ass to the back of a speeding bus? Now THAT is funny! Having a bad guy cop try to catch up to you in a car and you hook shot the front end of his ride to the ground so he pulls a T3:Rise of the Machines? Now THAT is cool.
Its a game folks, doing crazy shit should be SOP. Otherwise they might as well just make paintball simulators.
You're missing the most important reason for which MSFT got busted....if you pay your supply chain to keep others out then THAT'S an illegal monopoly. While I think Gates made a 1000% better CEO than the sweaty monkey there is no denying Gates is a vicious little bastard when it comes to competition. He had it rigged so that if you carried ANY other OS than Windows your per unit cost went through the roof and in the razor margins of PC sales it would have been a death sentence. Frankly Intel should have been busted and slapped with as much regulation as MSFT when they did the same trick with OEMs to keep AMD and Via from selling chips.
But to see why Apple (which just FYI the only Apple device I've ever owned is a B&W G3 I got to play with PPC) isn't DoJ material yet all one has to do is go into Best Buy. There you will see Android being sold in the same store as Apple with no penalty to BB. If they start making demands like "If you don't give us an exclusive you'll pay 40% more than your competitors" then Apple deserves to get busted. Right now are they being assholes? I would say yes. Is being an asshole illegal? no it isn't. You may not like the way they act like assholes with dubious patents but in the land of the free you are allowed to be as big a douche as you want. just look at Jersey Shore.
Oh please! Have you heard the fingernails on a chalkboard screeching that Yoko calls "singing"? Nuking her from orbit is the ONLY way to be sure pal, as you sure as hell wouldn't want to get within earshot to make sure she was down.....shudder.
As for TFA, how many big fat checks did the ones in charge get to cash? Bribing elected officials, whether with big fat checks or by offering cushy jobs to them and their families, should be seen as what it is....treason. And all those that commit treason should be lined up and shot, period. They are a bigger threat to democracy than any nutball with a bomb and a cause, because they cause permanent damage to democracy whereas the nutball's mess can be cleaned up.
Maybe Marx was right, that all capitalist societies will destroy themselves from within. That the greed will eventually because so rank and foul that the people will turn on them. Lenin said a capitalist will sell you the rope you hang him with, and since Citizens United all the obvious bribery here in the states while so many are hurting really makes me wonder if they were right. I had hoped maybe the EU would be a little better off than we are but it looks like the big fat checks cash just as well there.
Slashdot Mirror
Wanna hear something funny? I ask folks here in the shop what Windows they are running and apparently the big difference according to average folks is the color, at least those that have been exposed to other versions at work or school. They say they are running "the blue one" (WinXP), "the black one" (WinVista) or "The silvery see through thing" (Win7) and surprisingly that description helps me immensely.
Now I just ask folks which color Windows they have and they go "Oh I know that!" and it keeps them from feeling like a dummy. Makes them feel good, gives me the info I need, a win/win all around. Now MSFT is gonna cock that up with ARM Windows. Stupid as fuck MSFT, just stupid as fuck.
You have NO CLUE how business works, do you? Its called loss leaders and it REALLY pisses off your potential customers when they get there and find you don't have squat. I will often get older laptops in bulk and sell them for VERY slight profit, now why would I do that? Because the thought of cheap laptops, even older laptops, gets folks through the door where I then get a chance to upsell them and hopefully build a long term business relationship with.
Many of my best long term customers, folks that have spent thousands in my shop buying everything from fixes to upgrades to new boxes, all started out as customers that showed up because they heard I had cheap laptops and they decided they needed a laptop NOW for some reason or another.Take the graphics designer that has probably spent a good $3000 at my shop for example. He was pitching a bid for a VERY lucrative job at the local college and his laptop had bought the farm so he needed one he could hook to a projector and show his works. I sold him an older P4 mobile with RCA and S-Video and he landed the job and has bought all his gear from me ever since. As soon as the bad weather passes I'll be giving his desktop a Win 7 upgrade and doing some software tweaks, another $150 profit for me.
So it all comes down to getting their butts through the door and that is what loss leaders do. most here would laugh at older laptops for $80-$100 but when someone is in a bind or needs a machine NOW and doesn't want to be assraped on price? That is a VERY attractive offer, and helps me to get their butts through the door where I can then sell them everything from upgrades to their existing desktops to new builds. But if someone was to come along and try to buy out my stock constantly that would kill the best way I've found to get butts through the door and while I personally would tell them to fuck right off I can see other businesses limiting customers or saying no commercial sales.
How about when my sis was left crippled and later died of cancer leaving two young kids I stepped up to the plate and did my job instead of being a selfish self centered twat? How about that? I would have even had an excuse to be a self centered twat as I planned to never have children, what is the excuse of all those that chose to have unprotected sex and then refuse to deal with the consequences?
NOBODY said being a parent was easy, after 20 years in the role I'm probably down 3 years on sleep alone, not to mention all the great sex I gave up from two different women I had to tell to hit the bricks because they tried to make me choose between them and being a parent to those two boys. But you know what? I DID MY FUCKING JOB and those two NEVER went without, not without love, attention, nor education.
So I feel NO SYMPATHY AT ALL for someone that chooses to bring a life into this world then refuses to do their fucking job as best they can. nobody is saying they have to be Dr Spock here, but when your idea of "parenting" is doing your damnedest to avoid any contact with your children, like they were your boss trying to make you work on a Saturday? Then FUCK YOU YOU SORRY BASTARD put those kids up for adoption while they still have a chance at finding someone who'll give a fuck about them.
Oh you don't need to break out the popcorn as i saw EXACTLY what this trainwreck is gonna do last Xmas. See there was this place selling "Windows netbooks" with in tiny print "Windows Compact Edition" but since it looks like XP and consumers have no fucking clue what any of that means they sold out on a "first come first served no refunds" sale. So what happened?
They were dumped en mass on Craigslist when folks found they couldn't run Win apps and that is EXACTLY what is gonna happen with this moronic clusterfuck. When folks see the word Windows they are gonna rightly assume that it actually runs WINDOWS PROGRAMS because if it don't? Then why would they buy Windows? hell they could just run Android or buy an Apple iDevice!
The only nice thing I predict that will come from the massive trainwreck that Win 8 is shaping up to be, complete with retailers having masses of ARM Win devices they'll have to take a Touchpad sized bath on, is that FINALLY Ballmer will end up forced to "pursue other interests" and hopefully they can get Ozzie back or maybe one of the Office guys to take the helm and right the ship. Because this is just another example of Ballmer having a raging hard on for his competitors and completely ignoring his companies strengths and weaknesses trying to play "Me too! Ohhhh me too!" and it WILL come back to bite him in his sweaty monkey ass.
I'd agree on everything but the head server case. We had a need at the last shop I worked for someone else at for a server with a crapload of drives, this was in the days of Win9X where every damned thing had to have a special driver and most drives topped off at 40Gb, so we just spot welded 3 ATX cases together. When we were done we had a skeleton case that held 20 drives, was beyond simple to keep cool, and made swapping drives a breeze. it was damned nice to have nearly 500Gb of drivers on the network ready to go. you just mount a good board with one of those cheap quads or Opterons from Starmicro and you'd be good to go!
When you are trying to squeeze every drop of bang for the buck it is the little things like that that can mean the difference in having a couple more quad nodes for your cluster or not. Sure it isn't pretty to look at, but who cares? it works great and you can cool the whole smash with a $10 Walmart box fan like we did at the shop.
That's weird because I fix their PCs 6 days a week and except for the little old ladies, which frankly never let go of anything, I've found the numbers for IE dropped like a stone and now find it primarily on the LOL machines. Everyone else is either FF or Chrome.
The funny part to me is the big seller for FF and Chrome at least for me was customization and apparently "normal" users never change off the defaults because they never have so much as a single plug in other than flash. Hell they are just amazed and shocked! Shocked i tell you! When I show them they can sync their bookmarks or never see ads again with ABP.
So maybe you are in a heavy LOL area? With very few teens? Because for everyone else I've found FF and now Chrome shooting up like crazy. Oh if you are in a LOL area an easy way to get them off of IE? Seamonkey. Apparently LOLs are old enough that many used Netscape at work and the Seamonkey UI reminds them of Netscape so they are happy to switch. Really cuts down on the infections IMHO to get them off IE.
"Children's violence is actually the fault of the child and his parents that use games and TV as a babysitter. News at 11." FTFY.
My boys have been pretty much allowed to play any games that they wanted to play from a young age and I never worried about it because I actually sat and taught them how it all works. No mixing up reality and fantasy when you see how you can alter scripts to alter character movements, or tweak a DOOM Wad (dating myself there) to put your name on the walls, or fire up Unreal ED and show them how the different pieces come together to make levels. Did make for some interesting "cursing" from the oldest though. I'd hear things like "Look at the tearing! Who designed this mess? And this AI is a bad joke, I'm clearly in the line of sight! DUCK OR FIRE YOU STUPID SCRIPT!"
But sadly I have picked them up from friends houses when they were younger and saw houses without a single book in them (my mom read "Sci/Fi writers of the 70s" to them like she did to me when I was little, aaww) where they frankly didn't care WHAT the kid did as long as it didn't involve them. Hell their kids could be watching snuff porn for all they knew, as long as the kid wasn't bugging them it was all good as far as they were concerned.
Now while their kids are in dead end crap jobs the oldest is in his second year of pre-med and on the dean's list , and the youngest is trying to decide whether he would prefer to go for something that would help with his love of computer art or go with his love of cooking and be a chef.
Both of them are kind and decent human beings and both only play violent games if they have more than just violence to offer like a compelling story or well made levels. That is what happens when you treat kids like they actually have a mind and give them knowledge and help them develop the ability to decide on their own, you find they actually develop taste and critical thinking skills and judge based on merits, not just how many bodies they can throw in.
Oops, it seems I've woken up a delusional Linux zealot Sorry /.. At least he's very amusing. See how nicely that fits? Oh if I wanted I could smack your ass around with the truth all day long, you see that is the nice thing about reality, you have the truth on your side, how about a teeny tiny taste?
How about how a decade old Windows beat the shit out of the latest Linux on netbooks or how ASUS has given up on your bullshit or how about Walmart running away from linux as fast as it can? You got the crazy koolaid drunk enough to say they ALL are paid shills because they won't do your forum dance or CLI horseshit? Meanwhile your "hero" Torvalds the great says Plans? We don't need no steenkin plans!. Why don't you tell them that at work next week, see how quick you get a pink slip? More? How about you actually have the balls to celebrate getting a whole 1% market share while you are actually lower than JavaME and there is a whole website dedicated To your bullshit and excuses .
Now right there is a ton of links showing WHAT I HAVE SAID IS TRUE now can YOU do the same? Why no, instead you'll go "La la la I can't hear you, CLI gives me gonad powers and copypasta into a 70s term makes me leet! You must be an M$ Ninja!"
Now accept you are WRONG AND FULL OF SHIT and move on kid. Nobody cares or uses CLI or start>run in Windows except guys that ran DOS and have a raging case of nostalgia. Your OS CANNOT RUN WITHOUT CLI and frankly wouldn't last even a day without one in most cases.
I repeat, do you know what the definition of insanity is? Because here it is, 2011, and as I politely gave you the link to your numbers are worse than a shitty Java phone OS and the numbers don't lie. How big of a damned clue bat does someone have to smack you with before you accept that NOBODY WANTS CLI BUT NECKBEARDS and that a good 99.999998% of the population is NOT NECKBEARDS.
Accept it, give the customer what they want, or watch as they ignore your CLI heavy fiddly little mess. You see, that is the nice thing about a free market, we are free to NOT TAKE YOUR OS if it sucks or doesn't behave the way we want it to. you hang onto your CLI like a Tux blankie and see where your OS is in 5 years, because I'll tell you EXACTLY where it'll be in 5 years if you don't change....less than the margin for error, just where it is now and has been FOR TWENTY DAMNED YEARS NOW.
I'm your worst fucking nightmare...a retailer that still believes. I believe that the community doesn't have to take Torvalds shit sandwiches, I believe that things can be made better, I believe Linux can be something for more than elitist douchebags like you that will happily take a broken worthless garbage as long as you can say you are sticking to "teh man". I believe that there can be Linux boxes on actual shelves and penguins on boxes.
Uhhh...Its IE. Does ANYONE other than corporate drones forced by BOFHs still use IE? hell my dad is 70 years old and clueless and even HE don't use IE anymore!
And I'll be for HTML V5 when it stops being a piggy, thanks ever so. With flash even netbooks can run SD video smooth as butter, with HTML V5 the last i tried it anything less than a P4 3GHz with HT was a slideshow even in a window. Considering mobile and low power are the buzzwords of the day it amazes me so many here are happy to jump on a tech that sucks as much power as HTML V5. i guess nobody here cares about their batteries dropping like flies as long as its cross compatible. Hell of a price to pay for that though if you ask me.
Hell there was a security warning about a new bug that writes itself to Award BIOS chips coming out of China just last week, so how does mcCrappy think they can magically go any lower than that? Either you make it a ROM in which case good luck updating the thing when new threats figure out how to bypass it, or it is read/write which means that a bug can overwrite the thing.
That is why I say nothing beats a good bootable security CD. I use a Windows live CD which I then access a flash stick with the latest scanners once the boot CD has loaded. Even the BIOS bugs have to write some files to the HDD to make up for the tiny space they have in BIOS to work from so if those files are detected you can then reflash the BIOS and get it back up and running.
I think ultimately though if we want to do something about security we need to do something about the way browsers and JavaScript work. just running any third party code from the web willy nilly without even asking the user or OS is just asking for pain. Sandboxes are just bandaids on bullet wounds, there has to be a way to lock down the code before it ever runs so that it can't run malicious scripts. Hell look at that Yahoo FF porn bug script going around. If you suddenly start getting spam emails from a friend and he doesn't have an infection you'll know why, its the FF Yahoo porn bug. It spams your mail addresses while you look at teh titties, hell set up a password on your passwords in FF and see how many times the pop up asking for it gets called, its just nuts!
So in the end I think we are going the wrong way when it comes to security. We shouldn't be looking at drilling deeper and deeper into the hardware, we should be looking at the web and how we can change it so web designers can have their bling bling bullshit without crapping all over our security.
Uhhhh...nobody actually does that. I used to run an IRC for Windows problems, you know what a good 90% of that entailed? "Here run this .reg file, clicky clicky reboot" and that's it. That's all. no "open up CMD and type" 14 pages of horseshit, which BTW in a good 70%+ of the cases I saw you had damned well better be qualified to rewrite said 14 pages of horseshit, because it was written for hardware a rev d and you have hardware g rev h.
And frankly you could remove BOTH CMD and start>run off every computer on the planet and more than 90% would NEVER notice as THAT is how little they are used. Hell even the repair option on the Win 7 DVD now is a nice little GUI. Can YOU say the same?
Do you know what the definition of insanity is? it is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. The users HAVE SPOKEN and CLI is a giant flaming DO NOT WANT but do you listen? Nope you put a link to it on the desktop. Do you get a free neckbeard with it? do you think CLI gives you gonad powers?
CLI IS FOR ADMINISTRATORS AND SERVERS and NOT for home user's desktops, okay? Is that really so hard to understand? Hell Linux is so far behind it doesn't even have tech Windows has taken for granted for a decade. When the 6 month upgrade deathmarch hoses your drivers, do YOU have a find drivers button? How about a roll back drivers button? Hell how about a last known good config? nope the ONLY thing you have is "open up bash and type".
You know why nearly every distro has a terminal link on the desktop? it is because your OS doesn't work without a terminal it really really doesn't. try removing your terminal for 6 months, see how long it will function. Hell if you are running most distros not having a term will keep it from even booting. the term is God in Linux, too bad that disco is dead and the days of terminals and teletypes and punchcards will NEVER come back.
Linux was at 1% four years ago, it is at 1% now, guess what it'll be in 4 years? Why 1%. it is because YOU DON'T LISTEN and your post is proof. Do you HONESTLY think you will get users to "embrace the power of CLI" like it is the force? Dream on sparky.
Actually I am and more importantly I saw the Windows source code when it was leaked a few years back. Did you look at it? while it was well written there was a ton of places with comments like this: "HACK- Not sure what this does but if changed causes all Sim City games to bite it, DO NOT TOUCH" or "HACK-Changing this causes all Office Word and Excel before 2003 to crash hard, NO TOUCHIE"
Personally i love how with Windows I can run 15 year old programs right next to current ones but it really is a two sided sword. there is a hell of a lot of undocumented "hacks" that Windows programs use and/or Windows has kept over the years and if you are wanting to have even XP apps even from 7 years ago work with ReactOS then you WILL have to figure those out AND be able to replicate it.
Hell the fact that they have it running at all I think is a miracle and they deserve praise, but getting those hundreds of thousands of funky Chinese drivers PLUS all those buggy, hacked together Win32 apps to run? Don't forget the guys at ReactOS originally started targeting Win9X, followed by Win2K, followed by XP, and they haven't reached beta yet. XP is EOL in just 3 years and the Vista/7/8 model is VERY different from what came before.
So while I wish them all the luck in the world, I really do, because it would be nice to have a supported OS to put on all those boxes i'll end up with when XP is EOL, frankly I haven't seen anything to make me believe they are any closer than they were 3 years ago when it comes to having a truly functional and stable OS. I tried running the latest build in a VM and honestly i really couldn't get anything to work with it.
I truly hope they manage to pull it off though, as it is pretty damned obvious by now that the Linux community will never listen to the users and will therefor never be more than a teeny tiny niche. I mean here it is 2011 and they still expect people to use a terminal, read man pages, and jump through hoops every 6 months when the latest upgrade comes along and breaks everything, sigh. I had truly hoped that by now we would have Linux machines on shelves and penguins on labels making it beyond simple to shop and support Linux, but it is obvious all the community cares about is trying to force the world to go back to 1979 and that simply won't happen.
It is like how RMS insists on calling everyone "hackers" like he is at a computer club in 1977, it isn't even funny anymore, its just kinda sad. that is why I hope the ReactOS guys are able to pull it off, because otherwise the future is gonna be locked down between the big three, Apple, Google, and MSFT. And I predict that like what Apple did with BSD so too will Google eventually lock down Android. So if the React guys don't pull it off we'll have three proprietary OSes, it'll just be two of them are based on open source, not that it'll do you any good.
Question: How much bandwidth would that run? Because I've never had the chance to set up a cluster (most of my customers are SMBs and SOHOs) so I have no idea how much bandwidth you'd need to feed something like the Amazon cloud. If he is like many of us they probably have bandwidth limits and/or have to share that bandwidth with other users so if it takes a big ass pipe I could see that possibly being a problem.
That said if the cloud was out of the question I'd snatch up plenty of cheap AMD boards along with some cheap triples from Starmicro and simply mount the boards tray style in a simple home made rack. Those triples are last gen but at $40 a pop dirt cheap, any cheap cooler will work on those with an open tray design, and geeks sells AMD boards that they'll lost the I/O shields on for something like $20. Throw in some cheap DDR 3 and some small SATA drives along with Linux and voila! Cheap cluster.
But I have to agree with you and everyone else that if they are that tight on money the cloud would give them the most bang for the buck, and cut out a lot of the hassles and upkeep as well.
Oh if you want a slim Windows 7 you should try to get a hold of a copy of "Windows Tiny7" and give it a spin. They really need to hire the guy that makes the Tiny series to work for MSFT, because I've tried WinFLP and WinEmbedded and frankly it stomps the living hell out of both of those while being more compatible with existing programs than either of those.
How slim are we talking? Try a Win 7 that runs like a champ on a 1.4GHz with 512Mb of RAM, and which flies low on 1Gb or more. It idles at just 254Mb of RAM and the speed level is just pure insanity. But that is the thing about ALL of the Tiny series, just truly insane speed. His Tiny2K uses 49Mb of RAM, TinyXP uses just 65Mb of RAM, Tiny2K3 just 78Mb, and TinyVista which is the closest he has gotten to bloated uses around 380Mb.
But I have to say I think I'm just gonna sit this one out. Windows 7 runs great and with it being supported until 2020 I just haven't seen any real compelling reason to jump on Windows 8. If they have another one of those $50 upgrade deals I may buy a copy simply to play with in a VM but I can't see actually wanting to spend any time in metro unless I was running a tablet. Metro on a desktop? Just seems like a majorly dumb idea from the company whose current CEO seems to make the PHB in Dilbert look like Steve Jobs.
Riiight, and Windows is built upon DOS to this very day and all the drivers are VXDs with .ini files for configs...get real!
To be fair what the ReactOS guys want to accomplish, to have a Linux that can actually run Windows drivers AND programs without hoop jumping, is ambitious to say the least. Personally I don't see how they'll do it without the Windows source code to look at but I wish them luck.
As for TFA, how do you say "fuck the dissident loving pigs" in Russian? or has everyone already forgot that MSFT SEVERELY pissed off the Russian government by giving dissidents free Windows licenses thus taking away the Russian governments excuse de jure of "stopping pirates" in dissident groups by kicking in doors and seizing equipment
So I have NO doubt the Russian president might want to fund ReactOS, it would give him a way to flip the bird that MSFT gave to them by helping dissidents right back at MSFT by eliminating Windows or even possibly banning it outright in Russia without forcing their businesses to start over from scratch.
Well to be fair you can kill Metro and you'll have a bog standard Win 7 UI, which personally I think is the best damned UI MSFT has ever come out with by far. Breadcrumbs, jumplists, it makes it easier for power users while at the same time letting those that are clueless get around and find new features easily.
Frankly trying to pass Metro off on the desktop tells me what I already knew, that Ballmer isn't qualified to shine Gates shoes and he sure as hell ain't a decent CEO. he has a case of Apple envy so badly it hurts. i can just imagine him trying to fire up the troops "And with Metro we'll make Windows as hip and cool as Apple! Yes we will! We really will! STOP LAUGHING AT ME!!".
That is why I say its high time to replace the Gates borg, Hell Gates hasn't been there in years. Instead it should be Ballmer with his tongue out and an "I Heart Apple!" beanie, as that would better describe the current state at MSFT. While I'll wait to pass judgement on Metro until I try it frankly it looks stupid as hell for a desktop UI. I have a feeling I'll be killing Metro and sticking with Aero, if I don't just "pull a Vista" and bypass the whole thing. Win 7 is supported until 2020 you know, no reason to care if Ballmer cocks this one up.
I'm sorry, but I'm afraid your trolling simply doesn't measure up to the high standards we have here at Slashdot. You see, unlike at digg or fark, we here at Slashdot have a rich tradition of truly great trolling, and because of this we try to attract only the best and brightest of the trolling community. Our trolls have gone on to lead very rich and lucrative careers in exciting and rewarding fields such as shills for Microsoft and Intel management. Who do you think came up with the Intel x87 compiler trick and the OEM payoffs? That's right, a former Slashdot troll!
So please, in the future put more care and thought into your trolling. Remember that you are walking the path blazed by such luminaries as the GNAA and that you stand beside such greats as the shit eater troll and the ASCII goatse guy. So in the future try to remember the greats that came before you along with your trolling peers and live up to their high standards. Maybe if you troll hard you too will join the greats and have your portrait in the trolling hall of fame!* Thank you for your time and may you have a successful career trolling here at slashdot!
*-(Currently located in the mens room of the Hooters restaurant in Paramus,NJ, third stall from the front)
It means Intel can use the software without paying anything to the ones that actually wrote it number one, and number two in our first to file system Intel can patent things they didn't even invent, all they have to do is get a hold of it before anyone else does.
So while I would hope that it is Intel turning a new leaf, although frankly they would have to cut a check to Via, open up the new bus to Nvidia, and stop rigging their compilers for me to truly think that was true, IRL Intel not being vicious is about like believing MSFT is gonna make Win9X FOSS since they aren't using it anymore. nice thought, but fat fucking chance friend.
See that is what impressed me about JC II, they didn't make it impossible or penalize you for doing the crazy crap to civilians. You can do like that old Drew Carey bit "up on the sidewalk bop bop bop" launching civilians like strawmen, grab a 4 wheeler and tie the guy who just insulted you for bumping into him onto the back and see if you can hit the sign with him as you jump over an overpass, the truly batshit insane o' meter is way past redline with this one.
Someone complained about realism, but you know what? As long as the physics are decent (which they are) then the whole point of this thread is ITS A GAME and crazy shit is FUN. IRL you hit a single lampost and you've cracked the radiator, you sure as hell can't drive a car at 60MPH with two wheels down to metal and the hood on fire and at the last second jump off the roof onto a passing jeep and perfectly steal the fucker but guess what? That crazy shit is FUN. Look at RF: Guerrilla where your morale went down every time a civilian got it even when they stepped in front of you or decided it was time to charge the barricades even though you hadn't even fired a shot! And sure carrying a tiny amount of bullets is realistic, but where is the fun?
DOOM wasn't real but it was FUN, Quake wasn't realistic but it was FUN, Just Cause II is batshit nuts and is FUN. I agree with Yahtzee at ZP who says 'Who asked for all this realism? I don't remember saying I wanted fat space marines that can only carry two guns and waddle from one Chesty McWallhigh to another" and I agree completely. It should be about FUN with a capital F! Otherwise like I said it might as well be a paintball simulator or like in TFA have cities without a single civilian in the whole damned thing! Where is the FUN in that?
But you see, here is the thing about that. Unless you are one of the rare (although admittedly more of them exist here than in most places) people that are slamming the living hell out of your CPU and need to scrape up every single last flop you can CPUs are long past good enough for pretty much any task the common man can think up.
I was a lifelong Intel+Nvidia man until bumpgate and the massive bribery and compiler rigging came out, then for the first time since the K6 I built an AMD machine for myself, and you know what? Frankly even without going for the top o' the line chips its insanely overpowered. Video editing/transcoding, DVD ripping, gaming, you name it my 925 quad takes it like a champ and keeps right on coming and the whole thing, with 3Tb of HDDs, 8Gb of RAM, dual burners, HD4850, and Win 7 HP X64, cost me barely $700 before MIR, around $640 after. And that was before the prices dropped, now you can probably knock a good $150 or more off that easily.
I am a hell of a lot harder on a machine than the average folks which come to my shop so for them the bang for the buck is even more insane. When you can hand them a triple or quad for $500 or less and still make a decent profit? That is just nuts! But I bet if you were to check your CPU usage long term a good 80%+ of the time your CPU is twiddling its thumbs waiting for you to find some work for it to do. the only ones I've found that might need the extra 20-30% speed boost going Intel might give you and are willing to pay the 200% higher markup for that speed are guys doing a shitload of compiling. like I said there are more of those type here, but for everyone else? You can get an insanely overpowered and loaded to the brim machine for dirt cheap by going AMD. The bang for the buck is so far in the AMD camp now it isn't even funny and that is before you count the kick ass GPUs compared to the shite on a crusty roll that Intel calls a GPU.
So if you are not one of those 4% that slam their CPUs and push them to the absolute limit why would you spend the extra money on Intel? Like I said monster quads for less than $500 and you can even buy quad laptops for that price if being mobile is your thing. Its just nuts!
Exactly! Doing crazy shit is FUN with a capital F! hell that is why I started playing games in the first place, so I can do crazy shit nobody in real life would ever be able to do and possibly survive!
If you like truly crazy shit you really need to try Just Cause II, sadly I can think of no other game to even compare it to on the batshit insane o' meter. Try jumping out of an airplane to grab onto a helicopter, stomping the ass of the guy flying the chopper and toss him out, then take the chopper on a straffing run of a local base. Chopper get too shot up? Just jump out the bastard, rip the 20mm chain gun off a base defense and go T2 on their ass. Grab a bike and make Evil Knievel look like a pussy while dragging a little old lady behind you! Hell I even hook shot a soldier underneath a chopper and used his screaming ass as a wrecking ball to knock his buddies off a ledge! Cities, villages, jungles and mountains, this thing has to be the size of Bolivia and is FULL of shit to wreck or blow up!
Games are SUPPOSED to be crazy insanity, that is what makes them more than paintball simulators! i'm telling ya there is nothing like walking out a base in JC II that you entered by driving a tank off a cliff while surfing on the hood of the thing for a couple of thousand feet right into the center of enemy city, turning the whole thing into a mess of fireballs and bodies, and then as you are walking out and a few stragglers try to mount a defense you set off a half a dozen charges that makes a bigger mess than a Michael Bay action movie. Now THAT is fun crazy shit!!!
So we are just the lousy MOR race like in most RPGs? Not the fastest, smartest, strongest, just plain vanilla average across the board. We're like the unseasoned mashed potatoes of races! We're Oatmeal with no cinnamon!
As for TFA, we care about this.....why exactly? Personally I find it depressing as hell, its like "Hey look, here is another bunch of planets we will never see in person nor step foot on isn't that great?". What is the point when our engine tech frankly isn't any better than what they had 50 years ago? Sorry to be a killjoy but we could find a bazillion planets loaded with gold, candy, and three titted hookers, but if they are all light years away from us all you are doing is teasing.
Uhhhh...its pixels and polygons, so I should be able to blow up the barbie dolls if I wanna!
The problem is the dumbing down of society for the retarded. There is no personal responsibility anymore. you get some retard that was raised by games and the tube because mama was too busy being a whore and daddy don't even know he exists and this braintrust decides to play "GTA for real" and kill people the media blames the games instead of the shit for brains that deserves the blame.
IT IS A FUCKING GAME PEOPLE and we should be able to go completely apeshit in them because that is what games are for having fun and doing crazy shit you can't do in real life! What is next, some moron tries to swing on a grapple hook like Just Cause II? Or drives through houses like RF: Guerrilla? How sad is it that the last truly "Do what the fuck you want, whatever" game was fricking Postal II, and that was how many years ago?
For those that haven't tried it I highly recommend Just Cause II, it is truly the closest to a "do what the fuck you want" game I've seen in years. Having some civilian smart off to me when I am walking down the street and hook shot his ass to the back of a speeding bus? Now THAT is funny! Having a bad guy cop try to catch up to you in a car and you hook shot the front end of his ride to the ground so he pulls a T3:Rise of the Machines? Now THAT is cool.
Its a game folks, doing crazy shit should be SOP. Otherwise they might as well just make paintball simulators.
You're missing the most important reason for which MSFT got busted....if you pay your supply chain to keep others out then THAT'S an illegal monopoly. While I think Gates made a 1000% better CEO than the sweaty monkey there is no denying Gates is a vicious little bastard when it comes to competition. He had it rigged so that if you carried ANY other OS than Windows your per unit cost went through the roof and in the razor margins of PC sales it would have been a death sentence. Frankly Intel should have been busted and slapped with as much regulation as MSFT when they did the same trick with OEMs to keep AMD and Via from selling chips.
But to see why Apple (which just FYI the only Apple device I've ever owned is a B&W G3 I got to play with PPC) isn't DoJ material yet all one has to do is go into Best Buy. There you will see Android being sold in the same store as Apple with no penalty to BB. If they start making demands like "If you don't give us an exclusive you'll pay 40% more than your competitors" then Apple deserves to get busted. Right now are they being assholes? I would say yes. Is being an asshole illegal? no it isn't. You may not like the way they act like assholes with dubious patents but in the land of the free you are allowed to be as big a douche as you want. just look at Jersey Shore.
Oh please! Have you heard the fingernails on a chalkboard screeching that Yoko calls "singing"? Nuking her from orbit is the ONLY way to be sure pal, as you sure as hell wouldn't want to get within earshot to make sure she was down.....shudder.
As for TFA, how many big fat checks did the ones in charge get to cash? Bribing elected officials, whether with big fat checks or by offering cushy jobs to them and their families, should be seen as what it is ....treason. And all those that commit treason should be lined up and shot, period. They are a bigger threat to democracy than any nutball with a bomb and a cause, because they cause permanent damage to democracy whereas the nutball's mess can be cleaned up.
Maybe Marx was right, that all capitalist societies will destroy themselves from within. That the greed will eventually because so rank and foul that the people will turn on them. Lenin said a capitalist will sell you the rope you hang him with, and since Citizens United all the obvious bribery here in the states while so many are hurting really makes me wonder if they were right. I had hoped maybe the EU would be a little better off than we are but it looks like the big fat checks cash just as well there.