Uhhh...guess again friend. The French had an embargo going against Israel and the Israelis had too much tied into the Mirage design to abandon it, so they had the Mossad steal the plans and used the same engines they were getting from the USA in the F4 Phantom.
So what you have is a bastardized aircraft, with French plans, Israeli tweaks, and American engines. Sorry to burst your bubble but they stole the plane.
Then why are they not all in Somalia? No taxes at all there. Because from the stats I've seen higher taxes on the wealthy lead to lower unemployement and greater economic growth yet all we hear from the right is "Give teh rich more MONIES! nom nom nom". If this strategy worked, why didn't Raygun sit on top of unprecedented growth? Oh right, we had a nice little recession after he cut the hell out of taxes on the rich.
Its actually quite simple, the rich hoard, the poor and middle class spend. All that money being hoarded? is dead money, its gone, poof! If they invest it it sure ain't here. No in the past 30 years we've had trickle upon, voodoo economics, the "hey lets have trade agreements with those with NO workers rights or environmental laws, that'll work!", two wars while CUTTING taxes, the first time in the entire history of the USA that's happened BTW, and "bailout baby bailout".
If the right were correct in their theory, why we should be having a hell of a economy, with jobs everywhere....oh wait, they used their tax breaks to close 21,000 factories in this decade alone. Why? Because in China they can poison the workers, the air, the water, and it costs them NOTHING. No OSHA, no clean air act, no workman's comp, they can give every worker cancer and all they'll get is fired.
Is that REALLY the America you want? Where your kids play outside wearing gas masks so they don't get sick, and where your ass better have enough money for purified water or you will suck down so many toxins you might as well drink gasoline? Personally I like having clean air, water, and not working in sweatshops, thanks. of course that must make me an evil socialist since I don't support everything that can be done to maximize profits, which in the end is all the right gives a fuck about.
Dude industrial espionage between governments is as old as time. My grandfather was stationed in Germany and he used to laugh that if the Soviets wanted to take out the German bases all they'd have to do is send one plane at a time as they were ordered not to shoot at single Soviet planes. Why? Because we had a bounty on any Soviet air tech and we wanted to make sure the pilots knew they could just fly across the border and they'd be safe (and well paid). The Russians got us as well, they paid the Chinese for a dud Sidewinder that got stuck in one of their planes and jumped 10 years on their missile tech. According to the Wiki the copy they made of the sidewinder was so perfect you could mix and match parts and it would work perfectly.
The Israelis stole the plans for the Mirage from the French, the Chinese paid dirt farmers to dig up pieces of our crashed F117 so they could save years in research on stealth tech. It isn't like they are wanting to go to war with us, they are wanting to save billions in R&D. If they could get those routers into the right areas they could have all our best tech before it even rolls out of prototype stage. think about how much money that would save them in research!
Exactly and home users who need backups can just use a USB HDD. Once they have the first backup they can just differential from then on and never really saturate a USB or eSATA link.
The problem though IMHO isn't the link, its the crappy ass network we have here in the USA. Unless you are lucky enough to be one of those that can get FIOS, which if you are I say you suck you lucky bastard, but for the rest of us even getting 100Mbps would be great as most ISPs aren't giving anywhere near that. in my area it is cable which hits about 14Mbps or DSL which if you are lucky and the stars align you'll get 2Mbps, most of the time they are lucky to get 500Kbps.
So unless someone pulls a miracle and gives us a true free market for ISPs (yeah after Citizens United? Good luck with that) most of us will simply not hit anywhere near 100Mbps anytime soon, much less be able to really use Gigabit anywhere but our local networks.
Well lets see...how about a working network front end? I've seen wireless REFUSE TO STICK unless you go CLI. How about a simple fucking "find drivers" button, like Windows has had for a damned decade now?
As for why yours don't break...let me guess...you have REALLY old hardware? I've found Linux users and dumpster divers overlap quite a lot. Not meaning to insult, you like saving old hardware that is commendable, but most folks don't want shit THAT old. The ONLY machine I had survive a whole two upgrades in a row with ZERO driver breakage was a circa 1999 P3 733Mhz. Know what happened to it? I threw it away. Even goodwill don't want shit that old.
Try something a little newer though, like Realteck HD Audio, The later Intel/AMD/Nvidia chips, Sigma sound Realtek Ethernet...those don't survive upgrades. Oh I'll hear excuses, such as "you should only use the FREE drivers!"...But those don't work, hell they can barely do 2D and suck ass at 3d..."but they are FREE!"...yeah and so is a shit sandwich but I don't want that either.
Hell try it yourself. Download any distro from 2006, that will be the same as if you had 5 years of support. Now upgrade to the current version and see what happens...I bet my last dollar you will NOT have 100% working hardware. hell depending on what you have you'll be lucky to even get 60% sometime. And is there a "fix/find drivers" button? Even an easy way to roll back to a working state? Nope it is "open up bash and type".
Tell you what, if you think Linux is ready remove your shell. If your OS won't run without it, simply remove your access to it. I bet you won't make even 6 months without Bash, your OS is just too damned fiddly to live without the terminal. But broken drivers and terminal bullshit is a giant DO NOT WANT when it comes to consumers. but I know these things are true because I have done it, just last week I took 3 laptops that just came in and tried it with ubuntu 6 and mepis..hell whatever the Mepis was at in 2008, I have the disc somewhere. Guess what happened when I upgraded them to current? Broken mess. Meanwhile I have machines in the field running XP going on 9 years, that is THREE service packs and NO broken drivers. If MSFT can do it, why can't Linux?
Yes because GUIs are for squares daddy-o! Interfaces should stay in the era of disco and bell bottoms, when RMS calling everyone hackers wasn't just out of date, and when PDP11 and neckbeards were the way to go!
So please, enjoy your ancient terminal, and make sure it comes with a free neckbeard and lack of hygiene, meanwhile the other 99.9998% of the planet will enjoy the 21st century, where we have these really nice GUIs that make everything simple.
And what are you do with a storage device? Real men carry their kernel on punchcards. That is how the REAL men did it! Now quit being a lazy ass and get punching kid!
Uhhh...C&Q not work on the OS you were on? Because I have a 95w Deneb quad and unless I'm slamming the CPU I'm rarely above 91f. If I'm slamming it of course it'll get to around 128f, 138f if I leave it at stock clock (normally I underclock slightly as it keeps it cooler in my apt when transcoding for hours) but of course if I'm slamming the CPU I'll completely stomp your 45w anyway.
So I'm sorry but I just don't get it. Why would you not simply underclock what you had instead of buying a new more expensive CPU that has less performance? You know it is beyond simply in Vista and 7, right? You go into advanced power management and tell it to have the max CPU speed be 80% and voila! It simply uses C&Q to drop the chip down one notch, in my case dropping a 2.8GHz to 2.1GHz. It gives me the best of both worlds as I have a quiet machine most of the time, and a more powerful machine when I need it.
I like the way the pretty boxes look on the shelves and with Amazon most are less than $10 so it is often easier and cheaper to throw one in when I need something and get free shipping. Also the problem with piracy is DLC is unavailable and frankly with some games the DLC is better than the game! Bioshock II was okay but Minerva's Den was frankly better than the main game IMHO. But I won't have any of the Ubisoft games, not dealing with the phone home crap.
As for DRM free games I'm at over 35 from GOG now, and every time they have a game I'm even slightly interested in I buy it even though I haven't gotten around to playing even half what I have.
You want to get users? look at the above post to see what is wrong, with its half a page of config crap you have to put in simply to send a "I'm here!" to the counter through Gmail. That is fricking nuts folks!
This simple phrase bears repeating...you know what the definition of insanity is? It is doing the same action over and over and expecting a different outcome and sadly that is Linux in a nutshell. the world has spoken and the word is CONSUMERS! in giant 50 foot flaming neon. They want clicky clicky simple, nothing more than 3 GUI clicks away for basic tasks, CLI is a giant DO NOT WANT, and Torvalds and his kernel Goatse team need to "pursue other interests" because it is this attitude of "we do what we want not matter what" which he brags about in this article that makes Linux drivers a bad joke!
The clock is ticking Linux guys, the biggest shot since Vista is about to pop up right in front of you. Will you rise to the challenge? in 2014 hundreds of millions of XP machines will be EOLed. Nearly all of which is more than powerful enough for basic web and office tasks (average 2.2GHz-3.2GHz P4, 512Mb -2Gb of RAM) and they are all gonna fall into the laps of shop owners like me. Will we be stripping them for parts, upgrading the ones that can take it to Win 7 and tossing the rest, or will we be putting Linux on them? That is up to you people.
The reason I don't offer Linux is because every 6 months your drivers break and that is just unacceptable. We aren't talking funky Chinese cap cards here, we are talking Realtek, ATI, Nvidia, Intel, bog standard basic stuff. When I go to one of the forums and get told "Yeah well it does that, what you need to do is" followed by a page and a half of CLI gobbledygook...gentlemen that is simply unacceptable. you think I'm supposed to make Joe and Sally consumer learn bash scripting?
You don't want a stable ABI, you think you can do better than the kernel teams for BSD, MSFT, Apple, hell everyone BUT Linux? Fine then FIX THE PROBLEM but do it fast. No more excuses, no more "if they would just give us perfect drivers" bullshit, because that is what it is. NOBODY gets perfect drivers, they ALL have problems, but the others manage to get them to work consistently. hell you've had the Realtek drivers for ages yet the still fuck up! The clock is ticking folks, Apr 2014 isn't far away. get on the ball, give the people what they want, or don't be surprised when the new counter says you're stuck at 1%, just like you were 3 years ago, and which is you continue to try to force people to do things YOUR way instead of giving them what THEY WANT is where you will be in 3 years. The 1970s are over and disco is dead folks, trying to bring back the term is about as pointless as trying to bring back the 8 track. Its as out of date as RMS and how he calls everyone "hackers" like he is at a computer club in 1977.
Not to mention Win 7, which is what you should be running if you are gaming, has this little thing called "hybrid sleep" that is practically instant on WITH NO NOISE or fans running in the night. What are they planning to do, run the thing 24/7/365? if they need something to download all night they are better off with a cheap low power off lease and a KVM. Leave games on the big box, download onto the low power.
For downloads I have an old circa 2004 socket 775 Sempron, that thing runs so cool it never even kicks up the fan, and it is even good for light web surfing if I stick with a Chromium based instead of FF. Guys that expect a single PC to do everything they can possibly ever imagine are just nuts. Boxes are cheap and you wouldn't expect a sports car to haul furniture would you? Low power for jobs where the machine needs to be on for days, gaming PC for media center and games. Is that really so alien a concept?
The problem I have with BSD is it really is an enterprise OS. Nothing wrong with that but I need a home OS for my customers and BSD, at least last I checked, simply wasn't geared for that demographic. I need all GUI, clicky clicky, intuitive and simple. In 2003 it really looked like Linux would be ready by now, I remember figuring "just give them 4 to 5 years to iron out the little nigglers and the watch out!".
Instead it is just as you said, weird stupid crap like NIC flipping and my biggest head basher the constant driver breaking. The 80% hardware that I listed, the stuff that is on damned near every desktop or laptop made in the last decade SHOULD NEVER BREAK, not on update, not on upgrade, not ever. We aren't talking some Chinese no name wireless card here, we are talking bog standard stuff like Realtek!
It is just a shame, that's what it is. In 2014 hundreds of millions of XP machines are gonna be EOL, and those could be running Linux. Instead shops like mine will upgrade those that will run it to win 7 and shitcan the rest. My time is $35 an hour and margins on sales are razor thin. The 6 month poo flinging driver breakage makes Linux cost MORE money than simply putting on windows, as every time they break something I have to fix it. there really is no excuse man. It is 2011 and this is Mickey Mouse minor league bullshit. When I can't even say with 100% certainty that this machine with bog standard parts that every other machine on the planet has will run in 6 months if I put Linux on it? Something is seriously wrong in Linux land.
Well my sitch would really fuck with them as I buy the games, but play the pirate versions so WTF would THAT mean? Why would I do that? Simple I'm on an X64 OS and I've found the DRM in most of those games are 32bit ONLY yet not only do you not get to take it back if their DRM doesn't run on your OS, but you don't get anything if their shitty DRM hoses your PC!
A word of advice from your friendly PC repairman....if you go 64bit and play games keep lots of OS backups and watch out for mixing DRMs, like Safedisc plus SecuROM or Starforce plus SecuROM. You see the douches that makes those always assume you are on 32bit so their installers try to jam 32bit ring 0 hooks into a 64bit kernel, which is nuke bomb on stability bad, and then to top it off the uninstaller only works on 32bit so you can't even remove the fucker!
But getting consumers to stand up won't work, as they are "too big to fail". They'll just bring in a PPT that shows if they made X last year they should be making X+Y this year and since they ain't it just HAS to be piracy! So they'll get more draconian laws, thanks to bribes.......errr....Citizens United...and if that doesn't raise profits they'll just get a too big to fail check directly from your tax paying pocket. You see it is the new socialism, in that all profits are privatized but all losses, real or imagined, are born by the tax payer. it would be like going to Vegas and being allowed to gamble all you want and when you are finished if you didn't win they give you back your money PLUS 300% "for your trouble". Must be nice to be in that elite club.
It seems like the logical choice, which may be why they are building the coal plants, is to use coal plants and have the Co2 pumped into biodiesel. IIRC they can pump the output gasses of those plants into on site algae farms that will crank out the biodiesel so they basically get a two for.
Or maybe someone in the coal industry cut the German gov a big fat check, who knows. After seeing how badly bribed and obviously crooked politics are here in the states frankly nothing would surprise me. Are the German politicians as crooked as ours?
Uhhh...did you miss the "I have THE VERY SAME CHIP" part? Stock in a room that stays at 74f it runs around 85f-91f, depending on how much i multitask. Under full load with a 5 hour video encode it hits 128f-131f.
It ain't the chip friend, its the HSF. With a good copper based heatpipe HSF you'd be surprised at how quiet you can make it. and don't forget the guy got rid of a Mac Mini so he'll want equal to or better than what he had, or what's the point?
Finally don't forget the guy wanted to run BSNES which sure as hell ain't gonna run on that 45 watter friend. hell if he wants more than 25FPS he'll probably have to OC a little even with the 95watter. If I was building something to run that piggy I'd be looking at a Thuban 125w 6 core! Remember this is a program that runs "PIXEL PERFECT" emulation by simulating every. single. part. of the chip path. that kind of perfect emulation sucks the living hell out of cycles. The interview with the guy even said the odds of even running a Dreamcast emulator with the precision he is running BSNES would be impossible with today's tech!
Sure they can profit friend, you just don't know how the game is played!
You see they have already cost their targets money in lawsuits and court fees while at the same time getting salary from the shell corp which didn't have any assets! All the copyrights? Actually owned by Stephens Media NOT them, so they have NOTHING to lose. Since the real assets aren't in the shell corp they can just fold up their tents and then be "hired' by a NEW shell corp and cost more targets more monies!
I can see this working like a SLAPP, since even if you "win" against them you are out real money yet all you will get in return is an IOU. I'm sure that if they pull this scam a couple of times businesses will get the message that it is better just to settle than to lose money fighting a court battle against someone with no assets but infinite lawyer access.
Well there are plenty out there that don't vote because they know its pointless which it really is. I know every time i'm just throwing my vote away by voting green, but what choice do I have? you have Obama, the biggest spineless sellout the dems have had since Jimmy "I ain't got no backbone!" Carter, and the reps look like they'll run Perry, which is REALLY scary, as the man actually makes dubya look like a good leader. have you SEEN the stats for Texas under Perry? Yikes.
Oh and sadly the tea party WAS grass roots, but ever since the "tea party express" or the teabagger central as i call it, took over it has been the Koch bros all the way. All you have to do is follow the money and look at the platform, anything the Koch bros want? the teabagger central is pushing.
So I say lay back and enjoy the ride. be sure to have canned food and cash money, and if you are in an area that allows them a gun would probably be a safe bet, as the country she'll be going under, i give it maybe 10 years tops. You can't send all the jobs overseas, allow free trade with countries that don't allow the same for US goods (like China and soon thanks to Nobama we'll have "The NAFTA of the Pacific") and even Nobama's fabled "green jobs" are going to China and the third world, as witnessed by that solar panel plant that just closed here to set up there. Why? They can't compete with two dollars a day labor and Chinese subsidized utilities and housing.
So if you want to see what will happen in 10 to 15 years? it'll either be the USSR or Libya. Either the old guard will quietly give up (fat chance me thinks) or like Libya when it all collapses and a truckload of money won't buy a dozen eggs people will be raiding the national guard and making technicals. Sadly I'm betting on the second one, as one thing we have seen lately the rich here have a real "let them eat cake!" attitude. But the poor outnumber them by over 100,000 to 1 and that number is growing by the minute as the middle class is wiped out. So enjoy while you can, because we can't print free money forever.
Anyway let old Hairyfeet set you up and show you how its done. First I'd start with this box, while personally i like a little more elbow room he said little so little it is. Next up for a nice powerful but cheap CPU I'd go with this Phenom triple if he has a tight budget or this Phenom II quad if he has a little more to spare. I have this Phenom II chip in my own system and it is easy to under and over clock, and I have built plenty with the first Phenom triple chip, both are great.
Then you'll have to measure the depth to know how big a HSF you can go for, bigger is of course quieter so if it has enough room (haven't used a shuttle in awhile so I can't remember the depth offhand) I'd use something like this which if you turn on C&Q when you aren't slamming the Deneb this will be pretty quiet. Then for GPU something like this HD6570 which IIRC is the largest AMD makes that will still go low profile and passively cooled.
Finally slap in a 1Tb Samsung EcoDrive (quiet as a church mouse) and 4Gb of RAM along with Win 7 HP X64 (or the OS of your choice) and voila! You are good to go friend! Enjoy!
I could make it a hell of a lot more powerful and silent cooling BTW, but that would increase size. You can't beat the laws of physics, if it is powerful it is either gonna need fans or a big ass heatsink to cool the sucker. I've found most liquid cooling to be just as noisy if not more than regular HSFs, it just moves the fans from the CPU to the radiator. But this should give you a nice combination of speed and quiet and when you aren't slamming the living hell out of the Deneb all you will hear is the quiet hum of the PSU, that's it. With mine I hear the AC on the far side of the room more than I do the PC not 3 feet away from me, its nice.
But that is because they have a stable ABI so it doesn't matter if they release every six months or every six years as the drivers ain't getting shit upon like with Linux and THAT is my problem. I'm a retailer, you know the kind of guy Linux and FOSS needs for adoption to climb? Yeah hi. The problem is Torvalds constantly goes Goatse on the kernel breaking shit left and right and frankly Canonical pushing the whole "new product" release schedule is just making a house of cards even worse!
Before most FOSS developers had a "when its done" attitude to releases and you know what? I respected that. That shows a commitment to quality, and not rushing out releases to meet some PHB timetable which is the bain of proprietary software. yet for some damned reason Canonical has adopted those same bad habits but for no reason whatever!! I mean are their SALES gonna go down if they don't release every 6 months? Of course not, it is just fucking stupid pointless bullshit. But since so many developers want their software in Ubuntu they adopt the crazy bullshit schedule and things become even MORE unstable!
I figured in 2003 that by this time me and the other small shops would already have Linux on the shelves. The 80% hardware (ATI,Nvidia, Intel GPUs, Realtek sound and networking, Sigma sound, broadcom and Intel wireless, ATI,Nvidia, and Intel southbridges) would all be rock solid and "just work" so that 80% of the mainstream hardware would be good to go. so what the fuck happened Linux guys? if anything the shit is MORE buggy and drivers are WORSE than ever before! I set up 6 boxes with bog standard hardware, and I tested all the "user friendly" distros I knew of...Ubuntu/Mint, PCLOS, Mepis, and Fedora (I know Fedora isn't exactly friendly but I had a Linux fan screaming "Use Fedora!" on a forum at me so I figured WTF) and after install I tried to let it upgrade and what did I find?
Broken sound, broken network, broken video, not a SINGLE MACHINE came through with 100% working drivers....gentlemen that is simply unacceptable. And before some screams LTS I'd just point out that XP has longer before EOL than Ubuntu LTS right now, And Win 7 was released in 2009 and is supported until 2020, and that is if they don't release any service packs. you wanna call something LTS then it needs a solid 7 years minimum, preferably 10. Since we have gone multicore there simply isn't a reason to toss every 3 years.
Maybe in 5 years Canonical will be gone and Torvalds will "pursue other interests" and things will actually start moving forward again. but from here in my shop it looks like Linux went from "slow and steady wins the race" to "bling bling breaking shit woo hoo!" total crazy town. In 2003 it really looked like Linux would be solid as a rock and ready for the masses by 2008, maybe 2009 at the latest. Now it has gone back to even more fiddly, even more CLI "fixes" and hoop jumping, even more breakage, than it had even then. Kinda sad really, all that work down the drain, because the masses aren't gonna deal with that shit and I sure as hell ain't giving out lifetime free support because your developers don't know what QA means when it comes to drivers.
Weeeellll...considering the fact it has been slashvertisement city here as of late frankly we ought to be damned happy that it isn't some more Infoworld or that other site (you know, the one that had the brass balls to put a FIFTY ONE PAGE TFA under "Best FOSS software!" like a giant douche?) so personally I say welcome aboard dude.
As for TFA, yeah that is ALL we need, considering their "detection software" said a fricking laser printer was file sharing, is to give these douches an excuse for a fishing expedition on EVERY PC IN THE HOUSE. Be honest guys, how many of you have receipts for every bit of media, software, movies, etc, that you have? I know I'm moved 4 times in the past 5 years and have NO clue as to where half of my damned discs are. That was kinda the whole point of backing everything up onto a HDD as it is a hell of a lot easier to keep up with a USB HDD that holds thousands of discs worth of stuff than it is to keep up with thousands of discs.
I know some got crunched and tossed when my amp fell over on the box (boy that was a mess!) some are in storage, some I lent to my mom (whom I'm sure has promptly lost them or her damned goat of a dog had them for lunch), some I lent to friends (yeah good luck seeing THOSE again, hell I don't even remember who has what), some are in storage and some lord only knows where I put those boxes.
Personally as much as I hated Wesley Crusher I saw a video of Wil Wheaton at some convention and he nailed it "Make it simple for people to have the files legally" because as Gabe at Valve pointed out the pirates are offering a better value. I should be able to buy a disc ONCE, register it, and that's it, I'm done. i should from then on be able to put it in any damned format I like, toss the disc, whatever, I paid and I'm done. The IP bullshit is the only damned thing I can think where they say it is property AND/OR a license, apparently on the whim of the IP asshole. If I have the disc I only have a license, but then I lose the disc I only had the media and need to replace, WTF?
If I would have kept up with every single disc I swear i wouldn't be able to even walk in my damned apt, and if scum sucking lawyers like in TFA start using that excuse to make fishing expeditions frankly we're all fucked.
Uhhhh...so you are saying having crappier graphics is a GOOD thing? Because if so I have a 4Mb Matrox card I'll be happy to sell to you for $100 that will give you the crappiest graphics EVAR!
Jeez, of all the things to fricking brag about, to brag your OS doesn't support the latest graphical improvements surely has to be a new one. Do you brag that that your stuff loads quicker when the sound driver is borked as well?
As for TFA BSD has a hardware ABI, Linux don't, end of story. This means their drivers aren't constantly having to be rewritten when Torvalds, who BTW admits there is no planning or roadmap with the kernel and just continues to "scratch itches" and break shit like it is 1993, messes up yet again something critical for a driver and therefor their drivers are stable enough they have time to be optimized. Considering the frankly batshit insane 6 month release schedule Ubuntu has everyone on you're lucky any drivers work at all. I know that when I finally gave up on Linux around Ubuntu 11 I had dealt with broken sound, wireless, black screen o' death from the graphics drivers, oh and Ethernet died twice. Fun.
Is stability like a dirty word now? Have we really reached the point that it doesn't matter how broken and fucked something is as long as its "new product"? Hell everyone makes fun of Windows and their "forced upgrades" but they are slower than fricking Xmas compared to Linux now! Hell one copy every 7 years and you are done, stick a fork. Used to be Linux was the stable as a rock OS, remember that? Sure it didn't look all fancy with tons of bling bling crap, but it was solid as a rock. Now ever since Canonical got some press it has been like a race to see who can crank out "product" no matter how badly borked. Look at how many outstanding issues are on any bugtracker, its nuts!
Now go ahead and waste some mod points because I didn't say "Gee isn't Linux perfect? it sure is Biff, and RMS' beard smells like candy!" but if most of the guys here would be honest with themselves they would admit i'm right. Canonical threw a big ass monkey wrench in the slow and steady progress Linux was making and now its a bling bling clusterfuck. Nothing gets fixed, just new versions with three bugs for every one that gets retired. I don't get it, you're not selling the damned thing, what is the point with the constant "new product" bullshit? At least MSFT has an excuse for putting out a new version every 5 years, they are getting their asses kicked by Apple on one side and their own legacy OS on the other. What's the Linux excuse?
Riiight, because those with triple screens and steering wheels are totally the big market in PC gaming. Why I bet they are a whole 1/18th of 1% of the market! Meanwhile look at the numbers on the latest FPS and RTS games, Dirt on its best day would kill yo mama for those kinds of numbers.
Non console racing has always been a teeny tiny niche, like non console sports. That is why EA doesn't even bother with PC versions of that those categories anymore, as they said there simply wasn't enough money in the PC to make it worth it. Racing and other competitive sports are more fun with a bunch of buds around so you can trash talk as you run them into a wall, simple as that. FPS is MORE fun away from your buds, so they can't see where you are getting ready to pwn their asses, and with RTS you don't want them seeing you are loading up on tanks before you roll them down their throats.
It is just the way the games are designed, that's all. But triple screen gaming, no matter how badly AMD wishes it weren't, is just a teeny blip on the radar. Last Steam poll I saw had multi monitor at less than 2% of the total gamers. When you are trying to entice folks to buy expensive hardware appealing to less than 2% of the market really ain't the smartest of moves, but considering AMD went nearly a year without a CEO and have let Intel get away with some pretty illegal shit with the compilers sadly as much as I like the company dumb shit like TFA from AMD really don't surprise me, and this is from someone who has been selling AMD exclusively for nearly 3 years now.
Uhhhh...hate to break the news to ya bud, but starting TWO WARS while LOWERING taxes? That has NEVER happened in the entire history of this country, and that dumb shit can be laid squarely at the feet of Dubya. Oh and just FYI but you might want to look at the stats which clearly point out that higher taxes on the wealthy lead to lower unemployement and greater economic growth but don't let that get in the way of the classic right wing "Give teh rich MORE MONIES! Nom nom nom!" rant now. BTW you DO know the teabaggers think rasing payroll taxes, you know, the taxes peasants like you pay, is a-ok? meanwhile Bachmann is talking about how the corps should pay no taxes at all because the rich are just God's blessed don't ya know?
The problem with Obama is he is the biggest damned pussy since Jimmy "I ain't got no backbone!" Carter and hasn't the balls to stand up to teabaggers, or anybody else for that matter. Whatever they want all they have to do is act tough and Obama will roll over like a whipped dog. Of course he will end up winning in 2012 simply because the teabaggers will make sure Perry gets it, and anybody saying "Social security should be wiped out" is about as electable as David Duke, not to mention his "record" is such wonderful things like 1st in teen pregnancies, most people working for minimum wage, most pollution, most HS dropouts, most people without medical or dental care, hell the man makes Dubya look like Lincoln!
Riiiight, because nobody needs to do actual work, nope all they need is social media baby yeah! Speed? Posh, if it can't run on a CPU from 10 years ago you don't need it!
Please, mobile chips are playtoys. you know what they'll be in 10 years? playtoys. It is actually very simple, unless they start packing nuke batteries in the damned things you will ALWAYS have to give up speed for battery life which is fine if you want to play some angry birds, but when you are at home? fuck that slow ass bullshit.
That is just as damned stupid as the occasional customer I have that insists on a gamer laptop. No not because they wanna LAN, that would actually make sense. Nope they want to spend crazy money on a mobile device that they never take anywhere so what you end up with is a REALLY EXPENSIVE desktop with crappy parts that dies quicker from heat death. oh well fool and their money and all that.
Uhhh...why not just split the difference and save a ton o' cash? I bought a 1Tb EcoDrive for my OS a couple of months back, on sale for $39, and a 2Tb EcoDrive a couple of weeks ago, again on sale for $59. Last I checked those 3Tb drives were still pretty high and this lets me switch out the OS drive for another 2Tb down the road although frankly I think I may have hit my limit on usefulness. Even with every game I even slightly like I still have 1400Gb free on the 2Tb, and with a dual boot XP and Win 7 PLUS another partition for video editing my 3 partitions on the 1Tb have nearly 75% free each.
So I can see needing a 3Tb if you are doing a ton of video editing but for most folks I'd say the sweet spot is 2Tb or even 1Tb drives, especially if you catch them on sale. BTW if anyone is thinking about snatching a Samsung EcoDrive before they are all gone THEY ROCK HARD. you'd think by replacing a 7200RPM for a 5400RPM I'd take a speed hit but the fat cache on the EcoDrive (32Mb VS 8Mb for my Seagate 400Gb) jumped my benches from 92Mbps to nearly 120Mpbs. It is also quiet as a churchmouse and max temp is barely 85f, compared to nearly 120f on the Seagate. Well worth the money IMHO, truly sweet drives!
Well for one thing Codemasters has already been hacked recently. I got one of those "Hi, we've been pwned! Please change any passwords that you used and we hope you didn't use them anywhere else! kthnksbai" from Codemasters. So their record on security wasn't great to start with.
Second of all and slightly OT, but why Dirt? Ever since the Intel bribery scandal I've been buying nothing but AMD yet that promo was a giant turn OFF for me, can't think of any of my customers that would give a crap either. All the racing guys I've known played NASCAR or GT on consoles, is PC racing even the tiniest bit popular? They couldn't give us a shooter or RTS?
So while i'm sorry you got bit in the ass AMD i'm just glad none of my customers are having to deal with this mess, because the ones that qualified don't care about Dirt. hell if you want to show off your GPU make a deal with the guys that make Just Cause II. Watching those oil towers blow up in glorious DirectX 10 mode was well worth my card upgrade. Anytime I want to sell a customer on a GPU upgrade all I have to do is fire that game up and start blowing shit up. All those fireballs and ragdolls filling the screen and they always go "oooohhhhh...that's so damned cool!".
Slashdot Mirror
Uhhh...guess again friend. The French had an embargo going against Israel and the Israelis had too much tied into the Mirage design to abandon it, so they had the Mossad steal the plans and used the same engines they were getting from the USA in the F4 Phantom.
So what you have is a bastardized aircraft, with French plans, Israeli tweaks, and American engines. Sorry to burst your bubble but they stole the plane.
Then why are they not all in Somalia? No taxes at all there. Because from the stats I've seen higher taxes on the wealthy lead to lower unemployement and greater economic growth yet all we hear from the right is "Give teh rich more MONIES! nom nom nom". If this strategy worked, why didn't Raygun sit on top of unprecedented growth? Oh right, we had a nice little recession after he cut the hell out of taxes on the rich.
Its actually quite simple, the rich hoard, the poor and middle class spend. All that money being hoarded? is dead money, its gone, poof! If they invest it it sure ain't here. No in the past 30 years we've had trickle upon, voodoo economics, the "hey lets have trade agreements with those with NO workers rights or environmental laws, that'll work!", two wars while CUTTING taxes, the first time in the entire history of the USA that's happened BTW, and "bailout baby bailout".
If the right were correct in their theory, why we should be having a hell of a economy, with jobs everywhere....oh wait, they used their tax breaks to close 21,000 factories in this decade alone. Why? Because in China they can poison the workers, the air, the water, and it costs them NOTHING. No OSHA, no clean air act, no workman's comp, they can give every worker cancer and all they'll get is fired.
Is that REALLY the America you want? Where your kids play outside wearing gas masks so they don't get sick, and where your ass better have enough money for purified water or you will suck down so many toxins you might as well drink gasoline? Personally I like having clean air, water, and not working in sweatshops, thanks. of course that must make me an evil socialist since I don't support everything that can be done to maximize profits, which in the end is all the right gives a fuck about.
Dude industrial espionage between governments is as old as time. My grandfather was stationed in Germany and he used to laugh that if the Soviets wanted to take out the German bases all they'd have to do is send one plane at a time as they were ordered not to shoot at single Soviet planes. Why? Because we had a bounty on any Soviet air tech and we wanted to make sure the pilots knew they could just fly across the border and they'd be safe (and well paid). The Russians got us as well, they paid the Chinese for a dud Sidewinder that got stuck in one of their planes and jumped 10 years on their missile tech. According to the Wiki the copy they made of the sidewinder was so perfect you could mix and match parts and it would work perfectly.
The Israelis stole the plans for the Mirage from the French, the Chinese paid dirt farmers to dig up pieces of our crashed F117 so they could save years in research on stealth tech. It isn't like they are wanting to go to war with us, they are wanting to save billions in R&D. If they could get those routers into the right areas they could have all our best tech before it even rolls out of prototype stage. think about how much money that would save them in research!
Exactly and home users who need backups can just use a USB HDD. Once they have the first backup they can just differential from then on and never really saturate a USB or eSATA link.
The problem though IMHO isn't the link, its the crappy ass network we have here in the USA. Unless you are lucky enough to be one of those that can get FIOS, which if you are I say you suck you lucky bastard, but for the rest of us even getting 100Mbps would be great as most ISPs aren't giving anywhere near that. in my area it is cable which hits about 14Mbps or DSL which if you are lucky and the stars align you'll get 2Mbps, most of the time they are lucky to get 500Kbps.
So unless someone pulls a miracle and gives us a true free market for ISPs (yeah after Citizens United? Good luck with that) most of us will simply not hit anywhere near 100Mbps anytime soon, much less be able to really use Gigabit anywhere but our local networks.
Well lets see...how about a working network front end? I've seen wireless REFUSE TO STICK unless you go CLI. How about a simple fucking "find drivers" button, like Windows has had for a damned decade now?
As for why yours don't break...let me guess...you have REALLY old hardware? I've found Linux users and dumpster divers overlap quite a lot. Not meaning to insult, you like saving old hardware that is commendable, but most folks don't want shit THAT old. The ONLY machine I had survive a whole two upgrades in a row with ZERO driver breakage was a circa 1999 P3 733Mhz. Know what happened to it? I threw it away. Even goodwill don't want shit that old.
Try something a little newer though, like Realteck HD Audio, The later Intel/AMD/Nvidia chips, Sigma sound Realtek Ethernet...those don't survive upgrades. Oh I'll hear excuses, such as "you should only use the FREE drivers!"...But those don't work, hell they can barely do 2D and suck ass at 3d..."but they are FREE!"...yeah and so is a shit sandwich but I don't want that either.
Hell try it yourself. Download any distro from 2006, that will be the same as if you had 5 years of support. Now upgrade to the current version and see what happens...I bet my last dollar you will NOT have 100% working hardware. hell depending on what you have you'll be lucky to even get 60% sometime. And is there a "fix/find drivers" button? Even an easy way to roll back to a working state? Nope it is "open up bash and type".
Tell you what, if you think Linux is ready remove your shell. If your OS won't run without it, simply remove your access to it. I bet you won't make even 6 months without Bash, your OS is just too damned fiddly to live without the terminal. But broken drivers and terminal bullshit is a giant DO NOT WANT when it comes to consumers. but I know these things are true because I have done it, just last week I took 3 laptops that just came in and tried it with ubuntu 6 and mepis..hell whatever the Mepis was at in 2008, I have the disc somewhere. Guess what happened when I upgraded them to current? Broken mess. Meanwhile I have machines in the field running XP going on 9 years, that is THREE service packs and NO broken drivers. If MSFT can do it, why can't Linux?
Yes because GUIs are for squares daddy-o! Interfaces should stay in the era of disco and bell bottoms, when RMS calling everyone hackers wasn't just out of date, and when PDP11 and neckbeards were the way to go!
So please, enjoy your ancient terminal, and make sure it comes with a free neckbeard and lack of hygiene, meanwhile the other 99.9998% of the planet will enjoy the 21st century, where we have these really nice GUIs that make everything simple.
And what are you do with a storage device? Real men carry their kernel on punchcards. That is how the REAL men did it! Now quit being a lazy ass and get punching kid!
Uhhh...C&Q not work on the OS you were on? Because I have a 95w Deneb quad and unless I'm slamming the CPU I'm rarely above 91f. If I'm slamming it of course it'll get to around 128f, 138f if I leave it at stock clock (normally I underclock slightly as it keeps it cooler in my apt when transcoding for hours) but of course if I'm slamming the CPU I'll completely stomp your 45w anyway.
So I'm sorry but I just don't get it. Why would you not simply underclock what you had instead of buying a new more expensive CPU that has less performance? You know it is beyond simply in Vista and 7, right? You go into advanced power management and tell it to have the max CPU speed be 80% and voila! It simply uses C&Q to drop the chip down one notch, in my case dropping a 2.8GHz to 2.1GHz. It gives me the best of both worlds as I have a quiet machine most of the time, and a more powerful machine when I need it.
I like the way the pretty boxes look on the shelves and with Amazon most are less than $10 so it is often easier and cheaper to throw one in when I need something and get free shipping. Also the problem with piracy is DLC is unavailable and frankly with some games the DLC is better than the game! Bioshock II was okay but Minerva's Den was frankly better than the main game IMHO. But I won't have any of the Ubisoft games, not dealing with the phone home crap.
As for DRM free games I'm at over 35 from GOG now, and every time they have a game I'm even slightly interested in I buy it even though I haven't gotten around to playing even half what I have.
You want to get users? look at the above post to see what is wrong, with its half a page of config crap you have to put in simply to send a "I'm here!" to the counter through Gmail. That is fricking nuts folks!
This simple phrase bears repeating...you know what the definition of insanity is? It is doing the same action over and over and expecting a different outcome and sadly that is Linux in a nutshell. the world has spoken and the word is CONSUMERS! in giant 50 foot flaming neon. They want clicky clicky simple, nothing more than 3 GUI clicks away for basic tasks, CLI is a giant DO NOT WANT, and Torvalds and his kernel Goatse team need to "pursue other interests" because it is this attitude of "we do what we want not matter what" which he brags about in this article that makes Linux drivers a bad joke!
The clock is ticking Linux guys, the biggest shot since Vista is about to pop up right in front of you. Will you rise to the challenge? in 2014 hundreds of millions of XP machines will be EOLed. Nearly all of which is more than powerful enough for basic web and office tasks (average 2.2GHz-3.2GHz P4, 512Mb -2Gb of RAM) and they are all gonna fall into the laps of shop owners like me. Will we be stripping them for parts, upgrading the ones that can take it to Win 7 and tossing the rest, or will we be putting Linux on them? That is up to you people.
The reason I don't offer Linux is because every 6 months your drivers break and that is just unacceptable. We aren't talking funky Chinese cap cards here, we are talking Realtek, ATI, Nvidia, Intel, bog standard basic stuff. When I go to one of the forums and get told "Yeah well it does that, what you need to do is" followed by a page and a half of CLI gobbledygook...gentlemen that is simply unacceptable. you think I'm supposed to make Joe and Sally consumer learn bash scripting?
You don't want a stable ABI, you think you can do better than the kernel teams for BSD, MSFT, Apple, hell everyone BUT Linux? Fine then FIX THE PROBLEM but do it fast. No more excuses, no more "if they would just give us perfect drivers" bullshit, because that is what it is. NOBODY gets perfect drivers, they ALL have problems, but the others manage to get them to work consistently. hell you've had the Realtek drivers for ages yet the still fuck up! The clock is ticking folks, Apr 2014 isn't far away. get on the ball, give the people what they want, or don't be surprised when the new counter says you're stuck at 1%, just like you were 3 years ago, and which is you continue to try to force people to do things YOUR way instead of giving them what THEY WANT is where you will be in 3 years. The 1970s are over and disco is dead folks, trying to bring back the term is about as pointless as trying to bring back the 8 track. Its as out of date as RMS and how he calls everyone "hackers" like he is at a computer club in 1977.
Not to mention Win 7, which is what you should be running if you are gaming, has this little thing called "hybrid sleep" that is practically instant on WITH NO NOISE or fans running in the night. What are they planning to do, run the thing 24/7/365? if they need something to download all night they are better off with a cheap low power off lease and a KVM. Leave games on the big box, download onto the low power.
For downloads I have an old circa 2004 socket 775 Sempron, that thing runs so cool it never even kicks up the fan, and it is even good for light web surfing if I stick with a Chromium based instead of FF. Guys that expect a single PC to do everything they can possibly ever imagine are just nuts. Boxes are cheap and you wouldn't expect a sports car to haul furniture would you? Low power for jobs where the machine needs to be on for days, gaming PC for media center and games. Is that really so alien a concept?
The problem I have with BSD is it really is an enterprise OS. Nothing wrong with that but I need a home OS for my customers and BSD, at least last I checked, simply wasn't geared for that demographic. I need all GUI, clicky clicky, intuitive and simple. In 2003 it really looked like Linux would be ready by now, I remember figuring "just give them 4 to 5 years to iron out the little nigglers and the watch out!".
Instead it is just as you said, weird stupid crap like NIC flipping and my biggest head basher the constant driver breaking. The 80% hardware that I listed, the stuff that is on damned near every desktop or laptop made in the last decade SHOULD NEVER BREAK, not on update, not on upgrade, not ever. We aren't talking some Chinese no name wireless card here, we are talking bog standard stuff like Realtek!
It is just a shame, that's what it is. In 2014 hundreds of millions of XP machines are gonna be EOL, and those could be running Linux. Instead shops like mine will upgrade those that will run it to win 7 and shitcan the rest. My time is $35 an hour and margins on sales are razor thin. The 6 month poo flinging driver breakage makes Linux cost MORE money than simply putting on windows, as every time they break something I have to fix it. there really is no excuse man. It is 2011 and this is Mickey Mouse minor league bullshit. When I can't even say with 100% certainty that this machine with bog standard parts that every other machine on the planet has will run in 6 months if I put Linux on it? Something is seriously wrong in Linux land.
Well my sitch would really fuck with them as I buy the games, but play the pirate versions so WTF would THAT mean? Why would I do that? Simple I'm on an X64 OS and I've found the DRM in most of those games are 32bit ONLY yet not only do you not get to take it back if their DRM doesn't run on your OS, but you don't get anything if their shitty DRM hoses your PC!
A word of advice from your friendly PC repairman....if you go 64bit and play games keep lots of OS backups and watch out for mixing DRMs, like Safedisc plus SecuROM or Starforce plus SecuROM. You see the douches that makes those always assume you are on 32bit so their installers try to jam 32bit ring 0 hooks into a 64bit kernel, which is nuke bomb on stability bad, and then to top it off the uninstaller only works on 32bit so you can't even remove the fucker!
But getting consumers to stand up won't work, as they are "too big to fail". They'll just bring in a PPT that shows if they made X last year they should be making X+Y this year and since they ain't it just HAS to be piracy! So they'll get more draconian laws, thanks to bribes.......errr....Citizens United...and if that doesn't raise profits they'll just get a too big to fail check directly from your tax paying pocket. You see it is the new socialism, in that all profits are privatized but all losses, real or imagined, are born by the tax payer. it would be like going to Vegas and being allowed to gamble all you want and when you are finished if you didn't win they give you back your money PLUS 300% "for your trouble". Must be nice to be in that elite club.
It seems like the logical choice, which may be why they are building the coal plants, is to use coal plants and have the Co2 pumped into biodiesel. IIRC they can pump the output gasses of those plants into on site algae farms that will crank out the biodiesel so they basically get a two for.
Or maybe someone in the coal industry cut the German gov a big fat check, who knows. After seeing how badly bribed and obviously crooked politics are here in the states frankly nothing would surprise me. Are the German politicians as crooked as ours?
Uhhh...did you miss the "I have THE VERY SAME CHIP" part? Stock in a room that stays at 74f it runs around 85f-91f, depending on how much i multitask. Under full load with a 5 hour video encode it hits 128f-131f.
It ain't the chip friend, its the HSF. With a good copper based heatpipe HSF you'd be surprised at how quiet you can make it. and don't forget the guy got rid of a Mac Mini so he'll want equal to or better than what he had, or what's the point?
Finally don't forget the guy wanted to run BSNES which sure as hell ain't gonna run on that 45 watter friend. hell if he wants more than 25FPS he'll probably have to OC a little even with the 95watter. If I was building something to run that piggy I'd be looking at a Thuban 125w 6 core! Remember this is a program that runs "PIXEL PERFECT" emulation by simulating every. single. part. of the chip path. that kind of perfect emulation sucks the living hell out of cycles. The interview with the guy even said the odds of even running a Dreamcast emulator with the precision he is running BSNES would be impossible with today's tech!
Sure they can profit friend, you just don't know how the game is played!
You see they have already cost their targets money in lawsuits and court fees while at the same time getting salary from the shell corp which didn't have any assets! All the copyrights? Actually owned by Stephens Media NOT them, so they have NOTHING to lose. Since the real assets aren't in the shell corp they can just fold up their tents and then be "hired' by a NEW shell corp and cost more targets more monies!
I can see this working like a SLAPP, since even if you "win" against them you are out real money yet all you will get in return is an IOU. I'm sure that if they pull this scam a couple of times businesses will get the message that it is better just to settle than to lose money fighting a court battle against someone with no assets but infinite lawyer access.
Well there are plenty out there that don't vote because they know its pointless which it really is. I know every time i'm just throwing my vote away by voting green, but what choice do I have? you have Obama, the biggest spineless sellout the dems have had since Jimmy "I ain't got no backbone!" Carter, and the reps look like they'll run Perry, which is REALLY scary, as the man actually makes dubya look like a good leader. have you SEEN the stats for Texas under Perry? Yikes.
Oh and sadly the tea party WAS grass roots, but ever since the "tea party express" or the teabagger central as i call it, took over it has been the Koch bros all the way. All you have to do is follow the money and look at the platform, anything the Koch bros want? the teabagger central is pushing.
So I say lay back and enjoy the ride. be sure to have canned food and cash money, and if you are in an area that allows them a gun would probably be a safe bet, as the country she'll be going under, i give it maybe 10 years tops. You can't send all the jobs overseas, allow free trade with countries that don't allow the same for US goods (like China and soon thanks to Nobama we'll have "The NAFTA of the Pacific") and even Nobama's fabled "green jobs" are going to China and the third world, as witnessed by that solar panel plant that just closed here to set up there. Why? They can't compete with two dollars a day labor and Chinese subsidized utilities and housing.
So if you want to see what will happen in 10 to 15 years? it'll either be the USSR or Libya. Either the old guard will quietly give up (fat chance me thinks) or like Libya when it all collapses and a truckload of money won't buy a dozen eggs people will be raiding the national guard and making technicals. Sadly I'm betting on the second one, as one thing we have seen lately the rich here have a real "let them eat cake!" attitude. But the poor outnumber them by over 100,000 to 1 and that number is growing by the minute as the middle class is wiped out. So enjoy while you can, because we can't print free money forever.
Uhhh...it sounds like an F16 taking off?
Anyway let old Hairyfeet set you up and show you how its done. First I'd start with this box, while personally i like a little more elbow room he said little so little it is. Next up for a nice powerful but cheap CPU I'd go with this Phenom triple if he has a tight budget or this Phenom II quad if he has a little more to spare. I have this Phenom II chip in my own system and it is easy to under and over clock, and I have built plenty with the first Phenom triple chip, both are great.
Then you'll have to measure the depth to know how big a HSF you can go for, bigger is of course quieter so if it has enough room (haven't used a shuttle in awhile so I can't remember the depth offhand) I'd use something like this which if you turn on C&Q when you aren't slamming the Deneb this will be pretty quiet. Then for GPU something like this HD6570 which IIRC is the largest AMD makes that will still go low profile and passively cooled.
Finally slap in a 1Tb Samsung EcoDrive (quiet as a church mouse) and 4Gb of RAM along with Win 7 HP X64 (or the OS of your choice) and voila! You are good to go friend! Enjoy!
I could make it a hell of a lot more powerful and silent cooling BTW, but that would increase size. You can't beat the laws of physics, if it is powerful it is either gonna need fans or a big ass heatsink to cool the sucker. I've found most liquid cooling to be just as noisy if not more than regular HSFs, it just moves the fans from the CPU to the radiator. But this should give you a nice combination of speed and quiet and when you aren't slamming the living hell out of the Deneb all you will hear is the quiet hum of the PSU, that's it. With mine I hear the AC on the far side of the room more than I do the PC not 3 feet away from me, its nice.
But that is because they have a stable ABI so it doesn't matter if they release every six months or every six years as the drivers ain't getting shit upon like with Linux and THAT is my problem. I'm a retailer, you know the kind of guy Linux and FOSS needs for adoption to climb? Yeah hi. The problem is Torvalds constantly goes Goatse on the kernel breaking shit left and right and frankly Canonical pushing the whole "new product" release schedule is just making a house of cards even worse!
Before most FOSS developers had a "when its done" attitude to releases and you know what? I respected that. That shows a commitment to quality, and not rushing out releases to meet some PHB timetable which is the bain of proprietary software. yet for some damned reason Canonical has adopted those same bad habits but for no reason whatever!! I mean are their SALES gonna go down if they don't release every 6 months? Of course not, it is just fucking stupid pointless bullshit. But since so many developers want their software in Ubuntu they adopt the crazy bullshit schedule and things become even MORE unstable!
I figured in 2003 that by this time me and the other small shops would already have Linux on the shelves. The 80% hardware (ATI,Nvidia, Intel GPUs, Realtek sound and networking, Sigma sound, broadcom and Intel wireless, ATI,Nvidia, and Intel southbridges) would all be rock solid and "just work" so that 80% of the mainstream hardware would be good to go. so what the fuck happened Linux guys? if anything the shit is MORE buggy and drivers are WORSE than ever before! I set up 6 boxes with bog standard hardware, and I tested all the "user friendly" distros I knew of...Ubuntu/Mint, PCLOS, Mepis, and Fedora (I know Fedora isn't exactly friendly but I had a Linux fan screaming "Use Fedora!" on a forum at me so I figured WTF) and after install I tried to let it upgrade and what did I find?
Broken sound, broken network, broken video, not a SINGLE MACHINE came through with 100% working drivers....gentlemen that is simply unacceptable. And before some screams LTS I'd just point out that XP has longer before EOL than Ubuntu LTS right now, And Win 7 was released in 2009 and is supported until 2020, and that is if they don't release any service packs. you wanna call something LTS then it needs a solid 7 years minimum, preferably 10. Since we have gone multicore there simply isn't a reason to toss every 3 years.
Maybe in 5 years Canonical will be gone and Torvalds will "pursue other interests" and things will actually start moving forward again. but from here in my shop it looks like Linux went from "slow and steady wins the race" to "bling bling breaking shit woo hoo!" total crazy town. In 2003 it really looked like Linux would be solid as a rock and ready for the masses by 2008, maybe 2009 at the latest. Now it has gone back to even more fiddly, even more CLI "fixes" and hoop jumping, even more breakage, than it had even then. Kinda sad really, all that work down the drain, because the masses aren't gonna deal with that shit and I sure as hell ain't giving out lifetime free support because your developers don't know what QA means when it comes to drivers.
Weeeellll...considering the fact it has been slashvertisement city here as of late frankly we ought to be damned happy that it isn't some more Infoworld or that other site (you know, the one that had the brass balls to put a FIFTY ONE PAGE TFA under "Best FOSS software!" like a giant douche?) so personally I say welcome aboard dude.
As for TFA, yeah that is ALL we need, considering their "detection software" said a fricking laser printer was file sharing, is to give these douches an excuse for a fishing expedition on EVERY PC IN THE HOUSE. Be honest guys, how many of you have receipts for every bit of media, software, movies, etc, that you have? I know I'm moved 4 times in the past 5 years and have NO clue as to where half of my damned discs are. That was kinda the whole point of backing everything up onto a HDD as it is a hell of a lot easier to keep up with a USB HDD that holds thousands of discs worth of stuff than it is to keep up with thousands of discs.
I know some got crunched and tossed when my amp fell over on the box (boy that was a mess!) some are in storage, some I lent to my mom (whom I'm sure has promptly lost them or her damned goat of a dog had them for lunch), some I lent to friends (yeah good luck seeing THOSE again, hell I don't even remember who has what), some are in storage and some lord only knows where I put those boxes.
Personally as much as I hated Wesley Crusher I saw a video of Wil Wheaton at some convention and he nailed it "Make it simple for people to have the files legally" because as Gabe at Valve pointed out the pirates are offering a better value. I should be able to buy a disc ONCE, register it, and that's it, I'm done. i should from then on be able to put it in any damned format I like, toss the disc, whatever, I paid and I'm done. The IP bullshit is the only damned thing I can think where they say it is property AND/OR a license, apparently on the whim of the IP asshole. If I have the disc I only have a license, but then I lose the disc I only had the media and need to replace, WTF?
If I would have kept up with every single disc I swear i wouldn't be able to even walk in my damned apt, and if scum sucking lawyers like in TFA start using that excuse to make fishing expeditions frankly we're all fucked.
Uhhhh...so you are saying having crappier graphics is a GOOD thing? Because if so I have a 4Mb Matrox card I'll be happy to sell to you for $100 that will give you the crappiest graphics EVAR! Jeez, of all the things to fricking brag about, to brag your OS doesn't support the latest graphical improvements surely has to be a new one. Do you brag that that your stuff loads quicker when the sound driver is borked as well?
As for TFA BSD has a hardware ABI, Linux don't, end of story. This means their drivers aren't constantly having to be rewritten when Torvalds, who BTW admits there is no planning or roadmap with the kernel and just continues to "scratch itches" and break shit like it is 1993, messes up yet again something critical for a driver and therefor their drivers are stable enough they have time to be optimized. Considering the frankly batshit insane 6 month release schedule Ubuntu has everyone on you're lucky any drivers work at all. I know that when I finally gave up on Linux around Ubuntu 11 I had dealt with broken sound, wireless, black screen o' death from the graphics drivers, oh and Ethernet died twice. Fun.
Is stability like a dirty word now? Have we really reached the point that it doesn't matter how broken and fucked something is as long as its "new product"? Hell everyone makes fun of Windows and their "forced upgrades" but they are slower than fricking Xmas compared to Linux now! Hell one copy every 7 years and you are done, stick a fork. Used to be Linux was the stable as a rock OS, remember that? Sure it didn't look all fancy with tons of bling bling crap, but it was solid as a rock. Now ever since Canonical got some press it has been like a race to see who can crank out "product" no matter how badly borked. Look at how many outstanding issues are on any bugtracker, its nuts!
Now go ahead and waste some mod points because I didn't say "Gee isn't Linux perfect? it sure is Biff, and RMS' beard smells like candy!" but if most of the guys here would be honest with themselves they would admit i'm right. Canonical threw a big ass monkey wrench in the slow and steady progress Linux was making and now its a bling bling clusterfuck. Nothing gets fixed, just new versions with three bugs for every one that gets retired. I don't get it, you're not selling the damned thing, what is the point with the constant "new product" bullshit? At least MSFT has an excuse for putting out a new version every 5 years, they are getting their asses kicked by Apple on one side and their own legacy OS on the other. What's the Linux excuse?
Riiight, because those with triple screens and steering wheels are totally the big market in PC gaming. Why I bet they are a whole 1/18th of 1% of the market! Meanwhile look at the numbers on the latest FPS and RTS games, Dirt on its best day would kill yo mama for those kinds of numbers.
Non console racing has always been a teeny tiny niche, like non console sports. That is why EA doesn't even bother with PC versions of that those categories anymore, as they said there simply wasn't enough money in the PC to make it worth it. Racing and other competitive sports are more fun with a bunch of buds around so you can trash talk as you run them into a wall, simple as that. FPS is MORE fun away from your buds, so they can't see where you are getting ready to pwn their asses, and with RTS you don't want them seeing you are loading up on tanks before you roll them down their throats.
It is just the way the games are designed, that's all. But triple screen gaming, no matter how badly AMD wishes it weren't, is just a teeny blip on the radar. Last Steam poll I saw had multi monitor at less than 2% of the total gamers. When you are trying to entice folks to buy expensive hardware appealing to less than 2% of the market really ain't the smartest of moves, but considering AMD went nearly a year without a CEO and have let Intel get away with some pretty illegal shit with the compilers sadly as much as I like the company dumb shit like TFA from AMD really don't surprise me, and this is from someone who has been selling AMD exclusively for nearly 3 years now.
Uhhhh...hate to break the news to ya bud, but starting TWO WARS while LOWERING taxes? That has NEVER happened in the entire history of this country, and that dumb shit can be laid squarely at the feet of Dubya. Oh and just FYI but you might want to look at the stats which clearly point out that higher taxes on the wealthy lead to lower unemployement and greater economic growth but don't let that get in the way of the classic right wing "Give teh rich MORE MONIES! Nom nom nom!" rant now. BTW you DO know the teabaggers think rasing payroll taxes, you know, the taxes peasants like you pay, is a-ok? meanwhile Bachmann is talking about how the corps should pay no taxes at all because the rich are just God's blessed don't ya know?
The problem with Obama is he is the biggest damned pussy since Jimmy "I ain't got no backbone!" Carter and hasn't the balls to stand up to teabaggers, or anybody else for that matter. Whatever they want all they have to do is act tough and Obama will roll over like a whipped dog. Of course he will end up winning in 2012 simply because the teabaggers will make sure Perry gets it, and anybody saying "Social security should be wiped out" is about as electable as David Duke, not to mention his "record" is such wonderful things like 1st in teen pregnancies, most people working for minimum wage, most pollution, most HS dropouts, most people without medical or dental care, hell the man makes Dubya look like Lincoln!
Riiiight, because nobody needs to do actual work, nope all they need is social media baby yeah! Speed? Posh, if it can't run on a CPU from 10 years ago you don't need it!
Please, mobile chips are playtoys. you know what they'll be in 10 years? playtoys. It is actually very simple, unless they start packing nuke batteries in the damned things you will ALWAYS have to give up speed for battery life which is fine if you want to play some angry birds, but when you are at home? fuck that slow ass bullshit.
That is just as damned stupid as the occasional customer I have that insists on a gamer laptop. No not because they wanna LAN, that would actually make sense. Nope they want to spend crazy money on a mobile device that they never take anywhere so what you end up with is a REALLY EXPENSIVE desktop with crappy parts that dies quicker from heat death. oh well fool and their money and all that.
Uhhh...why not just split the difference and save a ton o' cash? I bought a 1Tb EcoDrive for my OS a couple of months back, on sale for $39, and a 2Tb EcoDrive a couple of weeks ago, again on sale for $59. Last I checked those 3Tb drives were still pretty high and this lets me switch out the OS drive for another 2Tb down the road although frankly I think I may have hit my limit on usefulness. Even with every game I even slightly like I still have 1400Gb free on the 2Tb, and with a dual boot XP and Win 7 PLUS another partition for video editing my 3 partitions on the 1Tb have nearly 75% free each.
So I can see needing a 3Tb if you are doing a ton of video editing but for most folks I'd say the sweet spot is 2Tb or even 1Tb drives, especially if you catch them on sale. BTW if anyone is thinking about snatching a Samsung EcoDrive before they are all gone THEY ROCK HARD. you'd think by replacing a 7200RPM for a 5400RPM I'd take a speed hit but the fat cache on the EcoDrive (32Mb VS 8Mb for my Seagate 400Gb) jumped my benches from 92Mbps to nearly 120Mpbs. It is also quiet as a churchmouse and max temp is barely 85f, compared to nearly 120f on the Seagate. Well worth the money IMHO, truly sweet drives!
Well for one thing Codemasters has already been hacked recently. I got one of those "Hi, we've been pwned! Please change any passwords that you used and we hope you didn't use them anywhere else! kthnksbai" from Codemasters. So their record on security wasn't great to start with.
Second of all and slightly OT, but why Dirt? Ever since the Intel bribery scandal I've been buying nothing but AMD yet that promo was a giant turn OFF for me, can't think of any of my customers that would give a crap either. All the racing guys I've known played NASCAR or GT on consoles, is PC racing even the tiniest bit popular? They couldn't give us a shooter or RTS?
So while i'm sorry you got bit in the ass AMD i'm just glad none of my customers are having to deal with this mess, because the ones that qualified don't care about Dirt. hell if you want to show off your GPU make a deal with the guys that make Just Cause II. Watching those oil towers blow up in glorious DirectX 10 mode was well worth my card upgrade. Anytime I want to sell a customer on a GPU upgrade all I have to do is fire that game up and start blowing shit up. All those fireballs and ragdolls filling the screen and they always go "oooohhhhh...that's so damned cool!".