But playing the guitar and banjo wouldn't really help you play the trumpet now would it? For us geeks these are quite simple things because we have literally grown up with the tech. my first "PC" was a VIC20 my uncle bought off the back of the truck and gave to me, followed by learning to program business apps into a Trash80 for my dad who had just started his electrical business and needed a way to keep the books.
Let me give an example of why giving out laptops and more importantly giving them courses in their usage would be important. There is a guy down the hall named Dave. Now Dave graduated HS in the late 70s, so he hasn't been exposed to computers. All his life he has worked at manual labor in factories only those don't exist here anymore, so a little at a time I'm having to teach Dave how to use a PC. Now it has been roughly 6 months, and he can open an email, he can reply, and he can even copy/paste as long as he has the cheat sheet i gave him, but that is it. he still can't wrap his head around the differences between memory and hard drive space, how permissions work, hell I'm gonna have to set up a thumbstick for him because he can't even figure out how to move a file from A to B on anything other than what he has been taught on and the library uses Vista and he has XP.
Now there have been probably 30 jobs he could have gone out for in the past month if he only had basic PC and office skills which he does not. Folks here seem to forget how hard it is for someone who doesn't have those skills to get a job anymore. The days of factories are gone and there are tons of people like Dave who not only have to deal with age discrimination but with simply not having the PC skills required of modern jobs.
So I'm personally glad I started my boys on a love of computers and tech starting at a VERY early age. So early in fact my late sister before she passed on and gave those two boys to me and my mom to raise wasn't very happy with me. She wanted the oldest to say mama as his first word SO badly, yet his first words ended up being "No! Mine!" when I had snuck the Genesis controller out of his little hand while he slept and switched the Barney game for some Eternal Champions, and boy was he pissed! he stuck his little hand out for the controller and I swear gave me a look that just screamed 'You sorry piece of garbage, stealing from a baby". I handed it to him and he pointed at the screen until I switched carts and gave me dirty looks for the rest of the day.
But now he is in pre-med and while many of his classmates struggle he is blowing through it, in no small part because thanks to having PC and web skills he knows how to research, cite references, and find tutorials on almost any subject quickly and easily. The ones from the local HS? Having to take a basic computer skills class so they can learn the things I taught him years ago. It is a 21st century world, and computer skills may mean the difference between a good job or no job at all, as Dave is finding out.
Hello ePeen, how tiny is your penis BTW? In case you ain't heard the games have been CONSOLE FIRST for damned near 5 years now, so with the exception of a couple of ePeen benchmark games (Which like Yahtzee at ZP says "Is used as a ritual processor sacrifice to the Gods of gaming") most games will play damned well on that $380 gaming PC.
Here are the specs for the gaming PC I just handed to a customer. He is playing Batman:AA and any other game he likes at 1080p and it looks great and runs smooth...Athlon X4 2.8Ghz, 4Gb of RAM, HD4850, win 7 HP, 1Tb HDD, DVD burner. And I don't know what the AC was smoking but Blu Ray is deader than Dixie. they are even pulling the BD section at my local Walmart and sticking them in the corner, as everyone uses DVD or Netflix.
Total for that including having me put it together? $520 before MIRs. After MIRs he'll be looking at around $480, and as I said it does every game he has thrown at it so far in native 1080p. Monitor with speakers? Tigerdirect has a 22 inch right now for $99. I won't even count keyboard and mouse as they are so cheap as to be a joke, got a nice wireless setup for a customer for $19 on sale a few weeks ago.
So even if they have NOTHING, absolutely nothing at all but a table to put in on, you are STILL looking at less than $650 for a machine that does 1080p and plays most games looking better than the consoles. You figure up the cost of OnLive PLUS the cost of the elite gaming package at your ISP (because you take a laggy regular line and OnLive is gonna suck) and in less than a year you've blown more than this easy. I know in my area the gamer line is $120 a month for just the net, no bundles included. You have to take cable as DSL doesn't even offer a gaming line, and frankly the lag on the DSL here is a joke.
But you are also making the same mistake the ePeen gamers are, which is the simple fact is most people don't play everything with 16xaa and 4xaf or whatever. they use whatever the default settings are because they are afraid they tweak all that stuff (which they don't have a clue what means anyway) and they'll "break something". Most people just want to 1.-stick in disc, 2.-go 'clicky clicky, next next next", 3.-start game. 4.-There is no step 4. That's it, that's all. And I can easily build a sub $500 machine that will do that. hell that $380 PC will do that, and has an unlocker board so that BE dual core may be a triple or a quad, I wouldn't know until i put it together.
So I'm sorry Mr ePeen, but most people don't sit around playing crysis with everything cranked while watching their FRAPS score, that just ain't what the common man does. My customer brings people over just so they can go "ohh ahh" at his new PC, and as long as batman looks good beating the shit out of bad guys (which he does BTW) he is a happy little camper. I have another similar kit on the way right now just from one of his friends going 'I want that too!" so I must be doing something right.
Why not just make them take a safety course before allowing someone to own one? Then you are not taking any of their rights away but just making sure they see first hand that these can be quite dangerous and aren't a toy. Sometimes all one needs is a good example of the danger to make sure they respect the device.
I know seeing my dad blow a hole in a concrete block and being told 'you know your head is thinner than that, right?" was all it took to get me to respect firearms. I did the same trick with my boys when they were old enough and sure enough they wouldn't touch a gun without adult supervision.
So I'd say a safety course with a few demonstrations of how powerful these lasers are would be appropriate before simply handing one out.
Hello time traveler from 96, let me tell you about 9/11 and fukushima. In reality land one can get a Barebone for $200 follow the little pictures or the nice little video where they walk you through putting it together (I swear they hold your hand so much now a grandma could do it) and add a $100 copy of Win 7 HP along with a nice cheap mid range game card and voila! Gaming PC for $380. Or if you don't want to DIY you can just pick up a prebuilt for $550 that is plug and play, or you can just go to any mom&pop shop and hire a guy like me that will put together any design your little heart desires.
Anybody that pays $900 for a gaming PC has a very tiny penis and is trying to make up for it with an ePeen. That or they are one of these idiots that think they have to do everything on a laptop, even if they don't actually go anywhere with the damned thing so are just spending a shitload of money on a really compact desktop with higher priced shittier parts.
As for TFA...do they have purple ponies and She Ra in candyland where OnLive lives? because I would like a ride. in case they haven't gotten the memo the greedy bastard ISPs are going to caps which kinda kills their magical service deader than Dixie. hell in my area neither the cable nor DSL has moved an inch or upgraded shit in damned near a decade, and that is with a huge college right in the middle of town. That would cut into profits you know!
It doesn't matter we already paid to the tune of 200 billion for nationwide broadband and all we got was a nice picture of Goatse from the CEOs who pocketed the cash or spent it on coke and hookers, or that in areas like mine (and large chunks of the country) that only have a monopoly or duopoly we are being royally ass raped on prices as it is (in my area it is now up to $75 for 2Mbps cable or $135 for the bundle with TV and phone) because they have to show Wall Street they can make iMoney and keep those profits rolling don't ya know?
OnLive trying to get this service off the ground now would be like offering a car for the masses that gets 5 MPG. The era of unlimited broadband, at least in the states, is coming to an end, it is like 8 tracks and muscle cars a thing of the past. Sadly I've seen the future and it is teeny caps and $1.50 per Gb if you go over, which means just one gaming session could cost you more than just going out and buying the game if you go over your cap.
Actually after the one two punch of Fiorina and Hurd frankly that would probably be an improvement. HP has just been so badly mismanaged they are frankly only floating with just their name and past to keep them above water. But don't worry the current head idiot with his "hey we'll just become IBM!" while kinda ignoring there already is an IBM will put the last nails in the coffin and make out like a bandit while doing so.
It must be nice to be in that exclusive 1%er club where no matter how badly you suck at your job you still walk away with rock star sacks of money. How much did Fiorina and Hurd walk away with again?
By that right then shouldn't Palm being suing Apple's ass? After all we are talking about a rounded square with cute little icons, that pretty much describes every Palm Pilot I have ever held in my hand.
But this is pretty much the problem with the whole patents and copyrights mess. they allow shit that is so damned vague you might as well patent 'A thing about some stuff' because frankly there ain't no way in hell anyone is gonna mistake a Galaxy for an iShiny. Android and iOS are about as different as night and day when it comes to feel and people look for the Apple logo, if it has the Apple logo it is considered hip and cool and if it doesn't have the logo it is considered an also ran at best.
No this is just more proof that Apple without Jobs sucks ass. When Jobs was healthy and in charge he didn't have to pull this lame shit, he would just look down his nose at the other guy and could point out a dozen reasons why it sucked. Hell look up the post interview with Jobs over the "Bill Gates has no taste" comment. The interviewer was laughing his ass off about how Jobs called Gates to apologize about the remark only to follow it up with "But its true Bill, you really have no taste". Jobs couldn't resist speaking his mind even when trying to apologize.
No I have a feeling we are gonna see more of this shit as the company slowly slides downhill without the man behind the big desk. Just like the last time it'll coast for a couple of years with what they have in the pipe but the dumb moves and bad plays that hurt their rep are already showing up. When you are #1 you don't bring attention to the other guy, especially one that has been channel stuffing because they can't move any real numbers. This reminds me of the Pepsi guy who ended up spending more and more of Apple's time and resources on lawsuits instead of coming out with new ideas and new products. That turned out to not be such a good idea IIRC, and damned near torpedoed the company. Sadly Jobs won't be able to ride in and save them again.
You forgot the fourth and probably biggest reason, which is starving humans eating them to survive just look up "bushmeat" and see for yourself. the really sad part is part of the reason those people are starving is just like blood diamonds we pay warlords for the minerals to make our cell phones and help to keep the wars there going.
Basically that whole damned area is a mess and unless we in the west just want to roll the tanks and try another hand at nation building (which never seems to work out) I doubt it'll be getting better there any time soon. Most likely the only examples of animals from the congo area and other third world hellholes 50 years from now will be in zoos if we are lucky, museums if we are not.
Actually I believe that AMD donates to the GCC compiler as well as supporting the
AMD x86 Open64 Compiler Suite which I believe is under Apache license so that is two compilers right there that could be used.
You see unlike Intel and their douchebag behavior the AMD compiler only looks for SSE flags and runs the code based on which flags are present. several coders have run tests with the AMD compiler and found it doesn't favor one side or the other, it just looks at SSE.
And I personally would love to see how much of Intel's compiler "performance" is just douchebag jury rigging and how much is actual performance. one thing i've found is when it comes to programmer tools FOSS code is usually better, simply because there are so many programmers on FOSS OSes and using FOSS software.
So I'd love to see Intel VS GCC VS Open64 and see which truly gives the best performance over the widest range of chips. After all, you wouldn't want to limit your customers to only those that have specific Intel CPUs would you? Because it has already come out that the original Intel compiler crippled the Pentium III as well as AMD so they could push the P4, which at the time was scoring nearly 30% LOWER than the P3 on most benches. With that in mind I wouldn't be surprised if the new Intel compiler cripples socket LGA775 or any older chips they aren't pushing anymore. They are real douchbags when it comes to crap like that, it reminds me of the early 90s MSFT in that regard.
Sadly you are wrong. you see you are thinking like a geek, and "if they can do X, then they can learn Y" but that is like saying because i can play a bass I can trivially learn to play the Oboe.
You see as someone who actually builds and repairs PCs I have found many VERY damned smart people that you might as well be speaking Chinese when it comes to PCs. they simply can not get their head around many of the concepts. if someone would have started them earlier it would probably be a lot easier now, but once they get past mid 20s trying to teach them anything more than how to get to a website is nothing but frustration, for you AND for them.
So I'm all for it, teach them basic file commands, teach them to get around and do basic tasks like check for errors or security best practices. I can tell you it gave my boys a BIG advantage in school because while the others were having to type everything in typewriters and use a ton of white out, because neither they nor their parents knew shit about PCs mine were handing in nice papers with graphics and references.
The only trouble we ever had was from a teacher who likewise didn't understand tech, she accused my oldest of cheating because "you have all these facts and you don't own a dictionary!". I just went to the principal and said 'Is she for real?" and handed the boy my laptop. he had 5 different sites open on whichever subject she wanted checking them for cross references and making sure the sites had accurate data.
But it really does make a difference. my oldest is now in pre-med and while there are others that are having to have remedial computer courses just to get them up to speed on what teachers expect he is just blowing through it. Having the ability to use a PC and do research and other basic computer and web tasks really does matter IRL and sadly once they get above a certain age trying to teach it to them is like trying to pick up Mandarin for someone who has never even heard the language. possible? Yes. In any way shape or form easier than pulling teeth? not a chance friend.
Well to be fair Whedon's take is a little different, what he was trying to get at is while their actions may be evil and they may accept that those actions are evil and know before doing it those actions are evil they feel morally justified in doing them, so that makes it "ok" in their eyes.
So in his take it would be like you flipped someone off in traffic so they follow you home and kill your family. To you it was just a minor traffic irritation but to the guy it could have been a grave insult which makes him feel morally justified in doing something horrible to you in return. So sorta similar but not.
The only problem is that most of the benchmarks use the Intel compiler and thus are completely worthless. it would be like basing the GPU results on Quack.exe, remember that? hell see for yourself. Run the benchmarks, change the CPU-ID to read "Genuine Intel" and run them again...gasp! Your CPU just jumped up in performance by over 30%....amazing!
People don't realize how BIG a chunk that compiler rigging takes, its not just pre-crippled, its tying a fucking boat anchor to the code, we are talking losing ALL of the SSE instructions sets, going back to 2002 and leaving nothing but early 90s X87 instructions. How long as it been since the x87? 1994?
So as I point out every chance I get run with a fair benchmark and then we'll talk. Compile it with the GNU compiler, we know that is agnostic, THEN run the benches. Fair is fair folks.
I still saying it is marketing the iShiny as a fashion device. A good example is my dad. My dad is completely clueless, hell he can't even work the phone he has worth a shit, yet he wants an iPhone. Why? Is it the touchscreen? The apps? No he doesn't have a clue about any of that all he knows is the other contractors have one so he wants one too in a classic "keep up with the Joneses"! I told him to wait for the Nokia WinPhone and see how it stacks up before paying iMoney for a phone he frankly won't know how to fricking work anyway, as he has Win 7 and if they get the integration down it'll probably be easier for him to work.
But as someone living right next to an Apple heavy college I can say I've seen that quite a lot. talking to these kids they don't know squat about Apple, can't even tell you a single feature that makes them better, they just know that is what the other kids have for phones so that is what they want as well. Funny thing is Apple seems to be losing that demographic on the PC front, as the Apple Macbooks have all but disappeared around here. why is that? netbooks. Apple really shot themselves in the foot by not offering an affordable machine in that SFF as the college kids just love the living hell out of the netbooks and smaller laptops. When they see kids like my oldest in the break area playing some MMOs on one of those little AMD machines its all "Ohhh...where did you get THAT?" and the next thing I know they are in my shop going "can you get me one like he has?".
So I'd say it is marketing. In the markets they are marketing heavily they have huge gains but in the markets they are not pushing or not listening to the consumer like the Macbook they don't seem to be gaining near as much, and at least in my area actually losing share. When it comes to fashion one really needs to get a certain amount for the network effect to kick in full swing and while they have that on the iShiny they seem to be losing it on the Mac. Just as well as i predict they'll not be selling the Mac in less than 4 years anyway, the margins are so much better on the consumer products and they have no real competition, unlike with Intel laptops.
Yeah but there was a couple of dirty little secrets with the early Athlons. Number one thanks to NO thermal monitoring so they burned up, they burned up a hell of a lot and took boards with them. We used to keep a dead chip bucket at my old shop and that thing was damned near full of nothing but early Athlons. Number two it was trivially easy to rip people off by OCing an Athlon and selling it as a faster chip. Those early Athlons really didn't give you enough info either in the BIOS nor in the OS to really tell, most of the time you'd have to delve deep into the BIOS or pop off the HSF and check the chip. I don't know how many times I got told by customers "I wouldn't buy AMD, they are unstable!" only to tell them to bring in their unstable machine and sure enough, some douchebag had OC'ed it by a huge amount and sold them a chip for 30% or more higher than it was worth. Oh and to make matter worse the HSF on those early Athlons were kinda shit, which mean when they were OCed they were more likely to burn, but even without OC any dust buildup could fry the CPU and board..
We lost so many Athlons in that period that was one of the reasons I stayed with Intel plus Nvidia for so long. But when it came out that Intel was bribing OEMs and rigging their compiler (which they still are BTW, even though part of the settlement was that they end the practice. All they do now is put a little FYI buried in the bottom of the manual IIRC) and Bumpgate on the Nvidia side I bit the bullet and came back to AMD and boy not only I but my customers are quite happy as well. I'm an AMD only shop and the lower prices have made me quite popular thanks to the crazy bang for the buck and for the first time since the K5-2 I built my own AMD PC and love the thing to death. what's not to love, when I could build a quad core with 8Gb of RAM, and HD4850 GPU, 3Tb of HDD space, and Win 7 HP X64, all for less than $775? And today I could probably have knocked another $75-$100 off the price! Go AMD!
So your reply is...bullshit,bullshit,bullshit and bullshit, correct? I gave you my answer as to ABIs, give me a single reason why EVERYONE ELSE ON THE PLANET is wrong and you are right. Give me a SINGLE EXAMPLE of the magical never break drivers that are called for in that religious text. Hey if that technique works there must be thousands of those that exist, yes? the kernel hackers have had the code FOR YEARS NOW so they must have the 80% in never break quality yes? but guess what Sparky THEY BREAK CONSTANTLY which shows that kernel dev was talking out his ass. Do you REALLY think he is smarter than the entire kernel teams for OSX, Windows, OS/2, Solaris, BSD, etc? I repeat, arrogant much?
And did you even read the post above me? How the guy had enterprise hardware and is stuck with an old kernel because guess what THE DRIVERS ARE BROKEN for ALL the new kernels? Care to tell HIM he should throw away thousands of dollars in hardware? It is THIS arrogant elitist horseshit without the code to back it up that helps keep people as far away from your shitpile OS as possible! With Windows you get a MINIMUM of 8 YEARS of support, often longer. Your OS? You can't even give me a 100% guarantee the stuff you have running now will continue running in 6 months! Yep, sure gonna lure the masses with that level of QA buddy. And oh yeah all those OSes are complete shit, even though most have quite huge numbers, why they just don't know how sweet the Linux koolaid is do they daddy-o? Doesn't matter that their drivers actually WORK and CONTINUE WORKING because CLI gives you gonad powers!
Which brings us to the two bad jokes of your religion, the "Linux is a kernel" and "CLI gives you gonad powers" jokes. you DO realize I can replace every. single. argument. that you have made with the appropriate Linux TM yes? Do you know why that is? Because after all these years you've been coming up with the same tired old horseshit about how it is everyone's fault but yours, how if people would only "embrace the power of CLI" like it is the God damned force that the world would be hearts and flowers. But you know what? NUMBERS DO NOT LIE and you have NOTHING to show for damned near 20 years of work! Read it and weep fucking JavaME is kicking your ass! Don't feel even a little bit ashamed at such shit numbers? or do you think being a dead end with less numbers than a shit cellphone OS just makes you "leet" and connects you to the neckbeards of old, when IRL all you do is copypasta into a term ?
I'll repeat this until it sinks in, i'll even highlight it, Do you know what the definition of insanity is? It is doing the same thing and expecting a different outcome and that is EXACTLY what you and the community have been doing for damned near a decade now. What were your numbers 3 years ago? why they were at 1%. What will your numbers be 3 years from now? I bet my last dollar they'll be 1%. It don't take Kojak to solve this case, and it isn't some conspiracy by Gates and the Illuminati, nor is it payoffs to the OEMs that ended over a decade ago.
Now it is the fact that YOU DON'T LISTEN, not to your customers, nor to the OEMs, nor to the retailers. Wanna read something sad? Dell the current number 3 OEM, even though they only offer Linux on a token amount of frankly outdated hardware, has to run their own repo at considerable out of pocket expense. Why is that? Because if they don't the DRIVERS DIE HARD. And you sir have NO excuse nor argument that can justify that, none at all. That is just typical shitty QA from Canonical and typical Linus Goatse bullshit. But I'm sure you'll say dell is "doin it wrong" or that every retailer and mom&pop shop on the planet should pay programmers to run their own repos so they can bless their customers with your sacred cow. But i
Oh but you could OC the living shit out of the Celery back then! With a good air cooler and a little luck a Celery could be OCed by a good 30% to 35%. Man in those days there really was a reason to replace your gear every 3 years or even less, the innovations on both sides of the aisle were just like two heavyweights duking it out....then Intel bribed all the OEMs and won through deceit what they couldn't when fairly, boo hiss.
Meh the big story as far as AMD goes isn't gonna be BD, frankly IMNSHO as a PC builder frankly PCs have been "good enough" on the CPU side for quite awhile which is one of the reasons my customers are quite happy I put my money where my mouth is and became an all AMD shop. No the really BIG STORY in 50 foot neon letters is gonna be the switch from VLIW to Vector Based GPUs, both in the discrete and in the APUs.
Imagine a chip that can not only crank out graphics like nobody's business but can actually work like a hyper FP on top of that with VERY little penalty. Today you are lucky if you get 1/4th the performance on double FP but with the new chips that will be cut down to less than half for the first bunch with the goal of native speed double FP in the next gen. I bet the math geeks are drooling at that prospect right now. And for those that switch to the APUs it'll mean an all new hybrid Crossfire where the APU can take over physics while handing off rendering to the discrete for some truly insane graphics. Sounds pretty damned sweet to me.
I just hope more geeks here at/. do as I do and give AMD some business. Unless you are one of those that literally slam your CPUs right to the bleeding edge (which admittedly there are more of those type here than on average) frankly the bang for the buck has been firmly in the AMD camp for some time now. you can get better quality boards with damned good IGPs for cheaper, The huge length of support time on the AM socket means you can go from dual to quad to six core without replacing anything but the CPU, the quads are dirt cheap right now, they just make really damned good, solid as a rock, long lasting systems.
I mean how can you not love a company that lets you get a fully loaded Black Edition dual kit for $200, a triple core kit for just $250 which BTW kicks ass as an HTPC, just swap the case for one of the "VCR style" cases and a dirt cheap 4xxx or 5xxx GPU, or a quad for $270? Oh and for those that have older machines I'd suggest a trip over to Starmicro where you can pick up cheap chips to upgrade older machines, both Intel and AMD. In my shop the Phenom X3 and the Pentium Ds are both quite popular upgrade paths for those with older AM2s or LGA775s respectively. Enjoy and go AMD!
But how much of that was the device, and how much because Jobs is a marketing genius the likes of which the world has never seen before? I'll never forget a quote i read years ago by someone attending MacWorld: "If Steve is having a bad day you'll feel like if you bought his product your life would be better off with it, but if Steve is on his game you will leave there thinking my life will be worse off if I don't have his product.
Don't get me wrong, i'm sure the iPad is nice, as is all the iShiny devices, but give the man credit where credit is due. Steve Jobs is a perfect example of that old southern saying "that man could sell ice cream to Eskimos". Look up the history of Apple on youtube and you'll see even the employees were blown away by Steve and his charisma. The man is a master showman and salesman of which I can't even think of anyone to compare him to, he is just THAT good.
That is why i think Cook is gonna have his work cut out for him. while he may be a damned good manager he simply hasn't got the ability to fire people up like Jobs had, at least not from what I have seen. Hell Steve could probably paint a Casio silver, call it the iWatch, and have folks so damned pumped up about it that it would be sold out on launch day, he is just an incredible salesman.
So you are saying Linux is for dumpster divers? Is THAT what you are saying? Because I have to agree with you there as the ONLY PC I EVER saw survive a 6 month upgrade with 100% working drivers was a circa 1999 733Mhz P3 with really old Intel shit. You know what? it ended up in the dump as nobody wants shit that old, not even Goodwill! I can't believe you had the balls to admit that though, bravo good sir!
As for Windows? bullshit, utter bullshit. hell most people would even know if you changed their OS out tomorrow as long as the icons were in the same place. i work for consumers 6 days a week and you have NO idea how many times I've been told "I have Windows" but they have no damned clue if it is Win98 or Windows 7, they honestly don't know.
Lets take a look at some facts, shall we? Now for SMBs and SOHO Linux is right out, as QuickBooks/Quicken is God in those markets, and for a good reason i might add, as a single QB Girl (And it is ALWAYS a girl, they must have a union or something) can run the whole damned company with a copy of QB and an expense sheet, but consumers? In my shop I have got to learn their habits quite well, you tell me what they are doing that doesn't work on Linux....they use Firefox, they go to Facebook, they check their webmail, they watch Youtube and if they are guys or females under 30 they also go to Porntube and the like.
Now is there a SINGLE thing on that list that couldn't run just as well on Linux? Nope not a one. But here is the catch...since I would have to charge MORE for Linux because I'd have to give out lifetime support (And NO, home users won't buy support contracts. Just ask Best Buy how much they howl and scream at even being offered extended warranties) it simply makes no sense. Now if Linux would fix the driver breakage and kill the damned terminal bullshit? Then I could offer the Linux boxes for less and price WILL WIN for a huge number of consumers. this is why Dell can sell tons of $300 laptops even though we both know they are plastic POSes, and why when I get in a load of 4 to 6 year old laptops I sell at $100 each I have them all sold in less than 24 hours. price trumps all for a large majority out there.
When the Linux community accepts that CLI should have remained in the 80s where it belonged and drivers shouldn't constantly break then and ONLY then will Linux gain share. of course when that happens I'll be riding a purple pony with She Ra because I have never met a more delusional elitist bunch in my whole damned life! I swear I even had one tell me I should encourage my customers to "Embrace the POWER of CLI" like it was the God damned force!
I think it goes even deeper than that. I remember a director's commentary by Joss Whedon on writing villains and why so many got it wrong. He said "The thing about the villain is they never feel they are the villain because to them there is always a reason for their actions. I have known people IRL that have done truly horrible things. People that have gone out of their way to cause harm and pain to a fellow human being and they believed they were in the right as they had some reason, some excuse or justification for their actions".
I think that pretty much nails it right there. I bet if you locked these people in a room and REALLY talked to them, even the hard core right wingers that are wanting to seriously hurt the poor and be a giant douche to the people and kiss the corporate ass, they aren't going "Muh ha ha! That'll show 'em" it is simply they believe their actions are just either through logic hoops, or the end justifies the means, or the propaganda has been bought by them hook line and sinker, but I bet nearly all of them have SOME reason why they think they are right.
it is just in their little ivory coated, gold padded worlds where 10,000 dollar lunches and 35k bottles of wine are nothing they don't see what real harm they are doing, and frankly i don't know which is worse: Cartoon villainy or true believers that are delusional. Both end up with the common man fucked so i don't suppose it really matters.
May I make a suggestion? get yourself a copy of TinyXP or Tiny7 and use that instead. the 1.1GHz Atom CPU in those is simply too weak for a full Windows install but the tiny versions run great on much weaker chips, with TinyXP smoking on a 400MHz with 128Mb of RAM and Tiny7 actually being snappy on a 733MHz with 512Mb of RAM. Put one of those on there and it'll be like a CPU plus RAM upgrade all in one.
As for TFA i'm sure all those channel stuffed units will end up going for pennies on the dollar, retailers don't like having tons of units gathering dust. i personally will be happy to pick one up at $99 on Woot! but I frankly wouldn't pay more than that for a pad. Some folks may think they are the greatest thing since sliced bread but i already get 4 hours plus on my laptop when playing video PLUS I can get work done, so what's the point.
Oh BTW Protip: If you want to really boost your battery life when watching videos on a laptop? Get DVDIdle Pro, well worth the money IMHO. It'll cache the video to RAM instead of spinning the DVD or HDD thus saving serious battery time by letting the HDD and DVD drive shut down. I have found I get nearly an extra hour, that is a 25% increase in time, simply by using DVDIdle pro, great piece of software.
You're right they can sell it for anything they want and I can just have it made in China where they don't play their little reindeer games, get the picture now Sparky? ALL YOU ARE DOING is taking work away from Americans, that's it, that's all. I can build it in China without paying them dick, and don't forget we are talking code they have ALREADY GIVEN AWAY on literally hundreds of thousands of discs, as that was the whole damned point of shareware.
So I'll just have it made in China, some Chinese guys can take home their checks to their families, and Americans can go line up for a welfare check, cool with you? Because that is what is gonna happen. I wanted it made here but greedy MBA douchebags wanted more than a triple AAA title for 25 year old shit. That is their right, as is mine to have it made in a country with sane IP laws. Works out great for everyone except those stupid American peasants, don't it? As long as there is a single place that doesn't play your reindeer games YOU HAVE TO COMPETE or someone else gets the business. So I'll just join the likes of GE and hundreds of other companies and offshore it, puts me in some great company. meanwhile Americans lose more work, don't get shit, again shock shock greedy MBA refuse to accept anything but iMoney and fuck American workers, why am I not surprised?
Did you even read what you posted to? read it it is a RELIGIOUS TEXT with the writer going on about how basically they wouldn't be able to Goatse the kernel anymore! Well boo hoo, you can't Goatse the kernel if you actually had to support anything, my heart bleeds.
And if you think he is right and I'm bullshit, riddle me this? if that approach would work WHY HASN'T IT BEEN DONE? i'll tell you, because like me riding a purple pony with She Ra it is a complete and total fantasy, that's why. you might as well say "Well if we could place a hardware fairy into each copy of Ubuntu, a little neckbeard that would pop out and fix the drivers whenever they break, we wouldn't have no problems with broken drivers!" which is true, but completely impossible.
Look at the facts...Windows, BSD, Solaris, OSX, OS/2....what do they have in common? A Stable ABI. Do you honestly think that your kernel hackers are so fucking brilliant they know better than the kernel teams of ALL those OSes? Arrogant much? Sadly that is what it comes down to, arrogance and religious dogma. The RMS camp says 'ZOMG If you had a stable ABI you'd lose the 4 freedoms ZOMG!" while ignoring that Nvidia already puts out binary blobs, as do others, it just makes supporting your OS a bigger pain in the ass. And as you found out letting the kernel devs do it can easily end up with fucked and abandoned hardware, they simply don't have enough hours in the day.
But don't take my word for it, mark this post and come back in a year and watch it come true! linux will gain NO SHARE in the next 12 months, they will gain NO SHARE in the next 24 months, they will gain NO SHARE in the next 36, in short Linux is a dead end in its current incarnation. The masses simply won't deal with the fiddly driver breaking CLI heavy bullshit, like it or lump it. Give the people what they want, give the reatilers a product that is easy to support, watch your numbers rise. Don't? I hope you enjoy where you are at, because you sure as hell ain't going anywhere.
How is it flaming? Because the Linux zealots here refuse to accept a single post that isn't "Gee Biff, isn't Linux doubleplusgood? Why it sure is Kim, and RMS smells like cotton candy!"
NAME A SINGLE THING that isn't true, just one. Broken drivers? You yourself admit that one. CLI heavy? For the love of God they have a term link on the desktop in a good 90% of distros for crying out loud! look on this very forum you'll find a Linux zealot that has taken HALF a quote from me and think it "proves"...something, hell if I know what. But the FULL quote bears repeating until the Linux faithful "get it".
As far as users are concerned THERE IS NO CLI in Windows or OSX, it doesn't exist. You could rip out CMD tomorrow on every single copy of Windows on the planet and 90%+ wouldn't even notice that is how little it is used. same for OSX. And before someone brings up Powershell that is SERVER TECH and I have yet to actually see it in the wild on a home machine, even once. I mean you can run a DB server on XP too, that don't mean anybody with any sense actually does it.
Look I have EVERY RIGHT to be royally pissed. i'm tired of being lied to, tired of having smoke blown up my ass, tired of having a bunch of basement dwellers telling me "Use distro X!" when I've already tried damned near a dozen, tired of NOTHING EVER CHANGING. You know what the definition of insanity is? Doing the same thing and expecting a different result. It has been TWENTY YEARS and Linux is STILL at 1%, it was below the margin for error 4 years ago, guess where it will be 4 years from now? same place.
Like it or lump it folks, but you can't change reality. Neckbeards have gone the way of paneling on cars, 99.9995% of the world is NOT made of programmers, the word is CONSUMERS in giant 50 foot neon, the CLI horseshit and 6 month breakage has been declared a giant DO NOT WANT, yet you continue to do the same tired BS and wonder why retailers like me won't carry your OS? maybe it is because you ignore your customers or insult them?
But don't worry, you stay on the same path. The world will ignore you, retailers like me won't touch your OS with a 50 foot pole, but you can sit there typing CLI crap you copypasta from some forum and acting like that connects you to the PDP11 using neckbeards of old. See if the world cares. Look at your numbers! If an OS with a $1000 barrier to entry gains while your FREE PRODUCT don't gain shit? Then dammit how big of a fucking cluebat do you need to be whomped upside the head with? UR DOIN IT WRONG
So you fixed OLD SHIT by using Linux, what a fucking surprise. You wanna dumpster dive? linux works great...ohh until you update the thing then you are royally fucked. Have you run apt upgrade yet? bet you haven't, bet you won't either if you have a brain as the entire thing will fall down like a house of cards.
And waste your mod points, go ahead and throw that tux blankie on your head and go "Leave poor wittle Linux alone!" and maybe you mods and the britney guy can do a tag team thing. Won't change reality. You don't think Linux support sucks? Step right up folks and take the hairyfeet challenge!
Just go to Walmart.com, Staples.com, and Bestbuy.com, the 3 largest retailers in the USA. Write down all the PC devices on sale or under $100, then go to...lets say Ubuntu forums, since Ubuntu is the most popular ATM. Look up how many devices on sale RIGHT NOW are supported. Go ahead, I'll wait.....You're looking at MAYBE 30%, and that is if you count "support" as an assload of CLI commands that may or may not work depending on whether they have gone from firmware a to firmware f without changing the box (which they do ALL the time).
As long as Torvalds is in charge you're fucked, end of story. That douchebag acts like it is still 1993 and the kernel is his personal playtoy, not the core of a multibillion dollar ecosystem, its just him and his little friends on IRC except....it ain't 1993 anymore jackass! Your driver model sucks, support for new hotness is terrible, the 6 month upgrades break more shit than they fix, do you REALLY want me to pile on the links of people screaming because the 6 month broke their shit? because this thing could get longer than war and peace, last i looked at the forums we are talking 1000s of posts, which for an OS with only 1% share if pretty impressive in its levels of fail.
You don't like what I'm saying? Then FIX IT. Demand the kernel be forked or Torvalds "pursue other interests" and get someone in there that makes driver stability job #1, freeze the 6 month upgrade horseshit and replace it with a solid, well thought out 5 year cycle, demand that those who have software in the distros FIX THEIR BROKE SHIT instead of just releasing yet another one, seriously look at the bug trackers, its fucking embarrassing.
Sorry MR AC, but the original VCS was prototyped in 1975, and I'm sure their BIOS would have come under copyright then. There are quite a few sites out there with the history of Atari, feel free to look it up. IIRC they had to keep it under wraps until 76 so that a contract one of them had would expire before they could show the hardware at CES, but the original Stella prototype? 1975.
It was on sale in 77 and only became popular in 1980 with the release of Space Invaders. I should know as I had one of the late 70s Atari machines when they started selling them at Magic Mart (God I'm dating myself, anybody remember Magic Mart?) and ended up selling it in late 82 or early 83 and getting a ColecoVision with the Atari add-on. Man that thing was sweet, but my mom feel in love with DK JR and Yar's Revenge and she'd play those things at like 2AM and I ended up with the beeps and boops stuck in my head. IIRC she actually got such a high score on DK JR she locked the thing up when it rolled over.
I'm sure someone will expect me to say "those were the days" but frankly i'll take my HD4850 creating 3D worlds that make you want to drool and 8Gb of RAM making everything instant load any day of the week. Its a hell of a lot nicer than waiting on my custom Pong game to load from the VIC20 cassette drive or the screeches that passed for sounds on the VCS.
Notice how none of the Linux zealots can stand the truth? i could line links up all damned day showing everyone from giant corps like Walmart to little shops like mine running away screaming because Linux is a fiddly CLI heavy bitch, but will they listen? Oh fuck no, they still have raging hard ons for the days of the PDP11 when everyone that used a computer was a programmer and neckbeards were the rage. i mean for the love of God RMS still calls everyone "hackers" like he is at a computer club meeting in 75. Wake up and smell the last 20 years of computing folks!
As for your point about being "too old"? bullshit, total bullshit. frankly once PCs reached around 2GHz they became "good enough" for all your basic web tasks which is what I'd say a good 60% to 70% of the people out there only use a PC for. Add to that any AMD AM2 or Socket 775 out there can be trivially upgraded to a dual core (hell I can get Pentium Ds all day long for less than $20 that frankly kick ass for all basic tasks and even MMOs) and there frankly isn't a reason to shitcan them except for the license issue. I'm sure many of the smaller shops will just load "Win 7 Razr1911" and call it a day but I run a legit shop.
But as for why nobody wants Linux? I'd argue because it is a fiddly little PITA that is why. Linux has the reputation of being a difficult to use OS FOR A DAMNED GOOD REASON and that is because it IS a PITA to use fiddly little OS. As I said look at the 80% hardware there should NEVER be a failure of that hardware, ever. Hell Windows has carried OOTB drivers for the 80% hardware since Win2K and you know what? it actually works!
Compare this to Linux where Linus' constantly going Goatse on the kernel and insane release schedule means broken driver after broken driver. And before anyone says bullshit i'll be happy to post a HUGE list of "update foo broke my driver" links if you'd like, the forums are literally overflowing with them. it is simple XYZ math folks, you have X amount of guys qualified to do driver work, you have Y times tens of thousands of drivers, and you have Torvalds Z breaking shit left and right. Even if the guys qualified to fix drivers never slept and did nothing but fix drivers 24/7 they would NEVER keep up, it is simply mathematically impossible.
Most likely all these machines which could be running Linux, as for that 60%+ there is not a damned thing they do that wouldn't work perfectly on Linux, simply will either have pirate Windows loaded or EOLed XP, and that is a damned shame. So much work by the community pissed down a rathole by Torvalds ego. you have great DEs, plenty of software, versions that will run on anything from a 300Mhz with 128Mb of RAM to a supercomputer, but until you get rid of the damned CLI horseshit and drivers are "write once, use for years" so that they aren't constantly breaking? Linux simply won't go anywhere. look at the numbers folks, it is below the margin for error. it was below the margin for error four years ago, it will be below the margin for error four years from now if things don't change.
Give the people what they want, all GUI, easy to use and manage, with no driver breakage constantly? Watch them beat a path to your door. Continue with this CLI neckbeard fixation, with the constant driver Goatse, and expecting the world to do things YOUR way and calling them trolls or idiots when they won't? enjoy your 1%. You already have the "fight teh powerz!" types, and the power users have no problems with Windows, so no growth there. you NEED the home users, see the giant 50 foot neon sign screaming CONSUMERS and get in the game, or don't be surprised when nobody pays attention to you.
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But playing the guitar and banjo wouldn't really help you play the trumpet now would it? For us geeks these are quite simple things because we have literally grown up with the tech. my first "PC" was a VIC20 my uncle bought off the back of the truck and gave to me, followed by learning to program business apps into a Trash80 for my dad who had just started his electrical business and needed a way to keep the books.
Let me give an example of why giving out laptops and more importantly giving them courses in their usage would be important. There is a guy down the hall named Dave. Now Dave graduated HS in the late 70s, so he hasn't been exposed to computers. All his life he has worked at manual labor in factories only those don't exist here anymore, so a little at a time I'm having to teach Dave how to use a PC. Now it has been roughly 6 months, and he can open an email, he can reply, and he can even copy/paste as long as he has the cheat sheet i gave him, but that is it. he still can't wrap his head around the differences between memory and hard drive space, how permissions work, hell I'm gonna have to set up a thumbstick for him because he can't even figure out how to move a file from A to B on anything other than what he has been taught on and the library uses Vista and he has XP.
Now there have been probably 30 jobs he could have gone out for in the past month if he only had basic PC and office skills which he does not. Folks here seem to forget how hard it is for someone who doesn't have those skills to get a job anymore. The days of factories are gone and there are tons of people like Dave who not only have to deal with age discrimination but with simply not having the PC skills required of modern jobs.
So I'm personally glad I started my boys on a love of computers and tech starting at a VERY early age. So early in fact my late sister before she passed on and gave those two boys to me and my mom to raise wasn't very happy with me. She wanted the oldest to say mama as his first word SO badly, yet his first words ended up being "No! Mine!" when I had snuck the Genesis controller out of his little hand while he slept and switched the Barney game for some Eternal Champions, and boy was he pissed! he stuck his little hand out for the controller and I swear gave me a look that just screamed 'You sorry piece of garbage, stealing from a baby". I handed it to him and he pointed at the screen until I switched carts and gave me dirty looks for the rest of the day.
But now he is in pre-med and while many of his classmates struggle he is blowing through it, in no small part because thanks to having PC and web skills he knows how to research, cite references, and find tutorials on almost any subject quickly and easily. The ones from the local HS? Having to take a basic computer skills class so they can learn the things I taught him years ago. It is a 21st century world, and computer skills may mean the difference between a good job or no job at all, as Dave is finding out.
Hello ePeen, how tiny is your penis BTW? In case you ain't heard the games have been CONSOLE FIRST for damned near 5 years now, so with the exception of a couple of ePeen benchmark games (Which like Yahtzee at ZP says "Is used as a ritual processor sacrifice to the Gods of gaming") most games will play damned well on that $380 gaming PC.
Here are the specs for the gaming PC I just handed to a customer. He is playing Batman:AA and any other game he likes at 1080p and it looks great and runs smooth...Athlon X4 2.8Ghz, 4Gb of RAM, HD4850, win 7 HP, 1Tb HDD, DVD burner. And I don't know what the AC was smoking but Blu Ray is deader than Dixie. they are even pulling the BD section at my local Walmart and sticking them in the corner, as everyone uses DVD or Netflix.
Total for that including having me put it together? $520 before MIRs. After MIRs he'll be looking at around $480, and as I said it does every game he has thrown at it so far in native 1080p. Monitor with speakers? Tigerdirect has a 22 inch right now for $99. I won't even count keyboard and mouse as they are so cheap as to be a joke, got a nice wireless setup for a customer for $19 on sale a few weeks ago.
So even if they have NOTHING, absolutely nothing at all but a table to put in on, you are STILL looking at less than $650 for a machine that does 1080p and plays most games looking better than the consoles. You figure up the cost of OnLive PLUS the cost of the elite gaming package at your ISP (because you take a laggy regular line and OnLive is gonna suck) and in less than a year you've blown more than this easy. I know in my area the gamer line is $120 a month for just the net, no bundles included. You have to take cable as DSL doesn't even offer a gaming line, and frankly the lag on the DSL here is a joke.
But you are also making the same mistake the ePeen gamers are, which is the simple fact is most people don't play everything with 16xaa and 4xaf or whatever. they use whatever the default settings are because they are afraid they tweak all that stuff (which they don't have a clue what means anyway) and they'll "break something". Most people just want to 1.-stick in disc, 2.-go 'clicky clicky, next next next", 3.-start game. 4.-There is no step 4. That's it, that's all. And I can easily build a sub $500 machine that will do that. hell that $380 PC will do that, and has an unlocker board so that BE dual core may be a triple or a quad, I wouldn't know until i put it together.
So I'm sorry Mr ePeen, but most people don't sit around playing crysis with everything cranked while watching their FRAPS score, that just ain't what the common man does. My customer brings people over just so they can go "ohh ahh" at his new PC, and as long as batman looks good beating the shit out of bad guys (which he does BTW) he is a happy little camper. I have another similar kit on the way right now just from one of his friends going 'I want that too!" so I must be doing something right.
Why not just make them take a safety course before allowing someone to own one? Then you are not taking any of their rights away but just making sure they see first hand that these can be quite dangerous and aren't a toy. Sometimes all one needs is a good example of the danger to make sure they respect the device.
I know seeing my dad blow a hole in a concrete block and being told 'you know your head is thinner than that, right?" was all it took to get me to respect firearms. I did the same trick with my boys when they were old enough and sure enough they wouldn't touch a gun without adult supervision.
So I'd say a safety course with a few demonstrations of how powerful these lasers are would be appropriate before simply handing one out.
Hello time traveler from 96, let me tell you about 9/11 and fukushima. In reality land one can get a Barebone for $200 follow the little pictures or the nice little video where they walk you through putting it together (I swear they hold your hand so much now a grandma could do it) and add a $100 copy of Win 7 HP along with a nice cheap mid range game card and voila! Gaming PC for $380. Or if you don't want to DIY you can just pick up a prebuilt for $550 that is plug and play, or you can just go to any mom&pop shop and hire a guy like me that will put together any design your little heart desires.
Anybody that pays $900 for a gaming PC has a very tiny penis and is trying to make up for it with an ePeen. That or they are one of these idiots that think they have to do everything on a laptop, even if they don't actually go anywhere with the damned thing so are just spending a shitload of money on a really compact desktop with higher priced shittier parts.
As for TFA...do they have purple ponies and She Ra in candyland where OnLive lives? because I would like a ride. in case they haven't gotten the memo the greedy bastard ISPs are going to caps which kinda kills their magical service deader than Dixie. hell in my area neither the cable nor DSL has moved an inch or upgraded shit in damned near a decade, and that is with a huge college right in the middle of town. That would cut into profits you know!
It doesn't matter we already paid to the tune of 200 billion for nationwide broadband and all we got was a nice picture of Goatse from the CEOs who pocketed the cash or spent it on coke and hookers, or that in areas like mine (and large chunks of the country) that only have a monopoly or duopoly we are being royally ass raped on prices as it is (in my area it is now up to $75 for 2Mbps cable or $135 for the bundle with TV and phone) because they have to show Wall Street they can make iMoney and keep those profits rolling don't ya know?
OnLive trying to get this service off the ground now would be like offering a car for the masses that gets 5 MPG. The era of unlimited broadband, at least in the states, is coming to an end, it is like 8 tracks and muscle cars a thing of the past. Sadly I've seen the future and it is teeny caps and $1.50 per Gb if you go over, which means just one gaming session could cost you more than just going out and buying the game if you go over your cap.
Actually after the one two punch of Fiorina and Hurd frankly that would probably be an improvement. HP has just been so badly mismanaged they are frankly only floating with just their name and past to keep them above water. But don't worry the current head idiot with his "hey we'll just become IBM!" while kinda ignoring there already is an IBM will put the last nails in the coffin and make out like a bandit while doing so.
It must be nice to be in that exclusive 1%er club where no matter how badly you suck at your job you still walk away with rock star sacks of money. How much did Fiorina and Hurd walk away with again?
By that right then shouldn't Palm being suing Apple's ass? After all we are talking about a rounded square with cute little icons, that pretty much describes every Palm Pilot I have ever held in my hand.
But this is pretty much the problem with the whole patents and copyrights mess. they allow shit that is so damned vague you might as well patent 'A thing about some stuff' because frankly there ain't no way in hell anyone is gonna mistake a Galaxy for an iShiny. Android and iOS are about as different as night and day when it comes to feel and people look for the Apple logo, if it has the Apple logo it is considered hip and cool and if it doesn't have the logo it is considered an also ran at best.
No this is just more proof that Apple without Jobs sucks ass. When Jobs was healthy and in charge he didn't have to pull this lame shit, he would just look down his nose at the other guy and could point out a dozen reasons why it sucked. Hell look up the post interview with Jobs over the "Bill Gates has no taste" comment. The interviewer was laughing his ass off about how Jobs called Gates to apologize about the remark only to follow it up with "But its true Bill, you really have no taste". Jobs couldn't resist speaking his mind even when trying to apologize.
No I have a feeling we are gonna see more of this shit as the company slowly slides downhill without the man behind the big desk. Just like the last time it'll coast for a couple of years with what they have in the pipe but the dumb moves and bad plays that hurt their rep are already showing up. When you are #1 you don't bring attention to the other guy, especially one that has been channel stuffing because they can't move any real numbers. This reminds me of the Pepsi guy who ended up spending more and more of Apple's time and resources on lawsuits instead of coming out with new ideas and new products. That turned out to not be such a good idea IIRC, and damned near torpedoed the company. Sadly Jobs won't be able to ride in and save them again.
You forgot the fourth and probably biggest reason, which is starving humans eating them to survive just look up "bushmeat" and see for yourself. the really sad part is part of the reason those people are starving is just like blood diamonds we pay warlords for the minerals to make our cell phones and help to keep the wars there going.
Basically that whole damned area is a mess and unless we in the west just want to roll the tanks and try another hand at nation building (which never seems to work out) I doubt it'll be getting better there any time soon. Most likely the only examples of animals from the congo area and other third world hellholes 50 years from now will be in zoos if we are lucky, museums if we are not.
Actually I believe that AMD donates to the GCC compiler as well as supporting the AMD x86 Open64 Compiler Suite which I believe is under Apache license so that is two compilers right there that could be used.
You see unlike Intel and their douchebag behavior the AMD compiler only looks for SSE flags and runs the code based on which flags are present. several coders have run tests with the AMD compiler and found it doesn't favor one side or the other, it just looks at SSE.
And I personally would love to see how much of Intel's compiler "performance" is just douchebag jury rigging and how much is actual performance. one thing i've found is when it comes to programmer tools FOSS code is usually better, simply because there are so many programmers on FOSS OSes and using FOSS software.
So I'd love to see Intel VS GCC VS Open64 and see which truly gives the best performance over the widest range of chips. After all, you wouldn't want to limit your customers to only those that have specific Intel CPUs would you? Because it has already come out that the original Intel compiler crippled the Pentium III as well as AMD so they could push the P4, which at the time was scoring nearly 30% LOWER than the P3 on most benches. With that in mind I wouldn't be surprised if the new Intel compiler cripples socket LGA775 or any older chips they aren't pushing anymore. They are real douchbags when it comes to crap like that, it reminds me of the early 90s MSFT in that regard.
Sadly you are wrong. you see you are thinking like a geek, and "if they can do X, then they can learn Y" but that is like saying because i can play a bass I can trivially learn to play the Oboe.
You see as someone who actually builds and repairs PCs I have found many VERY damned smart people that you might as well be speaking Chinese when it comes to PCs. they simply can not get their head around many of the concepts. if someone would have started them earlier it would probably be a lot easier now, but once they get past mid 20s trying to teach them anything more than how to get to a website is nothing but frustration, for you AND for them.
So I'm all for it, teach them basic file commands, teach them to get around and do basic tasks like check for errors or security best practices. I can tell you it gave my boys a BIG advantage in school because while the others were having to type everything in typewriters and use a ton of white out, because neither they nor their parents knew shit about PCs mine were handing in nice papers with graphics and references.
The only trouble we ever had was from a teacher who likewise didn't understand tech, she accused my oldest of cheating because "you have all these facts and you don't own a dictionary!". I just went to the principal and said 'Is she for real?" and handed the boy my laptop. he had 5 different sites open on whichever subject she wanted checking them for cross references and making sure the sites had accurate data.
But it really does make a difference. my oldest is now in pre-med and while there are others that are having to have remedial computer courses just to get them up to speed on what teachers expect he is just blowing through it. Having the ability to use a PC and do research and other basic computer and web tasks really does matter IRL and sadly once they get above a certain age trying to teach it to them is like trying to pick up Mandarin for someone who has never even heard the language. possible? Yes. In any way shape or form easier than pulling teeth? not a chance friend.
Well to be fair Whedon's take is a little different, what he was trying to get at is while their actions may be evil and they may accept that those actions are evil and know before doing it those actions are evil they feel morally justified in doing them, so that makes it "ok" in their eyes.
So in his take it would be like you flipped someone off in traffic so they follow you home and kill your family. To you it was just a minor traffic irritation but to the guy it could have been a grave insult which makes him feel morally justified in doing something horrible to you in return. So sorta similar but not.
The only problem is that most of the benchmarks use the Intel compiler and thus are completely worthless. it would be like basing the GPU results on Quack.exe, remember that? hell see for yourself. Run the benchmarks, change the CPU-ID to read "Genuine Intel" and run them again...gasp! Your CPU just jumped up in performance by over 30%....amazing!
People don't realize how BIG a chunk that compiler rigging takes, its not just pre-crippled, its tying a fucking boat anchor to the code, we are talking losing ALL of the SSE instructions sets, going back to 2002 and leaving nothing but early 90s X87 instructions. How long as it been since the x87? 1994?
So as I point out every chance I get run with a fair benchmark and then we'll talk. Compile it with the GNU compiler, we know that is agnostic, THEN run the benches. Fair is fair folks.
I still saying it is marketing the iShiny as a fashion device. A good example is my dad. My dad is completely clueless, hell he can't even work the phone he has worth a shit, yet he wants an iPhone. Why? Is it the touchscreen? The apps? No he doesn't have a clue about any of that all he knows is the other contractors have one so he wants one too in a classic "keep up with the Joneses"! I told him to wait for the Nokia WinPhone and see how it stacks up before paying iMoney for a phone he frankly won't know how to fricking work anyway, as he has Win 7 and if they get the integration down it'll probably be easier for him to work.
But as someone living right next to an Apple heavy college I can say I've seen that quite a lot. talking to these kids they don't know squat about Apple, can't even tell you a single feature that makes them better, they just know that is what the other kids have for phones so that is what they want as well. Funny thing is Apple seems to be losing that demographic on the PC front, as the Apple Macbooks have all but disappeared around here. why is that? netbooks. Apple really shot themselves in the foot by not offering an affordable machine in that SFF as the college kids just love the living hell out of the netbooks and smaller laptops. When they see kids like my oldest in the break area playing some MMOs on one of those little AMD machines its all "Ohhh...where did you get THAT?" and the next thing I know they are in my shop going "can you get me one like he has?".
So I'd say it is marketing. In the markets they are marketing heavily they have huge gains but in the markets they are not pushing or not listening to the consumer like the Macbook they don't seem to be gaining near as much, and at least in my area actually losing share. When it comes to fashion one really needs to get a certain amount for the network effect to kick in full swing and while they have that on the iShiny they seem to be losing it on the Mac. Just as well as i predict they'll not be selling the Mac in less than 4 years anyway, the margins are so much better on the consumer products and they have no real competition, unlike with Intel laptops.
Yeah but there was a couple of dirty little secrets with the early Athlons. Number one thanks to NO thermal monitoring so they burned up, they burned up a hell of a lot and took boards with them. We used to keep a dead chip bucket at my old shop and that thing was damned near full of nothing but early Athlons. Number two it was trivially easy to rip people off by OCing an Athlon and selling it as a faster chip. Those early Athlons really didn't give you enough info either in the BIOS nor in the OS to really tell, most of the time you'd have to delve deep into the BIOS or pop off the HSF and check the chip. I don't know how many times I got told by customers "I wouldn't buy AMD, they are unstable!" only to tell them to bring in their unstable machine and sure enough, some douchebag had OC'ed it by a huge amount and sold them a chip for 30% or more higher than it was worth. Oh and to make matter worse the HSF on those early Athlons were kinda shit, which mean when they were OCed they were more likely to burn, but even without OC any dust buildup could fry the CPU and board..
We lost so many Athlons in that period that was one of the reasons I stayed with Intel plus Nvidia for so long. But when it came out that Intel was bribing OEMs and rigging their compiler (which they still are BTW, even though part of the settlement was that they end the practice. All they do now is put a little FYI buried in the bottom of the manual IIRC) and Bumpgate on the Nvidia side I bit the bullet and came back to AMD and boy not only I but my customers are quite happy as well. I'm an AMD only shop and the lower prices have made me quite popular thanks to the crazy bang for the buck and for the first time since the K5-2 I built my own AMD PC and love the thing to death. what's not to love, when I could build a quad core with 8Gb of RAM, and HD4850 GPU, 3Tb of HDD space, and Win 7 HP X64, all for less than $775? And today I could probably have knocked another $75-$100 off the price! Go AMD!
So your reply is...bullshit,bullshit,bullshit and bullshit, correct? I gave you my answer as to ABIs, give me a single reason why EVERYONE ELSE ON THE PLANET is wrong and you are right. Give me a SINGLE EXAMPLE of the magical never break drivers that are called for in that religious text. Hey if that technique works there must be thousands of those that exist, yes? the kernel hackers have had the code FOR YEARS NOW so they must have the 80% in never break quality yes? but guess what Sparky THEY BREAK CONSTANTLY which shows that kernel dev was talking out his ass. Do you REALLY think he is smarter than the entire kernel teams for OSX, Windows, OS/2, Solaris, BSD, etc? I repeat, arrogant much?
And did you even read the post above me? How the guy had enterprise hardware and is stuck with an old kernel because guess what THE DRIVERS ARE BROKEN for ALL the new kernels? Care to tell HIM he should throw away thousands of dollars in hardware? It is THIS arrogant elitist horseshit without the code to back it up that helps keep people as far away from your shitpile OS as possible! With Windows you get a MINIMUM of 8 YEARS of support, often longer. Your OS? You can't even give me a 100% guarantee the stuff you have running now will continue running in 6 months! Yep, sure gonna lure the masses with that level of QA buddy. And oh yeah all those OSes are complete shit, even though most have quite huge numbers, why they just don't know how sweet the Linux koolaid is do they daddy-o? Doesn't matter that their drivers actually WORK and CONTINUE WORKING because CLI gives you gonad powers!
Which brings us to the two bad jokes of your religion, the "Linux is a kernel" and "CLI gives you gonad powers" jokes. you DO realize I can replace every. single. argument. that you have made with the appropriate Linux TM yes? Do you know why that is? Because after all these years you've been coming up with the same tired old horseshit about how it is everyone's fault but yours, how if people would only "embrace the power of CLI" like it is the God damned force that the world would be hearts and flowers. But you know what? NUMBERS DO NOT LIE and you have NOTHING to show for damned near 20 years of work! Read it and weep fucking JavaME is kicking your ass! Don't feel even a little bit ashamed at such shit numbers? or do you think being a dead end with less numbers than a shit cellphone OS just makes you "leet" and connects you to the neckbeards of old, when IRL all you do is copypasta into a term ?
I'll repeat this until it sinks in, i'll even highlight it, Do you know what the definition of insanity is? It is doing the same thing and expecting a different outcome and that is EXACTLY what you and the community have been doing for damned near a decade now. What were your numbers 3 years ago? why they were at 1%. What will your numbers be 3 years from now? I bet my last dollar they'll be 1%. It don't take Kojak to solve this case, and it isn't some conspiracy by Gates and the Illuminati, nor is it payoffs to the OEMs that ended over a decade ago.
Now it is the fact that YOU DON'T LISTEN, not to your customers, nor to the OEMs, nor to the retailers. Wanna read something sad? Dell the current number 3 OEM, even though they only offer Linux on a token amount of frankly outdated hardware, has to run their own repo at considerable out of pocket expense. Why is that? Because if they don't the DRIVERS DIE HARD. And you sir have NO excuse nor argument that can justify that, none at all. That is just typical shitty QA from Canonical and typical Linus Goatse bullshit. But I'm sure you'll say dell is "doin it wrong" or that every retailer and mom&pop shop on the planet should pay programmers to run their own repos so they can bless their customers with your sacred cow. But i
Oh but you could OC the living shit out of the Celery back then! With a good air cooler and a little luck a Celery could be OCed by a good 30% to 35%. Man in those days there really was a reason to replace your gear every 3 years or even less, the innovations on both sides of the aisle were just like two heavyweights duking it out....then Intel bribed all the OEMs and won through deceit what they couldn't when fairly, boo hiss.
Meh the big story as far as AMD goes isn't gonna be BD, frankly IMNSHO as a PC builder frankly PCs have been "good enough" on the CPU side for quite awhile which is one of the reasons my customers are quite happy I put my money where my mouth is and became an all AMD shop. No the really BIG STORY in 50 foot neon letters is gonna be the switch from VLIW to Vector Based GPUs, both in the discrete and in the APUs.
Imagine a chip that can not only crank out graphics like nobody's business but can actually work like a hyper FP on top of that with VERY little penalty. Today you are lucky if you get 1/4th the performance on double FP but with the new chips that will be cut down to less than half for the first bunch with the goal of native speed double FP in the next gen. I bet the math geeks are drooling at that prospect right now. And for those that switch to the APUs it'll mean an all new hybrid Crossfire where the APU can take over physics while handing off rendering to the discrete for some truly insane graphics. Sounds pretty damned sweet to me.
I just hope more geeks here at /. do as I do and give AMD some business. Unless you are one of those that literally slam your CPUs right to the bleeding edge (which admittedly there are more of those type here than on average) frankly the bang for the buck has been firmly in the AMD camp for some time now. you can get better quality boards with damned good IGPs for cheaper, The huge length of support time on the AM socket means you can go from dual to quad to six core without replacing anything but the CPU, the quads are dirt cheap right now, they just make really damned good, solid as a rock, long lasting systems.
I mean how can you not love a company that lets you get a fully loaded Black Edition dual kit for $200, a triple core kit for just $250 which BTW kicks ass as an HTPC, just swap the case for one of the "VCR style" cases and a dirt cheap 4xxx or 5xxx GPU, or a quad for $270? Oh and for those that have older machines I'd suggest a trip over to Starmicro where you can pick up cheap chips to upgrade older machines, both Intel and AMD. In my shop the Phenom X3 and the Pentium Ds are both quite popular upgrade paths for those with older AM2s or LGA775s respectively. Enjoy and go AMD!
But how much of that was the device, and how much because Jobs is a marketing genius the likes of which the world has never seen before? I'll never forget a quote i read years ago by someone attending MacWorld: "If Steve is having a bad day you'll feel like if you bought his product your life would be better off with it, but if Steve is on his game you will leave there thinking my life will be worse off if I don't have his product.
Don't get me wrong, i'm sure the iPad is nice, as is all the iShiny devices, but give the man credit where credit is due. Steve Jobs is a perfect example of that old southern saying "that man could sell ice cream to Eskimos". Look up the history of Apple on youtube and you'll see even the employees were blown away by Steve and his charisma. The man is a master showman and salesman of which I can't even think of anyone to compare him to, he is just THAT good.
That is why i think Cook is gonna have his work cut out for him. while he may be a damned good manager he simply hasn't got the ability to fire people up like Jobs had, at least not from what I have seen. Hell Steve could probably paint a Casio silver, call it the iWatch, and have folks so damned pumped up about it that it would be sold out on launch day, he is just an incredible salesman.
So you are saying Linux is for dumpster divers? Is THAT what you are saying? Because I have to agree with you there as the ONLY PC I EVER saw survive a 6 month upgrade with 100% working drivers was a circa 1999 733Mhz P3 with really old Intel shit. You know what? it ended up in the dump as nobody wants shit that old, not even Goodwill! I can't believe you had the balls to admit that though, bravo good sir!
As for Windows? bullshit, utter bullshit. hell most people would even know if you changed their OS out tomorrow as long as the icons were in the same place. i work for consumers 6 days a week and you have NO idea how many times I've been told "I have Windows" but they have no damned clue if it is Win98 or Windows 7, they honestly don't know.
Lets take a look at some facts, shall we? Now for SMBs and SOHO Linux is right out, as QuickBooks/Quicken is God in those markets, and for a good reason i might add, as a single QB Girl (And it is ALWAYS a girl, they must have a union or something) can run the whole damned company with a copy of QB and an expense sheet, but consumers? In my shop I have got to learn their habits quite well, you tell me what they are doing that doesn't work on Linux....they use Firefox, they go to Facebook, they check their webmail, they watch Youtube and if they are guys or females under 30 they also go to Porntube and the like.
Now is there a SINGLE thing on that list that couldn't run just as well on Linux? Nope not a one. But here is the catch...since I would have to charge MORE for Linux because I'd have to give out lifetime support (And NO, home users won't buy support contracts. Just ask Best Buy how much they howl and scream at even being offered extended warranties) it simply makes no sense. Now if Linux would fix the driver breakage and kill the damned terminal bullshit? Then I could offer the Linux boxes for less and price WILL WIN for a huge number of consumers. this is why Dell can sell tons of $300 laptops even though we both know they are plastic POSes, and why when I get in a load of 4 to 6 year old laptops I sell at $100 each I have them all sold in less than 24 hours. price trumps all for a large majority out there.
When the Linux community accepts that CLI should have remained in the 80s where it belonged and drivers shouldn't constantly break then and ONLY then will Linux gain share. of course when that happens I'll be riding a purple pony with She Ra because I have never met a more delusional elitist bunch in my whole damned life! I swear I even had one tell me I should encourage my customers to "Embrace the POWER of CLI" like it was the God damned force!
I think it goes even deeper than that. I remember a director's commentary by Joss Whedon on writing villains and why so many got it wrong. He said "The thing about the villain is they never feel they are the villain because to them there is always a reason for their actions. I have known people IRL that have done truly horrible things. People that have gone out of their way to cause harm and pain to a fellow human being and they believed they were in the right as they had some reason, some excuse or justification for their actions".
I think that pretty much nails it right there. I bet if you locked these people in a room and REALLY talked to them, even the hard core right wingers that are wanting to seriously hurt the poor and be a giant douche to the people and kiss the corporate ass, they aren't going "Muh ha ha! That'll show 'em" it is simply they believe their actions are just either through logic hoops, or the end justifies the means, or the propaganda has been bought by them hook line and sinker, but I bet nearly all of them have SOME reason why they think they are right.
it is just in their little ivory coated, gold padded worlds where 10,000 dollar lunches and 35k bottles of wine are nothing they don't see what real harm they are doing, and frankly i don't know which is worse: Cartoon villainy or true believers that are delusional. Both end up with the common man fucked so i don't suppose it really matters.
May I make a suggestion? get yourself a copy of TinyXP or Tiny7 and use that instead. the 1.1GHz Atom CPU in those is simply too weak for a full Windows install but the tiny versions run great on much weaker chips, with TinyXP smoking on a 400MHz with 128Mb of RAM and Tiny7 actually being snappy on a 733MHz with 512Mb of RAM. Put one of those on there and it'll be like a CPU plus RAM upgrade all in one.
As for TFA i'm sure all those channel stuffed units will end up going for pennies on the dollar, retailers don't like having tons of units gathering dust. i personally will be happy to pick one up at $99 on Woot! but I frankly wouldn't pay more than that for a pad. Some folks may think they are the greatest thing since sliced bread but i already get 4 hours plus on my laptop when playing video PLUS I can get work done, so what's the point.
Oh BTW Protip: If you want to really boost your battery life when watching videos on a laptop? Get DVDIdle Pro, well worth the money IMHO. It'll cache the video to RAM instead of spinning the DVD or HDD thus saving serious battery time by letting the HDD and DVD drive shut down. I have found I get nearly an extra hour, that is a 25% increase in time, simply by using DVDIdle pro, great piece of software.
You're right they can sell it for anything they want and I can just have it made in China where they don't play their little reindeer games, get the picture now Sparky? ALL YOU ARE DOING is taking work away from Americans, that's it, that's all. I can build it in China without paying them dick, and don't forget we are talking code they have ALREADY GIVEN AWAY on literally hundreds of thousands of discs, as that was the whole damned point of shareware.
So I'll just have it made in China, some Chinese guys can take home their checks to their families, and Americans can go line up for a welfare check, cool with you? Because that is what is gonna happen. I wanted it made here but greedy MBA douchebags wanted more than a triple AAA title for 25 year old shit. That is their right, as is mine to have it made in a country with sane IP laws. Works out great for everyone except those stupid American peasants, don't it? As long as there is a single place that doesn't play your reindeer games YOU HAVE TO COMPETE or someone else gets the business. So I'll just join the likes of GE and hundreds of other companies and offshore it, puts me in some great company. meanwhile Americans lose more work, don't get shit, again shock shock greedy MBA refuse to accept anything but iMoney and fuck American workers, why am I not surprised?
Did you even read what you posted to? read it it is a RELIGIOUS TEXT with the writer going on about how basically they wouldn't be able to Goatse the kernel anymore! Well boo hoo, you can't Goatse the kernel if you actually had to support anything, my heart bleeds.
And if you think he is right and I'm bullshit, riddle me this? if that approach would work WHY HASN'T IT BEEN DONE? i'll tell you, because like me riding a purple pony with She Ra it is a complete and total fantasy, that's why. you might as well say "Well if we could place a hardware fairy into each copy of Ubuntu, a little neckbeard that would pop out and fix the drivers whenever they break, we wouldn't have no problems with broken drivers!" which is true, but completely impossible.
Look at the facts...Windows, BSD, Solaris, OSX, OS/2....what do they have in common? A Stable ABI. Do you honestly think that your kernel hackers are so fucking brilliant they know better than the kernel teams of ALL those OSes? Arrogant much? Sadly that is what it comes down to, arrogance and religious dogma. The RMS camp says 'ZOMG If you had a stable ABI you'd lose the 4 freedoms ZOMG!" while ignoring that Nvidia already puts out binary blobs, as do others, it just makes supporting your OS a bigger pain in the ass. And as you found out letting the kernel devs do it can easily end up with fucked and abandoned hardware, they simply don't have enough hours in the day.
But don't take my word for it, mark this post and come back in a year and watch it come true! linux will gain NO SHARE in the next 12 months, they will gain NO SHARE in the next 24 months, they will gain NO SHARE in the next 36, in short Linux is a dead end in its current incarnation. The masses simply won't deal with the fiddly driver breaking CLI heavy bullshit, like it or lump it. Give the people what they want, give the reatilers a product that is easy to support, watch your numbers rise. Don't? I hope you enjoy where you are at, because you sure as hell ain't going anywhere.
How is it flaming? Because the Linux zealots here refuse to accept a single post that isn't "Gee Biff, isn't Linux doubleplusgood? Why it sure is Kim, and RMS smells like cotton candy!"
NAME A SINGLE THING that isn't true, just one. Broken drivers? You yourself admit that one. CLI heavy? For the love of God they have a term link on the desktop in a good 90% of distros for crying out loud! look on this very forum you'll find a Linux zealot that has taken HALF a quote from me and think it "proves"...something, hell if I know what. But the FULL quote bears repeating until the Linux faithful "get it".
As far as users are concerned THERE IS NO CLI in Windows or OSX, it doesn't exist. You could rip out CMD tomorrow on every single copy of Windows on the planet and 90%+ wouldn't even notice that is how little it is used. same for OSX. And before someone brings up Powershell that is SERVER TECH and I have yet to actually see it in the wild on a home machine, even once. I mean you can run a DB server on XP too, that don't mean anybody with any sense actually does it.
Look I have EVERY RIGHT to be royally pissed. i'm tired of being lied to, tired of having smoke blown up my ass, tired of having a bunch of basement dwellers telling me "Use distro X!" when I've already tried damned near a dozen, tired of NOTHING EVER CHANGING. You know what the definition of insanity is? Doing the same thing and expecting a different result. It has been TWENTY YEARS and Linux is STILL at 1%, it was below the margin for error 4 years ago, guess where it will be 4 years from now? same place.
Like it or lump it folks, but you can't change reality. Neckbeards have gone the way of paneling on cars, 99.9995% of the world is NOT made of programmers, the word is CONSUMERS in giant 50 foot neon, the CLI horseshit and 6 month breakage has been declared a giant DO NOT WANT, yet you continue to do the same tired BS and wonder why retailers like me won't carry your OS? maybe it is because you ignore your customers or insult them?
But don't worry, you stay on the same path. The world will ignore you, retailers like me won't touch your OS with a 50 foot pole, but you can sit there typing CLI crap you copypasta from some forum and acting like that connects you to the PDP11 using neckbeards of old. See if the world cares. Look at your numbers! If an OS with a $1000 barrier to entry gains while your FREE PRODUCT don't gain shit? Then dammit how big of a fucking cluebat do you need to be whomped upside the head with? UR DOIN IT WRONG
So you fixed OLD SHIT by using Linux, what a fucking surprise. You wanna dumpster dive? linux works great...ohh until you update the thing then you are royally fucked. Have you run apt upgrade yet? bet you haven't, bet you won't either if you have a brain as the entire thing will fall down like a house of cards.
And waste your mod points, go ahead and throw that tux blankie on your head and go "Leave poor wittle Linux alone!" and maybe you mods and the britney guy can do a tag team thing. Won't change reality. You don't think Linux support sucks? Step right up folks and take the hairyfeet challenge!
Just go to Walmart.com, Staples.com, and Bestbuy.com, the 3 largest retailers in the USA. Write down all the PC devices on sale or under $100, then go to...lets say Ubuntu forums, since Ubuntu is the most popular ATM. Look up how many devices on sale RIGHT NOW are supported. Go ahead, I'll wait.....You're looking at MAYBE 30%, and that is if you count "support" as an assload of CLI commands that may or may not work depending on whether they have gone from firmware a to firmware f without changing the box (which they do ALL the time).
As long as Torvalds is in charge you're fucked, end of story. That douchebag acts like it is still 1993 and the kernel is his personal playtoy, not the core of a multibillion dollar ecosystem, its just him and his little friends on IRC except....it ain't 1993 anymore jackass! Your driver model sucks, support for new hotness is terrible, the 6 month upgrades break more shit than they fix, do you REALLY want me to pile on the links of people screaming because the 6 month broke their shit? because this thing could get longer than war and peace, last i looked at the forums we are talking 1000s of posts, which for an OS with only 1% share if pretty impressive in its levels of fail.
You don't like what I'm saying? Then FIX IT. Demand the kernel be forked or Torvalds "pursue other interests" and get someone in there that makes driver stability job #1, freeze the 6 month upgrade horseshit and replace it with a solid, well thought out 5 year cycle, demand that those who have software in the distros FIX THEIR BROKE SHIT instead of just releasing yet another one, seriously look at the bug trackers, its fucking embarrassing.
Sorry MR AC, but the original VCS was prototyped in 1975, and I'm sure their BIOS would have come under copyright then. There are quite a few sites out there with the history of Atari, feel free to look it up. IIRC they had to keep it under wraps until 76 so that a contract one of them had would expire before they could show the hardware at CES, but the original Stella prototype? 1975.
It was on sale in 77 and only became popular in 1980 with the release of Space Invaders. I should know as I had one of the late 70s Atari machines when they started selling them at Magic Mart (God I'm dating myself, anybody remember Magic Mart?) and ended up selling it in late 82 or early 83 and getting a ColecoVision with the Atari add-on. Man that thing was sweet, but my mom feel in love with DK JR and Yar's Revenge and she'd play those things at like 2AM and I ended up with the beeps and boops stuck in my head. IIRC she actually got such a high score on DK JR she locked the thing up when it rolled over.
I'm sure someone will expect me to say "those were the days" but frankly i'll take my HD4850 creating 3D worlds that make you want to drool and 8Gb of RAM making everything instant load any day of the week. Its a hell of a lot nicer than waiting on my custom Pong game to load from the VIC20 cassette drive or the screeches that passed for sounds on the VCS.
Notice how none of the Linux zealots can stand the truth? i could line links up all damned day showing everyone from giant corps like Walmart to little shops like mine running away screaming because Linux is a fiddly CLI heavy bitch, but will they listen? Oh fuck no, they still have raging hard ons for the days of the PDP11 when everyone that used a computer was a programmer and neckbeards were the rage. i mean for the love of God RMS still calls everyone "hackers" like he is at a computer club meeting in 75. Wake up and smell the last 20 years of computing folks!
As for your point about being "too old"? bullshit, total bullshit. frankly once PCs reached around 2GHz they became "good enough" for all your basic web tasks which is what I'd say a good 60% to 70% of the people out there only use a PC for. Add to that any AMD AM2 or Socket 775 out there can be trivially upgraded to a dual core (hell I can get Pentium Ds all day long for less than $20 that frankly kick ass for all basic tasks and even MMOs) and there frankly isn't a reason to shitcan them except for the license issue. I'm sure many of the smaller shops will just load "Win 7 Razr1911" and call it a day but I run a legit shop.
But as for why nobody wants Linux? I'd argue because it is a fiddly little PITA that is why. Linux has the reputation of being a difficult to use OS FOR A DAMNED GOOD REASON and that is because it IS a PITA to use fiddly little OS. As I said look at the 80% hardware there should NEVER be a failure of that hardware, ever. Hell Windows has carried OOTB drivers for the 80% hardware since Win2K and you know what? it actually works!
Compare this to Linux where Linus' constantly going Goatse on the kernel and insane release schedule means broken driver after broken driver. And before anyone says bullshit i'll be happy to post a HUGE list of "update foo broke my driver" links if you'd like, the forums are literally overflowing with them. it is simple XYZ math folks, you have X amount of guys qualified to do driver work, you have Y times tens of thousands of drivers, and you have Torvalds Z breaking shit left and right. Even if the guys qualified to fix drivers never slept and did nothing but fix drivers 24/7 they would NEVER keep up, it is simply mathematically impossible.
Most likely all these machines which could be running Linux, as for that 60%+ there is not a damned thing they do that wouldn't work perfectly on Linux, simply will either have pirate Windows loaded or EOLed XP, and that is a damned shame. So much work by the community pissed down a rathole by Torvalds ego. you have great DEs, plenty of software, versions that will run on anything from a 300Mhz with 128Mb of RAM to a supercomputer, but until you get rid of the damned CLI horseshit and drivers are "write once, use for years" so that they aren't constantly breaking? Linux simply won't go anywhere. look at the numbers folks, it is below the margin for error. it was below the margin for error four years ago, it will be below the margin for error four years from now if things don't change.
Give the people what they want, all GUI, easy to use and manage, with no driver breakage constantly? Watch them beat a path to your door. Continue with this CLI neckbeard fixation, with the constant driver Goatse, and expecting the world to do things YOUR way and calling them trolls or idiots when they won't? enjoy your 1%. You already have the "fight teh powerz!" types, and the power users have no problems with Windows, so no growth there. you NEED the home users, see the giant 50 foot neon sign screaming CONSUMERS and get in the game, or don't be surprised when nobody pays attention to you.