Well that is a backhanded compliment at best as Win9x was a buggy little fucker from the get go. Who can forget that video of Gates plugging in a printer and the whole thing BSODing? But with Win2K I found it REALLY depended on which chips you had whether or not it was rosy or sucktastic.
Now don't get me wrong, even at its worst it was miles ahead of Win9x (I too ran RTM, I was actually given a copy my boss after complaining what a POS WinME was) but certain chipsets, like the Ali and Via? Could be seriously flaky. I ended up getting a cheap soundblaster just so I wouldn't have to keep rebooting to get my damned Via sound to work.
But I'd say the whole WinNT line with the exception of Vista was made of win. I had several customers that held onto WinNT for ages just because of how stable it was, Win2K was decent OOTB but after SP2 was frankly kick ass, WinXP was okay but after SP2 was also kick ass, and Win 7 was awesome from the get go. Vista? It was released half baked and frankly never really got any better. It would probably need a couple more SPs to iron out the bugs but now that they have Win 7 why bother?
No dufus my proposal was to offer them a percentage of ALL sales with no bullshit. The plan was a whole 3% for us, 5% for the DOSBox guys as a thank you, and the rest given to the authors after BOM which would have been quite cheap so you are talking more than 80% split between them. I'd also remind that we are talking about shareware titles here that were originally DESIGNED TO BE GIVEN AWAY to build interest in the full apps. I proposed a larger cut for those that gave full games but even if all they offered was the original shareware they would have been given a cut AND a link to any site they wanted to sell other merch AND full credit for something THEY ARE MAKING ZERO PROFITS ON right now.
Instead what I saw was the same douchebaggery over and over. they'd say "let me get back to you" followed by them finding out what the highest selling app on the iShiny was and then demanding 30% more than that because hey their shit don't stink, right? never mind we are talking about ZERO upfront costs to them, ZERO transfer of rights to me, and ZERO work involved with promotion or anything else from them. hell some of them had the brass balls to demand that we sign our rights over to them so they could do whatever they wanted with OUR work while giving us nothing in return but the right to load a 25 year old piece of shareware on a stick!
so now I'm looking at doing it in China where guess what? I won't have to pay them shit and can just sell it on a ton of places like chinamart. yet again the west loses because of greedy MBAs, why am I not surprised?
Don't forget wireless which still royally sucks the big wet titty on Linux. More and more of my customers are giving up running wires in their homes and simply buying a cheap wireless card for any new PC they add and if you've ever dealt with Linux wireless you know your ass better damned well be fucking great at forum hunts and terminal bullshit if you want it to work.
Oh BTW they're whole plan basically sucks. you don't ever buy parts separably, that is where you get a big old bite out of your ass. you buy a barebone kit like this one which gives you a black edition CPU PLUS a DVD burner for the same price after $30 MIR. Hell if you throw in a few more bucks you can go triple core with TB drive and no MIR.
If you keep an eye out on the sales you can frankly get a truly awesome PC fully loaded with Windows 7 for less than $500. I just finished up an Athlon X4, 4Gb of RAM, 500Gb HDD, an HD4830 for transcoding and gaming, and Win 7 HP X64 with a nice case to put it in all for $465 and that is after paying me to put the thing together and load all the software. hell when he gets his MIR that price will drop to just $435 and that is for a machine that will easily last him until Win 7 is EOL in 2020. He has it plugged into a 32 inch 1080p and frankly it gets great performance, smooth video, plenty of space for his music, just all around a really nice experience.
So I'd say it comes down to what you want to do. if you are a neckbeard that just wants something to run his term and IDE? Sure Linux works fine there, works great as a server OS or for embedded too. If you want to actually be able to just "plug and play" and not have to research like it is the fricking SATs, only to end up having to play hardware roulette and end up possibly with worthless hardware? Or easily run all the software that comes with your stuff? Then I'd suggest sticking with Windows.
For everyone else go to any Craigslist and you'll find plenty of dirt cheap machines with good XP CALs on them. Hell if you want Win 7 just contact any family or friends that are in college and you can get Win 7 pro for a whole $35. No friends in college? Chip in with a couple of buds on a $100 family pack, that is three installs of Win 7 HP, which comes to $33-$37 a piece depending on the sale price. Then you can enjoy the literally millions of programs out there in the vast ecosystem many of which have no Linux equivalent and most likely never will have, unless all you want are text editors or IDEs.
Look I like Linux, I really do. As a retailer I'd love the fuck out of a working Linux distro as I could undercut by competition by not having to pay for Windows. but as long as Linus Torvalds is in charge Linux is royally fucked as he has stated he will NEVER allow a stable hardware ABI, which means drivers will ALWAYS be fiddly bastards, with one thing being fixed while two break, for the life of the OS. I mean here,read for yourself what the man says and then be honest: How many of you if given an employee on a multibillion dollar project that said "Plans? We don't neeed no steenkin plans!" wouldn't fire his ass. Be honest.
What Linux needs is a Jobs or Gates to walk in there and lay the holy smack down on Torvalds and his itch scratchers and tell them "enough is enough". There is a simple list of hardware which SHOULD NEVER FAIL which I call the "80%", that is the hardware that is found on more than 80% of the bog standard machines out there. that is Intel, AMD/ATI, and Nvidia GPUs, Realtek HD and AC97 sound, Realtek , Nvidia and Intel Ethernet, Intel and Broadcom wireless. THESE SHOULD NEVER FAIL and if they do? YOU SUCK ASS AND SHOULD BE ASHAMED TO RELEASE BROKEN SHIT.
Yet every single time I try Linux, and I've tried a shitload of distros, Ubuntu/Mint, PCLOS, Mepis, Fedora, Puppy, hell if it was supposedly "user friendly" I tried it and not fucking once did the above hardware survrive a single upgrade unscathed. now since we are talking on average 6 month release schedules? Gentlemen that is simply unacceptable. And before someone says LTS! I'd just point out currently XP has longer support, and Windows 7 is supported until 2020 and that is if they don't release anymore service packs.
The clock is ticking hard Linux geeks, in 2014 hundreds of millions of XP boxes go EOL and if you can get retailers like me onboard? Then YOUR OS can have those machines. Imagine how quickly Linux adoption could jump if every mom&pop shop like mine had Linux laptops and desktops lining the shelves, all at affordable prices. it would be incredible. but gentlemen my time is $35 an hour, which means ALL IT TAKES is one of those 80% being borked on the 6 month deathmarch and my profits go right out the window. The simple fact is with the on average hour to two hours it takes to do the forum dance, find the CLI crap, load the CLI crap, find out I have to tweak the CLI crap, tweak the CLI crap, and then finally get the damned hardware working again? I've just blown the cost of Windows 7 HP right there.
ACCEPT THIS...the world is NOT LIKE YOU and they will NEVER adopt CLI, nor do forum dances or deal with borked drivers every 6 months. FIX THIS and you have a shot of gaining HUGE share in 2014. Continue on the current path of shitting on users and expecting them to jump on the neckbeard bandwagon? And then guys like me will simply strip or dump all those XP boxes and you won't gain shit. if the fact that an OS that has a $1000 barrier to entry gained when Vista hit and you didn't gain shit don't smack you with the clue bat I don't know what will.
The fact that the BIOS of a machine made in 1975 can be DMCAed shows us why China and India is gonna kick our ass. Can you believe such insanity? our entire industry is building upon the shoulders of the giants that came before but thanks to Valenti (may he rot in hell) and his endless copyrights combined with DMCA garbage the west is pretty much dead with regards to innovation.
One simply can no longer build on the ideas of the past without a giant minefield of patents and copyrights controlled by absolute douchebags. I should know because I had a nice little idea to bring back the Shareware discs of old. It would have been "DOSBox...in a box" where the old Shareware games could be loaded and played like the old days of pre Win9x. but trying to deal with the douchebags i quickly found that one can't even offer the shareware titles anymore because the pigs that currently hold the rights all want iMoney for them, even if they have NO PRODUCTS being offered or even any hope of porting those titles in the future. We ain't talking Wolf3D here, we are talking about all the funky and weird crap that used to be on those "300 games for $5!" discs.
I found out if I want to say "Fuck America!" I can have the whole thing made in China no problem, but in the USA? the minefiled makes it more expensive than the highest AAA games, all thanks to endless copyrights and douchebaggery. is it any wonder the USA is in the shitter?
Yeah MSFT tried that with WebTV and it didn't work so well, did it? text looks like shite on a crusty roll on an old TV set unless you are gonna rewrite the code to put everything big as hell like the old VIC20 and even then it'll be eyestrain o-vision.
A much better idea would be the good old D-Sub. CRTs are being dumped on the third world by HUGE amounts and even the poorest of the poor in the west can find an old CRT for cheap. Sure the picture may only be 800x600 but it will look and work a hell of a lot better than a TV, isn't that what matters?
If they truly want to help the third world it needs a cheap but solid plastic case, a D-Sub to go with the HDMI and RCA outs, USB ports for keyboards and mice, and enough storage you can actually load a few programs on the thing, I'd say 4Gb of NAND would be affordable. Add that to the $35 model and you have a unit you should be able to sell for less than $60 and make a few bucks while still having a unit that can be useful OOTB.
With 4Gb one could easily put in a stripped down Linux (maybe with XFCE or Fluxbox?) along with educational programs and still leave a couple of Gb for user files. it would be relatively snappy, easily customizable to the school or environment, work with any kind of screen they can come up with, and most importantly wouldn't need a CS degree to use. Hell with XFCE or JWM could be run by an 8 year old. This thing looks more like a hobby embedded playtoy than a PC for the third world.
Oh do NOT even get me started on the SB drivers! I used to run a Windows help line on IRC and you have no idea how many "ZOMG my PC is fucked!" I had to deal with that were traced to either SB or Via drivers.
ATI wasn't bad IF, and this is a damned BIG IF, you made DAMNED sure you ran the right version for your card! There were so damned many variations (most folks don't know there were even OEM variations ON TOP of the chip variations and running a standard driver with a OEM chip was FUBAR) that is was beyond simple to royally fuck yourself with the wrong choice.
My old boss Doug had me spot weld two PC skeletons together and we loaded a Celeron 400 MHz (this was when 1GHz had just come out, so we had plenty of those) and we mounted TEN, count 'em ten SCSI drives in that Frankenbox so that when most folks were lucky to have 30Gb we had nearly 500Gb running WinNT server on the network JUST FOR DRIVERS. We had EVERY chip, every variation, every OEM, you name it we had it, all right there on the network.
BTW if you like to play with old hardware, might I suggest something? look up "TinyXP" and give it a spin. We are talking a fully loaded XP that runs on less than 74Mb of RAM, or if you can luck into a copy there is "Windows Ultra DVD eXperience" that gives you sixteen variations of Windows Win2K-XP-2K3. Of course it will run without a key but the nice thing is it'll take your Windows keys so it is like having a pre-tweaked Windows ready to go, and the Ultra DVD will let you burn whichever version you want easy as "clicky clicky" and there is an.ISO.
Anyway if you have old hardware laying around it is quite cool to play with. Frankly they need to hire the Tiny guy at MSFT, because I have tried both winFLP and embedded and the tiny versions royally smokes both of those hands down. I mean when the guy releases Tiny7 that runs VERY FAST on a 1.5Ghz with 512Mb of RAM? Or even tinyVista that runs equally fast on the same hardware? that's just nuts!
If it is like the PCs I work on most of it would be twiddling its thumbs waiting for something to do or be a "just in case' cache of pretty much everything ever run on the machine? I generally like to slam the crap out of my PC but since going to 8Gb I've found most of it is just cache because i simply don't have enough data being worked on at any one time to need it. Right now checking ResMon I'm looking at 6300Mb being used for cache and only 1800Mb in actual use.
As for TFA while i'm sure it'll be useful for someone like the military to simulate nukes going off for most folks it would be a big old "meh" as they simply don't have enough work for even their duals and triples, much less something thousands of times faster. There just hasn't been a "killer app" that would really slam a CPU in so long it isn't even funny, that is why Nvidia and AMD are pushing 3D and Eyefinity because even games just aren't slamming the shit out of chips like the old days.
Everyone keeps saying "Oh pads are killing PCs!" because the PC sales are down but frankly its bullshit, it is simply folks don't know what to do with what they got power wise so adding MORE power is simply a waste of money for zero gain. While speed for speed's sake like in TFA is cool and all unless we have another killer app that royally slams machines most folks simply don't need it. Hell even my mom that only checks recipes and uses email has a 3.2Ghz P4 with HT and a laptop, simply because I didn't know what else to do with the things, what more do we need?
Frankly I wouldn't be surprised if some PMC took a contract for...oh say 40 million, from the USA and THAT is what we got for the money. it looks like some half assed thing you'd get if more was spent on paychecks and bribes than on the actual device.
What is sad is that while we still can't afford healthcare, or doing anything about the flood of illegals and a border you could just walk a nuke through i bet my soon to be inflated to nothing last dollar if that is a USA UAV we paid waaaaaaay too much money for it.
The problem with nukes is the NIMBYs which have pretty much frozen the tech at 1950s levels. if we would allow the small thorium design we could have plants the size of a shipping container that one could bury and then finish covering up when its lifecycle is finished, we could also reprocess and end up with a hell of a lot less waste but we have too many NIMBYs and "ZOMG reprocessing may make stuff somebody could make a bomb with ZOMG!" while ignoring the fact it'd be a hell of a lot cheaper just to buy old Soviet era stuff from bumfuckistan.
This is why we need national importance stuff run by scientists and not politicians, who only care about feeding voter fears long enough to get elected so they can enjoy the kickbacks. As someone else wrote those solar guys probably made out like bandits and no doubt there were plenty of kickbacks...errr campaign contributions to make sure nobody said boo.
Actually funny thing that, quite by accident I tripped over the reason why WinME sucked when i found a machine to this day that runs WinME beautifully. After doing some tests I found what the problem was in WinME it was....VXD drivers. the perfect machine had ONLY WDM drivers, and every test i ran on older machines around the shop showed WinME became unstable as hell with VXDs and just a pile of shit and bugs with VXDs and WDMs, which is what most machines were shipped with.
Vista was just released waaaaay too soon, with several beta testers (myself included) pointing out show stopping bugs that were ignored to make ship date. I know I reported horrible bugs in network file transfer and network shares right up to the end of the beta program and was apparently ignored as the last time i tried to use Vista (after SP1) the bugs were still there. Compare this to 7 where I ran it from beta right up to RTM and no major shop stoppers, still running my install from Oct 09 with NO major or frankly even minor bugs to report. The closest I found to a bug was the occasional need to reconnect network shares when waking from sleep, but that could be an internal firewall problem, it is so quick to just reconnect i never bothered to test further.
So he is not confused, he just has more experience than you on the subject or you have rose colored glasses. There were serious "plug in the USB device and pray it don't BSOD" right up until the switch from 9X to WinNT with Win2K, WinXP came by default with the firewall OFF (WTF?) up until SP2, and up until Win 7 I ran into show stoppers with every RTM release of Windows, of course I ran more weird and hot rodded hardware than most so YMMV.
Well to be fair with win2K you really needed to wait until SP2 before it was nice and stable, and Win98SE was a hell of a lot better than vanilla Win98.
But everyone here seems to be missing the forest for the trees on why this has UBER FAIL written all over it, and frankly the only good that will come from Win 8 IMHO is Ballmer finally being forced to "pursue other interests". so what is the uber fail? Simple it is Placing Windows on ARM and calling it Windows which is a Titanic level disaster. It was like my local CL right after Xmas, when there was literally a ton of ARM netbooks being dumped for pennies on the dollar. Why? Because they had been sold as "Windows netbook" with in tiny letters "Compact Edition" and a theme that looked like WinXP. So folks bought these thinking they could run their Windows programs and when they couldn't? Shitcanned they all went.
THE EXACT SAME THING is gonna happen with win 8 and it is a clusterfuck of insanely stupid PHB levels of fail. Folks will buy all these ARM devices with "Windows 8!" in bright letters and when it doesn't run their Windows programs they are gonna be returned en masse. you are gonna have pissed off customers, pissed off retailers, this is Sega levels of stupid and hopefully will be the last dumbshit move Ballmer ever does.
What they SHOULD be doing is promoting winPhone for ARM, in Home and Pro flavors for consumers/businesses respectively, add a few new "must have" features to Windows 7 (I would suggest a Homegroup style app that makes remote access a breeze) and call it a day. Instead Ballmer who has such a stiffie for Apple it ain't even funny anymore will try to rip off iOS and fail miserably. That is why I still think the Gates borg should be replaced by ballmer in a "I Heart Apple!" beanie with his tongue out, as it fits the batshit Apple worshipping stupid that is Ballmer's rein at Apple.
On a final and slightly OT note, I was one of those that LMAO when the Pepsi guy was running Apple into the ground. Now that the shoe is on the other foot? I'm sorry okay? it really ain't funny anymore! I had NO idea how badly a CEO could fuck up a company before now, so can we have Bill back? Pretty Please? Its only fair, you got Jobs back before the company was completely killed, now its our turn. Bring back Darth Gates!
Well lets see....For the first one we have a guy who makes a right wing leaning rival to Wikileaks who destroys anything that hurts right wing causes before he leaves. Duh he was paid off. I'd love to see his bank accounts for 6 months before and after the event, because i bet a BIG fat check got dropped in there.
As for the other two? if it is online it CAN be broken into, it is just a matter of time and skill. Everyone thinks they have security but a good 99.995% of them DO NOT, simply because if the org is larger than a single guy and if that guy doesn't spend all his time at black hat he WILL miss something.
Finally let us not forget there are quite a few 3 letter agencies that would like Wikileaks very much DEAD. not to mention the PMCs whose massive profits they are threatening. With THAT many groups with THAT much money after them? The Anons make a perfect front. The anons are shit slingers and have been in the news enough that frankly folks will believe anything and everything online can be blamed on them, so if I was gonna take a shot at Wikileaks I'd sure as hell say I was anon, it makes CYA soooo much easier.
Frankly after that cable came out that the US gov was covering for child sex trafficking by a PMC to secure a contract, not just once but as a SOP for getting contracts, and their ONLY concern was not saving the kids but how to keep all the kiddie fucking out of the press? I wouldn't trust the US gov to tell me whether it was raining or not outside. I have no doubt if one were to trace this attack it ends up landing on addresses owned by a PMC or 3 letter bunch.
Oh get off your high horse. Resistive screens are fine if your code works well which has been the BIG problem with the cheaper knockoffs. if you have played with them you know they slap a vanilla Android and that's it. Well surprise surprise a vanilla Android don't work worth a crap you have to tailor it to the hardware and then and ONLY then will the resistive screen work fine.
So resistive screen, custom Android, 1.2GHz single for the $150, 1.2GHz dual for the $199, 4Gb on the M1, 8Gb M2, and 512Mb of DDR3 on both. It would be VERY doable and still make a profit, it just wouldn't make iMoney which is why they won't get built. I have messed with plenty of the Chinese pad knockoffs that frankly would be fine if the code didn't suck but you just can't drop unoptimized code on a small device and expect it to run worth a shit. We used to get real work done with a hell of a lot less than a 1Ghz single core with 512Mb of RAM but the big difference was we were running optimized code and THAT good sir makes ALL the difference!
I bet my last dollar that a machine with those specs and optimized for the platform code would absolutely knock your socks off. It would be fast, responsive, and nimble. it is simply coders today have gotten spoiled by the "Throw more power at it" Moore's law way of doing things which just doesn't fly in mobile. those of us who used to have Palm Pilots remember how responsive well written code could be, and frankly it can be done again, it just has to be done RIGHT.
But that still doesn't really explain why Germans try to erase history by banning it. Do they think that will make Nazism magically disappear? This is why I think the American way is better, let them act like asses in the open so you don't let hatred fester and instead can confront it directly. i know from first hand experience that this method WORKS.
When I lived in Dallas several years ago I ran across some Neo Nazis trying to spread their hate literature so I went to a little hobby shop around the corner and made up my own little sign. it simply read "Ask me about the camps" and when people would stop I would tell them of my grandfather's experience liberating a camp, of the bodies so starved they couldn't tell male from female, of seeing cattle cars filled with corpses, of having to relay instructions to his men NOT to feed the starving no matter how much it ate at them, because they had been mistreated and starved for so damned long that rich GI food would throw their frail little bodies into shock.
Needless to say the little Hitlers were none to happy about this, one even tried to get a cop to make me go away. The cop laughed and I heard him say 'Free speech pal, he can speak too" so they packed up and went away. It is ALWAYS better to confront hate with truth than it is to hide it under the rug. Hidden in the dark it just festers and grows. if the Germans would quit trying to pretend it didn't exist and instead confront it with truth I think they'd find they'd be a lot better off.
Maybe TFA will be the start of that, but I doubt it, too many prefer to pretend bad things don't exist than confront them with the truth. I personally will always confront Nazis with the truth in honor of my grandfather, whom I promised to never forget what he had seen that day.
I think what you are trying to get at is what the late George Carlin used to do a bit on, how over the years language gets twisted by those with an agenda. The example he used was how shell shock became PTSD, which took the power out of the words and make it sound like you have PMS.
In this case we have the word free, which means in most dictionaries "exempt from external authority, interference, restriction, etc." being twisted to mean "Free as in what RMS believes in" which is not even static, as we have seen in the change from GPL V2 to GPL V3.
So personally I think we need to tell RMS where he can put his language twisting and just call it what it is....copyleft. it is simple, it is to the point, it explains quite easily what the GPL and its derivatives are about, which is a socialist (and I use that word without malice, that is another word being twisted to mean what it doesn't by the Faux news crowd) take upon a traditional copyright license.
So lets just call a spade a spade. GPL is copyleft, BSD is attribution only, and if one wanted to get technical the only true licenses that fall under the definition of free are PD and the "Do what the fuck you want" licenses, as they have no restrictions at all upon the user. But trying to twist free to mean copyleft is as much bullshit as shell shock to PTSD, it is warping the language to fit an agenda. Aren't we old enough and wise enough not to have our chains yanked by those with an agenda? We're geeks, right? shouldn't we be above weasel wording?
While I agree completely with everything you said, the one that sticks out for me is the Macbook. Everything else? yeah you can understand them, different CPUs on custom hardware plus Apple UI so I can see an argument for them even if I don't personally care for them.
But there is NOTHING to be for with the Macbook. it is bog standard Wintel parts at truly INSANE prices. geeks here love to talk about the "MSFT Tax" but frankly that is pocket change compared to the Mac, I mean have you SEEN what they are charging? $1000 for an i3 with INTEL graphics and only TWO Gb of RAM? WTF?
So as TFA shows they are dumping the toxins out the back door so they don't even have to pay for cleanup. With the iShiny one could argue they are doing custom chips but the Macbooks are just the same shit that everybody else sells. God i'l love to see their profits margins on the Macs, they must be making out like fucking bandits! But why anyone would buy one, especially any geek here that has enough sense to be able to read a howto, is beyond me. If you hate Windows so much just run Linux (Vector Linux is good on laptops I'm told) or do a Hackentosh and save the 40%+ markup, its just nuts.
The only thing I can figure is like another poster said, its like Prada. it is people paying for the logo. Considering the fact I can't picture WinPhone or Android selling any "I have money!" apps frankly it wouldn't surprise me.
God that is the only time I miss having an Indian coworker! Every time I deal with one of those desk jockeys all I can do is wish I had Ms Sakar beside me again so I could say "Here, deal with this dipshit" and hear her curse his ass in Hindi. It was soooo funny to watch this little 90 sound Indian woman going "NO you do NOT tell me to reboot! I have a dozen degrees and I'm NOT gonna reboot, because that will NOT fix the problem! Now you give me someone who knows what they are doing!" followed by a stream of what i'm sure was choice Hindi curses.
As for TFA thanks to Citizens United and even one of the members of SCOTUS taking bribes I have no doubt they WILL get to merge, fire tens of thousands of Americans, and screw millions more, they just need to cut the checks to the right people first. Like it or not we are quickly becoming a banana republic, with rampant bribery and corruption to rival our friends south of the border. Hell if they didn't do anything when a CEO went on record about how they considered Intel's bribes to be "like cocaine" and how they had whole quarters during the price wars where the ONLY profits Dell saw were kickbacks? What makes you think they are gonna stop this, which affected a hell of a lot less people?
AT&T just hasn't bribed the right people yet, but don't worry citizen, they will.
Let me guess...a Linux user. you have the elitist bad attitude down pat. Do you have ANY idea how many God damned programs i gotta deal with in a fucking workday? do you? Probably close to 50 as well as on average 2 to 3 different OSes and a bunch of support crap. And guess what? Other than the classic save edit close shortcuts nobody uses the same shortcuts my guess is because the programmers didn't know the shortcuts for the more offbeat stuff either.
So please do get off your 'CLI gives me gonad powers" keyboards make a man out of you BS. it is 2011, wake up and smell the iPad. The future is all GUI, all touch, all muscle memory, all visual. Dealing with consumers 6 days a week I can tell you copy paste is the ONLY keyboard shortcuts that ever get used on a consistent basis, and even then more than half the time they right click.
I got dozens of programs, PCs piled up to my nutsack waiting on me, I don't have time to curl up with cheat sheets for every one of the 50+ programs I use consistently like it is a Harry potter book. Just another classic example of ignoring how people ACTUALLY use products and instead demanding they use the product the way YOU use it. And folks wonder why Linux is stuck at 1%, hell it is practically the Linux motto!
Name a SINGLE component at the specs I called for that would kill those numbers, just one. A 1Ghz dual ARM? shouldn't be a problem. 4Gb of NAND? Dirt cheap. 512Mb of DDR3? beyond dirt cheap, Android? Free. And the $149 model would frankly most likely be the more profitable one, you could cut the NAND to 2Gb (both will have MicroSD slots of course) and a single core ARM at 1GHz I'm sure would be quite affordable.
The problem is NOT the specs, the BOM, manufacturing costs, or even development. The problem is every damned western company wants to be Apple and won't settle for less than 30%+ profit margins. look at the Touchpad, you had a BOM for $318 and they were selling for $500. Even if you took out say $60 a unit for advertising (which frankly HP didn't do shit for advertising) they still would have been making out like fricking bandits and THAT is the problem. Honest 5%-10% profits simply aren't acceptable to the PHBs and Wall Street, it has to be iMoney.
And THAT sir is why the far east will royally kick our ass. it isn't that American companies can't design and build great products, it is that our CEOs and PHBs are too fucking greedy and won't have anything less than 30% profit. There can only be one Apple, yet they would rather make nothing than not make iMoney on a product. how fucking sad.
I think the bigger question is why everyone assumes she must have known it was stolen. Now if the laptop was less than a year old? Yeah she should have known. But if it is more than a year and a half? Frankly I've seen them go for less and often sell 3 to 4 year old laptops myself for around that price. Often the batteries on the damned things cost more than they are worth so they go for cheap. hell I've seen nice Core2Duos go for $80 simply because the battery was toast.
As for the age thing? I've seen hot as hell 52 year olds and ugly as fuck 19 year olds, can't really go by that.
Yeah but they are selling on Craigslist for $320 RIGHT NOW and from what I read the BOM on the 16gb is $318. Sell them for $350 and make a nice tidy profit.
Sadly though this is why we are doomed and the far east will win, because nobody in the states wants to do shit unless "We can make iMoney nom nom nom!" and show constantly climbing profits to Wall Street, which is now just Vegas with nicer clothes.
Meanwhile companies like Lenovo will be more than happy to take those 100 million plus 6% profits that the western CEOs look down their noses on because "Its not iMoney! Nom nom nom". i predict the OEM will die, replaced by the ODMs who will cut out the middle man and keep the 6% profits for themselves. I wouldn't be surprised if some Chinese company just takes the Touchpad design, slaps Android on it, and has them for sale at $375 by Xmas.
I STILL think they are ALL missing the magic iPad killing price point though. Make a dual core ARM with 4Gb of storage and 512Mb of DDR2 for $199, with the single core going for $149, both running Android. You put that out and it will frankly slaughter as we have seen "good enough' and cheap kills should be the goal. Apple can keep the high end but the one that hits those price points with decent specs WILL take a HUGE chunk of the market, mark my words.
Uhhhh...dude? Everybody here seems to be going off an an epic FTP VS SCP debate while missing the forest for the protocols, which is this is yet again an ISP nickle and diming and being douches, which I'd say is a LITTLE more important than whether one uses FTP or SCP to connect.
After all if one doesn't have a royal shitfit when they do this on the unpopular stuff when it gets to the popular stuff the public will be so used to being gouged they won't even notice. it is bad enough while the rest of the planet is getting huge pipes run we in the USA get to ride the short bus to the information superhighway, but now they are gonna nickle and dime for every little bullshit they can think of.
Look, its a hobby or niche OS, alright? I'm sure they know they will NEVER take on the big three, but it makes them happy and I'm sure the few dozen guys that use it are happy too. I mean hell, they still sell OS/2 as eComstation so SOMEBODY must like these niche OSes or nobody would bother, right? And it is the SERVER that is built on Linux, the desktop is based on Amiga IIRC.
I just wonder how much of this is hanging onto the past and playing "what if?" because i know that feeling. I was using OS/2 warp back when everyone else was using Win95 and thinking "WTF are you people getting excited over THAT mess for?" but IBM screwed the pooch and tried to tie it to their too expensive and behind the curve hardware and killed it dead. Bad management was also to blame for Amiga. Back in the day it ran rings around just about everything when it came to multimedia but it was too expensive and Windows was "good enough" and cheap so it lost.
So give the guy a break and let him have his tiny minute in the spotlight. Personally i'd sure as hell like to read about the weird and wacky than another "Bob's distro' which of course will be based off Ubuntu and will be the SSDD. I mean how many distros does the world need? at least this IS something more than just slapping a couple of packages together on top of Debian or RH.
The problem is they changed those around too Dave. Take for example ctrl-alt-s which before was save, now frankly i don't know WTF it does, page break?
And keyboard shortcuts are fine and dandy for the things you do every day, but what about the once a week stuff? Once or twice a month? that is why we have that nice red X on the right side of ALL applications, it is so muscle memory makes it trivial to hit. I've known folks that used Office since Office 97 and they knew by memory where every single thing they used with ANY frequency was. We are talking more than 40 keyboard shortcuts to remember if they tried to go strictly keyboard, that is a PITA.
Like I said to me the saving grace of the 2K7 ribbon is the quick access toolbar. With it I can kill the damned ribbon and just put the things I use the most on that teeny tiny strip. since it is at the top i can slam my mouse up and hit what I want, it doesn't suck up real estate like the ribbon (those of us with widescreens don't have as much vertical you know) and most importantly it lets me make the Office 2K7 UI MY way, with what I USE right where I need it.
Sadly I would consider the ribbon a classic example of the Ballmer fucked up way of doing things. Gates was an engineer, Ballmer a salesman. While Gates was toolbar and menu heavy he was all about giving the USER options. Ballmer is all about focus groups and PPTs and ripping off Apple. hell have you SEEN the Win 8 UI? What a clusterfuck! And he is gonna put Win 8 on ARM as well as x86? WTF? yeah good way to burn your customers when they buy that Win 8 ARM netbook and none of their Windows software works. I predict i'll be seeing a shitload of ARM windows devices dirt cheap on Craigslist.
If the ribbon does it for you? i'm happy for you, I truly am. But Gates would have given us the choice of going back if we wished, Ballmer think "Jobs doesn't give choices, we should be like Steve" and cocks it up. Would it REALLY be so horrible to let BOTH of us have what we want?
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Well that is a backhanded compliment at best as Win9x was a buggy little fucker from the get go. Who can forget that video of Gates plugging in a printer and the whole thing BSODing? But with Win2K I found it REALLY depended on which chips you had whether or not it was rosy or sucktastic.
Now don't get me wrong, even at its worst it was miles ahead of Win9x (I too ran RTM, I was actually given a copy my boss after complaining what a POS WinME was) but certain chipsets, like the Ali and Via? Could be seriously flaky. I ended up getting a cheap soundblaster just so I wouldn't have to keep rebooting to get my damned Via sound to work.
But I'd say the whole WinNT line with the exception of Vista was made of win. I had several customers that held onto WinNT for ages just because of how stable it was, Win2K was decent OOTB but after SP2 was frankly kick ass, WinXP was okay but after SP2 was also kick ass, and Win 7 was awesome from the get go. Vista? It was released half baked and frankly never really got any better. It would probably need a couple more SPs to iron out the bugs but now that they have Win 7 why bother?
No dufus my proposal was to offer them a percentage of ALL sales with no bullshit. The plan was a whole 3% for us, 5% for the DOSBox guys as a thank you, and the rest given to the authors after BOM which would have been quite cheap so you are talking more than 80% split between them. I'd also remind that we are talking about shareware titles here that were originally DESIGNED TO BE GIVEN AWAY to build interest in the full apps. I proposed a larger cut for those that gave full games but even if all they offered was the original shareware they would have been given a cut AND a link to any site they wanted to sell other merch AND full credit for something THEY ARE MAKING ZERO PROFITS ON right now.
Instead what I saw was the same douchebaggery over and over. they'd say "let me get back to you" followed by them finding out what the highest selling app on the iShiny was and then demanding 30% more than that because hey their shit don't stink, right? never mind we are talking about ZERO upfront costs to them, ZERO transfer of rights to me, and ZERO work involved with promotion or anything else from them. hell some of them had the brass balls to demand that we sign our rights over to them so they could do whatever they wanted with OUR work while giving us nothing in return but the right to load a 25 year old piece of shareware on a stick!
so now I'm looking at doing it in China where guess what? I won't have to pay them shit and can just sell it on a ton of places like chinamart. yet again the west loses because of greedy MBAs, why am I not surprised?
Don't forget wireless which still royally sucks the big wet titty on Linux. More and more of my customers are giving up running wires in their homes and simply buying a cheap wireless card for any new PC they add and if you've ever dealt with Linux wireless you know your ass better damned well be fucking great at forum hunts and terminal bullshit if you want it to work.
Oh BTW they're whole plan basically sucks. you don't ever buy parts separably, that is where you get a big old bite out of your ass. you buy a barebone kit like this one which gives you a black edition CPU PLUS a DVD burner for the same price after $30 MIR. Hell if you throw in a few more bucks you can go triple core with TB drive and no MIR.
If you keep an eye out on the sales you can frankly get a truly awesome PC fully loaded with Windows 7 for less than $500. I just finished up an Athlon X4, 4Gb of RAM, 500Gb HDD, an HD4830 for transcoding and gaming, and Win 7 HP X64 with a nice case to put it in all for $465 and that is after paying me to put the thing together and load all the software. hell when he gets his MIR that price will drop to just $435 and that is for a machine that will easily last him until Win 7 is EOL in 2020. He has it plugged into a 32 inch 1080p and frankly it gets great performance, smooth video, plenty of space for his music, just all around a really nice experience.
So I'd say it comes down to what you want to do. if you are a neckbeard that just wants something to run his term and IDE? Sure Linux works fine there, works great as a server OS or for embedded too. If you want to actually be able to just "plug and play" and not have to research like it is the fricking SATs, only to end up having to play hardware roulette and end up possibly with worthless hardware? Or easily run all the software that comes with your stuff? Then I'd suggest sticking with Windows.
For everyone else go to any Craigslist and you'll find plenty of dirt cheap machines with good XP CALs on them. Hell if you want Win 7 just contact any family or friends that are in college and you can get Win 7 pro for a whole $35. No friends in college? Chip in with a couple of buds on a $100 family pack, that is three installs of Win 7 HP, which comes to $33-$37 a piece depending on the sale price. Then you can enjoy the literally millions of programs out there in the vast ecosystem many of which have no Linux equivalent and most likely never will have, unless all you want are text editors or IDEs.
Look I like Linux, I really do. As a retailer I'd love the fuck out of a working Linux distro as I could undercut by competition by not having to pay for Windows. but as long as Linus Torvalds is in charge Linux is royally fucked as he has stated he will NEVER allow a stable hardware ABI, which means drivers will ALWAYS be fiddly bastards, with one thing being fixed while two break, for the life of the OS. I mean here,read for yourself what the man says and then be honest: How many of you if given an employee on a multibillion dollar project that said "Plans? We don't neeed no steenkin plans!" wouldn't fire his ass. Be honest.
What Linux needs is a Jobs or Gates to walk in there and lay the holy smack down on Torvalds and his itch scratchers and tell them "enough is enough". There is a simple list of hardware which SHOULD NEVER FAIL which I call the "80%", that is the hardware that is found on more than 80% of the bog standard machines out there. that is Intel, AMD/ATI, and Nvidia GPUs, Realtek HD and AC97 sound, Realtek , Nvidia and Intel Ethernet, Intel and Broadcom wireless. THESE SHOULD NEVER FAIL and if they do? YOU SUCK ASS AND SHOULD BE ASHAMED TO RELEASE BROKEN SHIT.
Yet every single time I try Linux, and I've tried a shitload of distros, Ubuntu/Mint, PCLOS, Mepis, Fedora, Puppy, hell if it was supposedly "user friendly" I tried it and not fucking once did the above hardware survrive a single upgrade unscathed. now since we are talking on average 6 month release schedules? Gentlemen that is simply unacceptable. And before someone says LTS! I'd just point out currently XP has longer support, and Windows 7 is supported until 2020 and that is if they don't release anymore service packs.
The clock is ticking hard Linux geeks, in 2014 hundreds of millions of XP boxes go EOL and if you can get retailers like me onboard? Then YOUR OS can have those machines. Imagine how quickly Linux adoption could jump if every mom&pop shop like mine had Linux laptops and desktops lining the shelves, all at affordable prices. it would be incredible. but gentlemen my time is $35 an hour, which means ALL IT TAKES is one of those 80% being borked on the 6 month deathmarch and my profits go right out the window. The simple fact is with the on average hour to two hours it takes to do the forum dance, find the CLI crap, load the CLI crap, find out I have to tweak the CLI crap, tweak the CLI crap, and then finally get the damned hardware working again? I've just blown the cost of Windows 7 HP right there.
ACCEPT THIS...the world is NOT LIKE YOU and they will NEVER adopt CLI, nor do forum dances or deal with borked drivers every 6 months. FIX THIS and you have a shot of gaining HUGE share in 2014. Continue on the current path of shitting on users and expecting them to jump on the neckbeard bandwagon? And then guys like me will simply strip or dump all those XP boxes and you won't gain shit. if the fact that an OS that has a $1000 barrier to entry gained when Vista hit and you didn't gain shit don't smack you with the clue bat I don't know what will.
The fact that the BIOS of a machine made in 1975 can be DMCAed shows us why China and India is gonna kick our ass. Can you believe such insanity? our entire industry is building upon the shoulders of the giants that came before but thanks to Valenti (may he rot in hell) and his endless copyrights combined with DMCA garbage the west is pretty much dead with regards to innovation.
One simply can no longer build on the ideas of the past without a giant minefield of patents and copyrights controlled by absolute douchebags. I should know because I had a nice little idea to bring back the Shareware discs of old. It would have been "DOSBox...in a box" where the old Shareware games could be loaded and played like the old days of pre Win9x. but trying to deal with the douchebags i quickly found that one can't even offer the shareware titles anymore because the pigs that currently hold the rights all want iMoney for them, even if they have NO PRODUCTS being offered or even any hope of porting those titles in the future. We ain't talking Wolf3D here, we are talking about all the funky and weird crap that used to be on those "300 games for $5!" discs.
I found out if I want to say "Fuck America!" I can have the whole thing made in China no problem, but in the USA? the minefiled makes it more expensive than the highest AAA games, all thanks to endless copyrights and douchebaggery. is it any wonder the USA is in the shitter?
Yeah MSFT tried that with WebTV and it didn't work so well, did it? text looks like shite on a crusty roll on an old TV set unless you are gonna rewrite the code to put everything big as hell like the old VIC20 and even then it'll be eyestrain o-vision.
A much better idea would be the good old D-Sub. CRTs are being dumped on the third world by HUGE amounts and even the poorest of the poor in the west can find an old CRT for cheap. Sure the picture may only be 800x600 but it will look and work a hell of a lot better than a TV, isn't that what matters?
If they truly want to help the third world it needs a cheap but solid plastic case, a D-Sub to go with the HDMI and RCA outs, USB ports for keyboards and mice, and enough storage you can actually load a few programs on the thing, I'd say 4Gb of NAND would be affordable. Add that to the $35 model and you have a unit you should be able to sell for less than $60 and make a few bucks while still having a unit that can be useful OOTB.
With 4Gb one could easily put in a stripped down Linux (maybe with XFCE or Fluxbox?) along with educational programs and still leave a couple of Gb for user files. it would be relatively snappy, easily customizable to the school or environment, work with any kind of screen they can come up with, and most importantly wouldn't need a CS degree to use. Hell with XFCE or JWM could be run by an 8 year old. This thing looks more like a hobby embedded playtoy than a PC for the third world.
Oh do NOT even get me started on the SB drivers! I used to run a Windows help line on IRC and you have no idea how many "ZOMG my PC is fucked!" I had to deal with that were traced to either SB or Via drivers.
ATI wasn't bad IF, and this is a damned BIG IF, you made DAMNED sure you ran the right version for your card! There were so damned many variations (most folks don't know there were even OEM variations ON TOP of the chip variations and running a standard driver with a OEM chip was FUBAR) that is was beyond simple to royally fuck yourself with the wrong choice.
My old boss Doug had me spot weld two PC skeletons together and we loaded a Celeron 400 MHz (this was when 1GHz had just come out, so we had plenty of those) and we mounted TEN, count 'em ten SCSI drives in that Frankenbox so that when most folks were lucky to have 30Gb we had nearly 500Gb running WinNT server on the network JUST FOR DRIVERS. We had EVERY chip, every variation, every OEM, you name it we had it, all right there on the network.
BTW if you like to play with old hardware, might I suggest something? look up "TinyXP" and give it a spin. We are talking a fully loaded XP that runs on less than 74Mb of RAM, or if you can luck into a copy there is "Windows Ultra DVD eXperience" that gives you sixteen variations of Windows Win2K-XP-2K3. Of course it will run without a key but the nice thing is it'll take your Windows keys so it is like having a pre-tweaked Windows ready to go, and the Ultra DVD will let you burn whichever version you want easy as "clicky clicky" and there is an .ISO.
Anyway if you have old hardware laying around it is quite cool to play with. Frankly they need to hire the Tiny guy at MSFT, because I have tried both winFLP and embedded and the tiny versions royally smokes both of those hands down. I mean when the guy releases Tiny7 that runs VERY FAST on a 1.5Ghz with 512Mb of RAM? Or even tinyVista that runs equally fast on the same hardware? that's just nuts!
If it is like the PCs I work on most of it would be twiddling its thumbs waiting for something to do or be a "just in case' cache of pretty much everything ever run on the machine? I generally like to slam the crap out of my PC but since going to 8Gb I've found most of it is just cache because i simply don't have enough data being worked on at any one time to need it. Right now checking ResMon I'm looking at 6300Mb being used for cache and only 1800Mb in actual use.
As for TFA while i'm sure it'll be useful for someone like the military to simulate nukes going off for most folks it would be a big old "meh" as they simply don't have enough work for even their duals and triples, much less something thousands of times faster. There just hasn't been a "killer app" that would really slam a CPU in so long it isn't even funny, that is why Nvidia and AMD are pushing 3D and Eyefinity because even games just aren't slamming the shit out of chips like the old days.
Everyone keeps saying "Oh pads are killing PCs!" because the PC sales are down but frankly its bullshit, it is simply folks don't know what to do with what they got power wise so adding MORE power is simply a waste of money for zero gain. While speed for speed's sake like in TFA is cool and all unless we have another killer app that royally slams machines most folks simply don't need it. Hell even my mom that only checks recipes and uses email has a 3.2Ghz P4 with HT and a laptop, simply because I didn't know what else to do with the things, what more do we need?
Frankly I wouldn't be surprised if some PMC took a contract for...oh say 40 million, from the USA and THAT is what we got for the money. it looks like some half assed thing you'd get if more was spent on paychecks and bribes than on the actual device.
What is sad is that while we still can't afford healthcare, or doing anything about the flood of illegals and a border you could just walk a nuke through i bet my soon to be inflated to nothing last dollar if that is a USA UAV we paid waaaaaaay too much money for it.
The problem with nukes is the NIMBYs which have pretty much frozen the tech at 1950s levels. if we would allow the small thorium design we could have plants the size of a shipping container that one could bury and then finish covering up when its lifecycle is finished, we could also reprocess and end up with a hell of a lot less waste but we have too many NIMBYs and "ZOMG reprocessing may make stuff somebody could make a bomb with ZOMG!" while ignoring the fact it'd be a hell of a lot cheaper just to buy old Soviet era stuff from bumfuckistan.
This is why we need national importance stuff run by scientists and not politicians, who only care about feeding voter fears long enough to get elected so they can enjoy the kickbacks. As someone else wrote those solar guys probably made out like bandits and no doubt there were plenty of kickbacks...errr campaign contributions to make sure nobody said boo.
Actually funny thing that, quite by accident I tripped over the reason why WinME sucked when i found a machine to this day that runs WinME beautifully. After doing some tests I found what the problem was in WinME it was....VXD drivers. the perfect machine had ONLY WDM drivers, and every test i ran on older machines around the shop showed WinME became unstable as hell with VXDs and just a pile of shit and bugs with VXDs and WDMs, which is what most machines were shipped with.
Vista was just released waaaaay too soon, with several beta testers (myself included) pointing out show stopping bugs that were ignored to make ship date. I know I reported horrible bugs in network file transfer and network shares right up to the end of the beta program and was apparently ignored as the last time i tried to use Vista (after SP1) the bugs were still there. Compare this to 7 where I ran it from beta right up to RTM and no major shop stoppers, still running my install from Oct 09 with NO major or frankly even minor bugs to report. The closest I found to a bug was the occasional need to reconnect network shares when waking from sleep, but that could be an internal firewall problem, it is so quick to just reconnect i never bothered to test further.
So he is not confused, he just has more experience than you on the subject or you have rose colored glasses. There were serious "plug in the USB device and pray it don't BSOD" right up until the switch from 9X to WinNT with Win2K, WinXP came by default with the firewall OFF (WTF?) up until SP2, and up until Win 7 I ran into show stoppers with every RTM release of Windows, of course I ran more weird and hot rodded hardware than most so YMMV.
Well to be fair with win2K you really needed to wait until SP2 before it was nice and stable, and Win98SE was a hell of a lot better than vanilla Win98.
But everyone here seems to be missing the forest for the trees on why this has UBER FAIL written all over it, and frankly the only good that will come from Win 8 IMHO is Ballmer finally being forced to "pursue other interests". so what is the uber fail? Simple it is Placing Windows on ARM and calling it Windows which is a Titanic level disaster. It was like my local CL right after Xmas, when there was literally a ton of ARM netbooks being dumped for pennies on the dollar. Why? Because they had been sold as "Windows netbook" with in tiny letters "Compact Edition" and a theme that looked like WinXP. So folks bought these thinking they could run their Windows programs and when they couldn't? Shitcanned they all went.
THE EXACT SAME THING is gonna happen with win 8 and it is a clusterfuck of insanely stupid PHB levels of fail. Folks will buy all these ARM devices with "Windows 8!" in bright letters and when it doesn't run their Windows programs they are gonna be returned en masse. you are gonna have pissed off customers, pissed off retailers, this is Sega levels of stupid and hopefully will be the last dumbshit move Ballmer ever does.
What they SHOULD be doing is promoting winPhone for ARM, in Home and Pro flavors for consumers/businesses respectively, add a few new "must have" features to Windows 7 (I would suggest a Homegroup style app that makes remote access a breeze) and call it a day. Instead Ballmer who has such a stiffie for Apple it ain't even funny anymore will try to rip off iOS and fail miserably. That is why I still think the Gates borg should be replaced by ballmer in a "I Heart Apple!" beanie with his tongue out, as it fits the batshit Apple worshipping stupid that is Ballmer's rein at Apple.
On a final and slightly OT note, I was one of those that LMAO when the Pepsi guy was running Apple into the ground. Now that the shoe is on the other foot? I'm sorry okay? it really ain't funny anymore! I had NO idea how badly a CEO could fuck up a company before now, so can we have Bill back? Pretty Please? Its only fair, you got Jobs back before the company was completely killed, now its our turn. Bring back Darth Gates!
Well lets see....For the first one we have a guy who makes a right wing leaning rival to Wikileaks who destroys anything that hurts right wing causes before he leaves. Duh he was paid off. I'd love to see his bank accounts for 6 months before and after the event, because i bet a BIG fat check got dropped in there.
As for the other two? if it is online it CAN be broken into, it is just a matter of time and skill. Everyone thinks they have security but a good 99.995% of them DO NOT, simply because if the org is larger than a single guy and if that guy doesn't spend all his time at black hat he WILL miss something.
Finally let us not forget there are quite a few 3 letter agencies that would like Wikileaks very much DEAD. not to mention the PMCs whose massive profits they are threatening. With THAT many groups with THAT much money after them? The Anons make a perfect front. The anons are shit slingers and have been in the news enough that frankly folks will believe anything and everything online can be blamed on them, so if I was gonna take a shot at Wikileaks I'd sure as hell say I was anon, it makes CYA soooo much easier.
Frankly after that cable came out that the US gov was covering for child sex trafficking by a PMC to secure a contract, not just once but as a SOP for getting contracts, and their ONLY concern was not saving the kids but how to keep all the kiddie fucking out of the press? I wouldn't trust the US gov to tell me whether it was raining or not outside. I have no doubt if one were to trace this attack it ends up landing on addresses owned by a PMC or 3 letter bunch.
Oh get off your high horse. Resistive screens are fine if your code works well which has been the BIG problem with the cheaper knockoffs. if you have played with them you know they slap a vanilla Android and that's it. Well surprise surprise a vanilla Android don't work worth a crap you have to tailor it to the hardware and then and ONLY then will the resistive screen work fine.
So resistive screen, custom Android, 1.2GHz single for the $150, 1.2GHz dual for the $199, 4Gb on the M1, 8Gb M2, and 512Mb of DDR3 on both. It would be VERY doable and still make a profit, it just wouldn't make iMoney which is why they won't get built. I have messed with plenty of the Chinese pad knockoffs that frankly would be fine if the code didn't suck but you just can't drop unoptimized code on a small device and expect it to run worth a shit. We used to get real work done with a hell of a lot less than a 1Ghz single core with 512Mb of RAM but the big difference was we were running optimized code and THAT good sir makes ALL the difference!
I bet my last dollar that a machine with those specs and optimized for the platform code would absolutely knock your socks off. It would be fast, responsive, and nimble. it is simply coders today have gotten spoiled by the "Throw more power at it" Moore's law way of doing things which just doesn't fly in mobile. those of us who used to have Palm Pilots remember how responsive well written code could be, and frankly it can be done again, it just has to be done RIGHT.
But that still doesn't really explain why Germans try to erase history by banning it. Do they think that will make Nazism magically disappear? This is why I think the American way is better, let them act like asses in the open so you don't let hatred fester and instead can confront it directly. i know from first hand experience that this method WORKS.
When I lived in Dallas several years ago I ran across some Neo Nazis trying to spread their hate literature so I went to a little hobby shop around the corner and made up my own little sign. it simply read "Ask me about the camps" and when people would stop I would tell them of my grandfather's experience liberating a camp, of the bodies so starved they couldn't tell male from female, of seeing cattle cars filled with corpses, of having to relay instructions to his men NOT to feed the starving no matter how much it ate at them, because they had been mistreated and starved for so damned long that rich GI food would throw their frail little bodies into shock.
Needless to say the little Hitlers were none to happy about this, one even tried to get a cop to make me go away. The cop laughed and I heard him say 'Free speech pal, he can speak too" so they packed up and went away. It is ALWAYS better to confront hate with truth than it is to hide it under the rug. Hidden in the dark it just festers and grows. if the Germans would quit trying to pretend it didn't exist and instead confront it with truth I think they'd find they'd be a lot better off.
Maybe TFA will be the start of that, but I doubt it, too many prefer to pretend bad things don't exist than confront them with the truth. I personally will always confront Nazis with the truth in honor of my grandfather, whom I promised to never forget what he had seen that day.
I think what you are trying to get at is what the late George Carlin used to do a bit on, how over the years language gets twisted by those with an agenda. The example he used was how shell shock became PTSD, which took the power out of the words and make it sound like you have PMS.
In this case we have the word free, which means in most dictionaries "exempt from external authority, interference, restriction, etc." being twisted to mean "Free as in what RMS believes in" which is not even static, as we have seen in the change from GPL V2 to GPL V3.
So personally I think we need to tell RMS where he can put his language twisting and just call it what it is....copyleft. it is simple, it is to the point, it explains quite easily what the GPL and its derivatives are about, which is a socialist (and I use that word without malice, that is another word being twisted to mean what it doesn't by the Faux news crowd) take upon a traditional copyright license.
So lets just call a spade a spade. GPL is copyleft, BSD is attribution only, and if one wanted to get technical the only true licenses that fall under the definition of free are PD and the "Do what the fuck you want" licenses, as they have no restrictions at all upon the user. But trying to twist free to mean copyleft is as much bullshit as shell shock to PTSD, it is warping the language to fit an agenda. Aren't we old enough and wise enough not to have our chains yanked by those with an agenda? We're geeks, right? shouldn't we be above weasel wording?
While I agree completely with everything you said, the one that sticks out for me is the Macbook. Everything else? yeah you can understand them, different CPUs on custom hardware plus Apple UI so I can see an argument for them even if I don't personally care for them.
But there is NOTHING to be for with the Macbook. it is bog standard Wintel parts at truly INSANE prices. geeks here love to talk about the "MSFT Tax" but frankly that is pocket change compared to the Mac, I mean have you SEEN what they are charging? $1000 for an i3 with INTEL graphics and only TWO Gb of RAM? WTF?
So as TFA shows they are dumping the toxins out the back door so they don't even have to pay for cleanup. With the iShiny one could argue they are doing custom chips but the Macbooks are just the same shit that everybody else sells. God i'l love to see their profits margins on the Macs, they must be making out like fucking bandits! But why anyone would buy one, especially any geek here that has enough sense to be able to read a howto, is beyond me. If you hate Windows so much just run Linux (Vector Linux is good on laptops I'm told) or do a Hackentosh and save the 40%+ markup, its just nuts.
The only thing I can figure is like another poster said, its like Prada. it is people paying for the logo. Considering the fact I can't picture WinPhone or Android selling any "I have money!" apps frankly it wouldn't surprise me.
God that is the only time I miss having an Indian coworker! Every time I deal with one of those desk jockeys all I can do is wish I had Ms Sakar beside me again so I could say "Here, deal with this dipshit" and hear her curse his ass in Hindi. It was soooo funny to watch this little 90 sound Indian woman going "NO you do NOT tell me to reboot! I have a dozen degrees and I'm NOT gonna reboot, because that will NOT fix the problem! Now you give me someone who knows what they are doing!" followed by a stream of what i'm sure was choice Hindi curses.
As for TFA thanks to Citizens United and even one of the members of SCOTUS taking bribes I have no doubt they WILL get to merge, fire tens of thousands of Americans, and screw millions more, they just need to cut the checks to the right people first. Like it or not we are quickly becoming a banana republic, with rampant bribery and corruption to rival our friends south of the border. Hell if they didn't do anything when a CEO went on record about how they considered Intel's bribes to be "like cocaine" and how they had whole quarters during the price wars where the ONLY profits Dell saw were kickbacks? What makes you think they are gonna stop this, which affected a hell of a lot less people?
AT&T just hasn't bribed the right people yet, but don't worry citizen, they will.
Let me guess...a Linux user. you have the elitist bad attitude down pat. Do you have ANY idea how many God damned programs i gotta deal with in a fucking workday? do you? Probably close to 50 as well as on average 2 to 3 different OSes and a bunch of support crap. And guess what? Other than the classic save edit close shortcuts nobody uses the same shortcuts my guess is because the programmers didn't know the shortcuts for the more offbeat stuff either.
So please do get off your 'CLI gives me gonad powers" keyboards make a man out of you BS. it is 2011, wake up and smell the iPad. The future is all GUI, all touch, all muscle memory, all visual. Dealing with consumers 6 days a week I can tell you copy paste is the ONLY keyboard shortcuts that ever get used on a consistent basis, and even then more than half the time they right click.
I got dozens of programs, PCs piled up to my nutsack waiting on me, I don't have time to curl up with cheat sheets for every one of the 50+ programs I use consistently like it is a Harry potter book. Just another classic example of ignoring how people ACTUALLY use products and instead demanding they use the product the way YOU use it. And folks wonder why Linux is stuck at 1%, hell it is practically the Linux motto!
Name a SINGLE component at the specs I called for that would kill those numbers, just one. A 1Ghz dual ARM? shouldn't be a problem. 4Gb of NAND? Dirt cheap. 512Mb of DDR3? beyond dirt cheap, Android? Free. And the $149 model would frankly most likely be the more profitable one, you could cut the NAND to 2Gb (both will have MicroSD slots of course) and a single core ARM at 1GHz I'm sure would be quite affordable.
The problem is NOT the specs, the BOM, manufacturing costs, or even development. The problem is every damned western company wants to be Apple and won't settle for less than 30%+ profit margins. look at the Touchpad, you had a BOM for $318 and they were selling for $500. Even if you took out say $60 a unit for advertising (which frankly HP didn't do shit for advertising) they still would have been making out like fricking bandits and THAT is the problem. Honest 5%-10% profits simply aren't acceptable to the PHBs and Wall Street, it has to be iMoney.
And THAT sir is why the far east will royally kick our ass. it isn't that American companies can't design and build great products, it is that our CEOs and PHBs are too fucking greedy and won't have anything less than 30% profit. There can only be one Apple, yet they would rather make nothing than not make iMoney on a product. how fucking sad.
I think the bigger question is why everyone assumes she must have known it was stolen. Now if the laptop was less than a year old? Yeah she should have known. But if it is more than a year and a half? Frankly I've seen them go for less and often sell 3 to 4 year old laptops myself for around that price. Often the batteries on the damned things cost more than they are worth so they go for cheap. hell I've seen nice Core2Duos go for $80 simply because the battery was toast.
As for the age thing? I've seen hot as hell 52 year olds and ugly as fuck 19 year olds, can't really go by that.
Yeah but they are selling on Craigslist for $320 RIGHT NOW and from what I read the BOM on the 16gb is $318. Sell them for $350 and make a nice tidy profit.
Sadly though this is why we are doomed and the far east will win, because nobody in the states wants to do shit unless "We can make iMoney nom nom nom!" and show constantly climbing profits to Wall Street, which is now just Vegas with nicer clothes.
Meanwhile companies like Lenovo will be more than happy to take those 100 million plus 6% profits that the western CEOs look down their noses on because "Its not iMoney! Nom nom nom". i predict the OEM will die, replaced by the ODMs who will cut out the middle man and keep the 6% profits for themselves. I wouldn't be surprised if some Chinese company just takes the Touchpad design, slaps Android on it, and has them for sale at $375 by Xmas.
I STILL think they are ALL missing the magic iPad killing price point though. Make a dual core ARM with 4Gb of storage and 512Mb of DDR2 for $199, with the single core going for $149, both running Android. You put that out and it will frankly slaughter as we have seen "good enough' and cheap kills should be the goal. Apple can keep the high end but the one that hits those price points with decent specs WILL take a HUGE chunk of the market, mark my words.
Uhhhh...dude? Everybody here seems to be going off an an epic FTP VS SCP debate while missing the forest for the protocols, which is this is yet again an ISP nickle and diming and being douches, which I'd say is a LITTLE more important than whether one uses FTP or SCP to connect.
After all if one doesn't have a royal shitfit when they do this on the unpopular stuff when it gets to the popular stuff the public will be so used to being gouged they won't even notice. it is bad enough while the rest of the planet is getting huge pipes run we in the USA get to ride the short bus to the information superhighway, but now they are gonna nickle and dime for every little bullshit they can think of.
Look, its a hobby or niche OS, alright? I'm sure they know they will NEVER take on the big three, but it makes them happy and I'm sure the few dozen guys that use it are happy too. I mean hell, they still sell OS/2 as eComstation so SOMEBODY must like these niche OSes or nobody would bother, right? And it is the SERVER that is built on Linux, the desktop is based on Amiga IIRC.
I just wonder how much of this is hanging onto the past and playing "what if?" because i know that feeling. I was using OS/2 warp back when everyone else was using Win95 and thinking "WTF are you people getting excited over THAT mess for?" but IBM screwed the pooch and tried to tie it to their too expensive and behind the curve hardware and killed it dead. Bad management was also to blame for Amiga. Back in the day it ran rings around just about everything when it came to multimedia but it was too expensive and Windows was "good enough" and cheap so it lost.
So give the guy a break and let him have his tiny minute in the spotlight. Personally i'd sure as hell like to read about the weird and wacky than another "Bob's distro' which of course will be based off Ubuntu and will be the SSDD. I mean how many distros does the world need? at least this IS something more than just slapping a couple of packages together on top of Debian or RH.
The problem is they changed those around too Dave. Take for example ctrl-alt-s which before was save, now frankly i don't know WTF it does, page break?
And keyboard shortcuts are fine and dandy for the things you do every day, but what about the once a week stuff? Once or twice a month? that is why we have that nice red X on the right side of ALL applications, it is so muscle memory makes it trivial to hit. I've known folks that used Office since Office 97 and they knew by memory where every single thing they used with ANY frequency was. We are talking more than 40 keyboard shortcuts to remember if they tried to go strictly keyboard, that is a PITA.
Like I said to me the saving grace of the 2K7 ribbon is the quick access toolbar. With it I can kill the damned ribbon and just put the things I use the most on that teeny tiny strip. since it is at the top i can slam my mouse up and hit what I want, it doesn't suck up real estate like the ribbon (those of us with widescreens don't have as much vertical you know) and most importantly it lets me make the Office 2K7 UI MY way, with what I USE right where I need it.
Sadly I would consider the ribbon a classic example of the Ballmer fucked up way of doing things. Gates was an engineer, Ballmer a salesman. While Gates was toolbar and menu heavy he was all about giving the USER options. Ballmer is all about focus groups and PPTs and ripping off Apple. hell have you SEEN the Win 8 UI? What a clusterfuck! And he is gonna put Win 8 on ARM as well as x86? WTF? yeah good way to burn your customers when they buy that Win 8 ARM netbook and none of their Windows software works. I predict i'll be seeing a shitload of ARM windows devices dirt cheap on Craigslist.
If the ribbon does it for you? i'm happy for you, I truly am. But Gates would have given us the choice of going back if we wished, Ballmer think "Jobs doesn't give choices, we should be like Steve" and cocks it up. Would it REALLY be so horrible to let BOTH of us have what we want?