When I say "don't have time for backups" I mean they don't have time for DAILY backups which I wouldn't settle for less if they were running SSDs. There have been a few who haven't listened to me (which I tell them 'Don't come crying if you lose all your stuff') but most have followed my advice and made backups of important data their mantra. Some of the poorer ones use a cheap flash stick to keep their pictures, most have let me pick them up an external drive, but nearly all have taken my advice.
Oh and laptops? I try to steer folks away from those POS piles of plastic. I tell them "buy the cheapest junker you can because it doesn't matter, it'll be dead in 3 years or less regardless" and tell them to take the money they save and let me build a good solid multicore desktop, which will easily last them for many years. Just the other day I had the checkout girl in the local grocery ask me if I'd come out to her car to look at a PC given to her by a friend to "see if you can upgrade it a little" cause the poor thing had two kids and a checkout girl salary and I nearly fell over laughing when I saw what she had. When it looked like she was gonna cry I said "Oh I'm not laughing at you honey, don't cry, I was laughing because I built that old tank nearly a decade ago out of spare parts at the shop. On the bottom I wrote "Frankenputer" in marker which I showed her. I sold her a late model P4 with board, RAM and threw in a CD burner for $60 with install included and old Frankie is still going after all these years.
As for HDDs failing? I don't know, maybe I'm lucky because I'm half a day from the Newegg warehouse, who knows, but I honestly have seen a drive "just fail" in years. It has been so long I can actually remember my last two failures here at the shop. The first was the infamous IBM Deathstars which a local insurance company was unfortunate enough to get some HP desktops with 'em, and the other was the circa 2004 Maxtor DiamondMax which it turned out they used an early "green" solder that would break after repeated heat cycles.
But other than that knock on plastic I haven't seen a single unexpected failure. Sure drives have died, but I've always gotten plenty of warning, be it SMART, or the drive getting noisy, or Windows delayed write failures, something. maybe because I always ensure the case has good airflow?
And sadly I agree with ya on the RAID 0, but what could I do? If you've ever dealt with a gamer customer they are all "must have teh benchmarkz LOL!" with more money than sense. I mean his grandmama is running a fricking Skulltrail box because that is the SLOWEST hand me down the guy had! He is now on the top Intel chip (i970? He is the ONLY customer I'll buy Intel for since I switched my shop to AMD, only because he and his cousin have been buying from me for over a decade) with THREE fricking Nvidia Fermi cards and over a thousand watts of PSU and 16Gb of RAM in that bitch. Like I said, more money than brains and if the man wants RAID 0 Raptors? That is what he is gonna get. I have it set up with 1 touch backup so when he crashes it does a backup so at least he's covered.
But after having the SSDs fail so quick (his Intel in 7 months, his cousin's OCD? OZD, OCZ? Hell I can't remember, it failed in 5 months) they didn't trust another SSD and frankly I didn't blame them. I still think the tech is too new, they have too many bugs that still need working out. It is like the early HDDs which were flaky and easily died. Give them another 5 years and hopefully the tech will be mature. But until then nuh uh, not gonna do it. I pride myself on building machines that last (well except for the gamers who won't listen to anything but the benches, but they rarely keep a machine longer than 16 months before moving on) and SSDs are just too flaky ATM.
The problem with your thinking the current trends at Apple are a glitch is simple, Steve isn't there and unless/until Steve comes back I have a feeling you are gonna see "the return of the Pepsi guy" as far as bumbling incompetence goes.
It isn't just Lion either, look at how they burned and pretty much destroyed their small but quite lucrative market in movie/TV production by burning all the pros by replacing FCP with iMovie. Losing that market wasn't only stupid because of the money it generated, but even more than that it generated tremendous buzz for Apple by making them "the hip machine" which made the movies and TV shows you watch every day. You'd always see some director or producer on the behind the screens type shows in front of an Apple machine. Now that market is gone, switched to the competitors, and all that buzz is gone with it.
Then there is the "don't say malware and don't help the customer" stink, which wouldn't have happened under Jobs, hell I bet the folks here can think of plenty of others. As much as Ballmer is a sweaty used car salesman, throwing shit at a wall in a "me too!" fest hoping something sticks? It doesn't even compare to Apple without Jobs. You just have to give that man credit where credit is due, he is the one who cuts through the BS and has the vision to see what needs to be done.
Just let me leave with this little story I read by one of the guys who developed iDVD which i think illustrates why Apple has to have Jobs at the helm..."So we knew Steve was coming to look at what we were doing that day, so I had worked with my team to come up with all these mockups, with tabs for the various features and all the extras, when in walks Steve. He completely ignores what we've laid out and walks over to the whiteboard. He draws a box and says "This is the product. You drop a movie in the box and a single button comes up that says "burn" and that's it. that's what I want" and then he put down the marker and walked out while we stood there with our mouths open."
And THAT is why you HAVE TO have Jobs at the helm of Apple. Without him the team was thinking button fest and featureitis and BAM! Jobs walks in and cuts through the shit. Even though I'm not an Apple guy I will give that man credit, he has earned his place in that tiny circle of kings of their domain, where they can be named by just their last names, Jobs, Buffet, Gates, Ellison. Like 'em or hate 'em each one knew what they wanted and had the drive and big brass balls to get things done. If Lord forbid Steve kicks the bucket I have a feeling it'll be a seriously bad time at Apple, maybe even worse than the Pepsi guy.
I agree but there should be an up side to this, in that we'll get some solid data to see if Atwood at coding horror is correct that SSDs need to be judged on a hot/crazy scale due to the insanely high SSD failure rates.
The reason I personally won't recommend SSDs to customers or carry them myself is after having my two "must have teh benchmarkz!" gamer customer buy top o' the line SSDs both of them had the SSD fail without warning which for me is unacceptable. Sure they got them replaced under warranty, but so what? That didn't cover their downtime, the cost of the 1Tb drives they had to pick up to hold them over while they waited on the RMA, or the data they lost between their last backup and the SSD failure. in the end they went dual Raptors in RAID 0 with the 1TB as backup and game storage.
The nice thing about HDDs is in my experience one gets plenty of warning before they go tits up. The drive gets noisy, you get Windows delayed write failures, the drive starts running hot, you get SMART warnings, something. with both of the SSDs it was just...poof. Dead drive. on one I was able to retrieve a little bit of the data, on the other it wouldn't even show up in BIOS.
That is why unless I have a customer where IOPS is all like in TFA or someone that lives on a heavily mobile laptop AND has the time for daily backups or stores all their important data in the cloud to just stay away until they get the kinks worked out. it is still too new and IMHO they haven't really got the tech down yet, hence all the failures. I tell my customers to have a fat HDD with plenty of cache along with giving Windows 7 plenty of RAM (4Gb minimum, 8Gb is better) to really use Superfetch and preload their apps into memory and they'll be happy. Yeah it doesn't boot with SSD speed, but who boots anymore?
Uhhh..where the hell is the block button of which you speak? Because I tried in both Dragon and FF 5 and in both cases all I get is a choice of the link or the Google cache.
As for TFA, how is this not blackmail? It seems like a textbook definition to me. I just don't see how they aren't adding their own mugshot to the list with a stunt THIS brazen. After all this isn't like some neighborhood watch website where they are informing people there may be someone dangerous in their midst, no these guys set this thing up to get paid to make it go away. But then again I thought Yelp should have been busted for their "make bad reviews go bye bye, just shell out $$$" stunt.
Its a totally different audience anyway, it is like how I was arguing with someone who said tablets were "laptop and netbook killers" and I pointed out that is as stupid as saying this new compact is gonna put trucks out of business. One is for consuming content, the other for work.
And with TFA the Arduino is the ultimate DIY cheapo hacker toy. You can do nearly anything with that little sucker and if you can think of it somebody has probably already written the code for it. The device in TFA would be more of a fit for my local college, where they have plenty of programmers well fluent in Visual Studio and a rocketry and robotics dept. With something like TFA they could get the VS guys to write code for the R&R guys and cut down on the time it takes to make a prototype which would allow them to get more done in a semester.
so one is DIY, the other more SMB and college projects. Two different groups with different needs so there are different solutions. I just love how everything nowadays has to be an "X killer" instead of just a new product. Meh, whatever it takes to drive page views i guess. I'd rather read about this than something from the Linux troll Nichols on the WinTroll Thurott any day of the week. At least TFA is keeping the BS down to a manageable level.
How EXACTLY is "use distro X" being helpful in ANY way shape or form? you DO realize there are over 400 distros on distro watch, yes? So use distro X can easily last a couple of years installing weekly!
And if you would have bothered to look at the others posting in this thread EVERY SINGLE MEME I pointed out was called upon, sorry if you find that bothersome but I didn't feel like posting to each one individually to point out which meme they were using. you used TWO memes, the "you must have used Linux years ago!" meme along with "use distro x" which is why i chose yours.
And how many times do I have to say this? it is NOT the installation that is the problem, okay? NOT the installation. it is the 6 month upgrade deathmarch that takes a big steaming dump on the drivers!
Since you seem so sure it is me, why don't you perform this little test and see for yourself. Download Ubuntu 8, then upgrade to Ubuntu 11. That is only THREE YEARS worth of upgrades so you should have NO problems, right? i'm willing to bet my last dollar that if you get all the drivers working on Ubuntu 8 by the time you get to 11 half will be broken and there will be NO WAY for you to fix them EXCEPT "open up bash and type" which I've already point out is a fail since home users won't touch that CLI crap.
Look when MSFT puts out a superbomb like Vista and you gain NO SHARE while Apple, with a $1000 entry fee, gains like mad. then to quote one of the memes "ur doin it wrong". pick ANY distro, any one at all, I dare you. pick any one and take the.ISO from 5 years ago and upgrade to the current and see how much is broken. Remember that isn't even half what you get for Windows support so surely it'll work, right?
And frankly I don't give a shit what you think of me, I'm just tired of the bald faced lies. Linux is NOT ready for the desktop, it is NOT a drop in replacement for Windows, it is NOT easy to use, it is NOT stable! Reality and the BS being pushed is about as far apart as from here to Mars! this is why Best Buy, Staples, Walmart, and ASUS, who ALL tried selling Linux have ALL quit bothering and walked away. it isn't the price, it is the fact that the constant driver breakage makes your support costs insane.
One final thing...when was the last time you had to fire up a term? was it this month? This week? Today? if the answer is "at all" then it simply isn't ready because Joe and Sally average aren't messing with that 70s era terminal shit and frankly who can blame them. As far as they are concerned both Windows and OSX don't have a CLI, because they never ever in a million years touch the thing, ever. I have yet to see even simple problems fixed in Linux without CLI. CLI is great for servers but NOT for desktops. Good day sir.
Hell that is true for non MMOs as well. look up the sales numbers for Bioshock II and compare it to Bioshock I. While II made money they didn't sell squat compared to what was projected in no small part to word of mouth. Go to Amazon right now and half the posts are "Stuck with GFWL DRM, game is buggy, do NOT buy!" and you know what? People see that and move along. My kids were looking forward to Spore but after i pointed out what they were gonna have to do to have it (limited installs, buggy, major DRM BS) they said "Ewww, no thanks" and there was another lost sale. look at Driver 3 which I was all pumped to buy at release date simply for a single car the 1971 Pontiac Le Mans, because that was the car i spent most of my teen years behind the wheel of. Always online DRM bullshit? Bye bye, I can find another game.
If you treat your customers like shit they will simply avoid your product or pirate it. And noooo, the consoles do NOT stop piracy! Take a look on any Craigslist and you'll find hacked X360s preloaded with games, all for quite cheap. Most of the console guys I've talked to keep the hacked one for games they don't care about playing online, and a second one for XBL. Give us a good value for our money, treat us like customers and not scum, and you know what? We'll give you our money. Don't treat us worth a crap, put out buggy useless console rips? And watch us walk away and your profits with it. Sadly it doesn't matter how badly they treat the customer they'll simply whip off a PPT that blames it all on piracy anyway, never mind the fact that those that treat their customers well like GOG and Valve with steam are backing up the money trucks.
Is Ubuntu 11.04 new enough for you? Sadly I can replace every single response to this thread with a meme from Linux TM repository because it is nothing but the same old shit. Ur doin it wrong, use distro X, stable kernel ABI nonsense, I can go on all day.
You want proof, proof like a bitchslap in the face that is impossible to deny? riddle me this: Why does Dell, the third largest OEM on the planet, have to waste serious money and resources maintaining a badly out of date repo of their own? Because if they don't, even though they only offer Linux on a teeny tiny subset of their hardware Linux will take a big shit on the drivers that's why!
Accept it or not but if the third largest OEM can't even make the God damned drivers work without having their own fucking development team what chance does a little guy like me have? The answer, not a snowball's chance in hell. and I just love how the SAME GUYS that say "Linux is a drop in replacement for Windows" and post all those articles that say 'have an older PC? put Linux on it and save money" will in the very next breath say "Oh well you need to only buy hardware X that is certified by whom it is supposedly certified I have NO fucking idea, but it drives a stake in that "Linux can replace Windows" bullshit doesn't it? If I have to replace more than half the parts to use your OS why would I bother?
Accept it or not, frankly I don't care. After writing articles pointing out what I needed to sell your product, practically begging on forums to get treated worse than a nigger at a Klan convention, and be modded to oblivion for daring to point out your OS has serious issues? Frankly I give up, I wouldn't take your OS if you tied $50 bills and hookers to the thing.
But be man enough to admit it is BY geeks and FOR geeks and for the average folk it is a nightmare from hell. You have a SERIOUS OPPORTUNITY coming up, WinXP gets its plugged pulled in Apr 2014. That is literally hundreds of millions of machines out there that COULD be converted if you get the shops like mine onboard. But instead you'll spout the same "ur doin it wrong, use distro x, ur a Winshill" bullshit and then be shocked! shocked I tell you! When guys like me simply add more RAM or throw out the guts of all those PCs and put boards capable of running Windows 8 in them.
Are we gonna have to add that to the "ATM machine" and "PIN number" on the redundancy levels of redundant dept?
As for TFA it reads like something off of eHow. While I don't mind a general overview in layman's terms, especially if it is something heady like new theories of quantum physics, with TFA there is no "there" there. There is light on details and then there is "we have a thing that does some stuff" and this falls firmly in the latter. What makes it different from other light based solutions? What advantages does having multiple colors give you over plain white? A little more meat in TFA wouldn't have killed anybody ya know. This reads like something for Yahoo News not/.
You DO realize that you are spouting the same BS that has been spouted for soooo damned long it actually has its own meme,right? its called Use Distro X! you see it doesn't matter that I ALREADY tried Ubuntu/Mint (both of which are supposed to be the "easy Linux") Mepis and PCLOS...nope, I should have used Distro X!
Of course your post is worthless for TWO reasons, one I never said ANYTHING about initial installation, because other than a few nigglers initial installation went fine but that ain't the problem, it is the 6 month upgrade deathmarch that takes a big fat steaming dump on the drivers! And two if I used OpenSUSE and when the upgrade rolls around and it AGAIN takes a big old runny shit on the drivers? Well then i'll get told I should have used Gentoo, or Fedora, or some other version of X.
Tell ya what pal, you go download the OpenSUSE from 4 years ago, upgrade to the current version, and see how much continues to work! Because I get a MINIMUM of 8 years with Windows and that is if MSFT can actually stick to the release schedule which is doubtful. other wise I get a full 2 years past the next release or 2 years after the last service pack, whichever comes later. that translates to 10 YEARS for Win2K, 14 YEARS for XP, 7 years for Vista, and 11 years for Windows 7.
Show me a distro where I can get 7 years without the upgrade deathmarch taking a big dump on my drivers? THEN you have a point. oh and don't say "LTS!" because currently LTS has less than 2 years and LTS might as well be a codeword for "uses old software" since many software packages are tied to the kernel, which is dumb as fuck.
Because I have seen the same bullshit in my area with the natural gas wildcatters (which I assume is close enough to oil for this discussion) and here is how it goes. Wildcatter splits in two, the drilling side and the processing side, anything nasty comes up, like say....oh I don't know....they make a big fucking environmental mess? They let the drilling side take the hit as it is only leasing the assets from the other company and then dissolve the driller and start anew. lather rinse repeat.
This isn't some "little companies do it better" this is standard CYA "hey we'll keep all the profits and stick liabilities on the state and the fed!" total horseshit. Want to see the next dozen superfurnd sites? Well its coming and THIS is how they are gonna do it. Bend over and spread those cheeks pal, big business has figured out yet again how to stick you with the bill.
Re:This is why we don't listen to your rants
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I think Warren Buffet said it best "We are having a class war in this country...and my class is winning".. Never in our history have we had so much concentrated with so few while the rest fight over the scraps. i have to wonder...is this how Rome fell? did they become so corrupted by the ruling class that the people frankly quit giving a shit what happened because "anything has to be better than this"?
Because I live in a neighborhood with plenty of poor folks and I can tell you they would be happy to go communist, or even have our very own little Austrian because they believe ANYTHING has to be better than this. When so few of your population votes not because they don't care but because they no longer believe in the system then you are sitting on a powderkeg and any day it could blow.
Let me guess...the only people that make these mythical perfect Linux drivers are the guys writing for enterprise hardware, which if you are gonna pay that kind of money why not just buy Apple and have the resale value down the line? And doesn't that drive a stake in the whole "Linux is a drop in replacement for Windows!" meme that has been pushed here so often?
Because here are the different drivers that have broken on different hardware during the upgrade deathmarch, in no particular order, and we are talking BOTH non free AND FOSS since one of the helpful "hints" I got was "you should use FOSS drivers!" while not bothering to tell me most of the FOSS drivers are crippled, like the all in one printer that under FOSS drivers becomes a 'kinda sorta when it isn't crashing" printer with NO scanner or fax.
Well here goes, ATI, Broadcom, Realtek (both Ethernet and sound) Via, Ali, Sigmatek, Nvidia, oh and Intel which didn't die completely but instead became so flaky as to be unusable so I don't know whether or not dying would have been preferable.
I'm sorry but that is just nuts! In fact the ONLY box I had survive the upgrade deathmarch with 100% functionality was a circa 1999 P3 733Mhz Intel SFF. Needless to say there isn't exactly a market for shit more than a decade old and that box got to end up taking its functional Linux to the dump since I didn't have a use for something THAT damned slow.
Its actually VERY simple: Apple, BSD, Solaris, Windows, OS/2...what do all these have in common? A stable ABI that actually works. But as long as Torvalds is at the helm you can give it up, he'll NEVER let you have one. If he did he would have to admit he was wrong and he'd quit before doing that. Demand change, demand an ABI, or hell if you don't like ABIs design a way that Torvalds can Goatse the kernel without shatting on the drivers. Because as it is you will never gain above 3% max, simply because the majority isn't gonna deal with that broken driver bullshit. That crap was acceptable in 1992 but it ain't 1992 anymore, time for Linux to join the 21st century!
Sadly that isn't the problem with your idea. The problem with your idea is all the game engines are tied to the consoles which are some seriously old shit ATM and frankly from the looks of it the next gen won't be much better. Hell they are using an ATI 4xxx series for the new Nintendo console and that's what... 3 years and 2 generations behind? And the console isn't even released? I've already read that the next gen engines like the next Unreal are just sitting on ice because there is no way the consoles will run them and since nearly everyone is writing to the consoles FIRST there isn't any point in going beyond the craptastic 5+ year old console hardware.
So until we either see PC gaming make a resurgence (which I would argue its never left, look at the mountains o' cash valve makes off of Steam) frankly they could come up with an engine that renders the world in such mind blowing detail you cry at its beauty and angels sing its praises and frankly it won't matter because the shitty console garbage won't run the damned thing so nobody will use it.
Exactly Mr AC. If you are only gonna release a broken hunk of shit, why release at all? We PC gamers would be happier not wasting the money on.....oh I get it! Good way to kill your sales though. An example for me would be Mercenaries II, where the controls for the various moves are not explained anywhere in game which is real fun when you have to pull a quick time event and they just give you a foot symbol without an easy way to check and see WTF button is foot again.
Or Turning point: Fall of Liberty or TP as I call it because boy the only thing that game would be good for is wiping your ass. With that damned thing the game actually shows you the X360 buttons for most of the screens and can't even be controlled with a mouse on the menu! WTF? I might have actually had a little fun with that game if the damned developers had actually TRIED using a keyboard and mouse instead of plugging in an X360 controller because I can tell you without a controller its completely unplayable.
So PLEASE developers, if you aren't gonna bother then just....don't, okay? It isn't like we PC gamers don't have an incredible library of games that actually work, or have more new games to choose from than we could ever play. All your putting out shite ports does is burn the customer who will then hate you and avoid your company in the future.
Oh lord I've done that and I only wish I'd had a camera at the time, as it is like you found their off switch or something! They just stare and stare at the money, like they know there is a reason for what you've done but their brains just can't process it. The smarter ones will just ask "Why did you give me X?" or say "You've given me too much" and the others just sit there in vapor lock until you get tired of watching their gears slip and explain what you wanted.
It is a pretty damned sad state of affairs though when you see how widespread that is among HS grads. Last year a farmer cut through the fiber line to my home town and for 3 days the electronic registers would NOT work, for about half a day NO store was doing ANY business until the managers went and got a hold of pocket calcs and even then you'd have to explain what change you'd get as they were so used to the machines spitting out the change they'd try to give you dimes for everything.
It just shows you how worthless "teach to the test" is when you have to stand there behind someone and say "No M'am you don't need to give 8 dimes and 3 pennies for 83 cents, you can give her 3 quarters, a nickle, and 3 pennies. Yes I'm sure that's right". while I was at one shop I saw a manager give up an tell an employee to go get him $60 worth of dimes from the bank!
I just don't understand why guys that are supposed to be good at math just can't seem to grasp that yes Linux only has 1% and this is even giving Linux the benefit of the doubt by using heavily nerdish sites like/. in the counting!
As a PC retailer who has tried Ubuntu/Mint, Mepis, and PCLOS on the stacks of off lease office PCs that go through the shop I'll be happy to tell you why Linux is stuck at 1%...your driver model sucks! I'd love to be able to offer Linux on my PCs, as most of what my customers do can easily be done on any Web accessing OS, but until you fix the driver model so that the 6 month upgrades don't make the drivers shit themselves? Well I just can't carry your product.
I have 8+ year old XP boxes in the field where the only thing I've had to do was the occasional hardware upgrade but out of all the office boxes I tried not a single one survived the 6 month deathmarch unscathed with all having at least 1 driver shit itself, usually more than 1, and it didn't matter if I used FOSS or non FOSS drivers it was the same. But what can you expect when the head of Linux, old Linus Torvalds himself says Plans? We don't need no steenkin plans, it'll go like a virus LOL! yeah Linus its called the clap. That kind of attitude was fine when it was just him and his buds trading builds on IRC, but it ain't 1993 anymore and that kind of bullshit won't cut it in retail.
As a wise Linux user told me when I complained about the constant driver breaks "Yeah, it does that, you just have to get used to it" which is fine if your time is worthless and you think spending an evening in front of Bash while trawlling the forums for "fixes" is nice? Then I'm happy for you. But as a retailer I can tell you that kind of shit just won't fly if you want more than the 1% you currently have. if you want the public to embrace you then you have to give them what THEY want, not tell them they have to do things YOUR way. They will NOT "Open up Bash and type" and in fact see the term for what it is, a 70s throwback that doesn't belong on a modern OS, they will NOT trawl forums for "fixes", nor will they spend days looking up obsolete hardware lists in the hopes of finding something that they can buy that will actually work in Linux.
Fix this, make it so there is a stable ABI or hell sacrifice Linus to Cthulu if that is what it takes so drivers are "write once, use for years" and retailers like me will be happy to carry your product. think we like shelling out for Windows licenses? Hell no! But I can't sell a product where every 6 months something can be broken for a week or more because Linus got an itch and Goatse'd the kernel. It is simple math folks, you have X number of guys qualified to maintain drivers, you have Y times tens of thousands of drivers. Even if the driver devs never slept and spent 24/7 doing nothing but rewriting borked drivers you would ALWAYS be behind!
What is sad is it is a classic case of cargo cult usability where they try to ape the looks but not what makes the Chromium based browsers great, and that is Webkit.
For example I have to support users on a wide range of hardware, from circa 2004 office P4s to first gen netbooks and nettops to the latest multicores and since 3.6.x Firefox has frankly been unsuitable for purpose on anything less than a 3GHz P4 with HT and 2Gb of RAM and even then you better close that sucker out daily to keep FF from slamming the swap. Compare this to what I've switched my customers to Comodo Dragon (Chromium based with some nice extra security features) and even on the 1.8Ghz Sempron I use as a nettop the Dragon is fast, it NEVER loses responsiveness, doesn't slam the CPU and I can leave it on for days because unlike FF when I'm not doing anything with it the memory footprint stops growing which isn't the case with FF. And this is of course while having low rights mode on Win Vista and 7 which FF still hasn't implemented.
I personally think it is Gecko. I just don't think the engine is able to take all the extras being bolted onto it like separate plugin containers. The guys at Moz can ape Chrome all they want to, it isn't gonna turn Gecko into Webkit.
Meh I must have been playing too much Bioshock I&II lately because I thought it said protector and thought "There is something earlier than the Alpha series? Can i kill it?" as hunting Big Daddies and Alphas is my idea of a nice way to spend a Sunday afternoon.
As for TFA I wonder if they used this to "teach to the test" back in the olden days? Because while they may have been able to use protractors then I doubt today's kids would have a clue unless it was part of "no child not left behind". Hell you want to see sad just watch what happens when their little electronic cash registers fail at any store. the HS grads often can't even count out basic change without a calculator. Memorization may get them through the test but it sure as fuck don't help them with everyday life. All I have to say is thank God for Turbo tax as I'd hate to see these kids try to fill out a tax form without hand holding!
Uhhh...because unlike a slashvertisement this is a nice little free bit o' code that most of us would have never even thought of, much less thought of looking for, that helps make our days a little less sucky?
Anyone who has friends/family on social sites knows the "fun" of launching the page in the background only to have it start blaring some music because they posted a video or song to their wall. The only things I would change about this otherwise little snippet of goodness is have the ability to set background tabs to off by default, and have the icon change colors to indicate which state it is in. Blue for all off, green for background tabs off, red for all on.
But these are simply little nigglers which I'm sure will get added in the coming days. Thanks/. for posting this as it has already made my day a little nicer, and isn't that what programs should be for, making your day a little easier/nicer?
Next time someone tells you "Linux can't get bugs!" you just point them to this page which gives you how to write a Linux virus in 5 easy steps using plain old fashioned social engineering, the same stuff that I can confirm from my years of working repair is how the vast majority of Windows PCs get pwned.
It is actually extremely simple and logical if fanbois would only take a minute to think, instead of waving their Tux flags or iFlags or WinFlags...ALL OSes are extremely complex layers of code where even Torvalds himself can't tell you with 100% certainty what happens step by step when you launch a user mode application and then on top of all this complexity you add third party code and finally add the weakest link, the user him/herself and what do you get? Why a pwned machine of course!
All you can do is use defense in depth, use best security practices, and have frequent backups so that if the user bypasses all your defense so they can have the "LOL Kitteh!" screensaver with a trojan onboard you're ready to clean it up. I'd argue OOTB Win 7 is more secure than Linux or OSX, simply because MSFT learned from previous mistakes and now you have UAC ASLR, DEP, etc, etc. As you said SELinux or AppArmor would give the same protection but quickly becomes a royal PITA and you'll likely run into programs hanging like you do when trying to run XP as non admin.
Hi MR Teabagger! I just love how your choices are "fire everyone and become a communist state" or "let those poor 1%ers keep on NOT PAYING TAXES which will magically trickle upon the rest of us!". Funny your should bring up Buffet's company when Buffet himself, and I quote, says "There is something wrong with this country when my secretary pays more taxes than I do". And I notice you didn't say shit about the fact that NEVER in our history have we been at war and NOT raised taxes...ever.
So waste your mod points labeling me a troll for daring to call out your bullshit. but statistics as well as common sense shows that higher taxes on the wealthy increases employment and growth because if they get taxed if they keep it the rich will invest in businesses rather than pay the higher tax. Its common sense, the rich hoard, the poor spend and thus keep it in the economy. The majority of that money gates and his pals are sitting on is "dead money" for all intents and purposes might as well have been burnt or sent overseas never to return for all the good it did. This is why the "Obama bucks" stayed in the economy while "bailout baby bailout" went up in smoke.
If your mythological "Give teh rich more MONIES nom nom nom!" plan for this country weren't anything but a cash grab by the top 1%, who not only have historically low taxes to begin with but then take advantage of dodges like the "double dutch" or incorporating in Ireland (Another company you named MSFT does this so they don't pay shit on their profits while the little guy? Can't afford the scams) to end up paying NO taxes or getting a tax break, which they use to send jobs overseas (Look up "GE Tax break India" to read more) then your magical bullshit WOULD HAVE WORKED BY NOW but instead we are worse off then any other time!
But what do we expect from the "we're so full of shit you can smell us before you see us" party. Lets see how your philosophy has worked...we had trickle upon (81-88), voodoo economics (88-92) Lets give free trade status to those with NO environmental or workers regulations (92-00) the "Hey the rich only control 80% of the wealth, lets give them all MASSIVE tax breaks while starting TWO wars!" plan (00-08) and finally bailout the rich baby, bailout the rich (08-present). And now of course we have the "lets fuck the poor AGAIN!" debt 'compromise'. Well let me just say from the American people I wouldn't piss upon a rich man if he were on fire and when we have our own Arab Spring, which is coming mark my words, I'll be happy to knot the rope that we hang 'em with. I predict the smart rich will re-enact the fall of Saigon as they run for the choppers to get the fuck out of here, the rest? We got a lot of rope and a lot of trees.
The tree of liberty must be watered from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. I have a feeling it is just about time to do some watering.
Riiiight, because I really want to download every. stupid. video. I may or may not want to see even once! With flash I can spend a couple of seconds previewing and if it is crap close the tab. By your method I hope you got grandfathered in on an unlimited ISP account which I hate to break the news to ya will be going the way of 8-tracks and bell bottoms.
As for TFA? Works in Comodo Dragon, thanks dude. I have several friends I keep up with through social sites and the damned little video or audio clips they have on their walls drove me......well up a wall! Although a nice feature you could add if you read this is to have a "default off" option that will remember your choice between sessions. Also have the icon change colors (I'd vote blue for muted, red for on) so that once can look at a glance and know whether or not it is engaged.
But thanks for the extension dude, very cool. It looks like after the Firefox "piss off business users and extension developers!" debacle all the cool extensions will end up being on chrome. Now if the Chromium guys can only give the NoScript guy the hooks he needs I'll have every extension I liked in FF plus cool ones like TFA!
Actually it makes a pretty fucking BIG difference as frankly we've has the ACs but not the support ships which make the ACs nothing but sitting ducks thanks to surface to ship missiles, like oh say the big bastards China is currently building that can drop an AC from nearly 1000 miles away?
As we learned in WWII the ONLY way to protect something that fucking big and slow on the water is the "big blue blanket" where you not only have combat air patrols but a ring of surface ships providing fire support. As much as I disagreed with Reagan he knew this which was why he wanted a "600 ship Navy" as without the support vessels the carrier is a dead duck. As it is now they are ONLY useful against brown people whose best and most powerful weapons are AK47s.
I would also point out this ain't WWII and the simple fact is a predator drone can hit from 1000+ miles from home base which can be as simple as a parking lot with a couple of tents. again this makes adding MORE ACs when we are already broke stupid, pointless, and a waste. And while I agree there may be a few bases worth keeping (such as Rammstein in Germany where we have excellent medical facilities for our troops) the majority are cold war leftovers that frankly should have been shut down ages ago.
In the end it doesn't matter though, as the teabaggers are gonna ram through their "lets fuck teh poor while giving teh rich MORE MONIES nom nom nom" debt ceiling bill, pretty much ensuring within 5 years we have our own Arab Spring. A great man once said "The tree of liberty needs to be watered from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants" and I for one will be happy to risk the loss of my blood if it causes the massive bleeding out of several of the tyrants currently in control of this once great country.
Re:For a revolutionary workers party!
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We have THREE wars yet the top 1%ers (which now control more than 90% of the wealth in this country, leaving the other 90% to fight for the last 10%) have determined it is their God given right to have "More MONIES! Nom nom nom". NEVER in our history have we had a war and not raised taxes on the wealthy, EVER, yet here is the right wing more than happy to cheer on at least two of those wars while refusing to pay a fucking cent in. I guess war is great as long as it costs you nothing and you get to keep your breaks and make a tidy sum on your Raytheon stock huh?
I urge everyone to go here and let your congressmen know anyone who votes for this kick to the balls of the poor, which cuts provider payments to medicaid/care while not cutting a cent to the military or making the top 1%ers pay a penny WILL BE VOTED OUT next election! I also urge you to vote Green or new Whig next election, as it is obvious that a vote for a D or an R is now a "wasted vote" thanks to Citizens United. This is our last option before having an Arab Spring which I truly believe is coming.
Better to default than to take this piece of trash legislation.
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When I say "don't have time for backups" I mean they don't have time for DAILY backups which I wouldn't settle for less if they were running SSDs. There have been a few who haven't listened to me (which I tell them 'Don't come crying if you lose all your stuff') but most have followed my advice and made backups of important data their mantra. Some of the poorer ones use a cheap flash stick to keep their pictures, most have let me pick them up an external drive, but nearly all have taken my advice.
Oh and laptops? I try to steer folks away from those POS piles of plastic. I tell them "buy the cheapest junker you can because it doesn't matter, it'll be dead in 3 years or less regardless" and tell them to take the money they save and let me build a good solid multicore desktop, which will easily last them for many years. Just the other day I had the checkout girl in the local grocery ask me if I'd come out to her car to look at a PC given to her by a friend to "see if you can upgrade it a little" cause the poor thing had two kids and a checkout girl salary and I nearly fell over laughing when I saw what she had. When it looked like she was gonna cry I said "Oh I'm not laughing at you honey, don't cry, I was laughing because I built that old tank nearly a decade ago out of spare parts at the shop. On the bottom I wrote "Frankenputer" in marker which I showed her. I sold her a late model P4 with board, RAM and threw in a CD burner for $60 with install included and old Frankie is still going after all these years.
As for HDDs failing? I don't know, maybe I'm lucky because I'm half a day from the Newegg warehouse, who knows, but I honestly have seen a drive "just fail" in years. It has been so long I can actually remember my last two failures here at the shop. The first was the infamous IBM Deathstars which a local insurance company was unfortunate enough to get some HP desktops with 'em, and the other was the circa 2004 Maxtor DiamondMax which it turned out they used an early "green" solder that would break after repeated heat cycles.
But other than that knock on plastic I haven't seen a single unexpected failure. Sure drives have died, but I've always gotten plenty of warning, be it SMART, or the drive getting noisy, or Windows delayed write failures, something. maybe because I always ensure the case has good airflow?
And sadly I agree with ya on the RAID 0, but what could I do? If you've ever dealt with a gamer customer they are all "must have teh benchmarkz LOL!" with more money than sense. I mean his grandmama is running a fricking Skulltrail box because that is the SLOWEST hand me down the guy had! He is now on the top Intel chip (i970? He is the ONLY customer I'll buy Intel for since I switched my shop to AMD, only because he and his cousin have been buying from me for over a decade) with THREE fricking Nvidia Fermi cards and over a thousand watts of PSU and 16Gb of RAM in that bitch. Like I said, more money than brains and if the man wants RAID 0 Raptors? That is what he is gonna get. I have it set up with 1 touch backup so when he crashes it does a backup so at least he's covered.
But after having the SSDs fail so quick (his Intel in 7 months, his cousin's OCD? OZD, OCZ? Hell I can't remember, it failed in 5 months) they didn't trust another SSD and frankly I didn't blame them. I still think the tech is too new, they have too many bugs that still need working out. It is like the early HDDs which were flaky and easily died. Give them another 5 years and hopefully the tech will be mature. But until then nuh uh, not gonna do it. I pride myself on building machines that last (well except for the gamers who won't listen to anything but the benches, but they rarely keep a machine longer than 16 months before moving on) and SSDs are just too flaky ATM.
The problem with your thinking the current trends at Apple are a glitch is simple, Steve isn't there and unless/until Steve comes back I have a feeling you are gonna see "the return of the Pepsi guy" as far as bumbling incompetence goes.
It isn't just Lion either, look at how they burned and pretty much destroyed their small but quite lucrative market in movie/TV production by burning all the pros by replacing FCP with iMovie. Losing that market wasn't only stupid because of the money it generated, but even more than that it generated tremendous buzz for Apple by making them "the hip machine" which made the movies and TV shows you watch every day. You'd always see some director or producer on the behind the screens type shows in front of an Apple machine. Now that market is gone, switched to the competitors, and all that buzz is gone with it.
Then there is the "don't say malware and don't help the customer" stink, which wouldn't have happened under Jobs, hell I bet the folks here can think of plenty of others. As much as Ballmer is a sweaty used car salesman, throwing shit at a wall in a "me too!" fest hoping something sticks? It doesn't even compare to Apple without Jobs. You just have to give that man credit where credit is due, he is the one who cuts through the BS and has the vision to see what needs to be done.
Just let me leave with this little story I read by one of the guys who developed iDVD which i think illustrates why Apple has to have Jobs at the helm..."So we knew Steve was coming to look at what we were doing that day, so I had worked with my team to come up with all these mockups, with tabs for the various features and all the extras, when in walks Steve. He completely ignores what we've laid out and walks over to the whiteboard. He draws a box and says "This is the product. You drop a movie in the box and a single button comes up that says "burn" and that's it. that's what I want" and then he put down the marker and walked out while we stood there with our mouths open."
And THAT is why you HAVE TO have Jobs at the helm of Apple. Without him the team was thinking button fest and featureitis and BAM! Jobs walks in and cuts through the shit. Even though I'm not an Apple guy I will give that man credit, he has earned his place in that tiny circle of kings of their domain, where they can be named by just their last names, Jobs, Buffet, Gates, Ellison. Like 'em or hate 'em each one knew what they wanted and had the drive and big brass balls to get things done. If Lord forbid Steve kicks the bucket I have a feeling it'll be a seriously bad time at Apple, maybe even worse than the Pepsi guy.
I agree but there should be an up side to this, in that we'll get some solid data to see if Atwood at coding horror is correct that SSDs need to be judged on a hot/crazy scale due to the insanely high SSD failure rates.
The reason I personally won't recommend SSDs to customers or carry them myself is after having my two "must have teh benchmarkz!" gamer customer buy top o' the line SSDs both of them had the SSD fail without warning which for me is unacceptable. Sure they got them replaced under warranty, but so what? That didn't cover their downtime, the cost of the 1Tb drives they had to pick up to hold them over while they waited on the RMA, or the data they lost between their last backup and the SSD failure. in the end they went dual Raptors in RAID 0 with the 1TB as backup and game storage.
The nice thing about HDDs is in my experience one gets plenty of warning before they go tits up. The drive gets noisy, you get Windows delayed write failures, the drive starts running hot, you get SMART warnings, something. with both of the SSDs it was just...poof. Dead drive. on one I was able to retrieve a little bit of the data, on the other it wouldn't even show up in BIOS.
That is why unless I have a customer where IOPS is all like in TFA or someone that lives on a heavily mobile laptop AND has the time for daily backups or stores all their important data in the cloud to just stay away until they get the kinks worked out. it is still too new and IMHO they haven't really got the tech down yet, hence all the failures. I tell my customers to have a fat HDD with plenty of cache along with giving Windows 7 plenty of RAM (4Gb minimum, 8Gb is better) to really use Superfetch and preload their apps into memory and they'll be happy. Yeah it doesn't boot with SSD speed, but who boots anymore?
Uhhh..where the hell is the block button of which you speak? Because I tried in both Dragon and FF 5 and in both cases all I get is a choice of the link or the Google cache.
As for TFA, how is this not blackmail? It seems like a textbook definition to me. I just don't see how they aren't adding their own mugshot to the list with a stunt THIS brazen. After all this isn't like some neighborhood watch website where they are informing people there may be someone dangerous in their midst, no these guys set this thing up to get paid to make it go away. But then again I thought Yelp should have been busted for their "make bad reviews go bye bye, just shell out $$$" stunt.
Its a totally different audience anyway, it is like how I was arguing with someone who said tablets were "laptop and netbook killers" and I pointed out that is as stupid as saying this new compact is gonna put trucks out of business. One is for consuming content, the other for work.
And with TFA the Arduino is the ultimate DIY cheapo hacker toy. You can do nearly anything with that little sucker and if you can think of it somebody has probably already written the code for it. The device in TFA would be more of a fit for my local college, where they have plenty of programmers well fluent in Visual Studio and a rocketry and robotics dept. With something like TFA they could get the VS guys to write code for the R&R guys and cut down on the time it takes to make a prototype which would allow them to get more done in a semester.
so one is DIY, the other more SMB and college projects. Two different groups with different needs so there are different solutions. I just love how everything nowadays has to be an "X killer" instead of just a new product. Meh, whatever it takes to drive page views i guess. I'd rather read about this than something from the Linux troll Nichols on the WinTroll Thurott any day of the week. At least TFA is keeping the BS down to a manageable level.
How EXACTLY is "use distro X" being helpful in ANY way shape or form? you DO realize there are over 400 distros on distro watch, yes? So use distro X can easily last a couple of years installing weekly!
And if you would have bothered to look at the others posting in this thread EVERY SINGLE MEME I pointed out was called upon, sorry if you find that bothersome but I didn't feel like posting to each one individually to point out which meme they were using. you used TWO memes, the "you must have used Linux years ago!" meme along with "use distro x" which is why i chose yours.
And how many times do I have to say this? it is NOT the installation that is the problem, okay? NOT the installation. it is the 6 month upgrade deathmarch that takes a big steaming dump on the drivers!
Since you seem so sure it is me, why don't you perform this little test and see for yourself. Download Ubuntu 8, then upgrade to Ubuntu 11. That is only THREE YEARS worth of upgrades so you should have NO problems, right? i'm willing to bet my last dollar that if you get all the drivers working on Ubuntu 8 by the time you get to 11 half will be broken and there will be NO WAY for you to fix them EXCEPT "open up bash and type" which I've already point out is a fail since home users won't touch that CLI crap.
Look when MSFT puts out a superbomb like Vista and you gain NO SHARE while Apple, with a $1000 entry fee, gains like mad. then to quote one of the memes "ur doin it wrong". pick ANY distro, any one at all, I dare you. pick any one and take the .ISO from 5 years ago and upgrade to the current and see how much is broken. Remember that isn't even half what you get for Windows support so surely it'll work, right?
And frankly I don't give a shit what you think of me, I'm just tired of the bald faced lies. Linux is NOT ready for the desktop, it is NOT a drop in replacement for Windows, it is NOT easy to use, it is NOT stable! Reality and the BS being pushed is about as far apart as from here to Mars! this is why Best Buy, Staples, Walmart, and ASUS, who ALL tried selling Linux have ALL quit bothering and walked away. it isn't the price, it is the fact that the constant driver breakage makes your support costs insane.
One final thing...when was the last time you had to fire up a term? was it this month? This week? Today? if the answer is "at all" then it simply isn't ready because Joe and Sally average aren't messing with that 70s era terminal shit and frankly who can blame them. As far as they are concerned both Windows and OSX don't have a CLI, because they never ever in a million years touch the thing, ever. I have yet to see even simple problems fixed in Linux without CLI. CLI is great for servers but NOT for desktops. Good day sir.
Hell that is true for non MMOs as well. look up the sales numbers for Bioshock II and compare it to Bioshock I. While II made money they didn't sell squat compared to what was projected in no small part to word of mouth. Go to Amazon right now and half the posts are "Stuck with GFWL DRM, game is buggy, do NOT buy!" and you know what? People see that and move along. My kids were looking forward to Spore but after i pointed out what they were gonna have to do to have it (limited installs, buggy, major DRM BS) they said "Ewww, no thanks" and there was another lost sale. look at Driver 3 which I was all pumped to buy at release date simply for a single car the 1971 Pontiac Le Mans, because that was the car i spent most of my teen years behind the wheel of. Always online DRM bullshit? Bye bye, I can find another game.
If you treat your customers like shit they will simply avoid your product or pirate it. And noooo, the consoles do NOT stop piracy! Take a look on any Craigslist and you'll find hacked X360s preloaded with games, all for quite cheap. Most of the console guys I've talked to keep the hacked one for games they don't care about playing online, and a second one for XBL. Give us a good value for our money, treat us like customers and not scum, and you know what? We'll give you our money. Don't treat us worth a crap, put out buggy useless console rips? And watch us walk away and your profits with it. Sadly it doesn't matter how badly they treat the customer they'll simply whip off a PPT that blames it all on piracy anyway, never mind the fact that those that treat their customers well like GOG and Valve with steam are backing up the money trucks.
Is Ubuntu 11.04 new enough for you? Sadly I can replace every single response to this thread with a meme from Linux TM repository because it is nothing but the same old shit. Ur doin it wrong, use distro X, stable kernel ABI nonsense, I can go on all day.
You want proof, proof like a bitchslap in the face that is impossible to deny? riddle me this: Why does Dell, the third largest OEM on the planet, have to waste serious money and resources maintaining a badly out of date repo of their own? Because if they don't, even though they only offer Linux on a teeny tiny subset of their hardware Linux will take a big shit on the drivers that's why!
Accept it or not but if the third largest OEM can't even make the God damned drivers work without having their own fucking development team what chance does a little guy like me have? The answer, not a snowball's chance in hell. and I just love how the SAME GUYS that say "Linux is a drop in replacement for Windows" and post all those articles that say 'have an older PC? put Linux on it and save money" will in the very next breath say "Oh well you need to only buy hardware X that is certified by whom it is supposedly certified I have NO fucking idea, but it drives a stake in that "Linux can replace Windows" bullshit doesn't it? If I have to replace more than half the parts to use your OS why would I bother?
Accept it or not, frankly I don't care. After writing articles pointing out what I needed to sell your product, practically begging on forums to get treated worse than a nigger at a Klan convention, and be modded to oblivion for daring to point out your OS has serious issues? Frankly I give up, I wouldn't take your OS if you tied $50 bills and hookers to the thing.
But be man enough to admit it is BY geeks and FOR geeks and for the average folk it is a nightmare from hell. You have a SERIOUS OPPORTUNITY coming up, WinXP gets its plugged pulled in Apr 2014. That is literally hundreds of millions of machines out there that COULD be converted if you get the shops like mine onboard. But instead you'll spout the same "ur doin it wrong, use distro x, ur a Winshill" bullshit and then be shocked! shocked I tell you! When guys like me simply add more RAM or throw out the guts of all those PCs and put boards capable of running Windows 8 in them.
Are we gonna have to add that to the "ATM machine" and "PIN number" on the redundancy levels of redundant dept?
As for TFA it reads like something off of eHow. While I don't mind a general overview in layman's terms, especially if it is something heady like new theories of quantum physics, with TFA there is no "there" there. There is light on details and then there is "we have a thing that does some stuff" and this falls firmly in the latter. What makes it different from other light based solutions? What advantages does having multiple colors give you over plain white? A little more meat in TFA wouldn't have killed anybody ya know. This reads like something for Yahoo News not /.
You DO realize that you are spouting the same BS that has been spouted for soooo damned long it actually has its own meme,right? its called Use Distro X! you see it doesn't matter that I ALREADY tried Ubuntu/Mint (both of which are supposed to be the "easy Linux") Mepis and PCLOS...nope, I should have used Distro X!
Of course your post is worthless for TWO reasons, one I never said ANYTHING about initial installation, because other than a few nigglers initial installation went fine but that ain't the problem, it is the 6 month upgrade deathmarch that takes a big fat steaming dump on the drivers! And two if I used OpenSUSE and when the upgrade rolls around and it AGAIN takes a big old runny shit on the drivers? Well then i'll get told I should have used Gentoo, or Fedora, or some other version of X.
Tell ya what pal, you go download the OpenSUSE from 4 years ago, upgrade to the current version, and see how much continues to work! Because I get a MINIMUM of 8 years with Windows and that is if MSFT can actually stick to the release schedule which is doubtful. other wise I get a full 2 years past the next release or 2 years after the last service pack, whichever comes later. that translates to 10 YEARS for Win2K, 14 YEARS for XP, 7 years for Vista, and 11 years for Windows 7.
Show me a distro where I can get 7 years without the upgrade deathmarch taking a big dump on my drivers? THEN you have a point. oh and don't say "LTS!" because currently LTS has less than 2 years and LTS might as well be a codeword for "uses old software" since many software packages are tied to the kernel, which is dumb as fuck.
Because I have seen the same bullshit in my area with the natural gas wildcatters (which I assume is close enough to oil for this discussion) and here is how it goes. Wildcatter splits in two, the drilling side and the processing side, anything nasty comes up, like say....oh I don't know....they make a big fucking environmental mess? They let the drilling side take the hit as it is only leasing the assets from the other company and then dissolve the driller and start anew. lather rinse repeat.
This isn't some "little companies do it better" this is standard CYA "hey we'll keep all the profits and stick liabilities on the state and the fed!" total horseshit. Want to see the next dozen superfurnd sites? Well its coming and THIS is how they are gonna do it. Bend over and spread those cheeks pal, big business has figured out yet again how to stick you with the bill.
I think Warren Buffet said it best "We are having a class war in this country...and my class is winning".. Never in our history have we had so much concentrated with so few while the rest fight over the scraps. i have to wonder...is this how Rome fell? did they become so corrupted by the ruling class that the people frankly quit giving a shit what happened because "anything has to be better than this"?
Because I live in a neighborhood with plenty of poor folks and I can tell you they would be happy to go communist, or even have our very own little Austrian because they believe ANYTHING has to be better than this. When so few of your population votes not because they don't care but because they no longer believe in the system then you are sitting on a powderkeg and any day it could blow.
Let me guess...the only people that make these mythical perfect Linux drivers are the guys writing for enterprise hardware, which if you are gonna pay that kind of money why not just buy Apple and have the resale value down the line? And doesn't that drive a stake in the whole "Linux is a drop in replacement for Windows!" meme that has been pushed here so often?
Because here are the different drivers that have broken on different hardware during the upgrade deathmarch, in no particular order, and we are talking BOTH non free AND FOSS since one of the helpful "hints" I got was "you should use FOSS drivers!" while not bothering to tell me most of the FOSS drivers are crippled, like the all in one printer that under FOSS drivers becomes a 'kinda sorta when it isn't crashing" printer with NO scanner or fax.
Well here goes, ATI, Broadcom, Realtek (both Ethernet and sound) Via, Ali, Sigmatek, Nvidia, oh and Intel which didn't die completely but instead became so flaky as to be unusable so I don't know whether or not dying would have been preferable.
I'm sorry but that is just nuts! In fact the ONLY box I had survive the upgrade deathmarch with 100% functionality was a circa 1999 P3 733Mhz Intel SFF. Needless to say there isn't exactly a market for shit more than a decade old and that box got to end up taking its functional Linux to the dump since I didn't have a use for something THAT damned slow.
Its actually VERY simple: Apple, BSD, Solaris, Windows, OS/2...what do all these have in common? A stable ABI that actually works. But as long as Torvalds is at the helm you can give it up, he'll NEVER let you have one. If he did he would have to admit he was wrong and he'd quit before doing that. Demand change, demand an ABI, or hell if you don't like ABIs design a way that Torvalds can Goatse the kernel without shatting on the drivers. Because as it is you will never gain above 3% max, simply because the majority isn't gonna deal with that broken driver bullshit. That crap was acceptable in 1992 but it ain't 1992 anymore, time for Linux to join the 21st century!
Sadly that isn't the problem with your idea. The problem with your idea is all the game engines are tied to the consoles which are some seriously old shit ATM and frankly from the looks of it the next gen won't be much better. Hell they are using an ATI 4xxx series for the new Nintendo console and that's what... 3 years and 2 generations behind? And the console isn't even released? I've already read that the next gen engines like the next Unreal are just sitting on ice because there is no way the consoles will run them and since nearly everyone is writing to the consoles FIRST there isn't any point in going beyond the craptastic 5+ year old console hardware.
So until we either see PC gaming make a resurgence (which I would argue its never left, look at the mountains o' cash valve makes off of Steam) frankly they could come up with an engine that renders the world in such mind blowing detail you cry at its beauty and angels sing its praises and frankly it won't matter because the shitty console garbage won't run the damned thing so nobody will use it.
Exactly Mr AC. If you are only gonna release a broken hunk of shit, why release at all? We PC gamers would be happier not wasting the money on.....oh I get it! Good way to kill your sales though. An example for me would be Mercenaries II, where the controls for the various moves are not explained anywhere in game which is real fun when you have to pull a quick time event and they just give you a foot symbol without an easy way to check and see WTF button is foot again.
Or Turning point: Fall of Liberty or TP as I call it because boy the only thing that game would be good for is wiping your ass. With that damned thing the game actually shows you the X360 buttons for most of the screens and can't even be controlled with a mouse on the menu! WTF? I might have actually had a little fun with that game if the damned developers had actually TRIED using a keyboard and mouse instead of plugging in an X360 controller because I can tell you without a controller its completely unplayable.
So PLEASE developers, if you aren't gonna bother then just....don't, okay? It isn't like we PC gamers don't have an incredible library of games that actually work, or have more new games to choose from than we could ever play. All your putting out shite ports does is burn the customer who will then hate you and avoid your company in the future.
Oh lord I've done that and I only wish I'd had a camera at the time, as it is like you found their off switch or something! They just stare and stare at the money, like they know there is a reason for what you've done but their brains just can't process it. The smarter ones will just ask "Why did you give me X?" or say "You've given me too much" and the others just sit there in vapor lock until you get tired of watching their gears slip and explain what you wanted.
It is a pretty damned sad state of affairs though when you see how widespread that is among HS grads. Last year a farmer cut through the fiber line to my home town and for 3 days the electronic registers would NOT work, for about half a day NO store was doing ANY business until the managers went and got a hold of pocket calcs and even then you'd have to explain what change you'd get as they were so used to the machines spitting out the change they'd try to give you dimes for everything.
It just shows you how worthless "teach to the test" is when you have to stand there behind someone and say "No M'am you don't need to give 8 dimes and 3 pennies for 83 cents, you can give her 3 quarters, a nickle, and 3 pennies. Yes I'm sure that's right". while I was at one shop I saw a manager give up an tell an employee to go get him $60 worth of dimes from the bank!
I just don't understand why guys that are supposed to be good at math just can't seem to grasp that yes Linux only has 1% and this is even giving Linux the benefit of the doubt by using heavily nerdish sites like /. in the counting!
As a PC retailer who has tried Ubuntu/Mint, Mepis, and PCLOS on the stacks of off lease office PCs that go through the shop I'll be happy to tell you why Linux is stuck at 1%...your driver model sucks! I'd love to be able to offer Linux on my PCs, as most of what my customers do can easily be done on any Web accessing OS, but until you fix the driver model so that the 6 month upgrades don't make the drivers shit themselves? Well I just can't carry your product.
I have 8+ year old XP boxes in the field where the only thing I've had to do was the occasional hardware upgrade but out of all the office boxes I tried not a single one survived the 6 month deathmarch unscathed with all having at least 1 driver shit itself, usually more than 1, and it didn't matter if I used FOSS or non FOSS drivers it was the same. But what can you expect when the head of Linux, old Linus Torvalds himself says Plans? We don't need no steenkin plans, it'll go like a virus LOL! yeah Linus its called the clap. That kind of attitude was fine when it was just him and his buds trading builds on IRC, but it ain't 1993 anymore and that kind of bullshit won't cut it in retail.
As a wise Linux user told me when I complained about the constant driver breaks "Yeah, it does that, you just have to get used to it" which is fine if your time is worthless and you think spending an evening in front of Bash while trawlling the forums for "fixes" is nice? Then I'm happy for you. But as a retailer I can tell you that kind of shit just won't fly if you want more than the 1% you currently have. if you want the public to embrace you then you have to give them what THEY want, not tell them they have to do things YOUR way. They will NOT "Open up Bash and type" and in fact see the term for what it is, a 70s throwback that doesn't belong on a modern OS, they will NOT trawl forums for "fixes", nor will they spend days looking up obsolete hardware lists in the hopes of finding something that they can buy that will actually work in Linux.
Fix this, make it so there is a stable ABI or hell sacrifice Linus to Cthulu if that is what it takes so drivers are "write once, use for years" and retailers like me will be happy to carry your product. think we like shelling out for Windows licenses? Hell no! But I can't sell a product where every 6 months something can be broken for a week or more because Linus got an itch and Goatse'd the kernel. It is simple math folks, you have X number of guys qualified to maintain drivers, you have Y times tens of thousands of drivers. Even if the driver devs never slept and spent 24/7 doing nothing but rewriting borked drivers you would ALWAYS be behind!
What is sad is it is a classic case of cargo cult usability where they try to ape the looks but not what makes the Chromium based browsers great, and that is Webkit.
For example I have to support users on a wide range of hardware, from circa 2004 office P4s to first gen netbooks and nettops to the latest multicores and since 3.6.x Firefox has frankly been unsuitable for purpose on anything less than a 3GHz P4 with HT and 2Gb of RAM and even then you better close that sucker out daily to keep FF from slamming the swap. Compare this to what I've switched my customers to Comodo Dragon (Chromium based with some nice extra security features) and even on the 1.8Ghz Sempron I use as a nettop the Dragon is fast, it NEVER loses responsiveness, doesn't slam the CPU and I can leave it on for days because unlike FF when I'm not doing anything with it the memory footprint stops growing which isn't the case with FF. And this is of course while having low rights mode on Win Vista and 7 which FF still hasn't implemented.
I personally think it is Gecko. I just don't think the engine is able to take all the extras being bolted onto it like separate plugin containers. The guys at Moz can ape Chrome all they want to, it isn't gonna turn Gecko into Webkit.
Meh I must have been playing too much Bioshock I&II lately because I thought it said protector and thought "There is something earlier than the Alpha series? Can i kill it?" as hunting Big Daddies and Alphas is my idea of a nice way to spend a Sunday afternoon.
As for TFA I wonder if they used this to "teach to the test" back in the olden days? Because while they may have been able to use protractors then I doubt today's kids would have a clue unless it was part of "no child not left behind". Hell you want to see sad just watch what happens when their little electronic cash registers fail at any store. the HS grads often can't even count out basic change without a calculator. Memorization may get them through the test but it sure as fuck don't help them with everyday life. All I have to say is thank God for Turbo tax as I'd hate to see these kids try to fill out a tax form without hand holding!
Uhhh...because unlike a slashvertisement this is a nice little free bit o' code that most of us would have never even thought of, much less thought of looking for, that helps make our days a little less sucky?
Anyone who has friends/family on social sites knows the "fun" of launching the page in the background only to have it start blaring some music because they posted a video or song to their wall. The only things I would change about this otherwise little snippet of goodness is have the ability to set background tabs to off by default, and have the icon change colors to indicate which state it is in. Blue for all off, green for background tabs off, red for all on.
But these are simply little nigglers which I'm sure will get added in the coming days. Thanks /. for posting this as it has already made my day a little nicer, and isn't that what programs should be for, making your day a little easier/nicer?
Next time someone tells you "Linux can't get bugs!" you just point them to this page which gives you how to write a Linux virus in 5 easy steps using plain old fashioned social engineering, the same stuff that I can confirm from my years of working repair is how the vast majority of Windows PCs get pwned.
It is actually extremely simple and logical if fanbois would only take a minute to think, instead of waving their Tux flags or iFlags or WinFlags...ALL OSes are extremely complex layers of code where even Torvalds himself can't tell you with 100% certainty what happens step by step when you launch a user mode application and then on top of all this complexity you add third party code and finally add the weakest link, the user him/herself and what do you get? Why a pwned machine of course!
All you can do is use defense in depth, use best security practices, and have frequent backups so that if the user bypasses all your defense so they can have the "LOL Kitteh!" screensaver with a trojan onboard you're ready to clean it up. I'd argue OOTB Win 7 is more secure than Linux or OSX, simply because MSFT learned from previous mistakes and now you have UAC ASLR, DEP, etc, etc. As you said SELinux or AppArmor would give the same protection but quickly becomes a royal PITA and you'll likely run into programs hanging like you do when trying to run XP as non admin.
Hi MR Teabagger! I just love how your choices are "fire everyone and become a communist state" or "let those poor 1%ers keep on NOT PAYING TAXES which will magically trickle upon the rest of us!". Funny your should bring up Buffet's company when Buffet himself, and I quote, says "There is something wrong with this country when my secretary pays more taxes than I do". And I notice you didn't say shit about the fact that NEVER in our history have we been at war and NOT raised taxes...ever.
So waste your mod points labeling me a troll for daring to call out your bullshit. but statistics as well as common sense shows that higher taxes on the wealthy increases employment and growth because if they get taxed if they keep it the rich will invest in businesses rather than pay the higher tax. Its common sense, the rich hoard, the poor spend and thus keep it in the economy. The majority of that money gates and his pals are sitting on is "dead money" for all intents and purposes might as well have been burnt or sent overseas never to return for all the good it did. This is why the "Obama bucks" stayed in the economy while "bailout baby bailout" went up in smoke.
If your mythological "Give teh rich more MONIES nom nom nom!" plan for this country weren't anything but a cash grab by the top 1%, who not only have historically low taxes to begin with but then take advantage of dodges like the "double dutch" or incorporating in Ireland (Another company you named MSFT does this so they don't pay shit on their profits while the little guy? Can't afford the scams) to end up paying NO taxes or getting a tax break, which they use to send jobs overseas (Look up "GE Tax break India" to read more) then your magical bullshit WOULD HAVE WORKED BY NOW but instead we are worse off then any other time!
But what do we expect from the "we're so full of shit you can smell us before you see us" party. Lets see how your philosophy has worked...we had trickle upon (81-88), voodoo economics (88-92) Lets give free trade status to those with NO environmental or workers regulations (92-00) the "Hey the rich only control 80% of the wealth, lets give them all MASSIVE tax breaks while starting TWO wars!" plan (00-08) and finally bailout the rich baby, bailout the rich (08-present). And now of course we have the "lets fuck the poor AGAIN!" debt 'compromise'. Well let me just say from the American people I wouldn't piss upon a rich man if he were on fire and when we have our own Arab Spring, which is coming mark my words, I'll be happy to knot the rope that we hang 'em with. I predict the smart rich will re-enact the fall of Saigon as they run for the choppers to get the fuck out of here, the rest? We got a lot of rope and a lot of trees.
The tree of liberty must be watered from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. I have a feeling it is just about time to do some watering.
Riiiight, because I really want to download every. stupid. video. I may or may not want to see even once! With flash I can spend a couple of seconds previewing and if it is crap close the tab. By your method I hope you got grandfathered in on an unlimited ISP account which I hate to break the news to ya will be going the way of 8-tracks and bell bottoms.
As for TFA? Works in Comodo Dragon, thanks dude. I have several friends I keep up with through social sites and the damned little video or audio clips they have on their walls drove me......well up a wall! Although a nice feature you could add if you read this is to have a "default off" option that will remember your choice between sessions. Also have the icon change colors (I'd vote blue for muted, red for on) so that once can look at a glance and know whether or not it is engaged.
But thanks for the extension dude, very cool. It looks like after the Firefox "piss off business users and extension developers!" debacle all the cool extensions will end up being on chrome. Now if the Chromium guys can only give the NoScript guy the hooks he needs I'll have every extension I liked in FF plus cool ones like TFA!
Actually it makes a pretty fucking BIG difference as frankly we've has the ACs but not the support ships which make the ACs nothing but sitting ducks thanks to surface to ship missiles, like oh say the big bastards China is currently building that can drop an AC from nearly 1000 miles away?
As we learned in WWII the ONLY way to protect something that fucking big and slow on the water is the "big blue blanket" where you not only have combat air patrols but a ring of surface ships providing fire support. As much as I disagreed with Reagan he knew this which was why he wanted a "600 ship Navy" as without the support vessels the carrier is a dead duck. As it is now they are ONLY useful against brown people whose best and most powerful weapons are AK47s.
I would also point out this ain't WWII and the simple fact is a predator drone can hit from 1000+ miles from home base which can be as simple as a parking lot with a couple of tents. again this makes adding MORE ACs when we are already broke stupid, pointless, and a waste. And while I agree there may be a few bases worth keeping (such as Rammstein in Germany where we have excellent medical facilities for our troops) the majority are cold war leftovers that frankly should have been shut down ages ago.
In the end it doesn't matter though, as the teabaggers are gonna ram through their "lets fuck teh poor while giving teh rich MORE MONIES nom nom nom" debt ceiling bill, pretty much ensuring within 5 years we have our own Arab Spring. A great man once said "The tree of liberty needs to be watered from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants" and I for one will be happy to risk the loss of my blood if it causes the massive bleeding out of several of the tyrants currently in control of this once great country.
We have THREE wars yet the top 1%ers (which now control more than 90% of the wealth in this country, leaving the other 90% to fight for the last 10%) have determined it is their God given right to have "More MONIES! Nom nom nom". NEVER in our history have we had a war and not raised taxes on the wealthy, EVER, yet here is the right wing more than happy to cheer on at least two of those wars while refusing to pay a fucking cent in. I guess war is great as long as it costs you nothing and you get to keep your breaks and make a tidy sum on your Raytheon stock huh?
I urge everyone to go here and let your congressmen know anyone who votes for this kick to the balls of the poor, which cuts provider payments to medicaid/care while not cutting a cent to the military or making the top 1%ers pay a penny WILL BE VOTED OUT next election! I also urge you to vote Green or new Whig next election, as it is obvious that a vote for a D or an R is now a "wasted vote" thanks to Citizens United. This is our last option before having an Arab Spring which I truly believe is coming.
Better to default than to take this piece of trash legislation.