Considering how well our ancient brethren figured out the movements of the stars? I don't see why it would be so hard for them to figure out that if the moon has a big geyser and a couple of days later it rains that the two are related. After all they built great temples aligned to the summer and winter solstices as well as devices like the Antikythera mechanism so I wouldn't say it was outside the realm of possibility.
That is why I look for the MOR reviews which it sounds like you do too. The ones that say its the greatest and the ones that say its a turd don't really give me any info so I look for the average Joe that you can tell by reading has used the thing.
For an example the review I read on Amazon for the Zoom bass pedal I ended up buying I found informative went like this: "Sounds are good as long as you don't go overboard with the effects, low noise but a few of the effects are just cheese, drum machine isn't gonna beat a dedicated machine but does keep a straight beat, whammy can be assigned to any effect. As long as you don't stomp the thing and try to use more than a couple of effects at a time it works good".
With that the guy gave me all I needed to know, don't go nuts with it, sound is decent as long as you don't overload the chips, and pedal is sturdy if not Doc Martin proof. He didn't act like it was the greatest nor garbage, just a nice general overview of what to expect. I bought the pedal and loved it.
So for me I've found just stick with the MOR and it all works out. If the review has tons of praise without any real nigglers? Most likely fake as anybody can find things they wish were different. By the same token those that find nothing but things wrong usually don't know how to use the thing and take their frustrations out on the review. So stick with the average guy MOR review and usually you're good to go.
Uhhh...dude? All it is is automated installers for most of the popular software, kept updated. you could do so yourself if you wanted to waste the time, or if you pay a whole 430 they'll give you the ability to set up your own offline repos that auto sync with theirs.
But frankly your "argument" could be used as is against the Linux repos. After all you are ultimately trusting a third party who may/may not have your interests at heart. look at the Quake infected Linux install the repos loaded up last year. At least with Ninite they are simply downloading the packages from the developers themselves and making automated installers for them.
Oh and there isn't any "installer". It is a simple file that sends an argument to their servers with a list of chosen software, similar to a bash script. As for cash flow? They sell automation systems for SMBs, so they can have their own repos with the software they use most based on the free version but with their devs integrating whatever softare your company needs. I wouldn't doubt they are doing very well with this as it is an underserved market as far as I can tell..
LOL wut? Dude the red states are the poorest in the nation by a pretty long shot. States like MS, AR, LA,OK, these states are traditionally poor as fuck and vote republican year in and year out.
Now if you wanna argue that the MIC is sitting there with their hands out and we waste money on crap like planes and aircraft carriers we don't even need? Right there with ya pal. But trying to say people vote D because they are getting a check simply doesn't jive with the numbers. Hell every one of the poorest states voted McCain in 08!
I still think it comes down to disease. For thousands of years even what we could consider today minor diseases killed your ass VERY dead and if you get to close its too late. The jerky movements of bots remind me of the coughing shakes one gets when you've got a bad bug, so I frankly wouldn't be surprised if the most primitive part of our brains go "Looks wrong, might be sick, STAY AWAY!" because frankly that would be a trait most likely to be passed down because those that got too close? Well they didn't get to pass on their genes thanks to getting sick and dying.
Exactly. If Walmart says "I want streaming new movies" you can bet your ass they WILL get new movies to stream, as Walmart can crush the sale of DVDs for any company they wish just by product placement. You walk into any Supercenter they have the new releases right by the checkout in kiosks for $10-$20 each so they can snatch the impulse buyers and in the electronics dept they have HUGE bins of movies for $3 and $5 for the frugal.
All Walmart will have to do to those that won't play ball is say "Fine, while your competitors get the kiosks at the checkout YOUR new releases will be stuffed against the back wall of the electronics dept and priced above MSRP." and then the studio will watch their sales nosedive while the competitors will take one look at the figures and do what Walmart says. Hell look at Walmart has done with the "Walmart phone" which frankly stomps the plans in many areas. you get unlimited minutes AND texts for $45, no contract. For those that just want to talk and text (a VERY large market) it is practically a no brainer.
So I wouldn't be so quick to write them off. Walmart usually tests the waters before jumping in but if Walmart wants in on a market just by their sheer size and buying power they WILL get a shot at that market. Whether they decide it is worth the effort or drop it like their music service? Who knows but I bet they are looking at the $$$ Netflix is rolling in and thinking how much they'd like that for themselves.
You want to know the sad part, the part that will have me modded to hell for daring to speak against their "chosen one" even though it is his own words I'm gonna link to? Linus Torvalds thinks its a big fucking joke and his attitude is Plans? We don't need no steenkin plans!
Now of course this attitude was fine in 1993, when Linux was a hobby project being passed around on IRC, but it ain't 1993 anymore. If you want Linux on the literally hundred of millions of PCs that are gonna be EOLed by MSFT in Apr 2014 the driver problem needs fixed NOW and it needs done ASAP.
Because in the end there is gonna be literally tons of hardware sitting in front of fixit guys like me, hardware which COULD easily run Linux for years thus saving it from the dump, cutting down on eWaste, and making thrid and fourth PCs easily and cheaply available for all those grandmas out there. But as I said with these 4 1.6Ghz I'm looking at the Windows CAL will cost more than the box is worth and Linux simply won't continue running past the first 6 month update without taking a big steaming dump on the drivers. Does the community REALLY believe grandma is gonna learn how to do the forum dance, or how to tweak Bash (because you ALWAYS have to tweak, the commands listed are always for hardware c rev b and you have hardware f rev h) commands so the forum CLI gunk will work? Really?
Windows doesn't stomp Linux in adoption because of some secret sauce, nor killer app, it is because it is trivial for guys like me to setup with a good AV and basic software like Firefox or Dragon browser and just hand it to grandma and 3 years from now it is still surfing the web and letting her print her recipes. That's all. Most of what grandma does could easily be done on Linux if the driver sitch wasn't such a giant mess. Fix this and I'll be happy to carry your product. Hell I even wrote an article for Linux Insider pointing out what I needed to help sell Linux. If I didn't care or wanted MSFT to win would I have gone to the trouble to write it?
Oh, I'm sorry I misread. In that case...no you don't AGAIN, as you must not have heard of a little gift of love from the heavens above called Ninite or as we PC fixit guys say "instant happy"! It has ALL the software most users will want, and if there is any you don't see you'd like? Tell them, they are happy to listen to you. The Klite codec pack on there? That was me asking nicely. Oh and NO TOOLBARS or any of the other crap some like Java try to pack in, just the most used defaults, like the CCleaner defaults have the ccleaner right click on the recycle bin setting chosen.
So just remember that name...Ninite and your Windows installs will be easy and happy and...well just really pleasant.
They had ONE fuckup where an affiliate got social engineered, and that was fixed in dragon less than 15 minutes after Comodo found out thanks to their ability to instantly update the certs on dragon. Now considering how much LULSec crap has been going on having only a single fuckup, and that fuckup only being with an affiliate instead of like Sony losing the keys to the whole damned kingdom? pretty damned good work IMHO.
They also give away an excellent AV that scores in the top 4 in just about every test, and that is free for commercial and non commercial use BTW, free firewall, free DNS, free VPN services, go look up how much Comodo gives you for absolutely free and you'll be amazed. And you didn't answer my question BTW: Where is the "I don't want to send anything to Google" button in Chrome? With dragon by default search as you type is turned OFF and if you decide to turn it on you have the choice of search engine providers.
And most importantly for me I can hand it to my customers and know the default settings, which home users will ALWAYS take, are secure and help keep them away from dodgy sites. Since switching users away from Firefox if anything I've noticed the rates of infection have dropped even lower than before, probably because by default dragon runs in low rights mode which makes it extremely difficult to use rive by malware tactics.
And the real bitch? They didn't need to hack shit to rig the election, just run off those they didn't want to vote. Look up videos taken in Ohio of the 04 election and you'll see the poor neighborhoods would get one or two broke ass machines while the rich areas got MUCH more machines than required, those that tried to hand voters a slip that pointed out their right to ask for a provisional ballot, since they were making people wait several hours in line only to tell them "you're in the wrong place" and expect them to go do it all over again were first threatened and then arrested, the whole thing was a scam from the word go.
Of course with BOTH parties now owned legally by the megacorps thanks to Citizens United you might as well not bother, hell the ballots might as well only have two choices "Show your love, vote for supermegacorp!" or "Teach those guys in DC a lesson, vote for supermegacorp!".
Sorry but I don't support all the "phone home" aspects of Chrome so I won't allow it in my builds. And since I'm dealing with SMBs, SOHOs, and home users I frankly don't care what Comodo thinks of other SSL providers but in my experience the ONLY times I've seen Dragon have a fit is when they are using an out of date cert or one not in most standard browsers (such as IE,Safari, and Mozilla) and rightly so, as I don't want my customers on websites that are using "Bob's certs" as they are...surprise! Dodgy. Finally Dragon has better domain validation than most and the option to use their secure DNS which bypasses the BS DNS servers the ISP use around here.
So I'm sorry but spying on users and sending everything to Google is simply unacceptable. Dragon does what I want it to do and helps to keep customers away from dodgy sites. Better for them, better for me, and they need to simply click the "proceed anyway" button and can continue on if they so desire. Where is the "I don't want to send anything to Google" button in Chrome?
Haven't used Windows since XP huh? You don't do the driver search anymore, they are automated into Windows Update for all but the most funky. My last Windows 7 install it even detected the funky USB capture card and installed the drivers before the first boot. It ALL "just worked" which sadly trying various flavors of Linux (Ubuntu/Mint, Mepis, PCLOS) I haven't seen be the case. I've had sound fail, wireless and wired networking die, blackscreen o' death after an upgrade (boy THAT was fun) and in ALL cases there isn't even a simple "rollback driver" button so you can return to a working state without doing the forum dance.
It is a real shame because IMHO this one is really holding Linux back. I can tell you that besides myself every other mom&pop shop owner I've talked to avoids Linux and in EVERY case it is the incredibly expensive support costs due to the broken driver model. Home users simply are not gonna learn to do the forum dance, nor will they ever "Open up Bash and type" as they see it is what it is, a 70s era terminal that frankly doesn't belong on a consumer desktop. Servers yes, desktops no. But no retailer, especially the small shops, like paying for Windows. But until we can hand a PC to a customer and know with 100% certainty that the drivers will still be 100% functional in a year without user intervention? We just can't carry your product.
Notice I dared to point out the truth and got labeled flamebait? But I have proof, proof NOBODY here can deny. Ready? If the current driver model isn't shit, why does the third largest OEM on the planet have to waste money and resources keeping their own badly out of date repos? Because if they don't, even though they offer Linux only on a teeny tiny portion of their systems the drivers die hard.
So don't blame the messenger if he points out your boss is kinda nekked, demand change. If you don't like a hardware ABI, something BTW that BSD, OSX, Solaris, Windows AND OS/2 ALL have in common? Then find another way. Hell I don't care if you have to sacrifice Linus to Cthulu if that is what it takes. Just trying to find a functional Linux in my little shop, testing on bog standard off lease office equipment, I have seen Linux drivers shit themselves over, in no particular order...ATI, Broadcom, Via, SiS, Realtek, Nvidia, Ali, Intel. hell out of all the machines I've tested on so far the ONLY MACHINE I've seen survive more than a single upgrade with ZERO driver failures or errors was a circa 1999 P3 700Mhz Intel box. Needless to say there really isn't any call for those IRL and that one ended up sent to the dump.
Whether you believe it or not (the/. current Linux loonie Alex thinks I'm a "sekret M$ Ninja!" sent to kill his precious) I would like to see this problem fixed and see Linux thrive, I really really would. I don't like paying for MS Licenses and most of what Joe average does can easily be done on Linux. but I can't have an OS where I'm gonna have to give away lifetime support because every 6 months the drivers shit themselves and die hard. And before anyone says "LTS!" that currently has less than a year and a half of support left and LTS is a codeword for "really old software" since many packages are tied to which kernel you are running.
So please fix this Linux community, have a fit at Linus or fork it away from him or whatever, because I can provide link after link after link of retailers trying and then giving up on your product and it ALWAYS comes down to support costs. Joe average isn't gonna do the forum dance or learn how to tweak lists of Bash commands so they can have working sound or Wifi every 6 months. I have 4 1.6Ghz PCs that are gonna end up in the dump right now because the costs of Windows licenses are more than they are worth and I HATE throwing away working gear. But until I can just install a Linux distro and not have to spend hours trawling forums just to make it work after 6 months? Well then I simply have no other choice.
Bingo! If you read TFA he is talking about using JAVA or Android, not MS Java...err I mean Davalik or whatever they call the thing. And it just amazes me that fanbois can cheer the exact same behavior they once booed simply by changing the name of the douchebag.
MSFT rips off Java and creates a "kinda sorta Java" which they will use their large base to snatch control away from Java? BOOO. Google rips off Java and creates a "kinda sorta Java" which they will use their large base to snatch control away from Java? YAAY!
Hell just change the names in the papers and the lawsuits read the same, the only difference is the fanboi love for the latter company. But IMHO being a douche is being a douche and just as MSFT was a douche then for cooking up their kinda sorta Java Google is a douche now for ripping a page from gate's playbook and hoping that saying "We do no evil" is a "get out of bad publicity" free card. Considering how much fanboi love they get no matter what they do that may be so. Maybe MSFT should change their slogan to "We heart kittens!" and Apple change theirs to "we love mom and Apple pie!" .
If it is based on the gecko desktop engine I'm frankly not surprised. I always gave Firefox out to customers and had been using it myself since before it was even called Firefox but starting with the 3.6.x branch I simply found it unsuitable for purpose as a desktop browser which is why after trying several browsers I switched to comodo dragon which I now hand out instead.
I have to support a very wide range of users, from low end netbooks and midrange P4s to the latest multicores and I found the memory and CPU usage on FF after the 3.5.x build to simply be unacceptable. I have found on anything less than a 2.8Ghz with HT the browser will slam the CPU when launching a new tab, sometimes for over 30 seconds when the tab contains flash video, and even when left alone its memory usage will steadily climb until closed or it slams into the page file. Most importantly it will completely lose responsiveness and make the machine stall until the page has finished loading completely.
Compare this to Dragon on the same hardware where even on the 1.8Ghz Sempron I keep in the shop as a nettop I can launch multiple tabs and never have it hit above 60% CPU usage, flash tabs 70% , RAM usage stays consistent and when tabs are closed memory returned (FF seems to have a real problem with returning memory) and most importantly the browser NEVER loses responsiveness nor takes complete control of the machine away from the user.
Now why FF does this I don't know, but I have a theory. I think the Gecko engine simply isn't capable of doing certain features like separating plugins from the browser and bolting on all this functionality is causing serious issues. But whatever the reason when everything is going "green" and using less is desirable (such as RAM and CPU starved mobile devices) FF sucks ever more power and memory to do the same task. I truly hope they figure it out as I miss having NoScript but until they do I need a browser that runs everywhere and FF just doesn't do that anymore. I have to give Google credit as Chromium is quickly becoming what Gecko used to be, a great platform for building on top of.
But with TFA you are talking split second precision required without a single thing going wrong in multiple stages, and this is after 8 months in space. With a plan we'll call "Apollo bounce" you could have plenty of time to correct for errors and would be able to rely more on basic physics than on computers.
Look up the design for the original Mercury capsules, there is a design of simplicity and application of physics if ever there was one. As I said the capsule had flaps so even if all the rockets failed to align the craft the air would catch the flaps and align the capsule. Now you can add to this a pair of chutes (one for backup and both using explosive bolts so if the first fails it can be blown free and the second deployed) with a big bouncy controlled by gyroscopes (again very basic and well tested tech) to give it a flat surface to land on there is a LOT less that can go tits up than TFA. Finally have the sides of the capsule have hinges that will deploy on landing (which again you can have explosive bolts in case the motor fails) to give you a ramp down for the probe.
I think this plan would leave the least amount to chance and perfect timing while cutting down on the stages and thus cutting down on the risk of timing errors. let me put it this way: Would YOU trust your life to the plan laid out in TFA?
Here is the first one I came across and it looks like there is a name to go with it George Tenet the former head of the CIA IIRC.
But Google is your pal, just put in "American Airlines 9-11 shorted stocks" and you'll find plenty of sources, they have just been ignored. But who better to know what was coming and profit from it than the head of the CIA?
Hell I think that is SOP with all OSes these days. Windows 7 optimizes files for boot performance, although rankly hybrid sleep has gotten so good I tell customers don't even bother with shutdown unless prompted for a reboot for some reason, just put her to sleep, Apple has always had excellent sleep from what I've been told, and now Ubuntu has 12 second boots.
But to me the problem with Linux was never boot or resource usage, both were usually great, but the drivers being borked all the time. When is Canonical gonna make some sort of universal driver repo that you can just click a "find drivers" button and it'll download and compile or configure the drivers FOR you, so you don't need forum hunts? Hell at least have a driver rollback button like Windows has had since Win2K so if an upgrade borks a driver you can rollback. The whole thing reminds me of this classic XKCD.
But if any Canonical devs are reading this? Congrats. You guys already have a nice OS, plenty of features, several DEs to choose from, lots of software, if y'all would fix the driver breakage problem my shelves would have plenty of Ubuntu boxes next to the Windows ones. Good luck guys and congrats again!
Which I'd say is a word that is the root of a LOT of the problem! I ended up home schooling my two boys because frankly the schools simply went over the same old BS, often times far behind where the kids SHOULD have been, simply because of the little Billys where the parents simply didn't give a fuck or were too defeated by the end of the day to interact with their kids.
Picking up the boys from their friends houses I was amazed at some of these people. We are talking not a single book anywhere in the home, the kid dropped in front of the console/PC/TV while the parents ignore him/her until bedtime. Never asking them if they even had homework as long as the kid wasn't bugging them all was cool as far as they were concerned.
Today sadly many kids aren't in schools to be taught, they are there to be babysat. With both parents working or worse a single parent with no help in paying the bills there simply isn't anyone at home for the kid and if you gave them the best teachers on the planet it isn't gonna help if the second the bells ring the books are forgotten and they are vegging in front of the Xbox. But Lord help you if you say little Billy needs to be in remedial classes because the parents will have a royal shitfit!
How do we fix it? Fuck if I know. You now have the 1%ers and the peasants and not really much of nothing in between. with all the single parents and flatlined pay even the good parents are simply too worn out at the end of the day to do much, and then there are the ones that just don't give a shit. How do we fix the education system when the whole country is broken?
Even if that were so, which I would counter with the fact that a dynamic enemy AI would be able to give everyone from the noob to the hardcore a consistent experience, that wouldn't change the fact that it would sell like mad for every single game with friendly NPCs.
Imagine NPCs that didn't just stand there and go "bring me the asses of 20 snow goats" but could actually react to the world around them? With friendly troops that would see what you are doing and actually back up your play? One of the things that ruined Red Faction: Guerrilla for me was the friendly AI that was so thick that I could bump a lamppost backing up only to have them go "We'll back up your attack!" and suddenly go charging into an enemy stronghold while i'm just sitting in my truck trying to get back on the road. not to mention how in the middle of a battle I'd be laying down suppression fire only to have them go "Herp derp CHARGE!" and then waltz right in front of my gun using their soon to be riddled bodies as human shields for the enemy.
I kinda doubt that designers so desperately wanting to create "a true cinematic experience" would seriously want their friendly Ai that thick. Imagine if in the middle of Saving private Ryan if the whole squad said "Herp Derp CHARGE!" and then promptly ran out in front of the 50cal while firing wildly in the air and not hitting shit? Tom Hanks would have probably felt like doing what many of us do in that situation in the games, which is shoot the living shit out of our own guys and wonder if the enemy has a good health care plan and any openings.
Sure thing. What worked last time? Big bouncy right? So why not use a chute with a really big bouncy? The air there is much thinner than here but chutes should work just the same and big bouncy made for a hell of a shock absorber.
If you wanted to use rockets then frankly an Apollo approach would be better with a capsule designed to right itself into the correct alignment by using flaps on the capsule so that even if the rockets fail the ship will have the shields pointed in the right direction. Rockets can fail, basic physics? not so much. Once it gets to a certain height the shield is blown by explosive bolts (well tested tech) and a variation on the bouncy blows up on the bottom of the craft to give it a stable landing platform Again if designed right one could build it with minimal computer control, by saying using gyroscopes to control the air in the bags upon landing.
With this there are simply too many layers IMHO of finely grained control required with even a single failure equaling the complete lost of the craft. The less stages between orbit and ground the better, and while I give NASA credit for years of great work I'd say the number of things that can go wrong with TFA style landing is just too numerous.
But he has a point. It is pretty common knowledge that there was someone at the Pentagon who shorted the hell out of American Airlines stock a full 90 minutes BEFORE anyone knew that a single plane had been taken, much less that it was American Airlines. That is a pretty red hot smoking gun that someone there KNEW what was gonna happen and instead of trying to prevent the attack decided to profit from it. That would be not only treason but capital murder of over 3000 Americans yet to this day nobody will investigate. Why? Because no doubt it was someone high up, someone with real power.
In the case of TFA Murdoch getting BSkyB would have given him incredible power there and somebody didn't like that. Murdoch had stepped on a LOT of toes, and been a real prick about it. Well someone got fed up with it and made sure that the rival paper had all they needed to hang old Murdoch. Who did it? We'll probably never know, as the list of powerful people that hated Murdoch is such that even single spaced would probably be long enough to wallpaper the cells of his boy and the rest of those at the top of NoTW.
Will Murdoch himself spend a day in jail, even if they manage to trace it back to him? doubtful as guys with THAT much money simply don't have to follow the laws everyone else does. but his days of wielding power with impunity in the UK are over, hell he might as well pack his bags and move on. Sadly I'm sure he'd be welcome here in the USA as we've never met an ultra rich booty that our movers and shakers wouldn't bend over backwards to accommodate.
Ya know I never took that "be careful what you wish for" phrase to mean much...until it happened to me. I thought I had it made with my now ex, cute, loved to cook, loved sex daily.
The problem? Frankly it was so easy to get her wound up and off that just as things started getting good she would be wore out and throwing the time out signal while trying to catch her breath! It totally ruined it for me as I LOVE foreplay and frankly anything less than 30 minutes I consider a quickie and with her after 12-14 minutes she was a sweaty twitching ball of post orgasmic goo ready to fall asleep. I guess I was lucky she ended up having to move to take care of an ailing father because the whole "please let me give you a blowjob as I can't come anymore" was driving me nuts!
So be careful what you wish for fellow/.ers, as I thought I had found the perfect woman, hell even my family thought the world of her and that NEVER happens. But I found out the hard way that one can have frequent sex and still be completely sexually incompatible.
Oh and before some troll says "She was just faking LOL!" yeah right, it really wasn't hard to tell when a gal like hers has an orgasm. When they buck up so hard they damned near throw you off the bed and you are drenched from the crotch down? One really doesn't need to look for subtle changes in physiology with a gal like that. I'm just glad we never did it in my Ranger as I hear you just can't get that out of cloth seats and I seriously doubt putting down a towel would have helped in her case.
Ya know I think the sentence would be fair if he did the right kind of time instead of just sitting in a cell for his time. Here in AR we have what is called "The Hoe Squad" where they drag your ass out of bed at dawn and you work your damned ass off until sundown in the fields earning your keep.
I've seen video footage on one of those "world's wildest" where a guy drove a car that was on fire with a wheel gone flying low, nearly flipping who knows how many times, just so he could cross the TN border to keep from going back to the hoe squad.
So he caused 675,000 people to have to deal with the royal bitch that is trying to get your credit straightened out from the big three, which anyone who has had to deal with ID theft knows what a nightmare dealing with those bunches is, well his 7 years before parole served on the hoe squad sounds fair to me. If we did the same to those malware writers maybe they'd think twice instead of using it as a stepping stone to get a cushy job for a security firm after their slap on the wrist.
But is there anything that plays AAC besides the iPod? The problem with these other codecs is as we have seen before like with Betamax no matter how great your product is the best will often lose to the good enough time and time again, usually on some technical or legal bullshit. look at MP3Pro, back in the day MP3Pro had MUCH better sound at the standard 128k of the time than plain MP3, but nothing played it so it died.
While the iPod is popular as hell frankly there is a hell of a lot more places than your PMP that most folks play their music, like their PC, their car, etc, and even the Apple guys I've known keep their tunes in MP3 simply because it'll play on anything anywhere.
So while I fully support their tests if for nothing else than an "FYI here's the results" list I think AAC has about as much chance of ever unseating MP3 as Theora has of becoming the de facto standard for video over H.264 and Flash. Oh and if their AAC is as good as their MP4 codec my money is on Nero.
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Considering how well our ancient brethren figured out the movements of the stars? I don't see why it would be so hard for them to figure out that if the moon has a big geyser and a couple of days later it rains that the two are related. After all they built great temples aligned to the summer and winter solstices as well as devices like the Antikythera mechanism so I wouldn't say it was outside the realm of possibility.
That is why I look for the MOR reviews which it sounds like you do too. The ones that say its the greatest and the ones that say its a turd don't really give me any info so I look for the average Joe that you can tell by reading has used the thing.
For an example the review I read on Amazon for the Zoom bass pedal I ended up buying I found informative went like this: "Sounds are good as long as you don't go overboard with the effects, low noise but a few of the effects are just cheese, drum machine isn't gonna beat a dedicated machine but does keep a straight beat, whammy can be assigned to any effect. As long as you don't stomp the thing and try to use more than a couple of effects at a time it works good".
With that the guy gave me all I needed to know, don't go nuts with it, sound is decent as long as you don't overload the chips, and pedal is sturdy if not Doc Martin proof. He didn't act like it was the greatest nor garbage, just a nice general overview of what to expect. I bought the pedal and loved it.
So for me I've found just stick with the MOR and it all works out. If the review has tons of praise without any real nigglers? Most likely fake as anybody can find things they wish were different. By the same token those that find nothing but things wrong usually don't know how to use the thing and take their frustrations out on the review. So stick with the average guy MOR review and usually you're good to go.
Uhhh...dude? All it is is automated installers for most of the popular software, kept updated. you could do so yourself if you wanted to waste the time, or if you pay a whole 430 they'll give you the ability to set up your own offline repos that auto sync with theirs.
But frankly your "argument" could be used as is against the Linux repos. After all you are ultimately trusting a third party who may/may not have your interests at heart. look at the Quake infected Linux install the repos loaded up last year. At least with Ninite they are simply downloading the packages from the developers themselves and making automated installers for them.
Oh and there isn't any "installer". It is a simple file that sends an argument to their servers with a list of chosen software, similar to a bash script. As for cash flow? They sell automation systems for SMBs, so they can have their own repos with the software they use most based on the free version but with their devs integrating whatever softare your company needs. I wouldn't doubt they are doing very well with this as it is an underserved market as far as I can tell..
LOL wut? Dude the red states are the poorest in the nation by a pretty long shot. States like MS, AR, LA,OK, these states are traditionally poor as fuck and vote republican year in and year out.
Now if you wanna argue that the MIC is sitting there with their hands out and we waste money on crap like planes and aircraft carriers we don't even need? Right there with ya pal. But trying to say people vote D because they are getting a check simply doesn't jive with the numbers. Hell every one of the poorest states voted McCain in 08!
I still think it comes down to disease. For thousands of years even what we could consider today minor diseases killed your ass VERY dead and if you get to close its too late. The jerky movements of bots remind me of the coughing shakes one gets when you've got a bad bug, so I frankly wouldn't be surprised if the most primitive part of our brains go "Looks wrong, might be sick, STAY AWAY!" because frankly that would be a trait most likely to be passed down because those that got too close? Well they didn't get to pass on their genes thanks to getting sick and dying.
Exactly. If Walmart says "I want streaming new movies" you can bet your ass they WILL get new movies to stream, as Walmart can crush the sale of DVDs for any company they wish just by product placement. You walk into any Supercenter they have the new releases right by the checkout in kiosks for $10-$20 each so they can snatch the impulse buyers and in the electronics dept they have HUGE bins of movies for $3 and $5 for the frugal.
All Walmart will have to do to those that won't play ball is say "Fine, while your competitors get the kiosks at the checkout YOUR new releases will be stuffed against the back wall of the electronics dept and priced above MSRP." and then the studio will watch their sales nosedive while the competitors will take one look at the figures and do what Walmart says. Hell look at Walmart has done with the "Walmart phone" which frankly stomps the plans in many areas. you get unlimited minutes AND texts for $45, no contract. For those that just want to talk and text (a VERY large market) it is practically a no brainer.
So I wouldn't be so quick to write them off. Walmart usually tests the waters before jumping in but if Walmart wants in on a market just by their sheer size and buying power they WILL get a shot at that market. Whether they decide it is worth the effort or drop it like their music service? Who knows but I bet they are looking at the $$$ Netflix is rolling in and thinking how much they'd like that for themselves.
You want to know the sad part, the part that will have me modded to hell for daring to speak against their "chosen one" even though it is his own words I'm gonna link to? Linus Torvalds thinks its a big fucking joke and his attitude is Plans? We don't need no steenkin plans!
Now of course this attitude was fine in 1993, when Linux was a hobby project being passed around on IRC, but it ain't 1993 anymore. If you want Linux on the literally hundred of millions of PCs that are gonna be EOLed by MSFT in Apr 2014 the driver problem needs fixed NOW and it needs done ASAP.
Because in the end there is gonna be literally tons of hardware sitting in front of fixit guys like me, hardware which COULD easily run Linux for years thus saving it from the dump, cutting down on eWaste, and making thrid and fourth PCs easily and cheaply available for all those grandmas out there. But as I said with these 4 1.6Ghz I'm looking at the Windows CAL will cost more than the box is worth and Linux simply won't continue running past the first 6 month update without taking a big steaming dump on the drivers. Does the community REALLY believe grandma is gonna learn how to do the forum dance, or how to tweak Bash (because you ALWAYS have to tweak, the commands listed are always for hardware c rev b and you have hardware f rev h) commands so the forum CLI gunk will work? Really?
Windows doesn't stomp Linux in adoption because of some secret sauce, nor killer app, it is because it is trivial for guys like me to setup with a good AV and basic software like Firefox or Dragon browser and just hand it to grandma and 3 years from now it is still surfing the web and letting her print her recipes. That's all. Most of what grandma does could easily be done on Linux if the driver sitch wasn't such a giant mess. Fix this and I'll be happy to carry your product. Hell I even wrote an article for Linux Insider pointing out what I needed to help sell Linux. If I didn't care or wanted MSFT to win would I have gone to the trouble to write it?
Oh, I'm sorry I misread. In that case...no you don't AGAIN, as you must not have heard of a little gift of love from the heavens above called Ninite or as we PC fixit guys say "instant happy"! It has ALL the software most users will want, and if there is any you don't see you'd like? Tell them, they are happy to listen to you. The Klite codec pack on there? That was me asking nicely. Oh and NO TOOLBARS or any of the other crap some like Java try to pack in, just the most used defaults, like the CCleaner defaults have the ccleaner right click on the recycle bin setting chosen.
So just remember that name...Ninite and your Windows installs will be easy and happy and...well just really pleasant.
They had ONE fuckup where an affiliate got social engineered, and that was fixed in dragon less than 15 minutes after Comodo found out thanks to their ability to instantly update the certs on dragon. Now considering how much LULSec crap has been going on having only a single fuckup, and that fuckup only being with an affiliate instead of like Sony losing the keys to the whole damned kingdom? pretty damned good work IMHO.
They also give away an excellent AV that scores in the top 4 in just about every test, and that is free for commercial and non commercial use BTW, free firewall, free DNS, free VPN services, go look up how much Comodo gives you for absolutely free and you'll be amazed. And you didn't answer my question BTW: Where is the "I don't want to send anything to Google" button in Chrome? With dragon by default search as you type is turned OFF and if you decide to turn it on you have the choice of search engine providers.
And most importantly for me I can hand it to my customers and know the default settings, which home users will ALWAYS take, are secure and help keep them away from dodgy sites. Since switching users away from Firefox if anything I've noticed the rates of infection have dropped even lower than before, probably because by default dragon runs in low rights mode which makes it extremely difficult to use rive by malware tactics.
And the real bitch? They didn't need to hack shit to rig the election, just run off those they didn't want to vote. Look up videos taken in Ohio of the 04 election and you'll see the poor neighborhoods would get one or two broke ass machines while the rich areas got MUCH more machines than required, those that tried to hand voters a slip that pointed out their right to ask for a provisional ballot, since they were making people wait several hours in line only to tell them "you're in the wrong place" and expect them to go do it all over again were first threatened and then arrested, the whole thing was a scam from the word go.
Of course with BOTH parties now owned legally by the megacorps thanks to Citizens United you might as well not bother, hell the ballots might as well only have two choices "Show your love, vote for supermegacorp!" or "Teach those guys in DC a lesson, vote for supermegacorp!".
Sorry but I don't support all the "phone home" aspects of Chrome so I won't allow it in my builds. And since I'm dealing with SMBs, SOHOs, and home users I frankly don't care what Comodo thinks of other SSL providers but in my experience the ONLY times I've seen Dragon have a fit is when they are using an out of date cert or one not in most standard browsers (such as IE,Safari, and Mozilla) and rightly so, as I don't want my customers on websites that are using "Bob's certs" as they are...surprise! Dodgy. Finally Dragon has better domain validation than most and the option to use their secure DNS which bypasses the BS DNS servers the ISP use around here.
So I'm sorry but spying on users and sending everything to Google is simply unacceptable. Dragon does what I want it to do and helps to keep customers away from dodgy sites. Better for them, better for me, and they need to simply click the "proceed anyway" button and can continue on if they so desire. Where is the "I don't want to send anything to Google" button in Chrome?
Haven't used Windows since XP huh? You don't do the driver search anymore, they are automated into Windows Update for all but the most funky. My last Windows 7 install it even detected the funky USB capture card and installed the drivers before the first boot. It ALL "just worked" which sadly trying various flavors of Linux (Ubuntu/Mint, Mepis, PCLOS) I haven't seen be the case. I've had sound fail, wireless and wired networking die, blackscreen o' death after an upgrade (boy THAT was fun) and in ALL cases there isn't even a simple "rollback driver" button so you can return to a working state without doing the forum dance.
It is a real shame because IMHO this one is really holding Linux back. I can tell you that besides myself every other mom&pop shop owner I've talked to avoids Linux and in EVERY case it is the incredibly expensive support costs due to the broken driver model. Home users simply are not gonna learn to do the forum dance, nor will they ever "Open up Bash and type" as they see it is what it is, a 70s era terminal that frankly doesn't belong on a consumer desktop. Servers yes, desktops no. But no retailer, especially the small shops, like paying for Windows. But until we can hand a PC to a customer and know with 100% certainty that the drivers will still be 100% functional in a year without user intervention? We just can't carry your product.
Notice I dared to point out the truth and got labeled flamebait? But I have proof, proof NOBODY here can deny. Ready? If the current driver model isn't shit, why does the third largest OEM on the planet have to waste money and resources keeping their own badly out of date repos? Because if they don't, even though they offer Linux only on a teeny tiny portion of their systems the drivers die hard.
So don't blame the messenger if he points out your boss is kinda nekked, demand change. If you don't like a hardware ABI, something BTW that BSD, OSX, Solaris, Windows AND OS/2 ALL have in common? Then find another way. Hell I don't care if you have to sacrifice Linus to Cthulu if that is what it takes. Just trying to find a functional Linux in my little shop, testing on bog standard off lease office equipment, I have seen Linux drivers shit themselves over, in no particular order...ATI, Broadcom, Via, SiS, Realtek, Nvidia, Ali, Intel. hell out of all the machines I've tested on so far the ONLY MACHINE I've seen survive more than a single upgrade with ZERO driver failures or errors was a circa 1999 P3 700Mhz Intel box. Needless to say there really isn't any call for those IRL and that one ended up sent to the dump.
Whether you believe it or not (the /. current Linux loonie Alex thinks I'm a "sekret M$ Ninja!" sent to kill his precious) I would like to see this problem fixed and see Linux thrive, I really really would. I don't like paying for MS Licenses and most of what Joe average does can easily be done on Linux. but I can't have an OS where I'm gonna have to give away lifetime support because every 6 months the drivers shit themselves and die hard. And before anyone says "LTS!" that currently has less than a year and a half of support left and LTS is a codeword for "really old software" since many packages are tied to which kernel you are running.
So please fix this Linux community, have a fit at Linus or fork it away from him or whatever, because I can provide link after link after link of retailers trying and then giving up on your product and it ALWAYS comes down to support costs. Joe average isn't gonna do the forum dance or learn how to tweak lists of Bash commands so they can have working sound or Wifi every 6 months. I have 4 1.6Ghz PCs that are gonna end up in the dump right now because the costs of Windows licenses are more than they are worth and I HATE throwing away working gear. But until I can just install a Linux distro and not have to spend hours trawling forums just to make it work after 6 months? Well then I simply have no other choice.
Bingo! If you read TFA he is talking about using JAVA or Android, not MS Java...err I mean Davalik or whatever they call the thing. And it just amazes me that fanbois can cheer the exact same behavior they once booed simply by changing the name of the douchebag.
MSFT rips off Java and creates a "kinda sorta Java" which they will use their large base to snatch control away from Java? BOOO. Google rips off Java and creates a "kinda sorta Java" which they will use their large base to snatch control away from Java? YAAY!
Hell just change the names in the papers and the lawsuits read the same, the only difference is the fanboi love for the latter company. But IMHO being a douche is being a douche and just as MSFT was a douche then for cooking up their kinda sorta Java Google is a douche now for ripping a page from gate's playbook and hoping that saying "We do no evil" is a "get out of bad publicity" free card. Considering how much fanboi love they get no matter what they do that may be so. Maybe MSFT should change their slogan to "We heart kittens!" and Apple change theirs to "we love mom and Apple pie!" .
If it is based on the gecko desktop engine I'm frankly not surprised. I always gave Firefox out to customers and had been using it myself since before it was even called Firefox but starting with the 3.6.x branch I simply found it unsuitable for purpose as a desktop browser which is why after trying several browsers I switched to comodo dragon which I now hand out instead.
I have to support a very wide range of users, from low end netbooks and midrange P4s to the latest multicores and I found the memory and CPU usage on FF after the 3.5.x build to simply be unacceptable. I have found on anything less than a 2.8Ghz with HT the browser will slam the CPU when launching a new tab, sometimes for over 30 seconds when the tab contains flash video, and even when left alone its memory usage will steadily climb until closed or it slams into the page file. Most importantly it will completely lose responsiveness and make the machine stall until the page has finished loading completely.
Compare this to Dragon on the same hardware where even on the 1.8Ghz Sempron I keep in the shop as a nettop I can launch multiple tabs and never have it hit above 60% CPU usage, flash tabs 70% , RAM usage stays consistent and when tabs are closed memory returned (FF seems to have a real problem with returning memory) and most importantly the browser NEVER loses responsiveness nor takes complete control of the machine away from the user.
Now why FF does this I don't know, but I have a theory. I think the Gecko engine simply isn't capable of doing certain features like separating plugins from the browser and bolting on all this functionality is causing serious issues. But whatever the reason when everything is going "green" and using less is desirable (such as RAM and CPU starved mobile devices) FF sucks ever more power and memory to do the same task. I truly hope they figure it out as I miss having NoScript but until they do I need a browser that runs everywhere and FF just doesn't do that anymore. I have to give Google credit as Chromium is quickly becoming what Gecko used to be, a great platform for building on top of.
But with TFA you are talking split second precision required without a single thing going wrong in multiple stages, and this is after 8 months in space. With a plan we'll call "Apollo bounce" you could have plenty of time to correct for errors and would be able to rely more on basic physics than on computers.
Look up the design for the original Mercury capsules, there is a design of simplicity and application of physics if ever there was one. As I said the capsule had flaps so even if all the rockets failed to align the craft the air would catch the flaps and align the capsule. Now you can add to this a pair of chutes (one for backup and both using explosive bolts so if the first fails it can be blown free and the second deployed) with a big bouncy controlled by gyroscopes (again very basic and well tested tech) to give it a flat surface to land on there is a LOT less that can go tits up than TFA. Finally have the sides of the capsule have hinges that will deploy on landing (which again you can have explosive bolts in case the motor fails) to give you a ramp down for the probe.
I think this plan would leave the least amount to chance and perfect timing while cutting down on the stages and thus cutting down on the risk of timing errors. let me put it this way: Would YOU trust your life to the plan laid out in TFA?
Here is the first one I came across and it looks like there is a name to go with it George Tenet the former head of the CIA IIRC.
But Google is your pal, just put in "American Airlines 9-11 shorted stocks" and you'll find plenty of sources, they have just been ignored. But who better to know what was coming and profit from it than the head of the CIA?
Hell I think that is SOP with all OSes these days. Windows 7 optimizes files for boot performance, although rankly hybrid sleep has gotten so good I tell customers don't even bother with shutdown unless prompted for a reboot for some reason, just put her to sleep, Apple has always had excellent sleep from what I've been told, and now Ubuntu has 12 second boots.
But to me the problem with Linux was never boot or resource usage, both were usually great, but the drivers being borked all the time. When is Canonical gonna make some sort of universal driver repo that you can just click a "find drivers" button and it'll download and compile or configure the drivers FOR you, so you don't need forum hunts? Hell at least have a driver rollback button like Windows has had since Win2K so if an upgrade borks a driver you can rollback. The whole thing reminds me of this classic XKCD.
But if any Canonical devs are reading this? Congrats. You guys already have a nice OS, plenty of features, several DEs to choose from, lots of software, if y'all would fix the driver breakage problem my shelves would have plenty of Ubuntu boxes next to the Windows ones. Good luck guys and congrats again!
Which I'd say is a word that is the root of a LOT of the problem! I ended up home schooling my two boys because frankly the schools simply went over the same old BS, often times far behind where the kids SHOULD have been, simply because of the little Billys where the parents simply didn't give a fuck or were too defeated by the end of the day to interact with their kids.
Picking up the boys from their friends houses I was amazed at some of these people. We are talking not a single book anywhere in the home, the kid dropped in front of the console/PC/TV while the parents ignore him/her until bedtime. Never asking them if they even had homework as long as the kid wasn't bugging them all was cool as far as they were concerned.
Today sadly many kids aren't in schools to be taught, they are there to be babysat. With both parents working or worse a single parent with no help in paying the bills there simply isn't anyone at home for the kid and if you gave them the best teachers on the planet it isn't gonna help if the second the bells ring the books are forgotten and they are vegging in front of the Xbox. But Lord help you if you say little Billy needs to be in remedial classes because the parents will have a royal shitfit!
How do we fix it? Fuck if I know. You now have the 1%ers and the peasants and not really much of nothing in between. with all the single parents and flatlined pay even the good parents are simply too worn out at the end of the day to do much, and then there are the ones that just don't give a shit. How do we fix the education system when the whole country is broken?
Even if that were so, which I would counter with the fact that a dynamic enemy AI would be able to give everyone from the noob to the hardcore a consistent experience, that wouldn't change the fact that it would sell like mad for every single game with friendly NPCs.
Imagine NPCs that didn't just stand there and go "bring me the asses of 20 snow goats" but could actually react to the world around them? With friendly troops that would see what you are doing and actually back up your play? One of the things that ruined Red Faction: Guerrilla for me was the friendly AI that was so thick that I could bump a lamppost backing up only to have them go "We'll back up your attack!" and suddenly go charging into an enemy stronghold while i'm just sitting in my truck trying to get back on the road. not to mention how in the middle of a battle I'd be laying down suppression fire only to have them go "Herp derp CHARGE!" and then waltz right in front of my gun using their soon to be riddled bodies as human shields for the enemy.
I kinda doubt that designers so desperately wanting to create "a true cinematic experience" would seriously want their friendly Ai that thick. Imagine if in the middle of Saving private Ryan if the whole squad said "Herp Derp CHARGE!" and then promptly ran out in front of the 50cal while firing wildly in the air and not hitting shit? Tom Hanks would have probably felt like doing what many of us do in that situation in the games, which is shoot the living shit out of our own guys and wonder if the enemy has a good health care plan and any openings.
Sure thing. What worked last time? Big bouncy right? So why not use a chute with a really big bouncy? The air there is much thinner than here but chutes should work just the same and big bouncy made for a hell of a shock absorber.
If you wanted to use rockets then frankly an Apollo approach would be better with a capsule designed to right itself into the correct alignment by using flaps on the capsule so that even if the rockets fail the ship will have the shields pointed in the right direction. Rockets can fail, basic physics? not so much. Once it gets to a certain height the shield is blown by explosive bolts (well tested tech) and a variation on the bouncy blows up on the bottom of the craft to give it a stable landing platform Again if designed right one could build it with minimal computer control, by saying using gyroscopes to control the air in the bags upon landing.
With this there are simply too many layers IMHO of finely grained control required with even a single failure equaling the complete lost of the craft. The less stages between orbit and ground the better, and while I give NASA credit for years of great work I'd say the number of things that can go wrong with TFA style landing is just too numerous.
But he has a point. It is pretty common knowledge that there was someone at the Pentagon who shorted the hell out of American Airlines stock a full 90 minutes BEFORE anyone knew that a single plane had been taken, much less that it was American Airlines. That is a pretty red hot smoking gun that someone there KNEW what was gonna happen and instead of trying to prevent the attack decided to profit from it. That would be not only treason but capital murder of over 3000 Americans yet to this day nobody will investigate. Why? Because no doubt it was someone high up, someone with real power.
In the case of TFA Murdoch getting BSkyB would have given him incredible power there and somebody didn't like that. Murdoch had stepped on a LOT of toes, and been a real prick about it. Well someone got fed up with it and made sure that the rival paper had all they needed to hang old Murdoch. Who did it? We'll probably never know, as the list of powerful people that hated Murdoch is such that even single spaced would probably be long enough to wallpaper the cells of his boy and the rest of those at the top of NoTW.
Will Murdoch himself spend a day in jail, even if they manage to trace it back to him? doubtful as guys with THAT much money simply don't have to follow the laws everyone else does. but his days of wielding power with impunity in the UK are over, hell he might as well pack his bags and move on. Sadly I'm sure he'd be welcome here in the USA as we've never met an ultra rich booty that our movers and shakers wouldn't bend over backwards to accommodate.
Ya know I never took that "be careful what you wish for" phrase to mean much...until it happened to me. I thought I had it made with my now ex, cute, loved to cook, loved sex daily.
The problem? Frankly it was so easy to get her wound up and off that just as things started getting good she would be wore out and throwing the time out signal while trying to catch her breath! It totally ruined it for me as I LOVE foreplay and frankly anything less than 30 minutes I consider a quickie and with her after 12-14 minutes she was a sweaty twitching ball of post orgasmic goo ready to fall asleep. I guess I was lucky she ended up having to move to take care of an ailing father because the whole "please let me give you a blowjob as I can't come anymore" was driving me nuts!
So be careful what you wish for fellow /.ers, as I thought I had found the perfect woman, hell even my family thought the world of her and that NEVER happens. But I found out the hard way that one can have frequent sex and still be completely sexually incompatible.
Oh and before some troll says "She was just faking LOL!" yeah right, it really wasn't hard to tell when a gal like hers has an orgasm. When they buck up so hard they damned near throw you off the bed and you are drenched from the crotch down? One really doesn't need to look for subtle changes in physiology with a gal like that. I'm just glad we never did it in my Ranger as I hear you just can't get that out of cloth seats and I seriously doubt putting down a towel would have helped in her case.
Ya know I think the sentence would be fair if he did the right kind of time instead of just sitting in a cell for his time. Here in AR we have what is called "The Hoe Squad" where they drag your ass out of bed at dawn and you work your damned ass off until sundown in the fields earning your keep.
I've seen video footage on one of those "world's wildest" where a guy drove a car that was on fire with a wheel gone flying low, nearly flipping who knows how many times, just so he could cross the TN border to keep from going back to the hoe squad.
So he caused 675,000 people to have to deal with the royal bitch that is trying to get your credit straightened out from the big three, which anyone who has had to deal with ID theft knows what a nightmare dealing with those bunches is, well his 7 years before parole served on the hoe squad sounds fair to me. If we did the same to those malware writers maybe they'd think twice instead of using it as a stepping stone to get a cushy job for a security firm after their slap on the wrist.
But is there anything that plays AAC besides the iPod? The problem with these other codecs is as we have seen before like with Betamax no matter how great your product is the best will often lose to the good enough time and time again, usually on some technical or legal bullshit. look at MP3Pro, back in the day MP3Pro had MUCH better sound at the standard 128k of the time than plain MP3, but nothing played it so it died.
While the iPod is popular as hell frankly there is a hell of a lot more places than your PMP that most folks play their music, like their PC, their car, etc, and even the Apple guys I've known keep their tunes in MP3 simply because it'll play on anything anywhere.
So while I fully support their tests if for nothing else than an "FYI here's the results" list I think AAC has about as much chance of ever unseating MP3 as Theora has of becoming the de facto standard for video over H.264 and Flash. Oh and if their AAC is as good as their MP4 codec my money is on Nero.