Where have YOU been? Everyone who cares at all has been avoiding them like the clap since the "Hey lets make them have an always on connection for single player!" DRM bullshit. the hilarious part is something like 3 weeks after that BS the "Reloaded" edition hit P2P where they managed to completely bypass their BS. Just goes to show you DRM only bites paying customers.
Now as for TFA if the ONLY thing it does is require payment for a used game to play MP? I really don't care. After all they are gonna have to pay to keep the severs up but on the flip side there needs to be an "expiration date" on ALL games with this crap so that you don't buy a game in the store and find out its "gone bad" because Ubisoft pulled the plug. If only they can host MP? Then it has to have an expiration date so everyone will know the EOL for the game. If I can host? Then NO expiration date.
You see for me that's the worst part, it isn't them nickle and diming for MP, anybody who doesn't know these companies are greedy little piggies hasn't been paying attention. No it is having the games just "die" with no way for the community to save it. I still play Freelancer MP and that game was.... what? 2003? Yet if anything it is even better today than when it was released because not only has the fans made patches to fix some seriously irritating bugs, but they have created huge new universes for you to play in.
Instead of being able to break out a favorite old game like Freelancer or Quake and find someone to do a little battle with you'll just have dead MP if you are lucky. if it is Ubisoft's "Forever Internet" games you won't even have single player and I really think the customers should be warned about that so they can make an informed buying choice. Of course the Razr1911 and Reloaded versions will still work, as I said it never bothers the pirates. Just more proof IMHO that the greedier these companies get the better piracy looks.
Oh they modded me down for daring to point out reality, can't ever please a fanboy you know. But that won't change black into white nor will it change the fact that when people see the word "Windows" the will expect their win32 programs to run and when they don't? They'll be shitcanned as fast as those WinCE ARM netbooks all over Craigslist.
I actually ran into one of those at a store. it had a VERY WinXP desktop GUI and had WINDOWS in big letters and "Compact Edition" in small letters beside it. Now how many people do you think knew that "Compact edition" wasn't just a different flavor of XP? i'll tell you ZERO which is why those that made the netbook did it!
Mark my words, just as you saw at your job with the Windows phones so to will this completely blow up in MSFT's faces if they try this shit. geeks here have got to realize the common man doesn't know ARM from a 72 Pinto. All they know is "Windows means my stuff runs" where stuff equals their games, or QuickBooks, or their EasyShare camera software, or any of the millions of other little Win32 programs people use every single day. if they buy a "New Windows 8" device and bring it home only to find it doesn't actually run "Real" Windows? I have a feeling geeks will have a field day because the returns are gonna be so high retailers won't be able to give the damned things away, and rightly so.
This is yet another fuckup by Ballmer whose tenure has been a long list of fuckups, Zune,Kin, killing PlaysForSure for the ZunePass flop, I still say the only good thing that might come out of this is Steve Ballmer will "leave to pursue other interests" and they can bring in real leadership (Maybe Ozzie?) for Windows 9.
I would also add that in software the USPTO seems to allow them to go as vague as they wanna be. With hardware you generally have to have a pretty detailed description whereas with the software they are as vague as humanly possible without going "Its some stuff about a thing" and yet the USPTO signs off.
Now as for the specifics of TFA? i'm sure I'll get hate from the fanboys for saying this but in an Apple VS HTC battle I'd say the biggest douches are...drum roll...Google! Now why are google the biggest douches? Simple it is because they are more than happy to profit on all that yummy Android search but when things get a little hot? Google is NOWHERE to be found.
To be fair I haven't tried WinPhone or WebOS at least those companies are willing to indemnify their customers. If Apple tries that with Nokia over WinPhone all Nokia has to do is pick up the phone and the MSFT lawyers will coming dropping in like the Nazgul. But to me the sad part is Google has such a geek fanboy base if Google were to indemnify and ask the community for prior art geeks would be killing themselves to help their favorite company.
so while I think software patents are bullshit Google really needs to step up to the plate, that is if they want Android to survive. A few more losses like this and I can see OEMs buying WebOS and WinPhone simply to keep from being buried in lawsuits. After all what OEM is gonna want to spend the bucks to build a bunch of Android devices if they can get their asses sued off and the devices banned?
Sadly as you can read what I wrote for Linux Insider I truly believe the answer is NO, not unless the community get behind a fundamental change in the GPL, from a "free for everyone" to "free for non commercial use'.
The reason why is simple: despite RMS and his desire for a completely free utopia the simple fact of the matter is that history has shown us the FOSS design model works on what I call the "grep pipe" principle. that is a bunch of small programs that when linked together do a bigger job. where it does NOT seem to work is in huge monolithic codebases, which is what you are talking about when you are dealing with office software.
Just to attempt to maintain (not make it better mind you, just keep up) with changes in MS Office Word you are probably gonna need a dozen guys who are intimately familiar with the Writer codebase and all its calls. If you want to improve compatibility? Add another dozen. And that is JUST for Writer. Now multiple that times the other components.
You see MSFT and Apple probably have a good 200 guys minimum working on their office suites, guys who know that code like the back of their hands, years of experience in each team. And THAT is what FOSS has to compete against. The "tin cup" model as I call it, where you survive by donations or support, simply won't work at the scale we are talking about for an individual program. Red hat can pull it off because companies hate not having someone to call when their servers go down because the servers make them money. If LO don't work? they'll just write it off as a failure and pick up a site license for MS Office.
If there was a "free for non commercial use only" clause then, even if it were only $2 a copy, those businesses that found use in LO could help pay the cost of development so that it can keep up and get better. But mark my words without IBM or Oracle or another big corp to pay those experienced developers they'll move on to where the grass is greener and volunteers are gonna take one look at the huge sprawling mess of code and run away screaming. it is simply too complex for a weekend coder to play with.
Sadly I believe in less than 5 years it will be as though Star Office never existed. The Document Foundation will try their little hearts out, they'll beg and plead for funds, but in the end they will just not get the resources to keep up. Each year their support for MS Office formats will get worse until there will be simply no way anyone can use it. The forums will be filled with "Install Wine and use MS Office" because to use LO will be like trying to work in Word 95 and deal with DocX.
I hate to see it happen, but happen it will, just mark my words. Why is it so hard for the community to understand that for huge projects like this you simply have to have a steady stream of good money to survive?
Isn't it just crazy? If you haven't played with one yet you really should. I picked up the MSI Wind AMD netbook for my dad about a year ago when they first started hitting. This thing came with 3Gb of RAM, an HD4350 GPU, 1.8GHz dual core, 300Gb HDD, it does full 1080P over HDMI without a sweat, hardware accelerated everything, for the hell of it I even loaded the latest Deer hunter for dad and tried it on his 50 inch widescreen. Smooth as butter. the price? $420 shipped. Its just nuts!
And of course that one is only getting about 5 hours on a battery, the new APU based ones get another 30% from what I've read while having even higher video and gaming ability. I recently had to take my mom to the Wally world and while she shopped I hit the electronics. I'd say a good 65% or more of the desktops and laptops were AMD. I stopped and asked a friend that works there and he said they sell like hotcakes because you get so much for the price. The few Intel ones they had had worse specs for a good 30% markup.
So I think we'll be seeing real growth in AMD in the coming quarters. The sad part is look how quickly AMD was able to come in once Intel was banned from bribing OEMs. Think about how far AMD designs would be ahead if Intel wouldn't have been able to pull that shit. Hell they would probably still have their fabs if Intel wouldn't have been able to rig the market like that. I just hope the EU busts their ass, because it is pretty obvious with our currently corrupted system you can do whatever the hell you want in the USA and never get hit with antitrust. Hell if the MSFT case was done today not only wouldn't they have gotten busted, they probably would have been given a tax break for doing it!
But yet again the geeks here are missing the forest for the trees. When you say "Windows" to the common man it means something that the geeks here seem to be missing. to the common man Windows means those discs they have sitting on the shelf work, the disc of card games they got at the Wally world work, it all "just works" which is why MSFT is constantly releasing updates for Windows 7 that do nothing but add support for yet more older programs because that is what the folks want and boy do they get pissy when it don't work!
Everyone here keeps praying for MSFT to "Do an Apple" like what Apple did with switching from System 9 to OSX, but first of all there really ain't nothing wrong with WinNT, and more importantly the selling point of Windows is compatibility and if it doesn't have that then why pay $100+ for Windows?
If you want to see what sticking the word Windows on everything will do all you have to do is look at Criagslist. If yours is anything like my area you'll find an assload of ARM netbooks with WinCE on them, all have "barely used" written on them. Why are there so many? Because people saw "Windows" and expected to run their programs and when it didn't they shitcanned it, just that simple.
The only nice thing that will come out of this is as the customers dump Windows products that don't actually run "real" Windows and get royally pissed we can FINALLY get that damned Ballmer F.I.R.E.D and bring in one of the office guys or maybe even Ozzie back. Because unless they have come up with some magical way to make ALL these devices run Win32 code? oh boy is this shit gonna bomb, and rightly so.
There isn't 100s of millions of Windows users because they like the desktop wallpapers ya know. everybody and their dog and their dog's fleas all have Windows programs they want/need to run, and this will just confuse the fuck out of the market. dumb MSFT, dumb as hell.
FUD. If you want to bring up legitimate concerns, like how even the student edition is nearly $100? I'm there with you. But I have dealt with multiMb proposals, including one humdinger where I had myself on Office 2K, two on 2K3, one on 2K7 and one on Office 2K4 for Mac and there were ZERO problems and this thing was fricking huge, with headers and footers and tables and embedded PPTs.Compare this to opening and saving the exact same doc in OO.o and ending up with a broken mess, word salad with screwed PPTs, formatting issues, even chunks of text missing.
So as I said there are plenty of things to hate about MS Office, the price on the low end editions for one, but I have been messing with seriously funky docs for years and NEVER have seen an issue from Office 2K on up. Sure if you have a Word 6 doc from 93 you might have problems, but who in the hell is still using Word 6 anymore? I've been passing docs between Office 2K (just finally replaced my beloved Office 2K this year because my oldest had to have 2k7 for school, sniff!) and the later versions and not a single whiff of trouble, not one.
Congratulations! You found a typo! if you know what SMTP is you probably likewise know what SMT is which is of course what I was trying to type.
It doesn't change the fact that it is gonna be hard to run true benchmarks on a chip that has a design unlike ANYTHING we have ever seen before without having code built to take this new technology into consideration, like running a 10 year old single core benchmark on a modern multicore and thinking its results will be anything useful. Unlike previous designs these new chips will have dual integer pipelines and only share a FP unit, and thanks to the new vector based GPU they are designing for it the AMD chips will be able to hand off things like FP to the GPU which will be as fast as the CPU when it comes to interprocess communication, should be VERY interesting, especially for those that wish to run HPC or Folding@Home kinds of jobs.
This does bring up something that DOES bother me greatly though, something I hope the guys at/. will point out at every opportunity...Benchmarks should NOT be trusted unless they are done with the non Intel compiler! As we saw from the compiler scandal ALL Intel compilers, from 2002 to this very day, rig the code against non Genuine Intel chips, hell it even rigs the code against the P3!
So please point out next time you see a benchmark being touted that unless they can confirm the benchmark software was compiled with GCC the results are useless. it would be as ridiculous as believing those MSFT "get the facts!" campaigns, since we are talking about Intel chips getting full SSE2 from the Intel compiler and everyone else getting x87 mode, which was depreciated in the Pentium 1 era. So every time you see a benchmark keep this in mind, it is like Intel tying a brick on every non P4 or above chip before the race even begins. Sorry douchebaggery at its finest but thanks to our government being bought and paid for the antitrust will never be brought against them. Maybe the EU will have better luck.
Well Dr Bob the fact that you think you can cure diseases like kidney problems and cancer by tweaking someone's back? It kinda makes you a bit of a loony.
As for TFA? if it ain't broke why the hell fix it.Ethernet works. It works damned well, it works no matter the OS, it works across hardware manufacturers without needing any funky drivers. Frankly that is more than i can say for sound, graphics, hell even certain southbridges are more fiddly than Ethernet. And I can take this 10 year old former school PC I have sitting in front of me, plug it into a 2 year old router and transfer files from my 1 year old desktop. That's nice.
So personally I say "Go Ethernet!" as year after year you remain the same rock solid standard I can count on, without needing dongles and adapters and all the other bullshit. Now if only we could get whomever is in charge of video outputs to make up their damned mind, between the DVI, HDMI, DisplayPort ARGH!! Just pick one and make it fricking universal already!
I think most here are missing the forest for the trees. Unless you are a Crysis playing ePeen "must win teh benchmarks!" type AMD doesn't have to win all they have to be is "good enough" which I would argue they currently are and these new chips will simply make it better.
I currently have a Deneb AMD quad as my main home machine and slam the living hell out of it. Video transcoding, using it as a Win 7 DVR, playing games for hours, often WHILE transcoding or recording and you know what? it works great. And I'm a hardcore case, most folks still only do one task at a time, be it gaming, browsing, whatever. Now most importantly I have a machine that will do all that, as well as take a 6 core later on if I wish, with 1.5Tb of HDDs and 8Gb of RAM and an HD4850 and the whole smash, including Win 7 HP X64? Less than $600 after MIR.
And THAT is what matters especially in a dead economy. Folks want a reasonably powerful machine that will last them for years and won't break their wallets and AMD frankly gives them overkill for cheap. I have built fully loaded triples that crank out the video at 1080p all day long for less than $450, quads less than $500 and thanks to how long AMD sticks with sockets if 5 years down the road they decide they want a little more oomph I can pick them up a cheap OEM and just drop it in.
I have found for the jobs the vast majority of folks that walk into my shop have "good enough" was passed with the dual core chips but thanks to AMD for nearly the same money they can go triple or quad which just gives them more years of service without slowdown. Hell the prices are so cheap i built my dad a quad for home. Does he need a quad? Oh hell no, he still single tasks everything like it is 1993! But by going quad I know that no matter how much crap like messenger he ends up running in the task bar he'll never lose responsiveness, and this machine will probably last him the rest of his life.
So unless you are trying to do the super heavy lifting like multiple compiles or hardcore video editing (which I'll admit there is more guys here that do such hardcore CPU pounding than the general pop by a long shot) then all the extra $$$ you spend by going Intel is simply wasted money. I'd say as long as AMD can stay even within a third of the performance of the Intel chips they'll be "good enough" for the vast majority, and having nice low prices simply seals the deal.
I'm willing to bet my last dollar it was opened in MS Office 2K7 or 2K10 as I've seen it myself. Something about the LO doc formatting turns even simple docs to word salad in the new MS Office suites. In fact that last MS Office where you could be assured a doc saved in LO would render correctly was Office 2K IMHO. In 2K3 I saw those collaborating with me using OO/LO have serious header/footer and font troubles while those same docs opened in my 2K7 on my laptop were just a garbled mess.
Sadly until LO manages to fix their compatibility (which as I noted in my original post on a monolithic design like LO I don't see that happening without a steady source of income so developers can get up to speed on the codebase) if you have to deal with businesses such as sending CVs or collaborate with those using MS Office pretty much your only choice ATM is MS Office. Despite the FUD many have repeated here I have had collaborations with multiple guys using multiple versions and not had a single error even on a multiMb proposal. In my case it was Office 2K, two had 2K3, one had 2K7 and one was on 2K4 for Mac. Not a single formatting issue but I personally had to give the one that ended up on Office 2K an extra copy I had laying at the shop because he was on OO originally and it would hose the formatting and screw the fonts.
Riiiight. BTW how's things in "life is fucking fair" land? is the weather nice there? because when you get put in the real world you'll find the vast majority of people you come in contact with don't give a flying fuck what you want and if your little rants causes them even a few seconds more work than the others? Welcome to file 13, aka the waste basket.
Most of the schools here have plenty of folks happy to take your slot so they do not need you if you are gonna cause trouble. Businesses? Have 200 guys trying for the same jobs so they don't need you if your CV doesn't work with their software.
So please keep it up as I'm sure the guys you'll be competing against will be happy to have one less person being considered. in case you ain't noticed sparky the advantage hasn't been on the worker side since the 1960s here, it is firmly on the side of businesses/schools and they don't need you when there are hundreds willing to play along.
Well to be fair if this bunch just did a quick Windows setup to run this chip frankly I wouldn't be surprised if they ran something like TinyXP/7 or one of the "Razr1911" Windows builds, all of which seem to have the time service disabled.
But I think the more important thing to note is we won't know what the true performance of the new AMD chips are for about 8 months after the first Bulldozer chips are released. Why is that? because they are currently currently preparing to switch to a whole new APU arch where the GPU will be MUCH more tightly integrated as well as a completely new design (from VLIW to a new vector based GPGPU) which will have several benefits. One the FP on the thing will just be insane and double precision will go from 1/5th the performance of single to more than half, two they are going to share the cache between CPU/GPU, three they are gonna have hybrid graphics where the discrete paints the screen and the APU does physics, four completely new SMTP design which drivers are gonna have to be optimized for which is unlike anything AMD or Intel has put out before. As one reviewer I saw put it the new design is "SMT done right" with the extra integer path keeping bottlenecks to a minimum.
So I'd say while this might give a few rough ideas (the review says about in the middle of Sandy Bridge and that is without optimized drivers) with a new arch THIS radical it'll need motherboards and drivers designed for it which simply don't exist ATM. I'm personally glad that AMD is still quite competitive, as after the bribery and compilers scandals I put my money where my mouth was and switched to an AMD only shop and my customers couldn't be happier. They are happy with having low prices on triples and quads that have great integrated GPUs (having HDMI onboard is nice) and I'm happy not to be supporting a company that should have been busted for antitrust years ago. its a win/win and from the looks of things these new chips will just make for more happy customers. I'd say it'll make me happy to but my current AMD quad is fast enough I don't see myself building another personal machine for a good 5 years.
I can answer that as I've had to deal with the crap. HR uses a program that fast indexes Word docs looking for keywords and putting them in categories and the stuff will NOT work on PDF, RTF,ODF, hell I wouldn't be surprised if the crap can't parse.TXT!
So I can tell you that while "just use PDF" sounds nice in theory, IRL if you are lucky they will ask you to re submit as a.doc for their software, if you aren't lucky they will just toss your PDF and move on. I've also seen handouts at the local college for various classes and they ALL demand.doc for their anti-cheating software.
This is one of the reasons I truly and sincerely hope LO finds a source of steady funds so they can hire more developers. Right now.doc support is awful unless it is the most simple doc (try it yourself, go to the government websites and find some of their.docs, then open in LO and save back as a.doc and you'll find a mangled word salad) and while I would like nothing more than to not have to warn my customers about using LO for anything but home use after seeing friends get their grades in college dinged for trying to send LO docs I can't in good conscience not warn them.
As it is if you are just writing for yourself? or you are gonna print it? LO is just great. If you are gonna turn it in for a class, collaborate with someone using MS Office, or worse need to send in resumes? Then you would be insane to trust LO's MS Office compatibility. I really wish it weren't so but I've seen docs mangled before my very eyes by simply opening in LO and saving edits back into a.doc format. talk about a mess!
And I'd say sadly that thanks to 'free as in beer" and the freeloader effect it is ultimately a loss for FOSS. lets be honest folks...have you LOOKED at the LO/OO code? We are talking this huge monolithic mess that would probably take someone a good year or more to get fully up to speed on. if you don't manage to keep those long term developers that were building it at Sun i'd say you're screwed as it'll take a good 3 years or more to rebuild the thing into a more modular design, which is eternity in software time.
Meanwhile you have Apple and MSFT with iWork and MS Office spending tons of money on R&D and features so to keep even partially up on features or even have functional compatibility so you can use LO as a drop in replacement is gonna take serious coding. developers of the skill required to do this? NOT cheap and this kind of monolithic project isn't something a coder can just 'pop in on the weekends" and get anything done, its just too massive.
So I truly believe that unless FOSS projects like this find a stable source of revenue things are only gonna get worse as the economy sours. The "tin cup" model of either donations or support works fine in a healthy economy but that isn't what we've got ATM and companies are gonna cut costs any way they can. if they can have your product without paying a cent why give you anything?
Sadly this is completely a case of short sighted "damn everything but the quarterly reports!" thinking because without funding LO will fall further behind. Who cares if it is free if in 3 years it can't open the MS Office 2015 Doc files, or open the latest iWork for that matter?
We've seen that the FOSS model really kicks ass on the "tiny programs piped together" style, as it is easy to maintain and upgrade without needing huge teams of developers well versed in the code. i just don't know how well FOSS is gonna work long term with such a huge monolithic code base and as someone who happily hands out LO to all his home users that does worry me.
Riiight. hey lets create huge masses of starving people in an economy with negative overall job growth in a country with access to an insane amount of guns! that'll be the ticket? It sure will be if you want a lot of dead rich folks with their houses looted. They have a similar "paradise" where nobody gives a shit about the poor, its called Somalia, you might enjoy it as long as you have money for some technicals.
As for TFA, its another F35. The thing is insanely behind schedule and over budget, won't be done for years yet, it is a classic case of mismanagement that needs to get the ax. And I agree with another poster that sending meatbags into space just to say we've sent a meatbag into space? Seriously fucking DUMB. the robots do better science, can go farther, last longer, get more readings/samples, and don't need piles of water, food, and a place to shit and sleep.
So until we can get some better engine tech (which we can develop and test on the robots, as nobody is gonna be bawling if the robot bites it on national TV) sending meatbags out there is like trying to drive a model A up Everest. Sure it is possible, but it is slow, risky as hell, and just plain pointless. Better to send probes like New horizons to learn as much as we can while spending the money to search every inch of the skies to ensure we don't miss some planet killer drifting in the darkness.
And did you read that shit? They charge that little old lady more than $14,000 for charges on an old rotary phone and then MAKE HER GIVE IT BACK to end the contract! Well fuck you AT&T you heartless greedy bastards! I wouldn't piss on your CEO if he was on fire!
The sad part is thanks to bribery the T-Mobile deal WILL go through and then that just leaves who... Verizon? That's it? All that is left to bring back the Ma Bell monopoly? I wonder how long it will take them to merge with Verizon so that can go back to supermega monopoly. We probably shouldn't be surprised though, after BOTH the dems and the reps happily gutted the rules barring one corp from owning all the outlets in an area, aka the "Clearchannel clause" regulation of supermegacorps consists of helping said corps keep new entrants from gaining a toehold. Hell we might as well just put a bag in front of each congress critters desk to drop off the checks and change the anthem to "Mighty Mighty Dollar bill" and be done with it.
Oh God that sounds wonderful! We'll have true universal health care and maybe something like the WPA and...oh wait. You are just doing the standard bullshit of using words like communist because you think it is a big scary word, unlike say fascist which is what a lot of the actors in BOTH parties are..
Let me guess, another who subscribes to the "give the rich more monies!" theory? Well we had trickle down (1980-88) voodoo economics (89-92) free trade with those with no environmental or worker regulations (92-2000) lets give rich people lots of tax breaks! (2000-2008) and finally bailout baby bailout (2008 present) and this has made the USA a utopia...oh wait, it hasn't. In fact GE took their bailout and said "Gee Thanks America!" and then promptly sent a major factory to India with the money.
It is actually quite simple, do try to keep up. Huge profits sucked up by rich people? that money is dead money, it is out of the economy, they are gonna sock it away, it is gone..poof! If they get the living shit taxed out of them if they keep it? Well then they reinvest in their businesses so as to lower their taxes, duh! Also higher taxes mean higher growth and lower unemployment yet despite plenty of evidence of this the ring wing will STILL cling to their "give the rich more MONIES!" mantra, which after 30 years of gutting the middle class and slaughtering our manufacturing sector while tripping over themselves to give more monies to the rich ought to be obvious it is a giant can o' FAIL.
So please, keep hanging onto your communist boogeyman because you know what? to these unemployed masses out here, which outnumber you by more than 10,000 to 1? That whole communism thing is starting to sound pretty good. You can only say "let them eat cake" while stuffing your pockets for so long before the peasants rise up and ask for your head. The reason so many don't vote is because they no longer believe in the system of democracy and with so many of our youth going straight from college to the unemployment line you have the makings of another Arab spring right here in the USA.
So please, keep it up. Those of us who believe the entire system is corrupted and needs to be replaced are quite happy for you to keep kicking the poor and screaming "give teh rich more MONIES!" as it creates a huge teeming mass filled with hatred, the simmering resentment growing ever higher. keep it up.
So you say "You sir are a bunch of liars and thieves!" and then hand them your money and this proves....what exactly? Do you think you'll make their CEO cry as they cash your check?
Thanks to the wonders of unrestrained bribery most of us have NO choice when it comes to services like this, and how many could live without their phone? What if a relative is hurt and you are the next of kin listed? you gonna say "well i'm sorry I wasn't there to approve that surgery but I had to show da man who's boss!"?
My cable bill seems to have a permanent case of the price creeps but you know what? Not a damned thing I can do about it. You can go complain ALL you want, they'll be happy to tell you that you are free to go back to dialup. In my area it is cable or DSL that is SUPPOSED to be 3Mbps but in reality when the moon is full you MAYBE get 600Kbps, and my customers on it have shown me it is literally faster to drive to my shop to download a driver, even if it is 25 miles to my place from theirs, than it is to wait on the DSL when it is topping out at less than 100Kbps.
My cableco could change their bill to a four page color foldout of Goatse with red letters underneath that says 'This is what we think of you bitch!" and I'd have NO choice but to take it. I have family and friends scattered to the four winds and it is kinda hard to fix computers if I can't even download a driver.
So I don't see how your saying "You sir are a LIAR!" to them when you'll still have to cut the liar a check really helps. Welcome to the capitalist system, works great, huh?
What really pisses me off about this shit is it is preying on those weakest and least likely to understand they are getting ripped off...old folks. It is the grandma and grandpa out there with landlines, the little old lady that can't read her bill with her coke bottle glasses anyway whom they are screwing over. It is disgusting.
Between this and the truly obscene profiteering that we saw in the earlier article on providing broadband to rural areas (which are also full of the poor and the elderly) it just shows me what I've known for quite awhile, this system is totally corrupted to its very core. if you or I tried this we would be in jail for wire fraud so fast it would make our heads swim, but if supermegacorp who greases the right palms rips off people left and right? hell they'll get a tax break!
it is truly damned sad IMHO that old observation is even more true today, rip off $500 and go to prison, rip off 500 million? Have dinner at the White House.
Oh I agree completely that the best solution would be one that would work on any modern browser, be it mobile or desktop. The problem is HTML V5 not only isn't ratified yet as a proper standard but thanks to the split with MSFT and Apple on one side with H.26X and FOSS on the other with Theora and WebM it most likely never will. Then there is the problem of there not being the easy to use tools to "design" in HTML V5 like there is in flash. hell my mom could make whiz bang website crap in flash, it is drag and drop simple. There are too many website "designers" that couldn't code HTML V5 if their lives depended on it and as long as you can use flash so easily they won't be switching.
But that brings up another can of worms, and that is FOSS vs performance and I'm sorry, but WebM and Theora just don't cut it compared to H.264, not on bandwidth usage, not on picture quality at the same file sizes, it just doesn't. You can't expect the world to take half ass just because its free, and the added costs of bandwidth because of the inefficient Theora and WebM codecs just won't fly. It is similar to Vorbis ealier, where years after MP3 became the de facto standard along comes Vorbis with serious problems and no real benefits other than being FOSS. but the majority of the planet don't care about licenses, they can about how well it works, and the current king is H.264 because it gives the best quality and file size for the buck.
but it doesn't matter in the end if we were having a nice discussion about needlepoint, because just as the republican party has been taken over by the batshit wing so too has Linux and FOSS seemingly been taken over by the crazies. Alex will follow me for months spouting "Ur a M$ Ninja!" with the only proof being the voices in his head, while the other loonies go "yeah he pointed out their is driver issues, he must be a ninja on the M$ payroll!" making the whole community look like they are off their meds. it is a shame too because other than the serious driver issue I'd be hard pressed to find fault with Linux, it has nice GUIs, the hardware acceleration is coming along, it is low system requirements, so other than that it is great. Of course when you are dealing with customers whose PCs shit themselves every 6 months when the updates roll around and the only answer you get from the community when you point this out is either PNGs of trollface or the "ur a M$ Ninja!" craziness that is similar to saying other than the whole shooting thing the President had a nice trip to Dallas in 63.
Want another one to give your friend? Because I have a doozy for you about why giving power to these monopolies will screw the common man, Check it out 100% true...
I had a friend in a similar situation, the business he co-owned was about a mile from the end of the line and it was hurting them. But he got a different idea than mine, he went out and after getting his partner to go in half with him had a T1 ran from town which all told cost them nearly $20,000. You see this area had NOTHING but dialup and would get as a response from the duopoly "we have no plans now or in the future for that area". Now we are talking about a good 125 houses plus, including two apt buildings. So what my bud's plan was was to rent off access to their T1, set up a local server for WSUS and popular FOSS software, to give everyone a nice setup that was better than the $70 a month the teleco was sticking for dialup. Capitalism in action, right?
Well the teleco got wind, probably when they saw their $70 a month dialup take a nosedive so the cut off his access to the backbone as well as made a few phone calls so nobody else would sell him access either. Their words were to the effect "Go on, just TRY and sue us!" and his lawyer said "Sure, you'll win. No doubt about it. But it will cost you a million dollars and a decade in court to fight the legal bullshit they'll throw in your way".
So after losing $20,000 on a T1 and still getting nothing but dialup they said fuck it, closed up shop and moved away. Cost nearly a dozen people their jobs and even though this was in 2000 to this very day ALL those people there have is dialup with the same "we have no plans for that area now or in the future" bullshit.
So send THAT to your friend as well, and also point out a couple of links to the cities that have tried running their own lines only to get sued by the telecos for 'unfair competition" even though they have no intention of supporting them even if they win just forcing them to keep the same worthless dialup or low rent DSL horseshit they currently have.
It makes my damned blood boil I'm having to pay out the ass for shoddy WISP service to my mom's place and my nephew has to run into the shop from school at least twice a week because he can't even get his college work done with the piss poor "options" they have, which is dialup or WISP that is down more than it is up. And sorry about the length but as someone who has been fighting the pricks for over a decade now it REALLY pisses me off!
I just think it is fucking hilarious how delusional some of the nutjobs that hang around the Linux community truly are. the sad part? they aren't even the enjoyable kind of crazy, just the lame talking to themselves kind of nuts. Now twitter? Oh THERE was a great Linux nutbar! Sure he was total batshit but one could post a link and he would expertly weave it into his delusion. Look at my posting history and you can see we'll be having a discussion of trees or something else totally unrelated and here comes Alex, talking about how I must be some super secret MSFT stealth ninja, just ready to jump on "his precious" when the topic doesn't have a God damned thing to do with Linux.
But I will ALWAYS bitchslap the face of hypocrisy, and I will ALWAYS counter lies with truth, so I will consider it a public service to slap the living shit out of Alex every time he pokes his little crazy head out with his "ur a M$ Ninja!" bullshit.
And WHAT was the "great revelation" that completely shattered his delusional world? What was the dark incantation that caused him to wet his Tux blankie and go completely batshit? in a talk about various OSes I pointed out that as a retailer while I quite like the security features of Linux, and the GUIs such as LXDE and the 3.x branch of KDE are really top notch and have really nice features as well as being low resource until there is either a 7 year LTS so my customers can have a machine that is updated for a decent length (7 years is on average half of what Windows gives you but I would argue that is enough) or fix the broken driver model so that they can do in place upgrade without Linux having a coronary and keeling over, taking half the drivers with it? Then I simply can't offer it in my store as the support costs will kill my margins.
Seriously who DOESN'T know Linux has a problem with drivers breaking by now? Go to any forum you'll literally find thousands of variations on "Update foo broke my (insert driver)". Who doesn't know this? Hell even Dell, one of the largest OEMs on the entire planet, has to pay a team of developers to do nothing but keep their own repo, even though they only offer a teeny tiny subset of their catalog with Ubuntu. Why? because if they don't the drivers get shat upon and as a retailer having to spend hours or even days doing forum hunts while keeping enough loaners that customers aren't screaming down my neck would wipe my business out.
Hiding your head in the sand and going "la la la you can replace Windows with Linux and it'll all just work" won't change the fact there is a SERIOUS driver issue, nor will it change the fact that while Windows, BSD, OS/2, Solaris, and OSX ALL have a working driver ABI Linus refuses to allow Linux to have one thus making the problem worse.
So Alex can hug his piss wet Tux blankie while rocking himself and going "nigger nigger faggot!" or in the Linux version "shill shill astroturfer!" and pretending that I'm a super secret M$ stealth ninja sent to murder his precious instead of a retailer that actually got burned selling Linux but it won't change reality. So every time he pops up in a thread having nothing to do with OSes and spouts his "ur a M$ Ninja!" bullshit I will consider it a sacred duty to cockslap him with the righteous rod of truth. after all there may be those reading this that can have an affect on the Linux community and maybe they'll read the links and accept having broken drivers kills Linux as a retail OS and keeps businesses like mine from selling and supporting Linux, even when we want to.
Well that sounds more like an expansion pack then a microtransaction. I personally have no problem with expansions as long as they don't screw the user like how certain games were released with "DLC" that was available on the disc at RTM which to me just smacks of crippling a game so you can nickle and dime the content that should have been in the game in the first place!
But as long as they are relatively cheap and aren't game breakers (by game breakers I mean things like weapons that give those that pay an advantage over those that don't) then I don't see any real harm. My youngest has probably spent $50 on game cards for his MMOs so he could buy little things like extra character slots and my oldest ended up buying Mines of Moria for LOTRO because he figured it would be cheaper than buying it all ala carte.
So done right I can see it giving the gamer a reason to spend without having to run off many players with a monthly fee. I myself don't have enough free time to justify a monthly fee but if I find an MMO I like I could easily see paying a few bucks here and a few bucks there for some extras, it is when they go apeshit with it like EVE and the $60 monocle is what turns folks off the idea, along with as I said cutting pieces out of a game to sell later on as DLC.
Because you are causing a horrible trauma to a little kid for no damned reason? It really doesn't take much to put terror into the mind of a six year old child and even to give them a phobia. Kids already have so damned many things to be scared of now that giving them a phobia of airlines and security really ain't helping here. watch that video of that little kid being groped by the TSA and ask yourself, will that kid have nightmares over that? maybe even an unrational fear of certain situations?
So I would say it is a combination of nobody liking seeing a kid traumatized and that natural instinct to protect a child from harm. I know if I would have been there and saw that I would have handed my cell to my GF and told her to get my lawyer on the phone as i'm about to get an assault charge. It was pointless, uncalled for, and most likely caused real emotional harm to a small child for NO gain.
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Where have YOU been? Everyone who cares at all has been avoiding them like the clap since the "Hey lets make them have an always on connection for single player!" DRM bullshit. the hilarious part is something like 3 weeks after that BS the "Reloaded" edition hit P2P where they managed to completely bypass their BS. Just goes to show you DRM only bites paying customers.
Now as for TFA if the ONLY thing it does is require payment for a used game to play MP? I really don't care. After all they are gonna have to pay to keep the severs up but on the flip side there needs to be an "expiration date" on ALL games with this crap so that you don't buy a game in the store and find out its "gone bad" because Ubisoft pulled the plug. If only they can host MP? Then it has to have an expiration date so everyone will know the EOL for the game. If I can host? Then NO expiration date.
You see for me that's the worst part, it isn't them nickle and diming for MP, anybody who doesn't know these companies are greedy little piggies hasn't been paying attention. No it is having the games just "die" with no way for the community to save it. I still play Freelancer MP and that game was .... what? 2003? Yet if anything it is even better today than when it was released because not only has the fans made patches to fix some seriously irritating bugs, but they have created huge new universes for you to play in.
Instead of being able to break out a favorite old game like Freelancer or Quake and find someone to do a little battle with you'll just have dead MP if you are lucky. if it is Ubisoft's "Forever Internet" games you won't even have single player and I really think the customers should be warned about that so they can make an informed buying choice. Of course the Razr1911 and Reloaded versions will still work, as I said it never bothers the pirates. Just more proof IMHO that the greedier these companies get the better piracy looks.
Oh they modded me down for daring to point out reality, can't ever please a fanboy you know. But that won't change black into white nor will it change the fact that when people see the word "Windows" the will expect their win32 programs to run and when they don't? They'll be shitcanned as fast as those WinCE ARM netbooks all over Craigslist.
I actually ran into one of those at a store. it had a VERY WinXP desktop GUI and had WINDOWS in big letters and "Compact Edition" in small letters beside it. Now how many people do you think knew that "Compact edition" wasn't just a different flavor of XP? i'll tell you ZERO which is why those that made the netbook did it!
Mark my words, just as you saw at your job with the Windows phones so to will this completely blow up in MSFT's faces if they try this shit. geeks here have got to realize the common man doesn't know ARM from a 72 Pinto. All they know is "Windows means my stuff runs" where stuff equals their games, or QuickBooks, or their EasyShare camera software, or any of the millions of other little Win32 programs people use every single day. if they buy a "New Windows 8" device and bring it home only to find it doesn't actually run "Real" Windows? I have a feeling geeks will have a field day because the returns are gonna be so high retailers won't be able to give the damned things away, and rightly so.
This is yet another fuckup by Ballmer whose tenure has been a long list of fuckups, Zune,Kin, killing PlaysForSure for the ZunePass flop, I still say the only good thing that might come out of this is Steve Ballmer will "leave to pursue other interests" and they can bring in real leadership (Maybe Ozzie?) for Windows 9.
I would also add that in software the USPTO seems to allow them to go as vague as they wanna be. With hardware you generally have to have a pretty detailed description whereas with the software they are as vague as humanly possible without going "Its some stuff about a thing" and yet the USPTO signs off.
Now as for the specifics of TFA? i'm sure I'll get hate from the fanboys for saying this but in an Apple VS HTC battle I'd say the biggest douches are...drum roll...Google! Now why are google the biggest douches? Simple it is because they are more than happy to profit on all that yummy Android search but when things get a little hot? Google is NOWHERE to be found.
To be fair I haven't tried WinPhone or WebOS at least those companies are willing to indemnify their customers. If Apple tries that with Nokia over WinPhone all Nokia has to do is pick up the phone and the MSFT lawyers will coming dropping in like the Nazgul. But to me the sad part is Google has such a geek fanboy base if Google were to indemnify and ask the community for prior art geeks would be killing themselves to help their favorite company.
so while I think software patents are bullshit Google really needs to step up to the plate, that is if they want Android to survive. A few more losses like this and I can see OEMs buying WebOS and WinPhone simply to keep from being buried in lawsuits. After all what OEM is gonna want to spend the bucks to build a bunch of Android devices if they can get their asses sued off and the devices banned?
Sadly as you can read what I wrote for Linux Insider I truly believe the answer is NO, not unless the community get behind a fundamental change in the GPL, from a "free for everyone" to "free for non commercial use'.
The reason why is simple: despite RMS and his desire for a completely free utopia the simple fact of the matter is that history has shown us the FOSS design model works on what I call the "grep pipe" principle. that is a bunch of small programs that when linked together do a bigger job. where it does NOT seem to work is in huge monolithic codebases, which is what you are talking about when you are dealing with office software.
Just to attempt to maintain (not make it better mind you, just keep up) with changes in MS Office Word you are probably gonna need a dozen guys who are intimately familiar with the Writer codebase and all its calls. If you want to improve compatibility? Add another dozen. And that is JUST for Writer. Now multiple that times the other components.
You see MSFT and Apple probably have a good 200 guys minimum working on their office suites, guys who know that code like the back of their hands, years of experience in each team. And THAT is what FOSS has to compete against. The "tin cup" model as I call it, where you survive by donations or support, simply won't work at the scale we are talking about for an individual program. Red hat can pull it off because companies hate not having someone to call when their servers go down because the servers make them money. If LO don't work? they'll just write it off as a failure and pick up a site license for MS Office.
If there was a "free for non commercial use only" clause then, even if it were only $2 a copy, those businesses that found use in LO could help pay the cost of development so that it can keep up and get better. But mark my words without IBM or Oracle or another big corp to pay those experienced developers they'll move on to where the grass is greener and volunteers are gonna take one look at the huge sprawling mess of code and run away screaming. it is simply too complex for a weekend coder to play with.
Sadly I believe in less than 5 years it will be as though Star Office never existed. The Document Foundation will try their little hearts out, they'll beg and plead for funds, but in the end they will just not get the resources to keep up. Each year their support for MS Office formats will get worse until there will be simply no way anyone can use it. The forums will be filled with "Install Wine and use MS Office" because to use LO will be like trying to work in Word 95 and deal with DocX.
I hate to see it happen, but happen it will, just mark my words. Why is it so hard for the community to understand that for huge projects like this you simply have to have a steady stream of good money to survive?
Isn't it just crazy? If you haven't played with one yet you really should. I picked up the MSI Wind AMD netbook for my dad about a year ago when they first started hitting. This thing came with 3Gb of RAM, an HD4350 GPU, 1.8GHz dual core, 300Gb HDD, it does full 1080P over HDMI without a sweat, hardware accelerated everything, for the hell of it I even loaded the latest Deer hunter for dad and tried it on his 50 inch widescreen. Smooth as butter. the price? $420 shipped. Its just nuts!
And of course that one is only getting about 5 hours on a battery, the new APU based ones get another 30% from what I've read while having even higher video and gaming ability. I recently had to take my mom to the Wally world and while she shopped I hit the electronics. I'd say a good 65% or more of the desktops and laptops were AMD. I stopped and asked a friend that works there and he said they sell like hotcakes because you get so much for the price. The few Intel ones they had had worse specs for a good 30% markup.
So I think we'll be seeing real growth in AMD in the coming quarters. The sad part is look how quickly AMD was able to come in once Intel was banned from bribing OEMs. Think about how far AMD designs would be ahead if Intel wouldn't have been able to pull that shit. Hell they would probably still have their fabs if Intel wouldn't have been able to rig the market like that. I just hope the EU busts their ass, because it is pretty obvious with our currently corrupted system you can do whatever the hell you want in the USA and never get hit with antitrust. Hell if the MSFT case was done today not only wouldn't they have gotten busted, they probably would have been given a tax break for doing it!
But yet again the geeks here are missing the forest for the trees. When you say "Windows" to the common man it means something that the geeks here seem to be missing. to the common man Windows means those discs they have sitting on the shelf work, the disc of card games they got at the Wally world work, it all "just works" which is why MSFT is constantly releasing updates for Windows 7 that do nothing but add support for yet more older programs because that is what the folks want and boy do they get pissy when it don't work!
Everyone here keeps praying for MSFT to "Do an Apple" like what Apple did with switching from System 9 to OSX, but first of all there really ain't nothing wrong with WinNT, and more importantly the selling point of Windows is compatibility and if it doesn't have that then why pay $100+ for Windows?
If you want to see what sticking the word Windows on everything will do all you have to do is look at Criagslist. If yours is anything like my area you'll find an assload of ARM netbooks with WinCE on them, all have "barely used" written on them. Why are there so many? Because people saw "Windows" and expected to run their programs and when it didn't they shitcanned it, just that simple.
The only nice thing that will come out of this is as the customers dump Windows products that don't actually run "real" Windows and get royally pissed we can FINALLY get that damned Ballmer F.I.R.E.D and bring in one of the office guys or maybe even Ozzie back. Because unless they have come up with some magical way to make ALL these devices run Win32 code? oh boy is this shit gonna bomb, and rightly so.
There isn't 100s of millions of Windows users because they like the desktop wallpapers ya know. everybody and their dog and their dog's fleas all have Windows programs they want/need to run, and this will just confuse the fuck out of the market. dumb MSFT, dumb as hell.
FUD. If you want to bring up legitimate concerns, like how even the student edition is nearly $100? I'm there with you. But I have dealt with multiMb proposals, including one humdinger where I had myself on Office 2K, two on 2K3, one on 2K7 and one on Office 2K4 for Mac and there were ZERO problems and this thing was fricking huge, with headers and footers and tables and embedded PPTs.Compare this to opening and saving the exact same doc in OO.o and ending up with a broken mess, word salad with screwed PPTs, formatting issues, even chunks of text missing.
So as I said there are plenty of things to hate about MS Office, the price on the low end editions for one, but I have been messing with seriously funky docs for years and NEVER have seen an issue from Office 2K on up. Sure if you have a Word 6 doc from 93 you might have problems, but who in the hell is still using Word 6 anymore? I've been passing docs between Office 2K (just finally replaced my beloved Office 2K this year because my oldest had to have 2k7 for school, sniff!) and the later versions and not a single whiff of trouble, not one.
Congratulations! You found a typo! if you know what SMTP is you probably likewise know what SMT is which is of course what I was trying to type.
It doesn't change the fact that it is gonna be hard to run true benchmarks on a chip that has a design unlike ANYTHING we have ever seen before without having code built to take this new technology into consideration, like running a 10 year old single core benchmark on a modern multicore and thinking its results will be anything useful. Unlike previous designs these new chips will have dual integer pipelines and only share a FP unit, and thanks to the new vector based GPU they are designing for it the AMD chips will be able to hand off things like FP to the GPU which will be as fast as the CPU when it comes to interprocess communication, should be VERY interesting, especially for those that wish to run HPC or Folding@Home kinds of jobs.
This does bring up something that DOES bother me greatly though, something I hope the guys at /. will point out at every opportunity...Benchmarks should NOT be trusted unless they are done with the non Intel compiler! As we saw from the compiler scandal ALL Intel compilers, from 2002 to this very day, rig the code against non Genuine Intel chips, hell it even rigs the code against the P3!
So please point out next time you see a benchmark being touted that unless they can confirm the benchmark software was compiled with GCC the results are useless. it would be as ridiculous as believing those MSFT "get the facts!" campaigns, since we are talking about Intel chips getting full SSE2 from the Intel compiler and everyone else getting x87 mode, which was depreciated in the Pentium 1 era. So every time you see a benchmark keep this in mind, it is like Intel tying a brick on every non P4 or above chip before the race even begins. Sorry douchebaggery at its finest but thanks to our government being bought and paid for the antitrust will never be brought against them. Maybe the EU will have better luck.
Well Dr Bob the fact that you think you can cure diseases like kidney problems and cancer by tweaking someone's back? It kinda makes you a bit of a loony.
As for TFA? if it ain't broke why the hell fix it.Ethernet works. It works damned well, it works no matter the OS, it works across hardware manufacturers without needing any funky drivers. Frankly that is more than i can say for sound, graphics, hell even certain southbridges are more fiddly than Ethernet. And I can take this 10 year old former school PC I have sitting in front of me, plug it into a 2 year old router and transfer files from my 1 year old desktop. That's nice.
So personally I say "Go Ethernet!" as year after year you remain the same rock solid standard I can count on, without needing dongles and adapters and all the other bullshit. Now if only we could get whomever is in charge of video outputs to make up their damned mind, between the DVI, HDMI, DisplayPort ARGH!! Just pick one and make it fricking universal already!
I think most here are missing the forest for the trees. Unless you are a Crysis playing ePeen "must win teh benchmarks!" type AMD doesn't have to win all they have to be is "good enough" which I would argue they currently are and these new chips will simply make it better.
I currently have a Deneb AMD quad as my main home machine and slam the living hell out of it. Video transcoding, using it as a Win 7 DVR, playing games for hours, often WHILE transcoding or recording and you know what? it works great. And I'm a hardcore case, most folks still only do one task at a time, be it gaming, browsing, whatever. Now most importantly I have a machine that will do all that, as well as take a 6 core later on if I wish, with 1.5Tb of HDDs and 8Gb of RAM and an HD4850 and the whole smash, including Win 7 HP X64? Less than $600 after MIR.
And THAT is what matters especially in a dead economy. Folks want a reasonably powerful machine that will last them for years and won't break their wallets and AMD frankly gives them overkill for cheap. I have built fully loaded triples that crank out the video at 1080p all day long for less than $450, quads less than $500 and thanks to how long AMD sticks with sockets if 5 years down the road they decide they want a little more oomph I can pick them up a cheap OEM and just drop it in.
I have found for the jobs the vast majority of folks that walk into my shop have "good enough" was passed with the dual core chips but thanks to AMD for nearly the same money they can go triple or quad which just gives them more years of service without slowdown. Hell the prices are so cheap i built my dad a quad for home. Does he need a quad? Oh hell no, he still single tasks everything like it is 1993! But by going quad I know that no matter how much crap like messenger he ends up running in the task bar he'll never lose responsiveness, and this machine will probably last him the rest of his life.
So unless you are trying to do the super heavy lifting like multiple compiles or hardcore video editing (which I'll admit there is more guys here that do such hardcore CPU pounding than the general pop by a long shot) then all the extra $$$ you spend by going Intel is simply wasted money. I'd say as long as AMD can stay even within a third of the performance of the Intel chips they'll be "good enough" for the vast majority, and having nice low prices simply seals the deal.
I'm willing to bet my last dollar it was opened in MS Office 2K7 or 2K10 as I've seen it myself. Something about the LO doc formatting turns even simple docs to word salad in the new MS Office suites. In fact that last MS Office where you could be assured a doc saved in LO would render correctly was Office 2K IMHO. In 2K3 I saw those collaborating with me using OO/LO have serious header/footer and font troubles while those same docs opened in my 2K7 on my laptop were just a garbled mess.
Sadly until LO manages to fix their compatibility (which as I noted in my original post on a monolithic design like LO I don't see that happening without a steady source of income so developers can get up to speed on the codebase) if you have to deal with businesses such as sending CVs or collaborate with those using MS Office pretty much your only choice ATM is MS Office. Despite the FUD many have repeated here I have had collaborations with multiple guys using multiple versions and not had a single error even on a multiMb proposal. In my case it was Office 2K, two had 2K3, one had 2K7 and one was on 2K4 for Mac. Not a single formatting issue but I personally had to give the one that ended up on Office 2K an extra copy I had laying at the shop because he was on OO originally and it would hose the formatting and screw the fonts.
Riiiight. BTW how's things in "life is fucking fair" land? is the weather nice there? because when you get put in the real world you'll find the vast majority of people you come in contact with don't give a flying fuck what you want and if your little rants causes them even a few seconds more work than the others? Welcome to file 13, aka the waste basket.
Most of the schools here have plenty of folks happy to take your slot so they do not need you if you are gonna cause trouble. Businesses? Have 200 guys trying for the same jobs so they don't need you if your CV doesn't work with their software.
So please keep it up as I'm sure the guys you'll be competing against will be happy to have one less person being considered. in case you ain't noticed sparky the advantage hasn't been on the worker side since the 1960s here, it is firmly on the side of businesses/schools and they don't need you when there are hundreds willing to play along.
Well to be fair if this bunch just did a quick Windows setup to run this chip frankly I wouldn't be surprised if they ran something like TinyXP/7 or one of the "Razr1911" Windows builds, all of which seem to have the time service disabled.
But I think the more important thing to note is we won't know what the true performance of the new AMD chips are for about 8 months after the first Bulldozer chips are released. Why is that? because they are currently currently preparing to switch to a whole new APU arch where the GPU will be MUCH more tightly integrated as well as a completely new design (from VLIW to a new vector based GPGPU) which will have several benefits. One the FP on the thing will just be insane and double precision will go from 1/5th the performance of single to more than half, two they are going to share the cache between CPU/GPU, three they are gonna have hybrid graphics where the discrete paints the screen and the APU does physics, four completely new SMTP design which drivers are gonna have to be optimized for which is unlike anything AMD or Intel has put out before. As one reviewer I saw put it the new design is "SMT done right" with the extra integer path keeping bottlenecks to a minimum.
So I'd say while this might give a few rough ideas (the review says about in the middle of Sandy Bridge and that is without optimized drivers) with a new arch THIS radical it'll need motherboards and drivers designed for it which simply don't exist ATM. I'm personally glad that AMD is still quite competitive, as after the bribery and compilers scandals I put my money where my mouth was and switched to an AMD only shop and my customers couldn't be happier. They are happy with having low prices on triples and quads that have great integrated GPUs (having HDMI onboard is nice) and I'm happy not to be supporting a company that should have been busted for antitrust years ago. its a win/win and from the looks of things these new chips will just make for more happy customers. I'd say it'll make me happy to but my current AMD quad is fast enough I don't see myself building another personal machine for a good 5 years.
I can answer that as I've had to deal with the crap. HR uses a program that fast indexes Word docs looking for keywords and putting them in categories and the stuff will NOT work on PDF, RTF,ODF, hell I wouldn't be surprised if the crap can't parse .TXT!
So I can tell you that while "just use PDF" sounds nice in theory, IRL if you are lucky they will ask you to re submit as a .doc for their software, if you aren't lucky they will just toss your PDF and move on. I've also seen handouts at the local college for various classes and they ALL demand .doc for their anti-cheating software.
This is one of the reasons I truly and sincerely hope LO finds a source of steady funds so they can hire more developers. Right now .doc support is awful unless it is the most simple doc (try it yourself, go to the government websites and find some of their .docs, then open in LO and save back as a .doc and you'll find a mangled word salad) and while I would like nothing more than to not have to warn my customers about using LO for anything but home use after seeing friends get their grades in college dinged for trying to send LO docs I can't in good conscience not warn them.
As it is if you are just writing for yourself? or you are gonna print it? LO is just great. If you are gonna turn it in for a class, collaborate with someone using MS Office, or worse need to send in resumes? Then you would be insane to trust LO's MS Office compatibility. I really wish it weren't so but I've seen docs mangled before my very eyes by simply opening in LO and saving edits back into a .doc format. talk about a mess!
And I'd say sadly that thanks to 'free as in beer" and the freeloader effect it is ultimately a loss for FOSS. lets be honest folks...have you LOOKED at the LO/OO code? We are talking this huge monolithic mess that would probably take someone a good year or more to get fully up to speed on. if you don't manage to keep those long term developers that were building it at Sun i'd say you're screwed as it'll take a good 3 years or more to rebuild the thing into a more modular design, which is eternity in software time.
Meanwhile you have Apple and MSFT with iWork and MS Office spending tons of money on R&D and features so to keep even partially up on features or even have functional compatibility so you can use LO as a drop in replacement is gonna take serious coding. developers of the skill required to do this? NOT cheap and this kind of monolithic project isn't something a coder can just 'pop in on the weekends" and get anything done, its just too massive.
So I truly believe that unless FOSS projects like this find a stable source of revenue things are only gonna get worse as the economy sours. The "tin cup" model of either donations or support works fine in a healthy economy but that isn't what we've got ATM and companies are gonna cut costs any way they can. if they can have your product without paying a cent why give you anything?
Sadly this is completely a case of short sighted "damn everything but the quarterly reports!" thinking because without funding LO will fall further behind. Who cares if it is free if in 3 years it can't open the MS Office 2015 Doc files, or open the latest iWork for that matter?
We've seen that the FOSS model really kicks ass on the "tiny programs piped together" style, as it is easy to maintain and upgrade without needing huge teams of developers well versed in the code. i just don't know how well FOSS is gonna work long term with such a huge monolithic code base and as someone who happily hands out LO to all his home users that does worry me.
Riiight. hey lets create huge masses of starving people in an economy with negative overall job growth in a country with access to an insane amount of guns! that'll be the ticket? It sure will be if you want a lot of dead rich folks with their houses looted. They have a similar "paradise" where nobody gives a shit about the poor, its called Somalia, you might enjoy it as long as you have money for some technicals.
As for TFA, its another F35. The thing is insanely behind schedule and over budget, won't be done for years yet, it is a classic case of mismanagement that needs to get the ax. And I agree with another poster that sending meatbags into space just to say we've sent a meatbag into space? Seriously fucking DUMB. the robots do better science, can go farther, last longer, get more readings/samples, and don't need piles of water, food, and a place to shit and sleep.
So until we can get some better engine tech (which we can develop and test on the robots, as nobody is gonna be bawling if the robot bites it on national TV) sending meatbags out there is like trying to drive a model A up Everest. Sure it is possible, but it is slow, risky as hell, and just plain pointless. Better to send probes like New horizons to learn as much as we can while spending the money to search every inch of the skies to ensure we don't miss some planet killer drifting in the darkness.
And did you read that shit? They charge that little old lady more than $14,000 for charges on an old rotary phone and then MAKE HER GIVE IT BACK to end the contract! Well fuck you AT&T you heartless greedy bastards! I wouldn't piss on your CEO if he was on fire!
The sad part is thanks to bribery the T-Mobile deal WILL go through and then that just leaves who... Verizon? That's it? All that is left to bring back the Ma Bell monopoly? I wonder how long it will take them to merge with Verizon so that can go back to supermega monopoly. We probably shouldn't be surprised though, after BOTH the dems and the reps happily gutted the rules barring one corp from owning all the outlets in an area, aka the "Clearchannel clause" regulation of supermegacorps consists of helping said corps keep new entrants from gaining a toehold. Hell we might as well just put a bag in front of each congress critters desk to drop off the checks and change the anthem to "Mighty Mighty Dollar bill" and be done with it.
Oh God that sounds wonderful! We'll have true universal health care and maybe something like the WPA and...oh wait. You are just doing the standard bullshit of using words like communist because you think it is a big scary word, unlike say fascist which is what a lot of the actors in BOTH parties are..
Let me guess, another who subscribes to the "give the rich more monies!" theory? Well we had trickle down (1980-88) voodoo economics (89-92) free trade with those with no environmental or worker regulations (92-2000) lets give rich people lots of tax breaks! (2000-2008) and finally bailout baby bailout (2008 present) and this has made the USA a utopia...oh wait, it hasn't. In fact GE took their bailout and said "Gee Thanks America!" and then promptly sent a major factory to India with the money.
It is actually quite simple, do try to keep up. Huge profits sucked up by rich people? that money is dead money, it is out of the economy, they are gonna sock it away, it is gone..poof! If they get the living shit taxed out of them if they keep it? Well then they reinvest in their businesses so as to lower their taxes, duh! Also higher taxes mean higher growth and lower unemployment yet despite plenty of evidence of this the ring wing will STILL cling to their "give the rich more MONIES!" mantra, which after 30 years of gutting the middle class and slaughtering our manufacturing sector while tripping over themselves to give more monies to the rich ought to be obvious it is a giant can o' FAIL.
So please, keep hanging onto your communist boogeyman because you know what? to these unemployed masses out here, which outnumber you by more than 10,000 to 1? That whole communism thing is starting to sound pretty good. You can only say "let them eat cake" while stuffing your pockets for so long before the peasants rise up and ask for your head. The reason so many don't vote is because they no longer believe in the system of democracy and with so many of our youth going straight from college to the unemployment line you have the makings of another Arab spring right here in the USA.
So please, keep it up. Those of us who believe the entire system is corrupted and needs to be replaced are quite happy for you to keep kicking the poor and screaming "give teh rich more MONIES!" as it creates a huge teeming mass filled with hatred, the simmering resentment growing ever higher. keep it up.
So you say "You sir are a bunch of liars and thieves!" and then hand them your money and this proves....what exactly? Do you think you'll make their CEO cry as they cash your check?
Thanks to the wonders of unrestrained bribery most of us have NO choice when it comes to services like this, and how many could live without their phone? What if a relative is hurt and you are the next of kin listed? you gonna say "well i'm sorry I wasn't there to approve that surgery but I had to show da man who's boss!"?
My cable bill seems to have a permanent case of the price creeps but you know what? Not a damned thing I can do about it. You can go complain ALL you want, they'll be happy to tell you that you are free to go back to dialup. In my area it is cable or DSL that is SUPPOSED to be 3Mbps but in reality when the moon is full you MAYBE get 600Kbps, and my customers on it have shown me it is literally faster to drive to my shop to download a driver, even if it is 25 miles to my place from theirs, than it is to wait on the DSL when it is topping out at less than 100Kbps.
My cableco could change their bill to a four page color foldout of Goatse with red letters underneath that says 'This is what we think of you bitch!" and I'd have NO choice but to take it. I have family and friends scattered to the four winds and it is kinda hard to fix computers if I can't even download a driver.
So I don't see how your saying "You sir are a LIAR!" to them when you'll still have to cut the liar a check really helps. Welcome to the capitalist system, works great, huh?
What really pisses me off about this shit is it is preying on those weakest and least likely to understand they are getting ripped off...old folks. It is the grandma and grandpa out there with landlines, the little old lady that can't read her bill with her coke bottle glasses anyway whom they are screwing over. It is disgusting.
Between this and the truly obscene profiteering that we saw in the earlier article on providing broadband to rural areas (which are also full of the poor and the elderly) it just shows me what I've known for quite awhile, this system is totally corrupted to its very core. if you or I tried this we would be in jail for wire fraud so fast it would make our heads swim, but if supermegacorp who greases the right palms rips off people left and right? hell they'll get a tax break!
it is truly damned sad IMHO that old observation is even more true today, rip off $500 and go to prison, rip off 500 million? Have dinner at the White House.
Oh I agree completely that the best solution would be one that would work on any modern browser, be it mobile or desktop. The problem is HTML V5 not only isn't ratified yet as a proper standard but thanks to the split with MSFT and Apple on one side with H.26X and FOSS on the other with Theora and WebM it most likely never will. Then there is the problem of there not being the easy to use tools to "design" in HTML V5 like there is in flash. hell my mom could make whiz bang website crap in flash, it is drag and drop simple. There are too many website "designers" that couldn't code HTML V5 if their lives depended on it and as long as you can use flash so easily they won't be switching.
But that brings up another can of worms, and that is FOSS vs performance and I'm sorry, but WebM and Theora just don't cut it compared to H.264, not on bandwidth usage, not on picture quality at the same file sizes, it just doesn't. You can't expect the world to take half ass just because its free, and the added costs of bandwidth because of the inefficient Theora and WebM codecs just won't fly. It is similar to Vorbis ealier, where years after MP3 became the de facto standard along comes Vorbis with serious problems and no real benefits other than being FOSS. but the majority of the planet don't care about licenses, they can about how well it works, and the current king is H.264 because it gives the best quality and file size for the buck.
but it doesn't matter in the end if we were having a nice discussion about needlepoint, because just as the republican party has been taken over by the batshit wing so too has Linux and FOSS seemingly been taken over by the crazies. Alex will follow me for months spouting "Ur a M$ Ninja!" with the only proof being the voices in his head, while the other loonies go "yeah he pointed out their is driver issues, he must be a ninja on the M$ payroll!" making the whole community look like they are off their meds. it is a shame too because other than the serious driver issue I'd be hard pressed to find fault with Linux, it has nice GUIs, the hardware acceleration is coming along, it is low system requirements, so other than that it is great. Of course when you are dealing with customers whose PCs shit themselves every 6 months when the updates roll around and the only answer you get from the community when you point this out is either PNGs of trollface or the "ur a M$ Ninja!" craziness that is similar to saying other than the whole shooting thing the President had a nice trip to Dallas in 63.
Want another one to give your friend? Because I have a doozy for you about why giving power to these monopolies will screw the common man, Check it out 100% true...
I had a friend in a similar situation, the business he co-owned was about a mile from the end of the line and it was hurting them. But he got a different idea than mine, he went out and after getting his partner to go in half with him had a T1 ran from town which all told cost them nearly $20,000. You see this area had NOTHING but dialup and would get as a response from the duopoly "we have no plans now or in the future for that area". Now we are talking about a good 125 houses plus, including two apt buildings. So what my bud's plan was was to rent off access to their T1, set up a local server for WSUS and popular FOSS software, to give everyone a nice setup that was better than the $70 a month the teleco was sticking for dialup. Capitalism in action, right?
Well the teleco got wind, probably when they saw their $70 a month dialup take a nosedive so the cut off his access to the backbone as well as made a few phone calls so nobody else would sell him access either. Their words were to the effect "Go on, just TRY and sue us!" and his lawyer said "Sure, you'll win. No doubt about it. But it will cost you a million dollars and a decade in court to fight the legal bullshit they'll throw in your way".
So after losing $20,000 on a T1 and still getting nothing but dialup they said fuck it, closed up shop and moved away. Cost nearly a dozen people their jobs and even though this was in 2000 to this very day ALL those people there have is dialup with the same "we have no plans for that area now or in the future" bullshit.
So send THAT to your friend as well, and also point out a couple of links to the cities that have tried running their own lines only to get sued by the telecos for 'unfair competition" even though they have no intention of supporting them even if they win just forcing them to keep the same worthless dialup or low rent DSL horseshit they currently have.
It makes my damned blood boil I'm having to pay out the ass for shoddy WISP service to my mom's place and my nephew has to run into the shop from school at least twice a week because he can't even get his college work done with the piss poor "options" they have, which is dialup or WISP that is down more than it is up. And sorry about the length but as someone who has been fighting the pricks for over a decade now it REALLY pisses me off!
I just think it is fucking hilarious how delusional some of the nutjobs that hang around the Linux community truly are. the sad part? they aren't even the enjoyable kind of crazy, just the lame talking to themselves kind of nuts. Now twitter? Oh THERE was a great Linux nutbar! Sure he was total batshit but one could post a link and he would expertly weave it into his delusion. Look at my posting history and you can see we'll be having a discussion of trees or something else totally unrelated and here comes Alex, talking about how I must be some super secret MSFT stealth ninja, just ready to jump on "his precious" when the topic doesn't have a God damned thing to do with Linux.
But I will ALWAYS bitchslap the face of hypocrisy, and I will ALWAYS counter lies with truth, so I will consider it a public service to slap the living shit out of Alex every time he pokes his little crazy head out with his "ur a M$ Ninja!" bullshit.
And WHAT was the "great revelation" that completely shattered his delusional world? What was the dark incantation that caused him to wet his Tux blankie and go completely batshit? in a talk about various OSes I pointed out that as a retailer while I quite like the security features of Linux, and the GUIs such as LXDE and the 3.x branch of KDE are really top notch and have really nice features as well as being low resource until there is either a 7 year LTS so my customers can have a machine that is updated for a decent length (7 years is on average half of what Windows gives you but I would argue that is enough) or fix the broken driver model so that they can do in place upgrade without Linux having a coronary and keeling over, taking half the drivers with it? Then I simply can't offer it in my store as the support costs will kill my margins.
Seriously who DOESN'T know Linux has a problem with drivers breaking by now? Go to any forum you'll literally find thousands of variations on "Update foo broke my (insert driver)". Who doesn't know this? Hell even Dell, one of the largest OEMs on the entire planet, has to pay a team of developers to do nothing but keep their own repo, even though they only offer a teeny tiny subset of their catalog with Ubuntu. Why? because if they don't the drivers get shat upon and as a retailer having to spend hours or even days doing forum hunts while keeping enough loaners that customers aren't screaming down my neck would wipe my business out.
Hiding your head in the sand and going "la la la you can replace Windows with Linux and it'll all just work" won't change the fact there is a SERIOUS driver issue, nor will it change the fact that while Windows, BSD, OS/2, Solaris, and OSX ALL have a working driver ABI Linus refuses to allow Linux to have one thus making the problem worse.
So Alex can hug his piss wet Tux blankie while rocking himself and going "nigger nigger faggot!" or in the Linux version "shill shill astroturfer!" and pretending that I'm a super secret M$ stealth ninja sent to murder his precious instead of a retailer that actually got burned selling Linux but it won't change reality. So every time he pops up in a thread having nothing to do with OSes and spouts his "ur a M$ Ninja!" bullshit I will consider it a sacred duty to cockslap him with the righteous rod of truth. after all there may be those reading this that can have an affect on the Linux community and maybe they'll read the links and accept having broken drivers kills Linux as a retail OS and keeps businesses like mine from selling and supporting Linux, even when we want to.
Well that sounds more like an expansion pack then a microtransaction. I personally have no problem with expansions as long as they don't screw the user like how certain games were released with "DLC" that was available on the disc at RTM which to me just smacks of crippling a game so you can nickle and dime the content that should have been in the game in the first place!
But as long as they are relatively cheap and aren't game breakers (by game breakers I mean things like weapons that give those that pay an advantage over those that don't) then I don't see any real harm. My youngest has probably spent $50 on game cards for his MMOs so he could buy little things like extra character slots and my oldest ended up buying Mines of Moria for LOTRO because he figured it would be cheaper than buying it all ala carte.
So done right I can see it giving the gamer a reason to spend without having to run off many players with a monthly fee. I myself don't have enough free time to justify a monthly fee but if I find an MMO I like I could easily see paying a few bucks here and a few bucks there for some extras, it is when they go apeshit with it like EVE and the $60 monocle is what turns folks off the idea, along with as I said cutting pieces out of a game to sell later on as DLC.
Because you are causing a horrible trauma to a little kid for no damned reason? It really doesn't take much to put terror into the mind of a six year old child and even to give them a phobia. Kids already have so damned many things to be scared of now that giving them a phobia of airlines and security really ain't helping here. watch that video of that little kid being groped by the TSA and ask yourself, will that kid have nightmares over that? maybe even an unrational fear of certain situations?
So I would say it is a combination of nobody liking seeing a kid traumatized and that natural instinct to protect a child from harm. I know if I would have been there and saw that I would have handed my cell to my GF and told her to get my lawyer on the phone as i'm about to get an assault charge. It was pointless, uncalled for, and most likely caused real emotional harm to a small child for NO gain.